An Accidental Historian: Erasmus and theEnglish History of the Reformation

GREGORY D. DODDS

When post-Reformation English authors sought to describe pre-ReformationCatholicism, they turned to the writings of Desiderius Erasmus for historicalevidence to back up their arguments justifying the break from Rome. For many laterEnglish schoolboys, Erasmus was one of the only Catholic authors they read and thedepictions of Catholicism found in the Praise of Folly and, especially, in theColloquies, became their picture of Catholic clergy, as well as foundational imprintsfor their mental image of relics, pilgrimages, and other Catholic practices.References to Erasmus as a historical authority for his times appear in dozens, if nothundreds, of texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ignoring the literaryand fictitious nature of Erasmus’s satirical texts, they used Erasmus to justify theirdepictions of Catholic corruption, superstition, and irrationality. Over time, thesedescriptions became an almost uncritically accepted portrayal of the Catholic worldprior to the rise of Protestantism. This constructed reality thus became the worldviewof English speaking Protestants from the mid-sixteenth century up to nearly thepresent. Examining how later English authors used Erasmus helps us understand thesubsequent nature of English historical consciousness and the development ofEnglish and Protestant narratives of Church history.

“ALL Christen men beware of consentyng to Erasmus fables, for byconsentyng to them, they haue caused me to shrinke in my fayththat I promised to God at my Christenyng by my witnesses.”1

These were the words of Thomas Topley as recorded by John Foxe, thefamous sixteenth-century martyrologist and Protestant historian. The fablesTopley was thinking of were the stories Desiderius Erasmus told in hisfamous Colloquies. While the Catholic Topley had figured out that they werefables, many English Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

I would like to thank the wonderful staff at the Bodleian Library, special collections at theUniversity of St. Andrews, and, especially, the Folger Shakespeare Library. This article wouldnot have been possible without their assistance. I also appreciated the helpful comments ofscholars at several conferences and, especially, Patrick Henry, for his careful reading of thisarticle. I also want to acknowledge the support of my own institution, Walla Walla University,which graciously provided me with a sabbatical and a research grant.

Gregory D. Dodds is a Professor of History at Walla Walla University.

1John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of Matters Most Special and Memorable, volume 2 (London,1583), 1047.

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Church History 82:2 (June 2013), 273–292.© American Society of Church History, 2013doi:10.1017/S0009640713000024

treated Erasmus’s dialogues as accurate, first-hand, historical descriptions ofthe pre-Reformation Catholic world. The words spoken by the variousfictional characters in the Colloquies were presented as Erasmus’s words andhis observations of real Catholic clergy. The line between reality and fictionwas blurred and over time Erasmus’s fictional and satirical texts becamehistorical reality for English Protestants.

Erasmus (1467–1536) is best remembered as a Catholic reformer whocriticized the Church, but fell out with Luther over Luther’s insistence ondivine predestination. He is also remembered for his biblical scholarship, theprinting of the Greek New Testament, and for his calls for peace and unityamong Christians. He has been called a reformer, a philologist, a theologian,and occasionally a philosopher. What we do not often hear is that Erasmuswas a historian. Yet, in many of his writings, Erasmus demonstrated a deepappreciation for historical knowledge and the skills of critical historicalanalysis. Not only did he often stress the importance of Christian traditionand consensus, which required a basic understanding of history, but he alsounderstood the importance of historical methods for philological studies. Asone English author wrote in 1646, Erasmus was “a man better skill’d in allHistories and in the Annals of the times, than [others] . . . who are for themost part strangers and enemies to all good literature.”2 As I will discusslater, this reputation was important, as respect for Erasmus’s historical skillslent credibility to his accounts of his own times. Erasmus is not oftenthought of in connection with the cultural growth of historical consciousnessor with the development of the modern discipline of history. While he isacknowledged to be a figure of large historical significance, only limitedattention has been paid to his role in the advancement of historicalawareness, methods, and later cultural understandings of the past.

Renaissance humanists introduced new ways for critically thinking about thepast.3 Rather than assuming that the past was similar to the present, humanistsmaintained that the present was fundamentally different than previous eras.Changes in language, custom, government, and worldview meant thatunderstanding ancient texts, which were an overriding preoccupation of theRenaissance, required contextual readings and interpretations. The studiahumanitatis almost presupposed historical consciousness and the awarenessthat dramatic changes had occurred in the world since the classical era. Theidea of “rebirth” was a historical concept. The humanist emphasis onlinguistics, ancient texts, and education was closely linked with a more

2John Bastwick, The Utter Routing of the Whole Army of the Independents and Sectaries(London, 1646), sig. G2v.

3See Charles Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2011), 222.

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critical approach to historical development.4 Erasmus was part of a humanistmovement that stressed the importance of historical awareness and soundhistorical methodologies. It is not surprising, then, that Erasmus the historianis visible in his biblical scholarship, his patristic scholarship, and hisdepictions of the early church. His importance for historical writing,however, is not only witnessed in his approach to the past, primarily theancient past, but also in a historical legacy, especially in England. EnglishProtestantism, which was tightly linked with humanist methodologies, wasbuilt on historical narratives that depicted a sharp discontinuity from pre-Reformation Catholicism.5 Contextual readings of the recent past thusbecame part of the Protestant historical worldview. Protestants becameincreasingly aware of the importance of historical context for understandingthe early Church and as a polemical argument for criticizing the Catholictradition of their own times. But what sources could English Protestants trustfor accurate historical accounts of the early sixteenth-century Church? Overtime, Erasmus became a significant source and influence for many earlymodern English historians in both a methodological and contextual sense.During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England was religiously

transformed by what has been called the long English Reformation.6 Thereligious upheavals that shook the nation in the early sixteenth century didnot immediately create a Protestant nation and it would take decades beforethe majority of English men and women had internalized a Protestant ethos.7

There are, of course, virtually countless books and articles that discuss thechanges in religion that were brought to England by Henry VIII and hischildren and a prominent feature of those stories of the Reformation inEngland is the development of anti-Catholic rhetoric and propaganda.8

Recent studies, especially those by Alexandra Walsham, Michael Questier,

4See E. B. Fryde, Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London: Hambledon, 1983),1–33.

5Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987).

