IDEAS IN CONTEXT

CHRISTIAN HUMANISM
AND THE
PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER
 IDEAS IN CONTEXT
Edited by Wolf Lepenies, Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind
and Quentin Skinner

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions
and of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims and vocabularies that
were generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within
the contemporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed
studies of the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by dif-
ferent audiences, it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development
of ideas in their concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions be-
tween the history of philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and
politics, and of literature may be seen to dissolve.

Titles published in the series:

Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Philosophy
in History
J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History
M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits-. Bernard Mandeville's Social
and Political Thought
A. Pagden, The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe
D. Summers, The Judgment of Sense
L. Dickey, Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, 1770-1807

This series is published with the support of the Exxon Education Foundation
<3

CHRISTIAN HUMANISM
AND THE
PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

MARGO TODD
Department of History,
Vanderbilt University

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First published 1987

Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge

Todd, Margo
Christian humanism and the Puritan social
order. - (Ideas in context).
1. Puritans - England - History
2. Humanism - History
I. Title II. Series
285'.9'0942 BX9334.2

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Todd, Margo.
Christian humanism and the Puritan social order
(Ideas in context)
Bibliography
1. Puritans - Historiography. 2. Sociology, Christian.
3. Humanism. I. Title. II. Series.
BX9322.T62 1987 285'.9 87-6644

ISBNO 521 33129 3

BO
 CONTENTS

Preface page vii

Abbreviations ix
1 Introduction: The demythologizing of puritanism 1
2 Christian humanism as social ideology 22
3 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 53
4 The spiritualized household 96
5 Work, wealth and welfare 118
6 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 176
7 The conservative reaction: Trent, Lambeth and 206
the demise of the humanist consensus
Bibliography 261
Index 283
For Charles, Jesse and Adam
 PREFACE

I have incurred many debts during the course of research for this
study. The greatest of all I owe to my mentor, Derek Hirst, who has
been unstinting with his time, generous with his suggestions,
incisive in his criticism, and consistent in his encouragement of this
project since its genesis several years ago in his seminar in Stuart his-
tory at Washington University. His own zeal for research and for the
reassessment of traditional interpretations has been an unfailing
source of inspiration. J. H. Hexter has provided many useful sugges-
tions, and to his own work goes the credit for stimulating my early
thinking about the similarities between protestant and Christian
humanist social thought. Early drafts of all or parts of the study were
kindly read by Quentin Skinner, H. C. Porter, James McConica and
J. H. Plumb, and the final version has benefited greatly from their
insights; had I trod more carefully in the paths they indicated, I
would doubtless have avoided the errors that remain. For valuable
research suggestions early in the process I am grateful to George
Huppert, Nicholas Tyacke and Conrad Russell, and conversations
with Peter Lake and Jacqueline Levy proved more formative than
they may have known.
Research for this study was made possible by fellowships and a
travel grant from the Department of History at Washington Univer-
sity, and by a summer research fellowship from the Vanderbilt
University Research Council. A year's leave from teaching respon-
sibilities at Vanderbilt provided opportunity to write and revise;
however, the preceding years of teaching also played their part in the
final production - the fresh perspective of undergraduate queries
may have a more critical role than we generally acknowledge in
refining our interpretations.
To the staffs of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the

vn
viii PREFACE
Cambridge University Library, the Lambeth Palace Library and the
Trinity College Library in Dublin I wish to express my appreciation
of many courtesies. I am also indebted to the Masters and Fellows of
the Queen's College and Balliol College, Oxford, and of Emmanuel,
Pembroke, St. John's, Sidney Sussex and Trinity Colleges,
Cambridge, and to the President and Fellows of Queens' College,
Cambridge, for access to manuscripts in their possession. The
college librarians were unfailing in their patience and helpfulness.
Portions of chapter 4 were previously published as 'Humanists,
Puritans, and the Spiritualized Household' in Church History 49
(1980). I am grateful to the American Society of Church History for
permission to reprint this material.
Finally, for the patience and selflessness of my husband during
these years of research and writing, I have admiration as well as
gratitude. But for his steady encouragement and unwavering faith, I
might have followed an easier, but less interesting, route. To my
sons, so young to have lived so long with Erasmus, thanks.
As for the work that follows, I am inclined to echo Thomas
Gataker's preface to his own first book. He told his reader in 1619,
'Defects in it (I know) there can not but be many. Of thee
(whosoever thou art) I desire but to find an unpartial reader, a
judicious discusser, and a charitable censurer.'
 ABBREVIATIONS

Add. Additional
BL British Library
Bodl. Bodleian Library
CH Church History
Coll. The Colloquies of Erasmus, tr. Craig R Thompson (Chicago,
1965)
CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
CUL Cambridge University Library
CWE Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1974-)
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
EHR English Historical Review
F&R Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660,
ed. C H. Firth and R S. Rait (1911)
Harl. Harleian
HJ The Historical Journal
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission Reports
JBS Journal of British Studies
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
JHI Journal of the History of Ideas
JMH Journal of Modern History
NYRB New York Review of Books
P&P Past and Present
PR 0 Public Record Office
Rawl. Rawlinson
SCJ Sixteenth Century Journal
SP State Papers
STC A. W. Pollard and G. R Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of
Books Printed in England. . . 1475-1640 (1926)
ix
x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
TCD Trinity College, Dublin
TED Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power
(1924)
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Trin. Trinity College, Cambridge

Spelling, punctuation and capitalization have been modernized

except in titles of published works, and titles of contemporary
publications have been shortened except where the verbiage adds to
the description of the work or is otherwise of interest. For the
reader's convenience, modern English translations of works originally
published in Latin are quoted wherever possible. Where good
modern translations are not available, or where sixteenth-century
translations are of particular significance, contemporary trans-
lations published in England are cited. Place of publication is
London unless otherwise stated. All dates are Old Style, but the year
is held to begin on 1 January.
 Introduction:
the demythologizing of puritanism

