INTRODUCTION: ALTER ET IDEM

Contrary to the claim in St Johns Gospel 10:41, John the Baptist was a miracle worker. Specifically, he was the worker of a single miracle: he was a Carmelite. John the Baptist was a white friar twelve hundred years before the Order of the Hermits of St Mary of Mount Carmel existed, as John Bale, the Carmelite historiographer, explained in his history of the Order from its earliest days:
John the Baptist the most celebrated of all men, the son of Elizabeth and the priest Zachary, but the first teacher of the doctrine in the new law was taken into the wilderness as soon as he was born, nurtured by Enoch at Carmel, and hidden from the spite of the tyrant Herod. He lived, from the age of seven until thirty, with men of incredible abstinence, the Essenes, the sons of the prophets. Because in all things he precisely imitated Elijah it was believed that, once again, Elijah lived. Awaiting Christ in solitude, he philosophised with Angels. At length, having been bathed in celestial light, God sent this forerunner to prepare the way for Christ. In the spirit and strength of Elijah he was invited to revive the Israelite people, baptize them in the river Jordan, and scold the malevolent Pharisees for their arrogance. Not only did he prophesy the coming of Christ but also he presented and revealed him in the river. He delivered many predictions and sermons to the common people, which were preserved in part by the Essenes and made public to us by some of the writers of the Gospels. He was beheaded for having rebuked Herod Antipass great sin with his brothers spouse. His disciples, Enoch, Agabo, and Syla, said he was buried in the town of Sebasta in Palestine, between Elisha and Obadiah (who were brought up in the same manner of life).1

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Crucial to Bales untruth was proximity of kinship and of geography. The Baptist was a Carmelite because he was connected to Carmel and those who had lived there. He was nurtured at Carmel; he lived with the Essenes, the sons of the prophets, on Carmel; he imitated Elijah, the first hermit of Carmel; and he was buried between Elisha, Elijahs successor, and Obadiah, a disciple of Elishas. Here was a Carmelite-by-association. Note here that our concern is not with Mount Carmel proper, but with a more expansive region, as Bale later explained in an appendix to his life of the Baptist:
Jacob Ziegler, a most learned man, writes in his Palestina: Between Jerusalem and Jericho is wilderness, and in that wilderness is the Mount of the Quarantine, where

John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England Christ is remembered to have fasted for forty days, and the polluted seat of Addumin, which the Lord remembers in the parable of Luke 10[:307]. Elijah the prophet settled in this place of wilderness, and there Elisha constructed the cells for the prophets. The institution and religion of that place flowed through its descendants. Afterwards that wilderness was inhabited by the Essenes, men of incredible continency, who educated John, considered amongst the Essenes to be one whose sanctity had been foretold, in their customs.2

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Although nowadays Mount Carmel is confined to Israels northwest coast, some distance from Jerusalem and Jericho, in an earlier Christian tradition this region extended into the desert, which squares Elijahs exile in the wilderness with his habitation of the Mount.3 It was this more extensive region that linked Elijah, Elisha, the Essenes and John the Baptist. A shared geography facilitated and in fact exemplified a shared spirituality; the spirit of Elijah, residing in Carmel, flowed from one prophet to the next. In the Orders alleged beginning, a strong sense of place location, location, location was critical in determining a mutual identity. Bales geographical specificity clearly masked an element of fiction making. The New Testament says little about the Baptists early life, so Bales narrative was extra-scriptural, as he later conceded:
[i]f John had lived in a solitary manner outside of human company in those earlier years, unknown to everyone, and then had suddenly come forth to the role of prophesying, he would not have been accepted. Therefore a kind of publicly approved life had preceded it [his coming forth as a prophet].4

Although word of John the Baptists preliminary years had not been passed down to us, Bale remarked, again following Jacob Ziegler, that there were certain things that could be assumed. For example, it was inconceivable that the Baptist would have just appeared to the Essenes from out of nowhere; consequently they must have raised him. Such claims were not Bales innovations, and before him Philip Ribot, Jean de Cheminot and Thomas Scrope had claimed the Baptist for a Carmelite heritage, as had John Chrysostom and Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus (Mantuan hereafter), Bales preferred sources. Citing the latters Fasti, for example, Bale notes:
[r]esiding on the mountain of the men of Elijah in the manner of Carmel [ John the Baptist] (who lived in that woodland) learnt their customs, and delighted in their religion, and for a long time dwelled in the icy cold shades.5

There were gaps in the biblical narrative relating to John the Baptists upbringing, questions left unanswered, that a Carmelite tradition could fill. Critically, resultant assertions were not beyond the realms of credulity. Although silent on certain subjects, scripture was clear that John the Baptist was

Introduction

the returning prophet Elijah. Recall Jesuss words to the multitudes regarding the Baptist: if ye will receive it, this is Elias [Elijah].6 And in a passage clearly echoed in Bales narrative, John the Baptist was said to have gone before God, in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.7 Granted, the Baptist of the fourth Gospel denied this association when asked, Art thou Elias?, he replied, I am not but the Synoptic Jesus begged to differ, saying that Elias is come already. By this the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist.8 If Elijah was the original dweller of Carmel and John the Baptist was Elijah, then it was reasonable to surmise that the Baptist, too, was associated with Carmel. And because the white friars traced their heritage back to Carmel, the conclusion that both Elijah and John the Baptist were Carmelites was inescapable. It mattered little that this claimed heritage was an untruth if anything these early prophets were forerunners of the Carmelites for this would mean quibbling with a tradition that gave voice to the silences in biblical history. That the Order did not exist until the thirteenth century was a technicality to be rewritten and discredited, paradoxically, as a falsehood. The truth (to avail myself of the punctuation of suspicion) was that Carmelites had always existed, even before Christ, and that eminent among these early Carmelites was John the Baptist.9 Fast-forward some twenty years (Perpaucorum Carmeli Scriptorum was composed during the 1530s) and we witness a volte-face, for our author, John Bale, now rejects the suggestion that the Baptist was a Carmelite:
[i]n truth I read this history of the Carmelites in a certain book by Thomas Scrope. In Nottingham in England, in the Carmelite monastery there, was seen a solemn image of blessed John the Baptist, sculpted and painted, and displayed to spectators in their habit. The perpetrators established this fact after Christs words Matthew 11[:14], John is Elijah; and after the words of an Angel in Luke 1[:17], He shall proceed in the spirit and strength of Elijah though this is silly and foolish.10

