III.Catholic England and Catholic Europe
A consideration of the local in relation to English religion might seem automatically to demand an exclusively introspective analysis of the situation within the kingdom.Such an approach evades and ignores an immediate and more significant issue,that of England's own status within the totality of the western catholic church before the break with Rome.
It is far too easy to assume a monolithic catholicism against which England rebelled,that England‘broke away’from practices and dogmas clearly defined,and universally shared.Such a view of medieval catholicism is simply anachronistic:it takes the uniformity of post-Tridentine and subsequent papalism enforced by the homogeneity which can be imposed through print and thrusts it onto a very different world.Medieval catholicism was much more federal in character.The geographical variations in pre-Reformation catholicism—between countries,between regions,between localities—are subtle,but they are there:in the different circles of allegiance to saints and their cults;in localised funerary or memorial practices;in varying doctrinal interpretations.England was no less(and,perhaps,no more)catholic than France,or Spain;but it was catholic in its own way,reflecting its own spiritual and practical evolutions.[25]
That did not mean that England(or to be more precise the two ecclesiastical provinces of York and Canterbury,England's two‘churches’)was not integrated into catholicism broadly defined.Indeed,during the early 1500s it may have been assimilating more than before to some aspects of continental catholicism.There was the penetration of new Christocentric religious feasts,a process still incomplete(and so only complete in some localities)by the 1530s.[26]New English translations of continental devotional texts were appearing,whether of masterpieces like the Imitation of Christ,or lesser works like The Interpretacyon and Sygnyfycacyon of the Masse,which affirmed the parallel between the mass and the Passion of Christ,and invoked continental indulgences.[27]The continental influence may have been most evident with indulgences and their distribution,as continental printers loaded books of hours intended for the English market with ever more(and more elaborate)privileged prayers,offering relief from assorted dangers or extravagant amounts of post-mortem pardon.[28]Indulgence collections for non-English and non-crusading enterprises,notably that for St Peter's at Rome,also tied England into the wider catholic pattern.[29]Characteristic was the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth century activity for the Roman hospital of Santo Spirito,mirrored in Rome by the inclusion of English names(often by proxy)into the register of the hospital confraternity there.[30]
The openness to continental influence was intellectual as well as devotional.English Lutheranism began as a continental import;and for a short time could be legitimately debated.[31]A more orthodox sign of continental contact(and of an English contribution to European spiritual life)is John Fisher's contribution to the international debate on the identity of St Mary Magdalene.[32]
It is important that the Reformation did not obliterate this sense of England as part of something larger.Indeed,if anything the Reformation encouraged its affirmation.A strong assertion of difference within essential unity appears in the Bishops'Book of 1537,giving a robust attack on papal primacy but defending the catholicity of the popeless Church of England.[33]Such validation of regionalised religion had a long history,being advanced by Regino of Prüm around 900,but it would be foolhardy to suggest a formal continuity of that attitude in the intervening centuries.[34]What matters in the context of the 1530s is that such views were not confined to Henry VIII and his adherents.Those now identified as‘conformist catholics’could also hold them,people like Simon Mathew,prebendary of St Paul's in London,in 1535.He could accept the distinctness of the English church under a royal supremacy,because‘the diversity of regions and countries maketh not the diversity of Churches,but the unity of faith maketh all regions one Church’.[35]However,in the sixteenth century it was becoming difficult to maintain that unity of faith.The possibility of a localised control of doctrine by local‘royal supremacies’,and therefore of doctrinal differences between national churches,was argued for by the lawyer Christopher St German in the mid-1530s.[36]Such developments were dangerous.Medieval catholicism had asserted unity while accepting considerable diversity of practice;but doctrinal diversity,whether within a single realm,or between polities,might generate discord and adversity,and ultimately religious war.Within England the religious discord produced by Reformation did not quite produce religious civil war;but the threat was perhaps present in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and its associated risings,and fears of disorder and disobedience generated the repressive regime which marked Thomas Cromwell's period of control in the later 1530s.[37]