6See Eamon Duffy, “The Long Reformation: Catholicism: Protestantism and the multitude,” inEngland’s Long Reformation: 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (London: University CollegeLondon Press, 2003), 33–70; and, Jeremy Gregory, “The Making of a Protestant Nation:‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ in England’s Long Reformation,” in England’s Long Reformation: 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (London: University College London Press, 2003), 307–334.

7Eamon Duffy’s work has been especially important in demonstrating the longevity of Catholicpopularity among the English people and the very gradual acceptance of Protestantism in England.See Stripping the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2005); of Morebath (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); and“The Long Reformation.” Also see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1998).

8Of particular recent interest regarding English anti-Catholic rhetoric and propaganda is LeticiaÁvarez-Recio, Fighting the Antichrist: A Cultural History of Anti-Catholicism in Tudor England(Eastbourn, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 2011).

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Christopher Highly, and Stefania Tutino, among others, have provided us withcarefully nuanced interpretations of English Catholicism in post-ReformationEngland.9 One thread that these studies have not explored, or even seemedto notice, however, is the role of Erasmus in shaping English perceptionsof Catholicism during this era. The reception of Erasmus in England andhis importance for developments in education and religion is welldocumented.10 I have argued elsewhere that Erasmus was widely readthroughout the long English Reformation and that his views on predestination,moderation, and the philosophia Christi played a critical role in thedevelopment of uniquely English ways of being Christian.11 But if theCatholic Erasmus was so widely influential, then how and to what degree didhis works shape later perceptions of Catholicism? While this article does notattempt to reinterpret the broad strokes of how England became Protestant orhow anti-Catholic polemic developed in England, it will focus on a verysignificant and overlooked aspect of Protestant historical rhetoric. Perhapsmore than any other author, Erasmus crafted an image of early sixteenth-century Catholicism that became the received truth for generations of EnglishProtestants.

A number of scholars have examined Erasmus’s historical methods andanalytical interpretations of the past. Hilmar Pabel, for example, has studiedErasmus’s employment of historical setting for his paraphrase on Acts of theApostles.12 Others, such as Jacques Chomarat, have looked at Erasmus’sapproach to the Roman historians, while Peter Bietenholz examined Erasmus’suse of history and biographical writing.13 Despite these studies, very little

9See Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemicin Early Modern England (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell & Brewer, 1999); Michael Questier,Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage andReligion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher Highly,Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2008); and, Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England(Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007).

10For the early Tudor period see, James K. McConica, English Humanists and ReformationPolitics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). For the later Tudorperiod and the seventeenth century, see Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: The ErasmianLegacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2009).

11Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus, xi–xx, 264–268.12Hilmar Pabel, “Retelling the History of the Early Church: Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Acts,”

Church History 69, no. 1 (March 2000), 63–85.13See Jacques Chomarat, “La Philosophie de l’histoire d’Érasme d’après ses reflexions sur

l’histoire romaine,” in Miscellanea Moreana: Essays for Germain Marc’hadour, eds. Clare M.Murphy, Henri Gibaud, and Mario A. di Cesare (Bloomington, N.Y.: Medieval and RenaissanceTexts and Studies, 1989), 159–167; Jacques Chomarat, “More, Érasme et les historiens latins,”Moreana 86 (1985): 89–99; and Peter G. Bietenholz, History and Biography in the Work ofErasmus of Rotterdam (Geneva: Droz, 1966). Other studies dealing with Erasmus’s approach tohistorical inquiry include: Myron P. Gilmore, “Fides et Eruditio: Erasmus and the Study of

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work has focused on examining how later authors developed their historicalunderstandings and approaches from the writings of Erasmus. Erasmus wasnot only influential in the development of early modern historical writing, buthe also became something of an accidental historian on his own times. Thishappened in two ways. First, while writing history was never his primary goal,his use of historical skills and methodologies were critical to these works. Andsecond, Erasmus’s writings, especially his early critical texts the Praise ofFolly and Colloquies, became widely used as historical records by laterwriters. Erasmus thus became a historical authority on his own times for earlymodern authors writing the history of the early Reformation. It will be thissecond aspect of Erasmus’s historiographical legacy that I will examine here.There were a number of early modern English authors who directly cited

Erasmus to substantiate their historical descriptions of Catholicism and thepre-Reformation world. These included Holinshed, Thomas Dorman,Richard Crompton, Sir Francis Hastings, John Foxe, Francis Godwin,William Somner, John Bastwick, Francis Fullwood, Peter Heylyn, JosephHall, Henry Foulis, Jeremy Taylor, Francis Bacon, Sir Peter Pett, and HenryCare. This list is only partial and it grows much larger when one looks notonly for direct references to Erasmus, but also for similarities in historicalmethodology and for particular phrases that were either paraphrased ordirectly plagiarized. The histories these authors constructed were critical toProtestant self-identity during the second half of the sixteenth century andinto the seventeenth century.14 During the reign of Elizabeth I and the Stuartmonarchs who followed her, Protestants defined themselves in opposition toCatholicism. Protestant historians retold the story of Catholicism’s demiseduring the reign of Henry VIII so future generations of Protestants inEngland would understand both who they were and who they were not. Theconstruction of historical memory served a critical function in the making ofnational identity.15 And central to the stories these historians wrote were

History,” in Humanists and Jurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1963), 87–114; and István Bejczy, “Overcoming the Middle Ages: HistoricalReasoning in Erasmus’ Antibarbarian Writings,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 16(1996): 34–53.

14For a good collection of essays about the formation of identity in post-reformation England, seeMuriel C. McClendon, Joseph P. Ward, and Michael MacDonald, eds., Protestant Identities:Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1999). For the importance of defining Catholicism in Protestant England, seeEthan H. Shagan, ed., Catholics and the “Protestant nation”: Religious Politics and Identity inEarly Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

15For the importance of historical writing for the formation of Protestant identity, see BruceGordon, ed., Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 2 vols. (Aldershot,U.K.: Ashgate, 1996) and Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early Modern England(San Marino, Calif.: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2006).

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images of Catholic priests, monks, and prelates. Unsurprisingly, theseportrayals of Catholics were far from positive. What is surprising is howmany times one reads about these monks, friars, and church leaders andrealizes that the language was lifted almost directly from the Praise of Follyor the Colloquies. When English authors sought to describe pre-ReformationCatholicism they turned to the writings of Erasmus for evidence to supporttheir criticisms and to justify the break from Rome.