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A tradition that had once engaged Bales devotion, one that he had certainly perpetuated if not perpetrated, is dismissed out of hand as silly and foolish. And even though scripture identified that John the Baptist was the returning Elijah, any extra-scriptural narrative was now viewed as unsubstantiated lunacy. Bale continues:
[w]hence by chance a monk who was near that town, [Thomas] Elingham of the monastery of Lenton, arrived, and offended by their rashness wrote the verse that follows and, as if addressing the saint, fastened it to the foot of his image: Baptist of Christ, such clothes are not fitting. Whoever clothed you as a friar has died accursed. The Messiah had never been a friar, nor Elijah, and the people do not remain happily when the prophet is taken for a friar. If you turn John into a friar, I might as well call you Gehazi: so you should not unite Elisha and these Jebusites etc..11

John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England

Just as Gehazi had betrayed Elisha, the Carmelites had betrayed John the Baptist by turning him into a white friar.12 In turn, Elinghams graffiti inspired its own riposte:
Elingham you lie in foolish and strange metre. And you are ignorant of these things, but you pitch in as if you know. For God is the witness: these white clothes are fitting to me, much more than your blackish clothes, or your black hood. I am a Carmelite by merit, but you are Gehazi. And a false brother of Benedict, dishonest in speech, etc.13

Prefaced with a summary dismissal [b]arbarously indeed, a Carmelite of that place answered with his own barbarian verse on Blessed John Bale went on to repudiate both of his disputants protestations.14 Still in the voice of his source, Thomas Scrope, Bale reasoned that:
[i]n those days the spirit of envy and arrogance bit these hypocrites in turn. Neither peace nor fame were secure at any time because of their wickedness, except when together they opposed the Lord and truth. The Dominicans and Franciscans should also be declared evil, except I might do so elsewhere.15

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Although Elingham exposed a Carmelite falsehood, as a Benedictine he was no better than the white friars. They were all enemies of God. Elinghams dialogue with our anonymous Carmelite in strange, foolish, barbarian metre, ostensibly synonyms for the leonine hexameter, insinuates that even as they were conceived, Carmelite claims to antiquity were contested. Although long considered a paragon for the eremitic life, John the Baptist was only made a Carmelite in the fourteenth century, after which time it did not take long for Elinghams refutation to appear (at some point between 1414 and 1427).16 Scepticism in the face of a fabricated past was therefore not unheard of by 1557, when Bale agreed that John the Baptist was no Carmelite and that all claims to the contrary were folly. However thorough Bales shift from the position he had held two decades earlier, it is worth noting that this constitutes a devotional and intellectual revolution in every sense of the word, since on this occasion Bale also returns to a poetic exchange that he had first recorded in the mid-1520s.17 This tendency to revisit or reconsider his past interests is symptomatic of Bales rejection of Catholicism for a reformed faith his religious conversion. His surviving texts therefore introduce us to two very different figures the vituperative reformer, John Bale, and his former Carmelite self, John Bale who are nonetheless united in their interests (though not in their judgments). These texts preserve traces of the convert and the pre-convert; they introduce us to John Bale alter et idem, transformed and recognizable. This is the study of an individuals religious conversion during the protracted process of doctrinal and legislative change incited by Henry VIIIs 1534 Act of Supremacy the English Reformation.18 It goes without saying that scholarship

Introduction

in this area is beset by difficulties was the Reformation prompted by politics or theology? was it a widespread movement, the demand of an irrepressibly anticlerical public, or an imposition of the monarch and his clergy on an unwilling nation? did it share in the dramas played out in Germany and Switzerland, or did a peculiarly native, Lollard tradition stoke Englands fires of reform? what was the pace of religious change? was the Reformation inevitable? indeed, was it a success? but the particular focus of this investigation is the microcosm of a single subjects spiritual transformation.19 Like countless other Englishmen and women in the sixteenth century, Bale came to reject Catholicism, his heritage and the faith of his country, of his parents, of his youth, of his adolescence and of his early adult life, for a reformed religion, but in large part the specific process of individual change has gone unexamined in accounts of the Reformation. The present enquiry, insofar as it is even possible, gains a firmer purchase on the nature of conversion; thus here is glimpsed the English Reformation in miniature. By way of an introduction to the field, it is necessary to address the insoluble question of terminology, and ask, to what did Bale convert? Henry VIIIs break with Rome and Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth century inadvertently opened the floodgates of heterodoxy in England. Naturally efforts were made to bridle religious dissent, but the failure of the Ten Articles (1536) to stablyshe christen quietnes and unitie amonge us was manifest in its 1539 replacement: An Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions. Henry did not just expect unity in matters of faith but also true unity and sincere concord, a true, sincere, and uniform doctrine of Christs Religion, which required that the manifold perils, dangers, and inconveniences which have heretofore in many places and regions grown, sprung, and arisen of the diversities of minds and opinions, especially of matters of Christian Religion would be drawn to an end.20 Only they were not, and with a new monarch came another adjustment in faith. Edward VIs Injunctions of 1547 intended to plant true Religion [in England], to the extirpacion of all Hipocrisy, enormities, and abuses, but in 1549 legislators accepted that all attempts to stay innovations in religious practice hath not had such good success as his Highness required. By means of its own Act of Uniformity, the Edwardian regime sought to put this right and so established one convenient and meet order, rite, and fashion of common and open prayer and administration of the sacraments, to be had and used in his Majestys realm.21 In this age of shifting orthodoxies, conformity proved elusive; just three years later, in 1552, another Act of Uniformity bemoaned the great number of people in divers parts of this realm, [who] following their own sensuality and living either without knowledge or due fear of God, do willfully and damnably before Almighty God abstain and refuse to come to their parish churches. What was called for was another reformation.22 Of course Edward died in 1553 and was followed on the throne by his half-sister, Mary, who had very different ideas about what con-