The historiographical problem of puritanism has now reached epic

proportions. While some historians carry on the old debate about
precisely what constellation of beliefs constitutes 'puritanism',
others now question whether the concept exists at all.! While some
go on to attach the puritan label even to bishops, others are able to
talk about people traditionally regarded by everyone as puritans
without even using the word.2 The most extreme revisionists deny
that either puritans or puritanism had anything to do with the con-
flict of the 1640s; others, however, have resurrected the notion of a
Puritan Revolution.3 While advocates of the latter view find ele-
ments of radicalism in puritan thought, others have shown puritans
to have been upholders of the established order in church and state.4
1
Recent contributors to the literature on definition include Peter Lake, Moderate
Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982); William Hunt, The Puritan
Moment: The Coming ofRevolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Paul
Christianson, 'Reformers and the Church of England under Elizabeth I and the
Early Stuarts,' JEH 31 (1980), 463-82; Patrick Collinson, 'A Comment: Concern-
ing the name Puritan', JEH, 31 (1980), 483-8; and Richard Greaves, Society and
Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981). Among those denying any
meaning to'puritanism' is Michael Findlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English
Revolution: The Religious Eactor in English Politics before and after the Interregnum
(Toronto, 1983).
2
Lake, 'Matthew Hutton: A Puritan Bishop?', History, 64 (1979), 182-204; cf G M.
Dent, Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford, 1983).
3
Findlayson, ch. 3. cf Hunt,passim; B. Reay, 'Radicalism and Religion in the English
Revolution,' RadicalReligion in the English Revolution, ed.J. F. McGregor and B. Reay
(Oxford, 1984), 1-21; John Morrill, Cheshire 1630-1660 (Oxford, 1974), Reactions to
the English Civil War (New York, 1983), Introduction, 'The Religious Context of
the English Civil War,' TRHS, 5th ser., 34 (1984), 155-78, esp. pp. 170ff, and'Sir
William Brereton and England's Wars of Religion,' JBS 24 (1985), 311-32; and
Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981).
4
Hunt, chs. 8-10; Reay, p. 2; and Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
(1972), Milton and the English Revolution (1977), and The Experience of Defeat (1984).
On the other side, see Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982)
and 'The Early Dissenting Tradition,' Godly People (1983), 526-62.
2 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

The debate during the past decade has been intense and sometimes
bitter, and resolution of some of the most basic questions seems as
illusory as ever.
Fortunately, however, the historiographic conflict has not been
without positive results. It has managed to bring us closer to
understanding who puritans were and how they acted. Even those
historians who have ceased using the term still talk about the people
who we have always thought were puritans and have taught us a
good deal about them. As the polemical dust clears, it is becoming
evident that some old and weakly-founded constructs have been
quite properly demolished, and new interpretations based on
manuscript evidence and the discoveries of local historians have
been erected to good effect.
The biggest step forward has been the move to put puritans back
into the protestant mainstream of Elizabethan and early Stuart
England.5 Puritans are increasingly being depicted not as an
alienated opposition group but as part of the established order,
functioning as magistrates and ministers to establish the protes-
tantism of which they were the best representatives. Far from being
a seething revolutionary substratum of the Church of England, they
comprised a sort of'moral majority' within it, the 'sharp cutting edge
of an evangelical Protestantism.' 6 Of course, whether puritans were
sufficiently entrenched within mainline protestantism to render
meaningless their distinctively 'puritan' identity is at least question-
able. The fact that historians who repudiate 'puritan' wind up sub-
stituting for it terms like' advanced protestant' and' precisionist' and
'evangelical' is suggestive, and as Peter Lake has been at pains to
show us, the 'godly', however moderate, certainly recognized each
other in the midst of the 'mere Prayer Book protestants' who com-
prised the bulk of their church.7 But setting aside for the moment
the question of taxonomy, the least that can be said about accom-
plishments thus far is that Elizabethan and Jacobean puritanism is no
5
The achievement especially of Collinson in The Religion of Protestants and * Early Dis-
senting Tradition.' See also Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon (Toronto,
1978).
6
Collinson, Religion of Protestants, esp. ch. 4, 'A Comment' (the oft-quoted 'moral
majority' appears on p. 485), and 'Early Dissenting Tradition,' pp. 534—5, on the
'widespread social entrenchment of puritanism in Jacobean England'; Lake,
'Puritan Identities,' JEH 35 (1984), 112-23, p. 113; Christianson, Reformers and
Babylon, passim; Morrill, 'Religious Context', p. 162.
7
Dent uses 'advanced protestant,' 'radical' and 'reformer'; Morrill, Reactions,
Introduction (p. 15) uses 'advanced Protestants (or Puritan, if you will)'; Mary
Fulbrook, Piety and Politics: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in England, Wurtemberg
and Prussia (Cambridge, 1983), uses'precisionist,' although she retains'puritan' as
well; Lake's Moderate Puritans leans toward 'evangelical.'
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 3
longer welded immovably to revolutionary opposition to the
establishment, and this recognition has been an undeniable boon to
the study of puritans. It has broadened our perspective on and
therefore our understanding of puritans by drawing our attention to
the likes of Chaderton and Hutton, along with Field and Perkins, to
episcopally- approved lectures by combination, along with covert
classes, and to the cooperation of bishops and godly magistrates in
the enforcement of Sabbatarianism and the reformation of
manners.8 Puritans have been removed from their historiographic
box and examined within the context of the church and political
order of which they were in fact very much a part
The problem with all of this, of course, is that in 1642 these
bastions of order took up arms against their king; in 1645 the godly
representatives of the people tried and executed the Archbishop of
Canterbury; and in 1649 these bulwarks of magistracy and ministry
launched an experiment in republicanism and Congregationalism.
The consensus that Patrick Collinson has described for the Jacobean
period broke down in the next reign, and until it becomes clear how
the conservative, godly magistrates and ministers of Stuart England
managed so radically to re-channel English politics and society in the
1640s, historians are not rid of the puritan problem.
One area generally neglected by recent studies, an area potentially
crucial to understanding what happened in the 1640 s, is that of
puritan social and political thought The focus of late has been more
on activities than on ideas,9 perhaps in unconscious compensation
for the frequently misguided treatment of puritans by intellectual
historians and political scientists in the 1960s and 1970s. We now
know more than ever about what puritans did, as urban magistrates
and churchwardens and clergymen and gentlemen, but the theoretical
underpinning for their actions has received scant attention of late.
There has been virtually no systematic re-evaluation of the origins
and nature of puritan social thought and its political ramifications.
To the extent that studies focused on puritanism and society have
been produced, their conclusions seem to have very little to do with
the new, broader view of puritans as part of the mainstream; they
simply repeat old orthodoxies. Students who wish to examine
puritan social thought are left with the interpretations of the old
8
Lake, Moderate Puritans; Collinson, Religion of Protestants\ chs. 3 and 4, and Godly
People", Kenneth Parker, 'Thomas Rogers and the English Sabbath: The Case for a
Reappraisal,' CH, 53 (1984), 332-47.
9
The exception of theological studies should be noted: R. T. Kendall, Calvin and
English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979); Dewey Wallace, Puritans and Predestination:
Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525-1695 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982).
4 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

