Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton.

  • George Gordon Coulton
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Medieval panorama : the English scene from conquest to Reformation / by G.G. Coulton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    790/842 (page 756)
    CHAPTER XLVIII (pp. 664—680) continued bull is printed in Bp Burnet’s Reformation (Records, part 1, Bk ill, § 9; ed. 1841, II. lxxiii). (15) R. W. Chambers, Sir Thomas More, 330. (16) I deal more fully with this episode in Inquisition and Freedom (1937). (17) O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Elizabeth, 157-62. CHAPTER XLIX (pp. 681-694) (1) Migne, Patrologia Graeca, Lix. 324 (serm. XL in Joh.); cf. 235, 346. (2) E. Brown, Fasciculus, II. 474. (3) Neander, Church History (Bohn), ill. 181. (4) G. de Lagarde, Naissance de Vesprit laique, II. 70—5. (5) Marsilius (ed. Previte-Orton), 112, 281. (6) Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation (Eng. ed.), 11. 349. (7) More’s Dialogue, Bk ill, chs. 14-16. Again, in his Confutation of Tyndales Answer, he condemns all the translations lately made of the Psalter, Primer, and New Testament into English. He adds “which books, albeit that they neither can be there printed without great cost, nor here sold without great adventure and peril, yet cease they not with money sent from hence, to print them there [abroad] and send them hither by the whole vats full at once, and in some places, looking for no lucre, cast them abroad by night, so great a pestilent pleasure have some devilish people caught, with the labour, travail, cost, charge, peril, harm, and hurt of themselves, to seek the destruction of others. As the devil hath a deadly delight to beguile good people, and bring their souls into everlasting torment, without any manner winning, and not without final increase of his eternal pain; so do these heretics, the devil’s disciples, set their whole pleasure and study to their own final damnation, in the training of simple souls to hell by their devilish heresies ” (English Works, 344). More’s attitude is fully and excellently discussed by MissM. Deanesly in different places of her Lollard Bible (see index). (8) F. M. Powicke, Christian Life in the M.A. 83. (9) Grosse¬ teste’s Letters (R.S.), 317; E. K. Chambers, Med. Stage, 11. 98; Creizenach in Camb. Hist. Eng. Lit. IV. 37. (10) Handlyng Synne (E.E.T.S.), 1. 1303. (11) T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, II. 45. (12) York Mem. Book (S.S.), 11. cxxv; cf. xlix. 124, 245. For this absurd legend of Fergus see L. Toulmin Smith, York Mystery Plays, xxviiiff. I give fuller evidence, with a woodcut from a panel at Notre-Dame-de-Paris, in my Life in the Middle Ages, 11. 139-41. Fergus, or Belzeray, was a wicked Jew who laid hands upon the Virgin Mary’s bier when she was carried to her tomb, and whose hands miraculously clave to the wood and broke off from his own arms. The full story is in The Golden Legend (Temple Classics, IV. 239). (13) A. W. Pollard, Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, 99 ff. (14) W. W. Capes, English Church in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 209. (15) M. Deanesly, Lollard Bible, 117, 122ff. It is necessary here to expose the inexplicable misstatement in the Preface to the current Roman Index of Prohibited Books, published by Cardinal Merry del Val in the name of a Pope who has filled one of the greatest librarian’s posts in Europe (1929, p. xi). This Preface stigmatizes as a mere calumny the idea that “ tlie Church put obstacles in the way of printing and using the Bible in the vulgar tongue”. In disproof of this “calumny”, it is asserted that “during the 70 years which elapsed between the invention of printing and the publication of Luther’s German version, more than 200 editions of the Scriptures [della Scrittura] in various vernacular [correnti] languages, duly approved by the Church, were spread among the people.” This total is evidently arrived at by reckoning as “la Scrittura” such piecemeal publications as a Psalter or a “Plenary” (i.e. the Epistles and Gospels used at Mass). The assertion “approved by the Church” is still more inconsistent with the actual facts. (16) Printed in full by J. Jortin,