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stituted religious orthodoxy. She set about dismantling the Edwardian church and returning to Rome, and so in her own way she intended to rid England of the divers and strange opinions and diversities of sects that had arisen from the Reformation.23 That Elizabeths own Act of Uniformity (1559) harped on many of the same things indeed, that it was passed without a single churchmans consent confirms that at each stage of the English Reformation the establishment struggled to control and contain the flow of ideas.24 Paul OGrady, commenting on the Henrician religious settlement, has suggested that settlement seems ludicrously inapposite: flux, not fixity, is the hallmark of Henricianism, but he could also be describing the period as a whole.25 The result, in the opinion of Edmund Bonner, was that by the 1550s sundrye sortes of sects of heretickes as arrians, Anabaptistes, libertines, zwinglians, and lutherans had proliferated in the realm, and when we add to these the erasmians, erastians, sacramentarians, epicureans and papists, it is clear that in the sixteenth century religious identities were contested, and contestable, even if monikers such as these were in fact only whipping boys, inventions in the minds of the zealous.26 [W]hat a notable dyscencion, hathe bene in this Churche of Englande [since the break with Rome], what departinge from the true fayth of the knowen churche of God, the Marian apologist James Cancellar complained in 1556, what sectes, what diversitie of opinions is yet amonge us?27 What sectes indeed, Bale wondered in response, before cheekily volunteering Catholic sectes like the Benedyctynes, Bernardytes, Cartusyanes, Gilbertynes, Dominycanes, Franciscanes, massynge prestes, monkes, chanons, fryres, nonnes.28 This answer to Cancellars question, from 1561, warns us that in its own way the pre-Reformation church was no more unified than the post-Reformation church. Whatever the case, it is clear that in the sixteenth century faith was a vigorously contested category of self-determination, as John Foxes exhaustive and exhausting Actes and Monuments attests. There we are confronted by page after page of examinations, where inquisitors and their adversaries tussle over the nature of their beliefs. Of course definition did not come easily. Indeed, as the recent work of Michele Zelinsky Hanson has shown, some sixteenth-century men and women eschewed denominational labels altogether and instead identified themselves by the churches they attended.29 Taxonomies of reform will, as a consequence, always be imprecise, but in an attempt to avoid some of the more inflexible confessional categories, I favour the adjective and noun reformed, along with its many cognates, when describing Bales new faith.30 Sixteenth-century vocabularies were fantastically fluid, and even though Miles Huggarde would brand Bale a Protestante in 1556, converts from Catholicism spoke of themselves as brethren, gospellers, evangelicals, true Christians, Protestants (though in England only later in the century) and as Catholics.31 Even Bales rhetoric of binary oppositions was far from perspicuous, for although he purported to establish a stark division

Introduction

between papist and non-papist, by means of which he would institute a church of true believers of reformers he was purposely oblivious to theological nuance. Instead he levelled the variegated faiths of, among others, King John, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Hoccleve, John Wyclif, Mantuan, John Skelton, Princess Elizabeth, Anne Askew and Martin Luther.32 In Bales hands anyone who showed an interest in reviving Christian worship, or in critiquing abuses in the church, could be claimed for a programme of reform, even if in reality that reform was sought from within the Catholic Church. Perhaps this should not surprise us, since the history of Catholicism is punctuated by periods of reformation and regeneration.33 The principal point to be taken from this is that the status of reformer was not the sole preserve of the brethren, the gospellers or the evangelicals, despite what the rhetoric and theorizing would have us believe. A shifting background of competing creeds and terminologies can only be described using vocabulary that can bear tremendous weight, and any scheme of classification will always beg more questions than it answers. For instance, are one critics evangelicals anothers Protestants? Is brethren simply a synonym for gospeller? Do interpretative shifts follow lexical shifts when, for the sake of variety, a scholar substitutes one noun for another? Or in cases where one term is privileged, usually Protestant, does criticism make false claims for the existence of a unitary English non-Catholic faith? Although largely intractable, these difficulties cannot be willed away; the corollary is that if a decision on language is not made, the task of criticism, of even writing about the Reformation, becomes impossible. What particularly recommends reform is its latitude, for with guarded use the lexeme can signal both the differences and the continuities experienced by people during an age of transition. Most importantly, the appellation does not presuppose an unbridgeable gap between faith categories, allowing for the possibility that in the early stages of the English Reformation, religious differences were far more a matter of different emphases and tendencies than of clear-cut divisions between groups of catholics and protestants with wholly dissimilar sensibilities.34 Of course I accept that my preference for reform is not without its problems. Chiefly, I do not mean to suggest by use of it that in the sixteenth century the differences between groups of believers were so nuanced as to be imperceptible or nebulous. Huggarde, for one, knew not only who the protestantes were but also that the Henrician martyr Anne Askew and the Edwardian martyr Joan Bocher were more lyke helhoundes then holy ones.35 In addition, though, I accept that this is not a word favoured by Bale, who instead uses colourful epithets and value-laden adjectives, such as true and faithful, in order to distinguish between churches.36 If, however, I were to adopt in this book my subjects postconversion distinction between the synnefull synagoge of Rome and Christes true churche, then greater controversy would follow.37 If, instead of Catholic