masters, complete with misconceptions. Among the gravest of these

is the old myth that there was a distinctly puritan social theory, a new
view of social order peculiar to the hotter sort of protestants. The
myth has puritans as intellectual innovators - genuine creators,
breathing their spiritual zeal on theological dust, as it were, to bring
into being an original body of social thought that distinguished them
from their contemporaries, both protestant and Catholic. In the
context of the broad religious consensus that has been demon-
strated for Elizabethan and Jacobean England, this account looks
odd indeed, but it remains the going version for students of social
theory and continues to shape accounts of the Civil War. Clearly,
some review and re-evaluation is in order.

The historiography of puritan social thought from Weber and Tawney

to Hill and Walzer has attributed to protestant religious zealots a
degree of originality of thought rarely assigned to and almost never
deserved by any intellectual movement.10 While puritan intentions
have been disputed and the precise nature of their social ethic
variously interpreted, there is agreement among these historians
that the social order to which puritans aspired represented a drastic
and distinctively protestant break with the immediate past. Where
intellectual debts are acknowledged, they are credited to continental
Calvinist theology and to the Bible. But even where the puritan
outlook has been broadened into the Protestant Mind, there is no
suggestion that the social theorists of Elizabethan and early Stuart
England built on any but thoroughly Reformed foundations. 11
Students are thus presented with a view of puritanism which, given
modern veneration for creativity and innovative thinking, amounts
to little less than secular hagiography.
Christopher Hill, of course, is master of them all. His voluminous
and erudite output has given us a view of zealous Elizabethan and
early Stuart Calvinists as the generators of a progressive and
ultimately revolutionary theory of social order. Hill and his
followers have puritan social thought rising phoenix-like from the
ashes of medieval social and intellectual stagnation to ignite the Civil
10
Max Weber, 'Die protestantische ethik und der geist des kapitalismus,' in Gesam-
melte aufsatze zur religionssoziologie (Tubingen, 1922); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the
Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1926); William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New
York, 1938); cf Charles H. George, 'Social Interpretation of English Puritanism,'
JMH, 25 (1953), 327-42; Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins ofthe English Revolution
(Oxford, 1965), Puritanism and Revolution (1958), Society and Puritanism (New York,
1964); Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York, 1972).
11
Charles H. and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation
(Princeton, 1961).
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 5
War and usher in a new, bourgeois social system in seventeenth-
century England. Stressing the peculiar appeal of the Calvinist ethic
to the 'industrious sort', Hill portrays a rising bourgeoisie of late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England seizing upon such
Calvinist precepts as the priesthood of believers, the evident elec-
tion of the godly and the eventual triumph of the saints as an
ideological means of transforming the medieval social stasis which
they had inherited into a progressive, sober, hard-working, definitely
middle-class order. According to Hill, 'Men's ideas were blurred in
the sixteenth century, traditional attitudes outliving the social
environment which had given them birth.' It was puritans who took
up the challenge of stagnant values in a changing society and, on the
basis of purely protestant assumptions, produced 'a new pattern of
social discipline.'12 To the protestant Reformation generally, and to
puritanism in particular, Hill attributes an incredibly broad spec-
trum of social and intellectual creativity. From the Elizabethan poor
laws to the Scientific Revolution to the Civil War, change in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England is traced to the 'hotter
sort' of protestants.13
Among the most significant changes thus inaugurated, Hill iden-
tifies the phenomenon which he calls the spiritualization of the
household. Puritans are seen as the creators of an exalted notion of
the family as the fundamental spiritual unit of society. The family as
a 'little commonwealth' is set against traditional forms of order and
relationship; as a 'little church', it challenges the authority of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy. The concomitants of the doctrine - an
exaltation of the marriage relationship, a demand for household
religious education and discipline, and a slight but noteworthy
elevation of the position of women within the household - are
clearly attributed to protestant theology in the hands of zealous
English practitioners. Nor is Hill alone in his assertion that it was
puritanism which gave rise to this phenomenon: while his is the
clearest and most extensive treatment of it, he has both pre-
decessors and followers.14 Rarely is it suggested that puritans might
12
Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 222-3; Society and Puritanism, passim.
13
On the Scientific Revolution, Intellectual Origins, pp. 22, 34-61, and 'Puritanism,
capitalism and the scientific revolution,' in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seven-
teenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (1974), pp. 243-53; cf. Charles Webster, The
Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (New York, 1975).
14
Hill, Society and Puritanism, pp. 443-81; Chilton Powell, English Domestic Relations,
1487-1653 (New York, 1917), pp. 129, 147 etpassim; Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class
Culture in Elizabethan England(Chapel Hill, 1935), pp. 201-27; Levin L. Schiicking,
The Puritan Family (tr. B. Battershaw, New York, 1970), passim; Keith Thomas,
'Women and the Civil War Sects', P&P, 13 (1958), 42-62; Walzer, pp. 183-98; and
most recently, Greaves, Society and Religion, ch. 7 and pp. 737-67.
6 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