For many post-Reformation English schoolboys, Erasmus was one of the onlyCatholic authors they read and the depictions of Catholicism found in the Praiseof Folly and in the Colloquies became their picture of Catholic clergy, as well astheir foundational imprint for their mental picture of relics, pilgrimages, and otherchurch practices.16 In fact, Erasmus’s historical skills lent credibility to hisobservations regarding the pre-Reformation world. Educated English peoplewere familiar with his Paraphrases, his New Testament scholarship, and hispatristic scholarship.17 In all of these genres, Erasmus’s historical sensibilitieswere evident. His credibility was also strengthened, ironically, by hiscommitment to Roman Catholicism. The very fact that he was Catholic meantthat English schoolboys were taught that his views of Catholic corruptioncould be trusted because he could not be accused of being a Protestantpainting a biased picture.18 These stories, they were taught, came from aCatholic. They read his narratives as literal accounts and avoided morecomplex readings that might have recognized the satirical and comedic aspectsof his Praise of Folly and Colloquies. As a result, Erasmus’s early criticism ofthe Catholic Church became a part of the Protestant historical narrative.19

One of the most common methods whereby later English historians painted aderogatory picture of late-medieval Catholicism was to describe the cult ofsaints. The most often cited historical evidence for this picture wasErasmus’s description of Canterbury in his Colloquies. For example, SirFrancis Hastings suggested that the poor and needy were better cared for byProtestants after the Reformation than they had been under Catholicism. It

16Good analyses of Erasmus and English education can be found in James K. McConica, EnglishHumanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1965); and Todd, Christian Humanism.

17For the transmission of Erasmian texts in Elizabethan England, see Gregory Dodds, ExploitingErasmus, 61–92.

18For example, Henry Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of our PretendedSaints Representing the Beginning, Constitution, and Designs of the Jesuite (London, 1662), 7.

19This article focuses on the English use of Erasmus’s literary portrayals of Catholic clergy anddoes not seek to judge the validity of Erasmus’s depictions. On the one hand, Erasmus was clearlyplaying on common stereotypes and his audience would have recognized the figures he portrayed.On the other, his descriptions were often comedic and satirical in nature and did not representCatholic clergy as a whole, of which Erasmus was, of course, a member.

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should be noted that this is not the conclusion of modern historians.20 Hastings’sproof came from Erasmus’s Colloquies where Erasmus described the shrine ofSt. Thomas Becket. Hastings claimed that the gold and jewels covering theshrine, as described by Erasmus, meant that the Church cared more about itsown wealth and power than helping the poor. He wrote: “whence it hath cometo passe, that many liuely members of Christ Iesus, being colde, naked, andhungrie haue been neglected, while it was thought an holier worke to shrine ingold and siluer the bones of dead men, as Erasmus in his Colloquie ordialogue of peregrination for Religion sake doth note.”21 He then went on torecount Erasmus’s description of the shrine. Hasting’s point was that not onlywas the Church greedy, but also that underlying all of this fraud wassuperstition. Using Erasmus was the perfect way to engage readers whilesupporting the argument that the Catholic Church was, on the one hand,devious, cunning, and brilliantly defrauding the people, and on the other, filledwith illiterate, foolish, and almost laughable clerics. English Protestants trulywanted to have it both ways when they imagined the Catholic Church.Another historian to highlight Erasmus’s description of Becket’s Shrine and

Canterbury Cathedral was the bishop and historian Godwin Francis. In his 1630history of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, Francis alsostressed the grandeur of the Cathedral and the rich ornamentation of theshrine. The Catholic Church, in this account, was primarily devoted to themonetization of salvation. The diamonds, jewels, and gold that could betterhave helped the poor were instead being taken from the poor. The churchsought to demonstrate its wealth and power while continuing to steal moneyfrom the people. The source proving the corruption of Catholicism was againErasmus. According to Bishop Francis:

for from those times euen almost to our dayes all sorts of people from allparts of Europe, superstitiously frequented the Shrine of this vpstart Saint,with rich oblations indeuoring to procure his fauor. Hence the Monasterywas so inriched, that of it and the Church ERASMVS said, That eueryplace was enlightened with the lustre of most precious and huge stones,and the Church throughout abounded with more than Royall Treasure.22

20See Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (New York: Longman, 1988);Elfrieda Dubois, “Almsgiving in post-reformation England” History of European Ideas 9, no. 4(1988): 489–495; Ian W. Archer, “The Charity of Early Modern Londoners,” Transactions of theRoyal Historical Society 12 (2002): 223–244; and Thomas Max Safley, ed., The Reformation ofCharity: The Secular and Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2003).

21Sir Francis Hastings, An Apologie or Defence of the Watch-word (London, 1600), 19.22Francis Godwin, Annales of England Containing the Reignes of Henry the Eigghth. Edward the

Sixt. Queene Mary (London, 1630), 40–41. Erasmus’s De libero arbitrio and Luther’s response arediscussed on page 71.

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The point, for Francis, was to portray the medieval Catholic Church as havinggrown extremely wealthy by manipulating the gullibility of the people. Thisdescription, when joined with other descriptions of illiterate and corruptmonks and secular clergy, became the preferred Protestant memory ofEnglish Catholicism.

Francis also noted Erasmus’s description of the shrine at Walsingham andstated that during the Reformation it too was pulled down so that it “mightbee no further cause of superstition.”23 Naturally, the point of all of this wasto justify English Protestantism. Erasmus’s literary evidence was very usefulfor several reasons. First, his descriptions were interesting, memorable, andassociated with a famous name. Second, he was useful in that he was a well-known Catholic. Protestant authors could therefore claim the descriptionswere not based on Protestant propaganda. Better yet, as the EnglishProtestant historian Henry Foulis noted in 1662, Erasmus could not only betrusted because he was a Catholic commentator on Catholicism, but alsoconversely because Catholics, especially Ignatius of Loyola, had rejectedhim.24 It was similarly helpful that both the Index of Prohibited Books andthe University of Paris had censored the Colloquies.25 After all, if he was inthe Index, then it was practically an approved book for Protestants. From aProtestant perspective, therefore, Erasmus was perfectly situated as a reliablesource for Catholic history. He was safe, but he was also credible. The thirdreason he was so useful to authors such as Hastings and Francis was becausereaders were already familiar with the passages they were quoting from theColloquies and educated readers would have read his portrayals of theshrines when they were learning Latin.26 I have mentioned the histories ofHastings and Francis as examples of references to Erasmus’s descriptions ofthe shrines at Canterbury and Walsingham, but there were many more;including histories written by Francis Bacon and William Somners.27 These

23Godwin, Annales, 160. For the context of Erasmus’s visit to Walsingham, see Peter Marshall,Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006), 133–134.