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and reformed, or even pre-convert and convert, I used Bales wycked and true, I would be suspected of endorsing his vision of Church history and sharing his allegiance.38 I would risk being drawn into the confessionally charged culture wars of recent Reformation historiography, which resounds with charges of Anglican or Catholic bias.39 Though it will not please everyone, the elastic and, I hope, relatively neutral term reformed may satisfy at least some. My concern with potential religious fluidity connects with recent work on Bale that draws attention to his significance as a link between institutionalized chronological and ideological boundaries, particularly the medieval and renaissance (or early modern). Cathy Shrank has dubbed him a transitional figure and a Janus figure, and James Simpson has drawn attention to Bales divided consciousness.40 In particular, the latter has interrogated the various pressures that motivated Bales literary production. Although Bale rejected his medieval Catholic heritage, he was also compelled to preserve a literary past on the brink of obliteration, the result of Henry VIIIs dissolution of the monasteries and concomitant destruction, and dispersal, of libraries. As a consequence Bale laboured to memorialize a past, his past, even as his present and future sought to erase it, for to destroye all without consyderacyon, is and wyll be unto Englande for ever, a moste horryble infamy amonge the grave senyours of other nacyons. His was a mind that could both rejoice in and lament the course of the Reformation:
thys is hyghly to be lamented, of all them that hath a naturall love to their contrey, eyther yet to lerned Antiquyte, whyche is a moste syngular bewty to the same. That in turnynge over of ye superstycyouse monasteryes, so lytle respecte was had to theyr lybraryes for the savegarde of those noble & precyouse monumentes this would I have wyshed (and I scarsely utter it wythout teares) that the profitable corne had not so unadvysedly and ungodly peryshed wyth the unprofytable chaffe.41

In determining the ways in which the medieval and early modern worlds bleed into one another in Bales thought, Simpson has concluded that the reformer worked under divided impulses.42 Such critical sensitivity is less often evident in discussions of Bales faith; that he might also have traversed the confessional monoliths Catholic and reformed, for example, has been of little concern to scholars, even though more general work on popular piety and catechisms has indicated that many people inhabited similar moral and intellectual universes either side of the Reformation.43 Lady Jane Greys personal prayerbook recently attributed to Katherine Parr, though perhaps incorrectly includes transcriptions of Thomas Mores manuscript prayers, which he composed while in prison for refusing Henry VIIIs Royal Supremacy. Though these were tweaked to satisfy a reformed sensibility, they do at least show that a Catholics writings could circulate among a non-Catholic community.44 Ongoing work by Felicity Heal on the numerous contributors to

Introduction

Raphael Holinsheds Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577 and 1587) also shows how, in the later period, people of different faiths lived and worked alongside one another whatever their differences.45 And Benjamin J. Kaplan has written about the Simultankirche in Biberach, Germany, a church in which both Lutherans and Catholics have worshipped since 1548.46 Members of different faiths were able to accommodate one another, but whether the individual convert, John Bale, accommodated a sense of personal division between his old faith and the new, requires more thought. Chiefly this is because most work on Bale is simply work on the reformer, and his thirty-odd years as a Carmelite friar have been tacitly dismissed in scholarship as a critical blind alley, to be acknowledged in footnotes or briskly skimmed in introductory chapters before the real work, on his role as a first-generation convert, can get underway.47 The suspicion that academics view his formative years as an inconvenience is inescapable, and this is despite the forceful work of revisionist historians in restoring the study of medieval Catholicism to accounts of the Reformation.48 There are numerous reasons why this might be the case. First, the overwhelming majority of Bales surviving texts are violently anti-papal in tenor, and his contribution to Reformation polemic was significant. Indeed, he was a pioneer, and not just in the field of religious controversy. Besides establishing an industry of reformed English martyrology, Bale was also responsible for: the first printed autobiography in English, The Vocacyon of Johan Bale; the first Reformation commentary on the Book of Revelation, The Image of Bothe Churches; the first English history play, King Johan; A Lamentable Complaynte of Baptista Mantuanus, the first (and only) English translation of Mantuans De Contemnenda Morte Carmen; and the first English translation of a group of funeral orations given on the death of Martin Luther, The True Historie of the Christen Deparynge of D. Martyne Luther.49 It is correct that this corpus should be subject to scrutiny. In contrast, Bales few surviving Catholic devotional works seem addressed to a past, irrelevant age that had no purchase on the explosive ideological (both political and theological) events of his present. What of interest can be gleaned from the collection of derivative, ahistorical saints lives in Cambridge University Library (MS Ff.6.28), the product of a religious mind withdrawn from the world? Second, matters are exacerbated by the inaccessibility of Bales Carmelite texts, which only exist in manuscript, and in Latin to boot. In comparison, almost all of Bales post-conversion texts were printed in English exceptions include his major bibliographical works and his history of the popes, which were printed in Latin and a handful of these are available in comparatively modern editions. But third, and most crucial of all, Bale explicitly repudiated his Catholic heritage. I eradicated the stamp of the most accursed Antichrist, he declares, and hurled all his chains far from me so that I might be given to the strength and freedom of the children of God.50 The

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scholars who proclaim the primacy of Bales espoused faith are sensible to do so, but this has created problems for the study of his religious transformation. Specifically, the near exclusivity of this critical focus has generated an image of religious change in which the subject converted to something from nothing. To date we have been offered conversion without Catholicism.51 Here I consciously echo Christopher Haighs summary of a Reformation historiography in which scholars once offered a Reformation without Catholics.52 Because the rise of a reformed faith was seen as inexorable, even necessary, there seemed little reason to give serious consideration to what came before it, apart from to denigrate and to castigate it.53 Scholars have tended to approach Bales Carmelite heritage in a similarly teleological vein. Note, for example, the perceptive Leslie Fairfield on the link between Bales Catholic and reformed hagiography:
Bales many years of work as a Carmelite hagiographer, in his younger days, had prepared him to answer the need for a new and reformed martyrology, the need which the earliest English Protestants such as William Tyndale had recognized.54