have gone beyond the Bible or their Reformed heritage for their
ideas.
Hill and others have similarly traced to the Calvinist doctrine of
calling the insistence of puritans on the obliteration of idleness and
of the indiscriminate charity which fostered it as the solution to the
problem of poverty. Hill finds 'the very closest connection between
the protestant ideology of hard work and the economic needs of
English society.' Puritans, as 'a class for whom the accumulation of
capital had become an absolute good in itself, accordingly preached
a morality in which 'humanitarianism was irrelevant.' Alms were to
be carefully administered to train and employ the poor and set 'lusty
beggars' on forced work; only thus would the godly prosper and the
commonwealth be reformed.15 Other historians have quarreled with
this interpretation of the puritan attitude toward wealth and property,
and local historians have unearthed many examples of puritan
charity. At least one study has suggested that whatever puritan con-
ceptions were, they were shared by Anglicans, but an historiographical
consensus exists on the protestant generation of these ideas.16
In parallel fashion, Michael Walzer has attributed to puritanism
the beginnings of the end of the Great Chain of Being, that medieval
doctrine of the cosmos as a natural, static hierarchy of orders and
degrees. The arbitrary God of the Calvinists, we are told, establishes
his own omnipotence by leveling the cosmos and destroying the
intermediary powers of angels, saints, bishops, and kings. Degree in
the kingdom of the elect now depends on behavior, rather than on
being, and order in the commonwealth is to be achieved not by
enforcing obedience to constituted hierarchical authority, but by
informing and disciplining the individual conscience.17
15
Hill, Society and Puritanism, pp. 276, 287, 292; Puritanism and Revolution, pp. 215-38;
The World Turned Upside-Down (New York, 1972), pp. 32-3.
16
V. Kiernan, 'Puritans and the Poor,' P&P, 3 (1953), 45-53 (cf. Hill's response, pp.
53-4); Timothy H. Breen, 'The Non-Existent Controversy: Puritan and Anglican
Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640,' CH, 35 (1966), 273-87; W. K.
Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 (New York, 1959), pp. 15Iff. George,
Protestant Mind, p. 155, sees the protestant view of charity as the assertion of
brotherhood. Greaves contrasts Anglican suspicion of wealth with puritan recep-
tivity of'the idea that prosperity could be a reward of godliness' (p. 751), although
he notes Anglican and puritan similarity on many aspects of poor relief (e.g. pp.
572, 575). William Hunt provides abundant examples of puritan charity in Essex;
however, he is not interested in the generation of the puritan ideology of poor
relief (chs. 6 and 10). Paul Slack does note briefly in 'Poverty and Social Regu-
lation in Elizabethan England,' The Reign of Elizabeth /(Athens, Georgia, 1985),
221-37, p. 236, that Elizabethan governors were 'anxious to prove their humanist
credentials with a little social engineering in the interests of the commonwealth,'
but on the same page he remarks that the 'new ideological input in Elizabeth's
reign . . . came from Protestant religious enthusiasm.'
17
Walzer, passim; cf. Hill, Intellectual Origins, pp. 293-4; Hunt, p. 250, says of the
Warwick/Barrington circle in the 1630s, 'their puritanism provided them with a
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 7
The radical implications of these and other elements of puritan
social thought are readily apparent, and however staid and conserva-
tive the moderate puritans of recent accounts appear, the evidence
produced by the authors of the old orthodoxy, and the evidence of
the war itself, demand that we take another look. Furthermore, sug-
gestions of puritan radicalism are not confined to a past generation
of historians. Not only has Hill's own productivity not waned in
retirement- the revivers of the 'Puritan Revolution' will not let the
question rest. Hunt's Essex puritans were certainly in opposition to
Crown and Canterbury by the mid-1620s, and it does not seem far-
fetched to identify them with 'the aggressive, reformative, and
hence socially disruptive aspects of zealous Protestantism' which he
finds in Essex and defines as 'puritanism'. 18 The fact that Collinson
devotes a substantial portion of his account of the religion of protes-
tants to an attack on Walzer illustrates at least that the question is
still a live one.19 Was there a radicalism inherent in puritan thought
all along, deeply dormant perhaps in the pacific generations before
Charles and Laud, but ready to surface in times of stress? A look
beyond Collinson's terminal date, 1625, suggests that this idea may
not be devoid of merit. If it is correct, was this element, as Walzer,
Hill, and others assume, the intellectual offspring of Calvinistic
protestantism? Was social reformism a puritan distinctive? Puritan
advocacy of the 'culture of discipline' is undeniable, and even con-
ceding the cooperation of some bishops with the godly in reforming
community manners seems still to connect Calvinist protestantism
with the genesis of reformist ideology.
The time has come to ask whether the body of social thought
which we associate with advanced English protestants could have
sprung fully formed from purely Calvinist heads. To grant that
puritans were concerned with social ethics is one thing; to transmute
their concern into the creation of a new ethical system is quite
another. To the extent that historians have described and provided
evidence for puritan social theory as activist, progressive, practical
and reformist in its methods and aims, they have made a positive