24Foulis, The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies, 7.25C. R. Thompson, “Introduction,” in Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, vol. 39 (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1997), xxxix–xxxx.26For the use of the Colloquies in English education see C. R. Thompson, “Erasmus and Tudor

England,” in Extrait des Actes du Congrès Erasme, Rotterdam 27–29 Octobre 1969 (Amsterdam:North Holland Publishing, 1971), 29–68; Todd, Christian Humanism, 93; Ian Green, Humanismand Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009), 176;and Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus, 64, 89.

27William Somner, The Antiquities of Canterbury (London, 1640), 86, 164–5, 170–172, 177–178. It is also worth noting that in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Bodley, whencommissioning the historical friezes for the library reading room at Oxford, included Erasmuswith other figures who established Protestantism in England. See Ian Philip, The BodleianLibrary in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983),22–25.

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histories shaped the way educated English people remembered their Catholicpast.Perhaps more historically significant than Erasmus’s depiction of Catholic

shrines was his portrayal of monks, friars, theologians, and prelates.Erasmus’s Colloquies and Praise of Folly became definitional texts forProtestant views of Catholic clergy. Tracing all of the connections inProtestant works to these Erasmian texts would be nearly impossible. Theyshow up in hundreds, if not thousands, of texts, though most were withoutdirect references. But the language and structure of the portrayals leave littledoubt that these originated in readings of Erasmus. The Colloquies andPraise of Folly were the books, by a Catholic author, that a wide swath ofProtestants continued to read in post-Reformation England. As one Catholicauthor astutely bemoaned, “there is commonly read in al scooles a boke ofColloquies, compiled by Erasmus of Roterdam, wherin be many thynges,whiche may beate in to younge and tender myndes, ungodlynes, and infectethe frayle and bryckel age.”28 From an English Catholic perspective, this isprecisely what was happening in England. The Colloquies were filled withstereotypical views of Catholics that English readers assumed were true forall Catholic clergy. Here is another description of the Colloquies in Englandfrom 1560:

and as touchynge the colloquies of Erasmus, thus it standeth. Amongstmanye other workes wherby Erasmus wonderfully aduaunced learning, hemade also a booke of Dialogues for chyldren. And seyng it red so gredely,he ofte augmented the same. And as he was a man of an excellent witte,and of great eloquence, he toke pleasure to wryte of sondry argumentestaken out of naturall thynges, and of the lyfe of men. And with a certenmaruelous dexteritie, and style moste pleasaunt, he setteth forth precptesof Godlye and vertuouse maners, and noteth with all by the same occasion,olde accustomed errours and vices, whereof commeth this complaynte ofhym.29

The Colloquies were filled with godly wisdom, but this also caused some tocomplain. From a Protestant point of view, though, such a “complaynte ofhym” provided yet an additional reason to read and trust such a text.One of the most prominent writers to draw from Erasmus’s texts for

historical descriptions of the Reformation was the famed martyrologist JohnFoxe.30 Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, commonly referred to as the “book ofmartyrs,” was perhaps only surpassed by the Bible in popularity in

28Johannes Sleidanus, A Famouse Chronicle of Our Time (London, 1560), clvi–clvii.29Sleidanus, Famouse Chronicle, clviii.30For more on Foxe’s use of Erasmus see Bruce Mansfield, Phoenix of His Age: Interpretations

of Erasmus, c 1550–1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 111–114.

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Elizabethan England.31 On numerous occasions in this text Foxe pointed toErasmus as an authority on his times and used references to Erasmus’s textsto support his negative historical portrayals of the Catholic Church.32

Interestingly, Foxe highlighted the significance of the Colloquies forundermining Catholicism. I began this article with a quotation from ThomasTopley that Foxe included in his Acts and Monuments. Taking another lookat Topley’s full statement is useful for understanding his fear of the corrosiveeffects of the Colloquies. In his recantation, Thomas Topley specificallysingled out the Colloquies for his loss of faith in the Church:

all Christen men beware of consentyng to Erasmus fables, for by consentyngto them, they haue caused me to shrinke in my fayth that I promised to God atmy Christenyng by my witnesses. First, as toughyng these Fables, I read inColloquium by the instruction of Syr Richard Foxe, of certain Pilgrimes,which (as the booke doth say) made a vowe to go to S. James, & as theywent, one of them dyed & he desired his felowes to salute S. James in hisname: and an other dyed homeward, and he desired that they would salutehis wife and his children, and the thyrd dyed at Florence, & his felowsayd he supposed that he was in heauen, and yet he sayd that he was agreat lyer. Thus I mused of these opinions so greatly, that my mynde wasalmost withdrawne from deuotion to Saintes. Notwithstandyng I consentedthat the diuine seruice of them was very good, and is though I haue nothad such sweetnesse in it as I should haue had, because of such Fables, &also because of other foolish pastimes, as dauncing, tennes and such other,which I thinke haue bene great occasions that the goodnes of God hathbene voyde in me, and vice in strength.33

The fables of Erasmus lessened the “sweetnesse” of Topley’s devotions. Thiswas a surprisingly candid testimonial about reading Erasmus and the effectthat such reading had on traditional approaches to faith and religiouspractice. While Catholics lamented this corrosive Erasmian effect, such apassage was sure to delight Foxe’s Protestant audience, for whom Erasmuswas the key to exposing Catholic corruption, abuse, and foolishness. Thisstatement by Topley, however, gets to the problematic nature of usingErasmus’s Colloquies and Praise of Folly as historical evidence. These textscombined literary elements of satire, comedy, and fiction to craft polemicalpoints. In England, though, they were often treated as accurate historicaldescriptions of Catholicism. Topley, in contrast, pointed out that they were

31For a discussion of the importance and print history of Foxe’s Acts andMonuments, see John N.King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006).

32See Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 838, 841, 844, 857, 989, 1075, 1113–1114, 1177–1179, 1265,1298, 1379–1380, 1567.

33Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1047.