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Described thus, the products of Bales younger days by which is meant Bales twenties and thirties are reduced to spectres that lurk behind his later work in an uncomplicated fashion, to be discarded as quickly as they are invoked. In large part Bales Carmelite productions have only been interesting as antecedents, forerunners and precursors to his reformed martyrologies. In fact, his Carmelite works are imagined as portents that heralded the arrival of his more mature labour. The more recent work of Shrank seems alert to this alluring teleology. Claiming that we should not be seduced by Bales own rhetoric of difference, she has argued for an image of the reformer in which techniques and motifs from medieval drama permeate his prose works, as well as his plays.55 Her thesis is sound the medieval and early modern are permeable categories but more remains to be done. In particular, it is necessary to push a little bit further the concept of medieval solicited by Shranks study. Bale is the product of a medieval upbringing, she affirms, but further qualification is necessary, as the implicatory medieval shows.56 In particular, it is essential to engage with aspects of Bales specifically Carmelite heritage. Like others before me, my starting point in this study is Bales conversion to a reformed faith, his rebirth; but in a break with tradition, my focus is the problematic nature of this transformation, which has been impossible to locate. Thomas Fuller optimistically suggested that Bale converted in 1519, twelve years after joining the Carmelites at Norwich; Honor McCusker has argued for late in [Bales] Cambridge career or shortly after, sometime between 1527 and 1530; Fairfield, Jesse Harris, Thora Blatt and Andrew Jotischky have settled for 1533; and Peter Happ has offered 1534.57 Despite the appearance of a clear

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consensus the debate has continued, and more extensive processes of conversion have replaced specific moments of conversion. Harris antedated Bales transformation to 1531, arguing that he was altogether a Protestant in that year even though he remained a Carmelite; Jotischky has swapped 1533 for [d]uring the 1530s, probably in or after 1536; Blatt has argued that there is evidence that the attitude which led to [Bales] definitive break with Roman Catholic ideas was developed over a period of several years; and Fairfield has concluded similarly, claiming that the revolution in [Bales] devotional life was complete, after 1536 or so.58 All attempts at specificity have thus given way to something more tentative, but now this means that Bales conversion is believed to have taken place at some point between 1527 (Fullers 1519 can be summarily dismissed) and 1536. With his recent contribution to the debate, John N. King has urged even further caution, suggesting a terminus post quem of 1540, and Happ, aware of the existence of competing claims, has determined that it is very hard to say precisely when there was a definitive break. Perhaps indeed it is vain to try to pinpoint the change.59 In this radical proposition we see that the inefficacious quest may actually be an insurmountable methodological problem for scholars of the Reformation. Throughout this study I will have cause to outline these sorts of discrepancies in existing scholarship, not to sneer but because actually they point to areas of complexity that deserve consideration. In a pronounced way, these unacknowledged disagreements are the clearest guides we have to the problems that need to be addressed in the study of conversion. Acknowledging the same, and with reference to the conversions of John Bale, Hugh Latimer, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer, Peter Marshall has remarked that:
[i]t is striking that modern biographers of many of the leading English reformers of the first generation have found considerable difficulty in attempting to date with any precision at all when it was that their subjects converted from traditional Catholicism.60

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Of course this observation is correct, but expected should perhaps take the place of striking, given that with conversion we are concerned with an aspect of identity, faith, that is evolving, fluid, uncertain, liable to change, and that often resists definition. Or, to put it slightly differently, faith, because it is changing, snubs the conceit of historical chronology, the arrogance of definitiveness, and frustrates those who chase after it.61 The trap scholars have fallen into in their consideration of Bales conversion is that they have pursued an event that does not exist: a specific moment of conversion. Not only is religious change more properly thought of as a process, but also more crucially the experience of conversion is lost and all that exists for study is what texts call conversion.62 We are fortunate that Bale wrote a number of conversion narratives four in fact, two in the late 1530s, one in 1548 and

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another in 1557 but these are representations, not records of that phenomenon. The experience, whatever it was, in all its power, duration, and immediacy is lost, and in its place we have only a text before us; consequently our concern must be with the narrative representation of a process, with words and linguistic constructions, and not with a historical act.63 For this reason, this study rethinks the approach to Bales religious metamorphosis, which has typically been seen as an absolute break between the old religion and the new, a bare fact which almost defies analysis.64 Formulated thus, the individual convert is imagined as two distinct personalities one of which, the supplanted pre-convert, has faded from view in scholarship rather than as an individual alter et idem. But the effect of this has been a history of the reformer without a past. In response, my analysis brings aspects of Bales Carmelite heritage to the fore, and works from the assumption that all products of his thought, both Catholic and reformed, should be considered within the same space in critical discourse. Here I follow the work of scholars who acknowledge that:
[p]rotestantism as the very word suggests did not happen in isolation. It drew on Catholic piety and priorities, defined its doctrine in Catholic terms and, in the end, formed its identity against Catholic opposition. Protestants insisted in their creeds that they represented the true Catholic church.65

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My concern is not to hew my subject into constituent parts, or to sequence, after the fashion of chronologists, religious change; nor is it to chase after the impossible, Bales conversion-as-historical-event. Instead, the critics bte noire is replaced here by Bales conversion-as-discourse, his retrospective conception of religious change. It is the narrative construction of a historical moment that forms the basis of this study, and not the moment per se. From the outset it is important that the distinction be drawn between historical events and their subsequent representation, because when the written word is read simply for its historical pertinence, it is reduced to an act. Consider The Examinations of Anne Askew, and the specific case of her racking at the hands of Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich in 1546. According to the voice attributed to Askew:
they ded put me on the racke, bycause I confessed no ladyes nor gentyllwomen to be of my opynyon, and theron they kepte me a longe tyme. And bycause I laye styll and ded not crye, my lorde Chauncellour and mastre Ryche, toke peynes to racke me their owne handes, tyll I was nygh dead.