perfectly adequate ideology of social reform: they labored to institute the culture
18
of discipline.' Hunt, pp. 146, 195-6.
19
Religion of Protestants, pp. 150-88. In 'The Elizabethan Church and the New
Religion,' in The Reign of Elizabeth /, pp. 169-94, Collinson describes the
Elizabethan chapter of the English Reformation as tending toward 'a Protestant
nation containing deep tension and potential confusion with an outward shell of
consensus' (p. 176). He simply argues that the tension was not clearly manifest in
the period before 1625, the terminal point ofThe Religion ofProtestants. But its rapid
development from the mid-1620s and its explosion in the 1640s surely demands
further exploration of the intellectual genesis of the undeniable puritan
radicalism of the Civil War and Interregnum.
8 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

contribution to our understanding of puritanism. To the extent that

some have failed to recognize the appeal of puritanism to its
numerous well-born patrons and identified it with a hypothetical
middle class, they have been guilty of anachronism and distortion,
but have stimulated useful discussion. But to the extent that they
have ignored the ubiquity of reformism in sixteenth-century
England, and indeed Europe, and failed to consider puritans as only
one component, if a vocal one, of an important tradition of social
activism and progressivism which had existed among Catholics as
well as protestants since the beginning of the century, they have
committed a serious error of omission.20 They have wrenched
puritans not only from the social, political, and ecclesiological
mainstream, but from their intellectual moorings as well.
Historians of puritan ideas, even to the present day, have been like
intellectual historians and literary scholars of an earlier generation:
they have clung tenaciously to a 'great tradition', seeking to
establish a single and direct channel of influence on puritan thought.
Yet the best recent work in the field of intellectual history has
demonstrated tellingly the complexity of the intellectual context in
which a writer and thinker operates, and the foolishness of attempt-
ing to understand the intricate web of his thought by trying to
unravel a single strand. The methodological object lessons provided
byj. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner21 in the history of political
theory have been too little appreciated by other scholars, and among
the consequences are the monolithic appearance of puritanism and
the inflated claims made for protestantism in the historiography of
early modern ideas. Applying contextualism to detailed case studies
in the history of political thought has borne out the contentions of
Pocock and Skinner that only thus does the intellectual historian
begin to do justice to his sources. Applying this methodology to
puritan social thought will begin the long-overdue shifting of the
historiography of puritan ideas onto the path which has been so well
laid by modern intellectual historians and in the process reveal
20
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), notes that
throughout western Europe, in Catholic as well as protestant countries,
traditional popular culture was under pressure from the influence of a'major shift
in religious mentality' in the period 1500-1800 (p. 212).
21
J. G. A. Pocock, 'Working on Ideas in Time,' The Historian's Workshop, ed. L. P.
Curtis (New York, 1970); Politics, Language, and Time (1972); and The Machiavellian
Moment (Princeton, 1975). Quentin Skinner, 'Meaning and Understanding in the
History of Ideas,' History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3-53; 'Motives, Intentions, and the
Interpretation of Texts,' New Literary History, 3 (1971), 393-408; 'Some Problems
in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action', Political Theory, 2 (Wl4), 277-303,
283ff; and Foundations of modern political thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978).
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 9
puritans as people of their own times, rather than as the mythical
creatures of modern academics.22 It will also offer a parallel in
intellectual history to recent developments in the ecclesiastical,
social, and political history of puritans.

It is imperative that we begin to adopt this more historical approach

to puritan social thought, to examine puritanism within the context
of broader, European intellectual developments in the early modern
period. We must cease being unduly influenced by categories of
analysis which we have invented for our own convenience and begin
to take the wider view. Having said that, of course, brings us back to
the question of how to define what some now call an inconvenient
historians' invention, 'puritan'. However tiresome the debate, it is
necessary at the start to have a clear understanding of whose ideas we
are seeking to identify and examine in this study of social thought.
And however skewed the old categories, the evidence will not allow
us to dispense altogether with the term' puritan' even if it is regarded
as nothing more than'an admirable refuge from clarity of thought.'23
The people who called themselves the 'godly', 'professors', and even
'saints', and were called 'puritans' by their foes, were a sufficiently
self-conscious and popularly identifiable group in their own day to
deserve a name, and the traditional 'puritan' seems as good as any.
The historian who talks about the likes of Laurence Humphrey and
John Rainolds as 'advanced protestants' need not disturb us.24 We
know what he means by the term because we know of whom he
speaks: a puritan by any other name is still a puritan. And in the
midst of semantic confusion, historians reveal a remarkable con-
vergence in their identification of particular individuals as puritans
(or advanced protestants). Historians who quibble over definitions
in theory have less trouble than might be expected when confronted
with the need for flexible, working categories to apply to particular
historical situations. If we allow room for the theological con-
troversies of the 1620s and 1630s and the ecclesiological confusion
of the Civil War and Interregnum in our definition, it is really not so
22
Locating English protestant thought within the mainstream of early modern
intellectual development also necessitates a repudiation of the geographically
insular approach of many earlier historians: English protestants were part of a
larger, European intellectual community, one that extended beyond the Geneva-
London axis. The myth of the isolated, self-sufficient Englishman is just as mis-
leading as the myth of Calvinist innovation in social theory. To find the sole
continental influence on puritanism in the Geneva Bible and the Institutes is to
look at history through peculiarly English spectacles.
23
Hill, Society and Puritanism, p. 13. This statement is followed by 500 pages of
24
analysis of'puritan' social theory. Dent, Protestant Reformers, passim.
10 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