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fictions or fables, and also suggested that these stories of Catholic corruptionand foolishness were destroying faith. The assumption underlying the textwas that Topley was far from the only reader of the Colloquies to be pulledaway from Catholicism by Erasmus’s stories. From a Catholic point of viewthis was the danger of the Colloquies. From an English Protestantperspective, particularly that of John Foxe, this was exactly what they hopedwould happen when students read Erasmus’s dialogues.Foxe singled out one colloquy in particular as emblematic of the failures of

the Catholic clergy. The colloquy of the “Abbot and the Learned Lady” was theperfect vehicle for Foxe to ridicule unlearned and corrupt monks and otherCatholic clergy. It also included some rather interesting critiques about therole of women in society. Foxe wrote:

there is a learned man, which in a Dialogue that he maketh betwixt a rudeAbbot & a Gentlewoman, hauing skill in learning, jesteth, but with pretyearnest (as his manner is) and geueth a watch worde touching somewhatmy purpose. It is in the end of the Dialogue. The gentlewoman aunsweringthe Abbot, for that he had partly checked her, because she was quicke invtterance of learning: Syr (quoth she) if you continue therin so dull as youhaue done and dayly do, the world perceiuing it (as they begin fast to growquicke in sight) it is to be feared, least they will sette you beside thesaddle, and put vs in your roomes.34

In this instance, Erasmus was not directly named, but was simply referred to as“a learned man.” Educated readers, however, would have recognized this asone of Erasmus’s most well known dialogues. The punch line at the end ofthe colloquy was that learned women would take the positions of the clergyif they continued to exhibit such levels of ignorance and incompetence.While Erasmus may have been using this dialogue to encourage learning inwomen, the point for Foxe was clearly directed at the failures of Catholicclerics and the implication was that all Catholic clergy were ignorantbuffoons. In the early seventeenth century, Thomas Mason provided anedited version of Foxe’s “book of martyrs” and specifically directed readersto Erasmus. Following a long passage describing the foolishness of themonks at the time of the Reformation, Mason wrote that if readers wanted tohear about “more and worse pranks of Friers and Monks . . . [then] let themresort to . . . Erasmus, and he shall find ynough to infect the aire.”35 Ifreaders either did not believe Foxe or needed additional evidence for theevils of Catholicism then they should read the Colloquies. Erasmus thusprovided English Protestants with evidence for the supposedly derelict state

34Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1113.35John Foxe, Christs Victorie ouer Sathans Tyrannie: Faithfully Abstracted out of the Book of

Martyrs, and Diuers other Books. By Thomas Mason Preacher of Gods Word (London, 1615), 219.

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of affairs within the Church and its clergy prior to the English break fromRome.

There were similar references to ignorant and corrupt monks and friars inFrancis Fullwood’s The Church-History of Britain. Again, the materialclosely reflected passages in the Colloquies, though many of the paraphrasesdid not include a direct citation. After one passage describing useless andlazy monks, however, Fullwood added that “this plainly appeareth out ofErasmus in his Dialogues.”36 Fullwood’s historical methodology wasobviously rather suspect when he was proving his historical account byciting a fictional dialogue. But the Colloquies were widely known accountsthat had been written during the time period Fullwood was writing about andtherefore represented, as historical literary works continue to do for modernhistorians, a window into cultural perceptions. Early modern Englishhistorians, however, sought to use Erasmus’s fictional dialogues, such as TheAbbot and the Learned Lady, to exhibit the failings of the monastic systemand as proof of the necessity of a reformation in England. Naturally, forauthors such as Foxe and Fullwood, it was appropriate that the monasterieswere dissolved when they were filled with such unlearned, unchristian men.None of the sources noted that Erasmus had created fictional charactersbased on stereotypes that in no way represented the whole of the monasticsystem or the Catholic clergy. Instead, they took his accounts as truerepresentations of the entire Catholic faith.

As late as 1688 we find Sir Peter Pett citing Erasmus repeatedly in his historyof English Christianity. He said that both Henry VIII and Erasmus laughed andmocked the barbarous papacy and made it the “object of our mirth.”37 He thensuggested that the rise of the Catholic interest in England during the reign ofJames II should be dealt with in the same way Erasmus had previously dealtwith it: through mirth and ridicule. In Pett’s mind, Erasmus was associatedwith the dawn of the new learning: philology, languages, and clear thinkingin general. Erasmus had helped bring about a new England that broke awayfrom its superstitious Catholic past.38 In fact, the new experimentalphilosophy of the Royal Society, he said, had its roots in Erasmus’s thoughtand writings.39 According to Pett, the “Critical Masters of ExperimentalPhilosophy, and who by means of the great useful pains formerly taken by

36Francis Fullwood, The Church-History of Britain (London, 1655), 34–35. Also see pp. 166–167, 275, and vol. 2, pp. 87–88.

37Sir Peter Pett, The Happy Future State of England (London, 1688), 154.38Pett, Happy Future State, 73.39Pett was an associate of the Royal Society. See Frances Harris, “Ireland as a Laboratory: The

Archive of Sir William Petty,” in Archives of the Scientific Revolution: the Formation andExchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-century Europe, ed. Michael Hunter (Woodbridge, U.K.:Boydell & Brewer, 1998), 88.

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Erasmus, Sir Thomas Moore and others, in restoring Philological Learning,have now entire leisure to devote their Studies to the substantial Knowledgeof things, and whose Motto is, Nullius in verba.”40 This last phrase was aslogan for the Royal Society, which hoped to move beyond the dogmaticquarrels of the Reformation and, instead, to develop an understanding oftruth from empirical evidence, the knowledge of things. Returning to“popery” would be to reject an era of dawning rationalism and instead “runback to implicit faith and ignorance and barbarism.”41 From Pett’s point ofview, the very foundation of social progress was put in jeopardy by a newera of “popery” in England.42 Pett and his readers believed that Erasmus hadprovidentially exposed the real historical nature of Catholicism.Another of Pett’s historical targets was medieval scholasticism. Not