So that readers would register the depth of her torturers depravity, Askews interlocutor, Bale, fumed:
[m]arke here an example most wonderfull, and se how madlye in their ragynge furyes, men forget themselves and lose their right wittes now a dayes. A kynges high coun-

Introduction seller, a Judge over lyfe and deathe, yea, a lorde Chauncellour of a most noble realme, is now become a most vyle slave for Antichrist, and a most cruell tormentoure. Without all dyscressyon, honestye, or manhode, he casteth of hys gowne, and taketh here upon hym the most vyle office of an hangeman and pulleth at the racke most vyllanouslye.66

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Most scholars, whether literary critics or historians, have assumed the veracity of this account and condemned the protagonists actions for being cruel and vicious, as well as entirely illegal, since the law prohibited the racking of women, and Askew was a gentlewoman besides.67 One problem with this, though, is that the texts claim cannot be independently verified; another is that Askews narrative was designed to shock. The Examinations had a clear polemical intent [w]here coulde be seane a more clere and open experiment of Christes dere member, than in her myghtye sufferynges?, Bale asks and so forms part of the canon of saints lives, not of history.68 As such, it militates against the separation of fact from hagiographical fiction.69 Despite this, scholars have plundered the Examinations for historical truths, and the racking of Askew has become the nonverbal event that most clearly identifies the experience of cruelty under the Henrician regime. Besides the single source, however, we have no reason to believe that Askew was racked by Wriothesley and Rich. Glyn Redworth has, in passing, questioned the formers role in this grisly affair, and in John Foxes estimation the latter was innocent of the charge: until 1583 he thought that Askews scourges were Wriothesley and John Baker.70 Even so, a majority of scholars casually accept the martyrs account as authentic, and where evidence has failed, continued iteration and citation have produced the effect of its own veracity.71 Granted the status of a privileged observer, hagiography has been read as history and subjectivity has been interpreted as objectivity. The problem this poses for scholarship is that the Examinations now authorizes its own setting. By this I mean that the partisan narrative has been used to write the apparently unbiased historical moment in which it resides. As a consequence, when reading the martyrs text in situ following the dominant mode in literary criticism, historicism we reach a critical impasse, or hermeneutic circle, in which the single text is made both the subject and the object of academic study, both text and context.72 This makes for questionable history the Examinations cannot be its own critical test and suspect literary criticism, because Askews narrative should only be thought of as a representation of what might have happened to her.73 Of course it is a version of events that Bale, Askews editor, wants us to believe, but for obvious reasons this does not put it beyond reproach. And it is in this vein that I read Bales conversion narratives: as literary constructions and not as objective expressions of a historical event. Through careful attention to language I reveal that the image of John Bale evinced by his literary productions is not always consonant with the historical agent John Bale that scholars have revealed in their chronologies.

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John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England

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Any investigation of conversion in the early sixteenth century faces an acute problem of documentation, because an absence of unqualified faith statements from the period exacerbates the difficulties that beset the study of religious identity and change. From the seventeenth century onwards hundreds of conversion narratives were written, most famously John Bunyans Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.74 Yet despite the existence of influential models of conversion, chiefly Sauls journey to Damascus in Acts 9 and Augustines Confessions, [t]he tens of thousands of Europeans who in the course of the sixteenth century turned to Protestantism left very few accounts of their experiences of conversion.75 Leading European reformers were no exception to the rule, and for details of Martin Luthers Turmerlebnis we must content ourselves with a mere fragment in the prologue to the 1545 edition of his Latin writings.76 The same is true for John Calvin, who left only a passing reference to his conversion in the preface to his commentary on the Psalms, and this was written some twenty-five years after the experience.77 But even where conversion narratives exist they are far from self-explanatory, as literary scholars have convincingly established counter to the claims of historical positivism, particularly in their recognition that human accounts of history are constructed of language, a carrier of only imperfect signification.78 Accordingly, in their discussions of the origins, progress and consequences of the Reformation, scholars have tended to minimize the importance of individual religious conversion. This is not to say that nothing has been written on the subject, of course, but even the exceptions prove the rule. For example, short studies of the conversions of Cuthbert Tunstall, Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Chemnitz, David Chytraeus, Edward Crome and Nicholas Sheterden exist, but they also tend to declare their singularity.79 To these we may add the brief but insightful contributions of Euan Cameron, Brian Cummings, Peter Marshall and Andrew Pettegree, but book-length treatments of the subject continue to be conspicuous by their absence.80 This assessment may require further justification, because as Ethan Shagan recognizes, Reformation scholarship has always been concerned with the whole meta-narrative of conversion.81 Although all studies of the Reformation are, in one way or another, investigations into institutional, political, cultural and devotional change, whether at the level of a nation, town, village, community or individual, only a surprisingly small number of these have taken as their interpretative focus the meaning of conversion, with its various nuances and consequences. Conversion, in this study, is not just shorthand for the Reformation and its effects. Instead, the process of change, indeed, what it even means to be changed or to claim to be so, is the subject of study itself. By drawing this distinction I hope I will not be accused of splitting hairs, and I should of course say that my work clearly builds on the research of numerous others, both in the field of Reformation studies and in conversion studies more generally. In particular, this book forms part of a historiographical movement that is well established

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the study of the reception of religious ideas. Works on mentalits populaires, on how ordinary people responded to religious pressures, for example, have acted as important models for this study, as have intellectual biographies and the many investigations of religious history from the point of view of the consumer (alias the congregation).82 And already there exists a considerable bibliography on the subject of conversion in periods either side of the early sixteenth century, including two works by Michael Questier and Molly Murray that consider conversion in the Elizabethan age.83 Unquestionably, the conceptual issues raised in these books have guided my own thinking on the subject in ways that can never be adequately accounted for in individual notes and acknowledgements. Still, I am not aware that a full-length study of conversion to the early English Reformation (c. 152060) has been attempted. This book therefore uses Bales conversion narratives to intrude on a critical hiatus, but because I also move beyond just the consideration of his account of that experience, my study is not confined to these texts alone. Even though this was an age in which autobiography did not emerge in a recognizably modern form, there exists a huge number of other kinds of text that were loosely related to an idea of self-accounting.84 In Bales case, it is worth recognizing that his religious polemic continually edges towards the personal, as will become apparent in the rest of this study. Also recall the various treatments of John the Baptist with which I began this discussion, because by memorializing the consequences of their authors religious change, these introduce us to two versions of the same figure, the pre-convert and convert. But actually more can be said in the particular instance, for in certain ways the characterization so far offered is overly simplified. Specifically, the image of the Baptist gleaned from Perpaucorum Carmeli Scriptorum conflicts with a contemporary portrait by the same author. John the Baptist was an important figure for Bale, who not only wrote, in fourteen books or acts, a now lost play on the Baptists life, Vitam Diui Ioannis Baptiste, but also produced A Brefe Comedy or Enterlude of Johan Baptystes Preachynge in the Wyldernesse.85 The latter, apparently [c]ompyled by Johan Bale, Anno 1538 but which exists in an edition from 1744, neglects to mention the Baptists past as a white friar, and only an oblique reference to the Carmelite Rule, composed by Albert of Vercelli, is allowed to trespass on the close of the play. The character of Baleus Prolocutor, who fringes proceedings with an introductory and concluding sermon, begs his audience to:
[g]eve eare unto Christ; lete mennys vayne fantasyes go, As the father bad by hys most high commaundement. Heare neyther Frances, Benedyct nor Bruno, Albert nor Domynyck, for they newe rulers invent. Beleve neyther Pope, nor prest of hys consent. Folowe Christes Gospell, and therin fructyfye, To the prayse of God and hys sonne Jesus glorye.86