difficult to group together Rainolds, Cartwright, Perkins, Preston

and Cromwell, while excluding Brownists, Barrowists and Laudian
bishops from a useful and comprehensible category.
Basil Hall arrived nearly two decades ago at a limited but not
inflexible definition of puritanism which more nearly conforms to
modern historiographic practice than did earlier attempts.25 A ver-
sion of his definition, modified in light of recent work on * moderate
puritanism', has guided the work at hand. Hall, drawing extensively
from contemporary use of the term, acknowledged that theological
distinctions within English protestantism- Calvinism and Arminianism
- only emerged in the 1620s.26 Accordingly, his definition applies to
the entire period from 1564 to 1640 by not making predestinarian
theology a defining characteristic: he labels as puritan all those * rest-
lessly critical and occasionally rebellious members of the Church of
England who desired some modifications in church government and
worship, but not . . . those who deliberately removed themselves
from that Church.' His puritans' ranged from the tolerably conform-
able to the downright obstreperous, and to those who sought to
25
Hall, 'Puritanism: The Problem of Definition,' Studies in Church History, 2 (1965),
283-96. Earlier contributors to the debate made 'puritan' practically synonymous
with 'presbyterian.' A. S. P. Woodhouse identified Perry Miller and W. K. Jordan
in this group and then went to the opposite extreme, encompassing by the term
presbyterians, independents, separatists, baptists, radical millenarians and ran-
ters: Puritanism andLiberty (1938), p. 36. William Haller, in his Rise ofPuritanism, pp.
82-5, adopted Woodhouse's definition with the added proviso of predestinarian
theology. Charles and Katherine George, focusing on that proviso and noting the
shared Calvinism of non-conformists and pre-Laudian Anglicans, were the first to
deny the term 'puritan' any meaning at all before the Civil War; Protestant Mind, pp.
6-8, 399-407, and'Social Interpretations,' pp. 327-42. In the same year that Hall's
essay was published, Christopher Hill offered a similar definition of puritans as
'radical Protestants who wanted to reform the Church but (before 1640 at least)
did not want to separate from it,' but he somehow managed to identify all such
people with the 'industrious sort' who in his view composed an expanding
bourgeoisie in early modern England: Intellectual Origins, p. 26, and Society and
Puritanism, pp. 13-29, 124^44.
26
Nicholas Tyacke has traced the emergence of Arminianism in 'Puritanism,
Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,' in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed.
Conrad Russell (London, 1973), pp. 119—43; and 'Arminianism in England, in
Religion and Politics, 1604-1640' (unpublished D.Phil, thesis, University of
Oxford, 1968). He defines puritanism in terms of presbyterianism or non-
conformity, but after the rise of anti-predestinarian theology in the 1620s he adds
the theological criterion of doctrinal Calvinism, by that time a point of contention
between dissenting and some conformist clergy. Whether that contention was
actually between Calvinism and Arminianism or whether it was in fact simply a
dispute about varieties of doctrinal Calvinism within the context of diplomatic
and political troubles during the 1620s is duscussed by Peter White, 'The Rise of
Arminianism Reconsidered,' P&P, 101 (1983), 34-54. The contention clearly existed,
however, and even if we were to accept White's thesis that the rise of Arminianism
was mythical, puritans did see themselves as defenders of predestinarian
orthodoxy in the face of Anglican indifference, if not heterodoxy.
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 11
presbyterianise that Church from within.' Separatists are excluded
from the definition on the basis of contemporary opinion.27 Indeed,
membership in the Church of England as part of the definition of
puritan seems to imply for Hall, as it did for contemporaries, that the
puritan attitude toward and approach to reforming the church were
qualitatively different from those of separatists. The latter were not,
strictly speaking, reformists at all; rejecting the established church
as a hopeless case, they opted to seek the true church elsewhere.
The breadth of Hall's definition allows inclusion of the category
'moderate puritanism' illumined by the work of Peter Lake. Lake
defines puritanism as' committed evangelical protestantism' facing a
'tension between protestant principle and the brute facts of the
partially reformed nature of the English church' and characterized
by 'an intense vision of the reality and mutuality of the community
of the godly and of the way in which that community could and
should be called together through the word, particularly the word
preached.'28 While this definition includes the whole of Hall's range
from the conformable to the obstreperous, Lake focuses on the
hitherto neglected conformable, those moderate puritans who
can be found in Elizabethan Cambridge in the circle of Laurence
Chaderton, and in early Stuart Cambridge in that of Samuel Ward.
Moderate puritans did not refuse to conform, but they bowed to the
demands of the hierarchy under protest, and only when failure to
conform would jeopardize their preaching ministry.29 And they con-
tinued their campaign for the simplification of ceremonies and their
denunciation of the hierarchy's insistence on conformity at the
expense of a sufficient preaching ministry. It is clear from Collinson's
look at Jacobean episcopal preaching that devotion to the preached
woidper se in the absence of demands for further reform is not a sure
sign ofpuritanism.30 The combination of criteria in Lake's definition
is useful, because it excludes those who drifted uncomplainingly in
that vast protestant mainstream so well described by Collinson,
where the prevailing current of antipopery effectively engulfed
whatever eddies of discontent with the Elizabethan Settlement