surprisingly, he again turned to Erasmus for corroboration. “The Segacity ofErasmus,” he wrote, “could not then but easily see through the Cobwebs ofthe School-Divines.”43 After quoting directly from Erasmus against thescholastics, Pett crafted an interesting alliance between Erasmus and ThomasHobbes. According to Pett, “here it may not by the way be unworthy of yourLordships observation as to the concert that is between the Genius of onegreat Witt and another, that Erasmus and Mr. Hobbs had the same sense ofSchool-Divinity and School-Divines.”44 This reputation for great wit wasderived from Erasmus’s Colloquies and his Praise of Folly and though Pettdid not identify his source directly, it is apparent that much of his associationof Erasmus with the witty mockery of scholastics and theologians originatedin the Praise of Folly. He also noted that Foxe had relied on Erasmus for hishistories. Pett wrote that “our Martyrologist Mr. Fox could not haveexpressed more anger against a Bishop Bonner, than Erasmus a Papist hathhere against Popish Persecuting Prelates.”45 Erasmus’s credibility incriticizing Catholic practices was greater, according to Pett, because he was a“papist.” It is also important to note that Pett connected Erasmus and Foxeas historical sources critical of papal practices. Pett then continued:

had Erasmus then known of one practice enjoyn’d constantly by the Canonsto Popish Bishops at their Condemning of Heretics . . . I believe the great Witof Erasmus would after his ingenious account aforesaid of the Tragedy of theCondemned Heretic, pleasantly entertained himself and Posterity with the

40Pett, Happy Future State, 73.41Pett, Happy Future State, 73.42For Pett’s philosophical and political views, see Mark Goldie, “Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical

Toryism, and the Science of Toleration in the 1680s,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984),247–273.

43Pett, Happy Future State, 70.44Pett, Happy Future State, 70.45Pett, Happy Future State, 207.

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wanton cruelty of that Farce that ensued it, and let us see how the PopishBishop then using the Speech familiar to some Tooth drawers just beforetheir operation.46

Even though Erasmus had not written about these particular aspects of torture,he would have, Pett maintained, if he had known about them. For Pett, Erasmusappeared to be a reliable early sixteenth-century witness even when he was not.All these passages from Pett represent a linking of Erasmus and Foxe. Theysubstantiated each other and if Erasmus was good enough for Foxe, thenPett’s readers could trust that he was a credible historical source. Together,Foxe and Erasmus formed the historical justification for Protestantism. InPett’s mind, Erasmus’s “great Wit” provided the historical evidence for thecorruption, foolishness, and barbarism of the Catholic Church. Moreover,Pett’s own depictions of Catholicism in his time were not based oncontemporary accounts, but rather from portrayals found in the Praise ofFolly and the Colloquies written over a century earlier.

Perhaps the most important historical use of Erasmus came in Henry Care’shistory of the Christian Church.47 This was a unique history since it was writtenfor the vulgar sort and released as a serial over a period of several yearsbeginning in 1678. During that year, popular hysteria spread throughoutEngland over the supposed “Popish Plot” to assassinate Charles II andreplace him with his Catholic brother James. Henry Care was at the heart ofthe anti-Catholic propaganda that emanated from the English presses. In theend, at least fifteen innocent people were executed before the Plot wasexposed as a fabrication of Titus Oates and Israel Tonge. During the heightof the panic, though, Care was one of the most vociferous voices railingagainst the Catholic threat and calling for a parliamentary bill to excludeJames from inheriting the throne.48 One of the ways Care sought todemonstrate the evil of Catholicism was through a weekly history pamphletdesigned to attract a common readership. Each publication contained anotherchapter in the fifteen hundred year history of the Catholic Church.49 Entitled,The Pacquet of Advice from Rome: or, the History of Popery, it detailed what

46Pett, Happy Future State, 207.47For the polemical and political context of Care’s history, see Lois G. Schwoerer, The Ingenious

Mr. Henry Care: Restoration Publicist (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 44–75; and Peter Hinds, “‘Tales and Romantick Stories’: ‘Impostures,’ Trustworthiness and theCredibility of Information in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Roger L’Estrange and theMaking of Restoration Culture, eds. Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch (Aldershot, U.K.:Ashgate, 2008), 96–105.

48Ironically, Care would later become a supporter of James II when James called for full religioustoleration in England. See Lois G. Schwoerer, Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, 189.

49According to Daniel Woolf, Care’s Weekly Pacquets were the first serial histories published inEngland. See Daniel R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000), 274.

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Care believed was the corruption of Christianity by the Church and the abuse ofpower by the papacy against anyone who resisted its jurisdiction. Takentogether these pamphlets were, in essence, a large historical treatise brokenup into small chapters that the common people could purchase each week fora penny. In the introduction to his first volume of collected Pacquets, printedin 1679, Care maintained that he would only use unassailable sources. “TheAuthorities I shall make use of,” he wrote, “shall be either Sacred Scriptures,or such Authors as our Adversaries owne; which muste therefore becompetent witnesses without exception.”50 Apparently, given the largenumber of references to Erasmus, Care believed that Erasmus was anunassailable source for accurate descriptions of the early sixteenth century.This was, as we have already discussed, because Erasmus was Catholic. LikePett, Care also suggested that since Catholicism was irrational and rathersilly the way to combat it was with ridicule and scorn. After stating that hewould be moderate and base his criticisms with fact, Care wrote: “Sure wemay be allowed a little innocent Mirth, when they exercise so much Spleenand Gall. Indeed Popery is generally so silly a Foppery, that it deservesnone of our Passions but Scorn, bating only their Idolatries and Cruelties,which rather require our Compassion and Detestation.”51 Care thereforeneeded sources that were moderate, judicious, and, if possible, witty.Erasmus, he believed, was just such a perfect source.Care’s first pamphlet appeared in 1678 and started with early Christian

history. Four years later, in 1682, his pamphlets had reached the ProtestantReformation. Over these four years his readership had grown substantiallyand it is possible that his was the most widely read history of theReformation in seventeenth-century England.52 For Care’s description ofCatholic clergy and theologians at the time of the Reformation, he turned toErasmus and the Praise of Folly. Care regularly referred to Erasmus andErasmian texts in his writings and in the Pacquets Care paraphrasedsignificant sections from Erasmus. In fact, two entire weekly chapters ofCare’s Pacquet drew almost exclusively from the Praise of Folly. On Friday,November 24, 1682, the abstract at the top of the pamphlet read:

Fragments out of Erasmus. His Moriae Encomium. He taxes the lives of theSchoolmen and Popish Clergy. The Abominable and wicked lives of the

50Henry Care, The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome: Or, The History of Popery, vol. 1(London, 1679), 3.