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Not only are the Franciscan, Benedictine, Carthusian, Carmelite and Dominican rules rejected as extra-scriptural inventions, but so too is the authority of the pope and his ministers. In their place, Baleus Prolocutor ushers in an apparently antithetical belief in sola scriptura, instructing his flock to turn to Christs Gospel as the only authoritative Christian rule. What is certainly not made clear is that Bale had once counted the Baptist among the blessed Carmelites. Nor does the play mention, in fact, that Alberts Rule also recommended that the white friars should ponder the Lords law at all times and keep watch at their prayers, unless attending to another duty.87 Johan Baptystes Preachynge transferred portions of Bales biographical sketch to the stage, for there we see enacted the Baptists exhortation of the Gospel (the new law), his foretokening of Christ, his baptism of Christ and the Israelites, and his dispute with the Pharisees. What is missing, though, is any reference to the eremitical life that he may or may not have lived, that is, until Baleus Prolocutor takes to the stage. Cordoned off from the rest of the play, as if to protect proceedings from the infection of association, is the assertion: [t]he waye that Johan taught was not to weare harde clothynge, | To saye longe prayers, nor to wandre in the desart, | Or to eate wylde locusts. No, he never taught soch thynge. Although John the Baptist lived the life of a desert dweller, Bale quietly disabuses his audience of any notion that the Baptist enjoined his own practices on others. The play thus becomes a site of dialectical engagement between the preacher and his congregation, who are encouraged to think of the Baptist simply as an evangelist. In Baleus Prolocutors estimation, Johan was a preacher note wele what he ded teache: | Not mennis tradycyons, nor hys owne holye lyfe, | But to the people Christ Jesus ded he preache.88 The text is therefore firmly anchored to a Reformation Christocentrism, and through it Bale hoped to convert people to a reformed faith. But this depiction of John the Baptist is at loggerheads with the image preserved in Bales Perpaucorum Carmeli Scriptorum, a manuscript that Bale also seems to have been working on in the late 1530s.89 How can we bring the contrary portrayals together? One way is to quibble over dates and bibliographical particulars. Traditionally, Bales plays have been read as propaganda for Thomas Cromwells programme of religious reform in the late 1530s, which is certainly tempting, because entries in Cromwells account books from 1537 to 1539 reveal that he was sponsoring a troupe of players known as Balle and his ffelowes.90 Not only this, Bale seems to identify in his catalogues that he was writing anti-papal plays during this time, one of which may have been seen by John Alforde, who claims to have witnessed an enterlude concernyng King John at Thomas Cranmers house in 1538.91 Problematically, however, none of these early dramatic productions have survived. Instead we have print and manuscript versions of Bales plays, from either 1547 or 1548 (and even later), which sometimes claim, on

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their titles pages, to have been compiled a decade earlier.92 Of course it is still possible that these plays, in their current form, reflect versions that were in circulation in the late 1530s, though the reference to Edwarde, soch a kynge of God elect in A Comedy Concernynge Thre Lawes makes this unlikely.93 Bale was a habitual reviser of his own texts, and he clearly reworked at least one of his plays before publication, rethinking it for a new audience. As responsible critics we therefore have to presume that his other plays were similarly reworked, which means that in the form that we have them now, Bales plays date only to the latter half of the 1540s. Or to put it another way, they are not reliable guides to Bales religious sympathies of an earlier decade. Such an argument helps with the present dispute, that is, the discrepancy between the portraits of John the Baptist in Perpaucorum Carmeli Scriptorum and Johan Baptystes Preachynge, because it insinuates that the two images are not contemporary. And yet there are problems with this line of reasoning, because when Bales surviving drama is assigned to the 1540s we risk downplaying his reformed sympathies of the late 1530s. This is a very real concern, though one that is perhaps worth tolerating given that some of Bales other works provide ample enough evidence of his emergent heterodoxy in the 1530s (as I discuss in Chapter 2). Even so an alternative argument is available to us, because unlike Fairfield, W. T. Davies and McCusker have dated Perpaucorum Carmeli Scriptorum to 1533, which would again separate in time the two impressions of John the Baptist.94 That there is a degree of arbitrariness to both arguments from chronology is troubling, but also it is avoidable, given that a more elegant solution to the problem exists. Instead of trying to reconcile the disagreement, we can instead consider whether, in the earlier stages of conversion, it was possible for contradictory truths to coexist in the same mind?95 Bales Perpaucorum Carmeli Scriptorum is not uncompromisingly orthodox, and it is on the back of this that Fairfield has argued for a composition date of between 1537 and 1539.96 The claim hinges on the note of bitter invective against clerical celibacy and against religious vows in general that is preserved in Bales preface to the catalogue:
[i]ndeed, except for the decrees put out in that time under the law of Moses, which governed the mode of life that they kept, [the Carmelites] always lived (as Martin the Italian witnesses) by the direction of Carmel, and afterwards Christs ascension, his Gospels, Acts, and the Letters of the Apostles were their specific rule, up until Basil, who prescribed the double rule to certain of his followers who were venerators of the wilderness. Under this they were not strictly bound to the vows of the papist monarchy, which held holy matrimony as detestable, contempt for the world as a shipwreck, and obedience towards elders and rulers as nauseous.97