27
Hall, pp. 290, 294; on separatists, pp. 290-2. Both Tyacke ('Puritanism,
Arminianism and Counter-Revolution,' p. 120) and Hall make special reference to
presbyterians, recognizing the conviction of Elizabethan presbyterians that godly
authorities could impose the classis system on the established church in time;
however, presbyterian polity is not a defining characteristic of puritanism for
28
either. Lake, 'Matthew Hutton,' p. 182, and Moderate puritans, p. 3.
29
Lake, Moderate puritans, passim; Margo Todd, * "An Act of Discretion": Evangelical
Conformity and the Puritan Dons,' Albion, 17 (1986), 581-99.
30
Collinson, Religion of Protestants, pp. 48-52, focusing on Tobie Matthew.
12 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

diverted the more reform-minded from willing conformity. Hall's

definition, so far as it goes, does so as well; but it falls short in two
other aspects, the one chronological, the other related to the men-
tality which Lake so well describes in terms of zeal, intensity and self-
consciousness.
Hall declines to apply his definition to the period after 1640, pre-
ferring to the general label of puritan the 'party names . . . Pres-
byterian, Independent, and Baptist' used by Richard Baxter when
discussing the war years.31 He thus avoids the difficulty of fitting his
definition of puritan to the likes of Cromwell and Milton; however,
he thus implies that puritanism ceased to exist during the war - a
position to which few historians adhere in practice. If the ecclesio-
logical confusion of the Church of England during this period is
acknowledged,32 then the definition of puritans as zealous reformers
within the established church can apply during the 1640 s and 1650s
as well to independents and presbyterians as to those who main-
tained a predilection (however muted) for godly episcopacy. The
drastic changes which occurred in the nature and government of the
church during the Civil War and Interregnum simply confronted
reformers with a different established church and a wider range of
options for church government than their predecessors had known.
While the radical sectaries should continue to remain outside the
puritan pale during this period for the same reasons that the
followers of Henry Barrow were excluded earlier, it is surely
legitimate to include the independents in light of their combination
of religious zeal, ecclesiastical reformism and opposition to separatism
per se, however tolerant of it they became in practice. Cromwell and
Ireton were convinced, after all, that heaven would in time grant
their cause, that their perception of godly church order, ruled
neither by old priest nor by new presbyter, would in fact be incor-
porated into the reformation of the established English church.
The other change which would help Hall's definition is one of
emphasis. Here, too, Lake's work offers a valuable corrective, as
does Hunt's study of Essex puritanism. Hunt defines puritanism as'a
body of opinion within English protestantism characterized by
intense hostility to the Church of Rome as the incarnation of
Antichrist; an emphasis on preaching and Bible study rather than
ritual as the means of salvation; and a desire to impose a strict moral

31
Hall, p. 289; cf. The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, ed. J. Lloyd Thomas (London,
1931), pp. 35-6.
32
Claire Cross, 'The Church in England 1646-1660,' in The Interregnum, ed. G. E.
Aylmer (1972), pp. 99-120; John Morrill, 'The Church in England 1642-9,' Re-
actions, pp. 89-109.
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 13
code, which I term the culture of discipline, upon society as a whole.'
But he attaches an important rider to his definition: 'These
attitudes,' he says, 'were not necessarily peculiar to the people I con-
sider puritans, but puritans were distinguished by the intensity with
which they held them.' Anglicans he describes as 'more complacent
Protestants' who 'placed a high value on ceremonial splendor and
uniformity'; in comparison with puritans they were 'irenic', less fac-
tious, relatively unconcerned with the 'trauma of regeneration'
which obsessed puritans.33
Puritans were similarly distinguished from other protestants by
their contemporaries, who observed not only puritan desire that the
English Reformation proceed beyond the Elizabethan Settlement
and its Jacobean and especially Caroline interpretations, but also,
and perhaps pre-eminently, the 'singularity in zeal and piety'34 with
which puritans sought the further reform of the church, of the
individual believer and of the larger society as well. Puritans were the
'hotter sort' of protestants, remarkable, in the words of one contem-
porary, for the substance of their 'strict life, and precise opinion. . .
their more religious and conscionable conversation',35 but even
more for the degree to which these differed from the manners and
religiosity of their conformist neighbors. It was this difference of
degree which allowed puritans to perceive themselves as forming a
distinct cultural community, to claim the capacity 'of being able to
recognise one another in the midst of a corrupt and unregenerate
world' and to call themselves 'saints'.36 The young Richard Baxter
certainly had no trouble at all distinguishing puritans from the rest
of the mainstream. Puritans were distinguishable from conformists
not in that the latter approved of blasphemy and profanation of the
Sabbath- certainly did n o t - but in the intensity and zeal with which
puritans denounced and prosecuted these evils, and in the narrow
precision with which they defined them.37 Most Anglicans approved
33
Hunt, pp. xxi, 119.
34
[Henry Parker], A Discourse Concerning Puritans (n.p., 1641), p. 9.
35 36
Ibid., pp. 9, 53. Lake, Moderate Puritans, p. 282; Hunt, p. xi, chs. 5-6.
37
It is inconceivable, as Hunt points out, that an Anglican would make the claim that
Richard Rogers put forward in 1623, that 'those who love preachers . . . can be
assured against committing the sin against the Holy Ghost' (The Practice of Chris-
tianity, p. 44, quoted by Hunt, p. 114). On the other hand, Parker, 'Thomas
Rogers,' offers a persuasive challenge to older interpretations of Sabbatarianism as
a characteristically puritan phenomenon (Collinson, 'The Beginnings of English
Sabbatarianism,' Studies in Church History, 1 (1964), 207-21; Greaves, 'The Origins
of English Sabbatarian Thought,' SCJ, 12(1981), 19-34; Keith Sprunger, 'English
and Dutch Sabbatarianism and the Development of Puritan Social Thought,
1600-1660,' CH, 51 (1982), 24-38) by presenting evidence from visitation articles,
sermons, and church court registers of episcopal commitment to and enforcement
of strict sabbath observance. I am grateful to Dr Parker for allowing me to read an
early draft of this article.
14 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

