Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII
By Peter Marshal
Past and Present, Vol.178:1 (2003)
Introduction: In June 1534, as the final ties connecting the English Church to Rome were inexorably being severed, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer issued an order for the preservation of ‘unity and quietness’. For the space of a year, preachers were to steer clear of six topics which ‘have caused dissension amongst the subjects of this realm’, namely, ‘purgatory, honouring of saints, that priests may have wives, that faith only justifieth, to go on pilgrimages, to forge miracles’. The first four items on this list represent important doctrinal flash-points of the early Reformation; the fifth, an increasingly contentious ingredient of popular religious culture. But the sixth – ‘to forge miracles’ – is a more puzzling and arcane inclusion, which those scholars noticing the document have generally passed over without comment, or glossed as a reference to miracles in the round. Starting from this textual loose end, my essay aims to unravel a thread which can be found running the course of the Reformation in Henry VIII’s reign: a persistent concern to identify and accentuate instances of the fraudulent and the counterfeit.3 From asking why the idea of ‘forged miracles’ might have been at the forefront of Cranmer’s thinking at this particular juncture, it goes on to consider the broader implications of the theme for understanding profound and long-term shifts in religious and political culture taking place from the 1530s.
Click here to read this article from the University of Warwick
Click here to read this article from the University of South Carolina
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