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Unquestionably, this attack speaks of Bales discontent with the papacy, and with his Order in its present state, but this is preserved within a text that is overwhelmingly orthodox and content to be so. This suggests that at the time of

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writing Perpaucorum Carmeli Scriptorum, Bale was changing his mind about his Order. It is possible that just as the different images of John the Baptist introduce us to the idea of John Bale, alter et idem, so too does the individual manuscript. In the specific case we are faced with the really captivating possibility that in this manuscript either the Carmelite lets slip his anti-papal sentiment, or the reformer reveals his ongoing attachment to Carmelite legend. It is no small feat to decide between the two, so introduced here is the problem that forms the focus of the present study. The facts of Bales conversion, particularly as they have been set out in chronologies and biographical accounts, are discussed in Chapter 1 alongside the reformers conversion narratives, one of which, his last, written in 1557, has been read by scholars as a factual account of his transformation. In contrast, I argue that the differences between each narrative tend to mark each one out as an imaginative reinvention of the single event they describe. As a consequence, I maintain that Bales multiple conversion narratives partly reconstructed, rather than simply reflected, the converts past. In Chapter 2 I then test Bales claim that his metamorphosis was complete late in the 1530s, when he wrote his first conversion narratives. One result of this examination is that I reject attempts to determine the year in which Bale converted, and establish instead that conversion is properly understood as a shift that allowed for competing and irreconcilable systems of belief to coexist in the same mind, at least for a time. A case in point is Bales Anglorum Heliades, a work of traditional Carmelite devotion on the history of his Order that he continued to work on even after he claimed to have converted. In what way, I ask, was his rejection of the white friars an established fact if he continued to perpetuate Carmelite legend? In Chapter 3 I turn to consider whether religious change could be authenticated, and I identify that in Bales opinion a significant measure of real transformation was whether an individual had publicly repudiated his or her former devotion. With this in mind, I consider the ways in which Bale rejected his Carmelite heritage and argue that his converted self both assimilated and obliterated elements of this. As a consequence, I suggest that the white friar and the reformer, the pre-convert and convert, were aspects of the same individual. In other words, I maintain that Bale drew on his Carmelite devotion in developing a reformed identity. Even so, Bale changed thoroughly, and in my final chapter I turn from a consideration of the ways in which the individual articulated his own religious identity, to an account of how this was socially constructed and regulated. I look, for example, at a religious dispute that took place between John Bale and James Cancellar, in which both men challenged the others religious identity. What I identify is that mention of Bales former title, friar, aggrieved him, in part because this threatened his later sense of himself. In the rest of the chapter I explore the way in which a change of soul involves a change in religious community, and so I survey the converts search for an alternative, non-Catholic church. In this sense

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I return to an already familiar image of Bale the uncompromising anti-papist but what I suggest is that Bales efforts were, in part, a product of his Carmelite heritage, given the significance to his old Order of the ideal of fraternity. The larger argument here is that in Bales case the shift from medieval to early modern, from Catholic to reformed, is not a straightforward example of the birth of a spiritual individual in the manner of Jacob Burckhardts famed postulation. On the contrary, in conversion Bale exchanged one religious community for another. I end my study by drawing attention to a continuing concern of Bales, which was the threat that a convert might, like a dog, return to its vomit and re-convert to Catholicism.98 High-profile re-conversions imperilled the Reformations progress, as did Mary Is accession to the English throne, so in 1553 Bale looked back to Henry VIII and his overthrowe to [sic] the great Golias of Rome and complained:
[t]he fyrst [Henry] with noble Kynge David / prepared thys buyldynge of the Lorde / but thys other [Edward] with the wyse Kynge Salomon / to hys power made all thinges very perfyght. And though now after hys death / a Hieroboam paraventure is risen [Mary] / which will sett up the golden calves in Samaria / or mayntayne the popysh religion agayne / in Ymages / Aulters / ydle ceremonyes / and blasphemouse supersticions.

The reformer mourned the return of Catholicism, but still he hoped for a brighter future, where a faytfull Asa / shall folowe / eyther els a Josaphat / an Ezechias / or a myghtye Josias / which will dissolve those ydolatryes agayne.99 Once the wished-for Asa Elizabeth had come, however, Bale still found cause for complaint, since Canterbury in 1561 was thick with the stynkynge mystes of popysh tradicyons; indeed, the Reformations failure in the diocese provoked Bales cri de coeur, men rather have styll that darkenese, than the clere lyghte of the Gospell.100 There are ways, then, in which the particular focus of this study engages with the much more unruly question of how and when one of the most Catholic countries became one of the least.101 Needless to say, I have not answered the unanswerable, but this study may help point the way to a passable solution. After all, as Marshall has recently argued, [a]ny convincing attempt to redefine the English Reformation needs to start and end with the story of how English Christians managed to redefine themselves.102 Of course individuals responded to the Reformation in a huge variety of ways, some of which I identify towards the end of this study, and no single reaction is any more paradigmatic than another. The single case study, John Bales religious metamorphosis, is therefore not offered to the reader as an archetypal sixteenth-century response to the problem of religious change. On the contrary, Bale is typical of no one but himself, and rather than seek to extrapolate from the single example a general theory of conversion, my intention

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John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England

here is the much more modest one of establishing a set of critical perspectives on the subject that others will be able to examine elsewhere. All the same, Bale is an excellent subject for an initial foray into largely uncharted territory such as this. The fact that Bales conversion is indisputable, for example, means that no attempt to interrogate the process of change will ever teeter too near to the edge of New Catholic revisionism.103 What this study certainly is not doing, by nuancing the discussion of Bales religious transformation, is arguing it away; the converted Bale here presented can never be thought of as a crypto-Carmelite! But more than this, because Bale was such a prolific writer, and one who often liked to write about himself, his religious development can be scrutinized much more comprehensively than is often the case. The records that have survived are by no means perfect, or complete, but still there is enough to go on for a sustained investigation of his spiritual drift. And so to the business of this book: we know that Bale converted from Catholicism to a reformed faith, but we do not know what this transformation entailed. Let us now remedy this.

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