Proceedings of the 18th International Academic Conference, London

CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT MARTYRDOM IN ENGLAND: REPRESENTATIONS OF ENGLAND AS ISRAEL C.1530-1600

NICK CROWN

Abstract:

I am a final year PhD student at the University of East Anglia, due to graduate in July after successfully completing my Viva. My thesis, supervised by Doctors Silvia Evangelisti and Jessica Sharkey, provides the first in-depth comparison between Tudor-era Catholic and Protestant martyrs in England since the research of Patrick McGrath, Jack Scarisbrick and Arthur Dickens during the 1960s. Convinced they were living in the end-times, Catholics and Protestants alike strove to portray their own religious group as the elect. This was defined in traditional martyrologies as the uncorrupted successor to the early church or, especially among radical Puritans, ancient Israel. Henrician and Elizabethan Anglicans in particular strove to create a brand of universal, independent Catholicism distinct from continental Protestant heresy; and pre-Reformation Popery that allegedly advocated the worship of dead saints, and the Pope himself, rather than Jesus. At this conference, I intend to discuss the evolving representation of the English Protestant elect, as propagandists writing after the Marian persecutions sought to prove the restored Church of England's legitimacy and exclusivity. Fearing Catholic allegations of plagiarism, and eager to discredit the veneration of pre-Reformation saints as idolatrous, Elizabethan Puritans such as Foxe actively identified the Elizabethan confessional state with ancient Israel, in the belief that a religious group's superiority was determined by its ancient lineage. The following article will serve as the basis for a more in-depth piece of future research, where I will analyse the evolution of English Puritan attitudes towards contemporary Jews during the 17th-century. Furthermore, I will analyse the Catholic response, where Counter-Reformation Jesuits used depictions that would (by modern standards) be considered anti-Semitic, to equate English Protestants with the Jews who allegedly killed Christ; and lost God’s patronage due to their reputed wickedness and stubbornness. Such depictions were useful for reasserting the priesthood's claim of superiority, by arguing that, like the saints of the New Testament, Jesuits took it upon themselves to correct Old Testament errors unwittingly restored by the post-schism Anglican confessional state. N.K. Crown (Doctor designatus)

Keywords: Reformation, Tudors, British Israelism

DOI: 10.20472/IAC.2015.018.030

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