51Care, Weekly Pacquet, vol. 1, 3.52Schwoerer, Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, 72–74. Care felt that his history provided common

English men and women with greater insight into the Catholic Church than any other volume.See Henry Care, The History of Popery or Pacquet of Advice from Rome, vol. 4 (London,1682), sig, A2v.

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Monks and Friers. Their Fopperies and vile way of Preaching. The mannersof Princes, Noble men, and Ladies reprehended.53

What followed this summary, over the next six pages of the pamphlet, wereErasmus’s depictions of foolish clerics developed from the Praise of Folly.The presentation, however, made no acknowledgement of the satirical natureof the text or that Erasmus’s fictional character, Folly, was the main speaker,not Erasmus himself. Though Folly was indeed making Erasmus’s points,Erasmus was using satire, hyperbole, and a comedic lightness to get hisreaders thinking. All of that is gone in Care’s paraphrase and what remainedwas a biting attack on the Catholic Church, an attack ostensibly comingfrom Erasmus rather than Care. Moreover, the material was presented asErasmus’s objective historical description of his times. After beginning witha description of the exorbitant pride of the theologians and clergy, Careturned to the monks. The following passage from Care, which was entirelydrawn from Erasmus, provides a good sense for how English authors wereincorporating Erasmus’s fictional depictions into their own historicalaccounts of the period. Paraphrasing Erasmus, Care wrote:

next to these come those who call themselves the Religious, and Monks;most false in both Titles; when both a great of them, are farthest fromReligion, and to men swarm thicker in all places than themselves; a sortof wretches they are, that all men detest to that height, that they take it forill luck, to meet one of them by chance; yet such is their happiness thatthey flatter themselves. In the first place they reckon it one of the mainpoints of piety, if they are so illiterate, that they can’t so much as Read:And then, when they run over their Offices, which they carry about ‘em,rather by rote than understanding, they believe the Gods more thanordinary pleased with their braying. Some there are among them, that putoff their trumperies at vast rates; yet wander up and down for the breadthey eat. There is scarce an Inn, Wagon, or Ship, into which they will notintrude, to the no small Damage to the Commonwealth of Beggars: Andyet like pleasant fellows with all this Vileness, Ignorance, Rudeness,Impudence, and Debaucheries they represent to us (for so they call it) theholy and mortified lives of the Apostles; and what is more pleasant, stillthey do all things by rule, and as it were a kind of Mathematics, the leastswerving from which were a Crime beyond forgiveness.54

There was no indication in the text that this was anything other than anunembellished description by Erasmus of his times. In Care’s text, Folly was

53Henry Care, Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome: or, The History of Popery, vol. 5 (London,1683), 97. I would like to thank the helpful staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library for helping me tolocate these specific pamphlets.

54Care, Weekly Pacquet, vol. 5, 98.

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not the speaker. Instead, Erasmus was the historical authority that should betrusted by English Protestants. The previous quotation is but one example inan entire pamphlet that could be quoted to demonstrate Care’s reliance onthe Praise of Folly to justify the English break from Rome.Two weeks later, on Friday, December 1, 1682, the next Weekly Pacquet

appeared and was again based almost entirely on Erasmus’s In Praise ofFolly. Care began this chapter with a critique of the bishops and episcopalhierarchy of the Catholic Church:

it would be a kind of Sin to forget the Superiour Clergy, since we have beenso Critical upon the Inferiour, and therefore out of the same Erasmus we willgive you two or three other remarks, which may be as pleasant to be read, asprofitable to be understood; this done we shall briefly answer someobjections and scandalls against the life and story of Luther; and then assumeagain Our History.55

As with the previous week’s Pacquet, the pages that followed this introductioncondensed, paraphrased, and quoted from the Praise of Folly. The Catholichierarchy was filled with ambitious, prideful, and unlearned men who soughtmoney and power. They represented the height of foolishness. As with theprevious week, Care presented a paraphrase of Erasmus’s text, but suggestedthat it was Erasmus’s observations of his times and again the speaker, ratherthan Folly, was an amalgam of Erasmus and Care. For Care, and presumablyhis readers, Erasmus’s satire had become the authoritative source for EnglishProtestant views of Roman Catholicism. These two “Weekly Pacquets” thatquoted extensively from Erasmus were central chapters for Care’s thesis. Allof the weeks, over the previous four years of his serial history, had beenleading his common reader to the inevitability of the break from Rome. Andwhile he discussed Luther and Calvin, Erasmus was Care’s proof of thecorruption and failures of the Catholic Church and its clergy. He needed tomake his English audience believe that the reforms of Henry VIII andEdward VI were absolutely necessary. Erasmus provided the evidence thatmade everything else Care wrote—and would write—believable. We shouldnot underestimate the appeal or significance of Care’s texts at a criticalmoment in the making of the Protestant history of the Reformation.56 Care’santi-Catholicism, built on particularly Protestant readings of Erasmus, shapedthe context for the overthrow of James II in 1688. The Whig politicalmovement, Protestant populism, and Anglican narrative that emerged out ofthis era were built on precisely these historical readings. Erasmus’s earlysatirical criticism of the Church had a very long and pervasive afterlife in

55Care, Weekly Pacquet, vol. 5, 105.56See Schwoerer, Ingenious Mr. Henry Care, 75.

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England and his critiques of the Church became an intrinsic part of the Englishstory of Protestant identity.

The formation and evolution of historical memory is a complex culturalprocess.57 At least a portion of the corporate memory for early modernEnglish Protestants was built on a particular image of pre-ReformationEnglish Catholicism—a literary image developed from Erasmus’s earlycriticism of the Catholic Church. The amusing pictures Erasmus crafted ofmonks, theologians, and clerics became the Protestant historical narrative.For centuries, Erasmus’s Colloquies remained a significant componentwithin early modern Latin education. This was especially true in England.Young Protestant students were served a steady diet of Erasmus’s criticaldepictions of Catholic clergy. Unsurprisingly, these images of Catholiccorruption, superstition, and irrationality became an almost uncritically acceptedportrayal of the Catholic world prior to the rise of Protestantism. There is adistinct irony in the fact that Erasmus, who sought to use his pen to first inspirereform and then, later, to find common ground in the pursuit of peace, wouldhelp establish a historical foundation for dissenting anti-Catholicism.58

For English Protestants, Erasmus’s depictions of a Catholic Church in needof reformation became the standard stereotype of Catholic priests, monks,bishops, theologians, and church government. The Praise of Folly and theColloquies played a large role in this. Erasmus, thus, helped both to awakenhistorical consciousness at the dawn of the Reformation and, surprisingly,became the primary source for historical depictions of reformation eraCatholicism for generations of Protestants. We can therefore study Erasmusthe historian in two ways: first, as a pioneer of modern historical methodsand insights through his attempts to better understand the history and literarycontext of the biblical and patristic world; and second, as a historicalcommentator on his own times whose views shaped approaches to Reformationhistory for generations to come. How many modern views of late-medievalCatholicism and how many stories of the Protestant Reformation are still builton long-standing English stereotypes of barbarous, greedy, illiterate, and foolishclergy? And how many of those Protestant stories were founded on aworldview rooted in Erasmus’s early criticism of the church? Though thesequestions cannot be fully answered, the material presented here suggests that

57See Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and, Christian Emden and David Midgley, eds.,Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World Since 1500 (Bern:Peter Lang, 2004).

58For an analysis of Erasmus’s peaceful and moderate rhetoric, see Hilmar Pabel, “The PeacefulPeople of Christ: The Irenic Ecclesiology of Erasmus of Rotterdam,” in Erasmus’ Vision of theChurch, ed. Hilmar Pabel (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995), 57–93.For a summary of Erasmus’s pacifism, see Patrick Henry, “Christianity without Borders:Erasmus’ Campaign for Peace,” Journal for Peace & Justice Studies 22, no. 1 (2012): 43–57.

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Erasmus had a profound influence on Protestant interpretations of English history.But Erasmus’s satire was obviously neither a real nor a complete description of theChurch and its clergy. They were literary constructs and stereotypes that Erasmusemployed to make a point about reform. They were effective for Erasmus,however, because readers recognized the type of character he was laughing at.English Protestant authors, however, did not dwell on the fact that Erasmusremained loyal to the papacy, the Mass, and the Catholic Church as a whole.As he grew older Erasmus was clear about his loyalty to the Church, hisrefusal to support the Protestants, and he increasingly tempered his criticism ofthe Church.59 Had he known that his fiction would become an assumedhistorical reality and further divide the Christian world, he might have regrettedsome of his words even more strongly.It was once the general story, often associated with the work of A. G.

Dickens, that the Protestant Reformation in England was a popularmovement built on widespread anti-clericalism and opposition toCatholicism.60 More recently, historians such as Christopher Haigh andEamon Duffy convincingly demonstrated that Catholicism was strong,vibrant, and popular in the early sixteenth century and that the Reformationwas imposed on an unwilling populace from above.61 A veritable library ofbooks and articles since then have generally supported and corroborated thispicture. What is interesting about the study of Erasmus as a primary sourcefor English history is that there is a reality to both of these accounts. On theone hand, we can see how English histories of the Reformation usedErasmus to construct an image of Catholic corruption and imminentcollapse. However, on the other hand, in analyzing how Erasmus was usedin these histories, we can also clearly see the problematic nature of thescaffolding upon which the anti-Catholic narratives were constructed andthen sold to the English people. What proved critical in the gradualprotestantization of England was a historical narrative that helped defineboth Catholic and Protestant identities. Erasmus, as a historical authority,became central to this Protestant task. Ultimately, I would argue thatErasmus was so useful precisely because there was not an A. G. Dickenstype of reformation in England. This may not help us explain why the

59Erasmus expressed this sentiment on a number of occasions, including in a letter to JodocusJonas. Beatus Rhenanus also noted that Erasmus often told him that he wished he had writtendifferently early on in his criticism of the Catholic Church. See John C. Olin, Six Essays onErasmus (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 15n28.

60A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, 1989).

61See Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Christopher Haigh, “The Recent Historiography of the EnglishReformation,” in Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England,ed. Margo Todd (New York: Routledge, 1995), 13–32; and Duffy, Stripping the Altars.

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Reformation happened, but it certainly helps us understand the subsequentnature of English historical consciousness. There was, of course, a broaddiversity within English Protestantism and significant differences in howvarious types of Protestants read Erasmus.62 However, in the ways in whichErasmus was used as a primary historical source, the readings were almostuniformly monolithic.63 Erasmus’s playful characterizations of late-medievalCatholicism had become serious cultural truths for a broad spectrum ofEnglish Protestants.

In summation, while it makes sense to think of Erasmus as contributing to thehistorical understanding of the biblical and patristic worlds, he also became anaccidental historian of his own times. Yet, had later sixteenth and seventeenthcentury authors paid more attention to Erasmus’s own historical andcontextual methodologies they would not have focused almost exclusively onhis critical and satirical writings for descriptions of Catholicism; his letters andlater writings often told a different, more nuanced and complex, story. Andthey certainly would have sought to analyze the ways Catholicism hadchanged over the decades rather than assuming that Erasmus’s clerics were thesame ones still filling the monasteries and schools of Continental Europe.Unsurprisingly, though, given the pervasive use of the Colloquies ineducation, they focused on Erasmus’s fiction and then embedded thestereotypes found there within the English cultural mentalité. Astute readerswould also have recognized the problematic nature of using satirical texts likethe Praise of Folly as actual historical descriptions of Catholic clerics. Butwhat began as fictitious narratives became the real narratives for thedevelopment of English Protestant history. Whether the assumptions derivedfrom his texts about the Catholic Church were valid or not, it is apparent howimportant Erasmus’s legacy was for early modern English historical writingand in shaping the worldview of generations of English Protestants.

62Some editions of the Colloquies adapted Erasmus’s dialogues to Calvinist theological views byadding new characters and arguments. Other publishers of Erasmus used him to challenge EnglishCalvinism. See Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus, especially ch. 5.

63There were authors, such as Peter Heylyn, Jeremy Taylor, and Edward Stillingfleet who usedthe memory of Erasmus to challenge assertions that the reformation in England was Calvinist innature, but even they supported the stereotypes of Catholic corruption. See Petery Heylyn,Historia Quinqu-Articularis (London, 1660), 109, 112; Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus(London, 1668), 38–39; Edward Stillingfleet, Several Conferences between a Romish Priest, aFanatic Chaplain, and a Divine of the Church of England Concerning the Idolatry of theChurch of Rome (London 1679), 115–119; and, Jeremy Taylor, The Second Part of theDissuasive against Popery (London, 1667), 36, 70, 81, 143, 185, 195, 280, 295.

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