of preaching itself (although there were exceptions like William

Osboldston, whose infrequent sermons were noted for their preach-
ing against frequent preaching), but the propagation of the gospel in
the 'dark corners' of Wales and North was a puritan enterprise.38
Puritans were zealously Protestant- always eager for a sermon, ever
anxious about their own spiritual states, constantly driven by the
need to expel from the English church the popish accretions which
the bishops continued to tolerate- and this intensity, however sub-
jective a criterion, ought to be incorporated into our understanding
of puritanism. They were, as Collinsonhas said, 'the more enthusiastic
and committed of Elizabethan Protestants', believing 'what other
protestants believed, but more intensely.'39
As a working definition, then, 'puritans' were a self-conscious
community of protestant zealots committed to purging the Church
of England from within of its remaining Romish 'superstitions',
ceremonies, vestments and liturgy, and to establishing a biblical dis-
cipline on the larger society, primarily through the preached word.
They are distinguished not by adherence to a particular form of
church government or to predestinarian theology, but by intensity
of evangelical concern and vocal commitment to further religious
reform within the state church. They can be further classified as
'moderate' or 'radical' based on whether in order to further the
preaching of the protestant gospel they chose to conform to the
ceremonies which they found objectionable, or whether they
refused conformity in the conviction that compromise would under-
mine the gospel.
As for the rest of the protestant mainstream, despite its nineteenth-
century accretions 'Anglican' continues to be used most effectively
to describe that portion of the Church of England in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries whose commitments were protestant yet
ceremonial, whose devotion was to the unity and the traditional

38
Christopher Hill, 'Puritans and" the Dark Corners of the Land",' TRHS, 5 th ser., 8
(1963), 77-102; Society and Puritanism, pp. 30-123. Osboldston is mentioned by
David Cressy in Literacy and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1980), p. 82, but contrast
Collinson's account of Matthew, Religion of Protestants, pp. 48-52.
39
Collinson, 'Elizabethan Church,' p. 180, and 'The Jacobean Religious Settlement:
The Hampton Court Conference,' in Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early
Stuart Politics and Government, ed Howard Tomlinson (New York, 1984), 27-52, p.
29. In 'The Early Dissenting Tradition,' Collinson talks about puritanism as 'an
evolved but still. . . primitive and fresh Protestantism' with its 'free, popular and
expansive impulse' (p. 535). cf Christianson, Reformers and Babylon, who sees
puritanism as the most vigorous and successful of religious tendencies contained
within Anglicanism, and Greaves, Society and Religion, ch. 1, who talks about
puritans in terms of relative spiritual intensity or 'warmth.'
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 15
liturgical practices of the English church, and who were 'less sure
than some that they could identify the godly' within the church.40
Derek Hirst finds 'Anglicans' so defined diverging from puritans in
temperament if not in intellectual conviction even in the sixteenth
century. For all their apparent lack of zeal in the pre-war period,
John Morrill has found an 'Anglican party* prepared to suffer per-
secution in defense of the Prayer Book in the 1640s.41 Interestingly,
these Anglicans are not identified with the Arminian theology and
high church formalism that had set the Laudian bishops decidedly
apart from the mainstream in the 1630s.42

40
Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 68-9. Lake, 'Puritan
Identities,' p. 119, and Collinson, 'A Comment,' p. 485, dismiss 'Anglican' as
anachronistic for this period. Lake, however, finds it necessary to substitute terms
like 'mere conformist' (e.g., in 'Matthew Hutton,' p. 182). In the present study,
'Anglican' will sometimes be modified or replaced by 'conformist' as a reminder
that it is not being construed more broadly as membership in the Church of
England While Hirst's (and Morrill's) definition may seem etymologically arbi-
trary, it is both useful and historiographically accepted usage.
41
Morrill, 'The Church in England 1642-9.'
42
The departure of Laudianism from both Anglican and puritan tradition is con-
sidered at length in chapter 7. Few of the published writers considered in the
following chapters were difficult to identify as puritan or Anglican. Where the
definition was put to the test was in designating the religious persuasion, if any, of
the authors of the anonymous commonplace books and notebooks discussed
especially in chapter 3. It was very tempting to label 'puritan' any notebook
overwhelmingly concerned with religious issues and guidelines for individual
godliness. These indices of religious zeal were not, however, adopted as sufficient
criteria for the puritanism of a writer; if they had been, John Donne would have
qualified for admission to the spiritual brotherhood. A document which combined
these criteria with remarks disparaging ceremonies, however, was tentatively
accepted as a puritan production, and additional comments praising
acknowledged puritan leaders and objecting to enforced conformity were regarded
as definitive (e.g., St John's, Cambridge, MS S.20). By contrast, Queens',
Cambridge, MS Home 41, despite its being 'overcharged with passions and
sorrows over sin' and obsessed with other 'signs of true contrition,' is not regarded
as necessarily puritan, given the absence of other criteria. Particularly intense
biblicism and Sabbatarianism, combined with opposition to popish ceremonies
and high regard for puritan preachers (e.g., St John's, Cambridge, MS S.44), were
also seen as indicating probable puritan authorship. Arminianism was not con-
sidered a disqualification for puritanism, particularly in the case of documents
written during the 1640s, but by the same token, opposition to Arminianism was
not necessarily associated with puritanism: St John's, Cambridge, MS S.20, for
example, an obviously puritan document by the above criteria, also argues that
God's grace is ineffectual without the consent of the human will (p. 159, my
pagination). CUL, MS Gg. 1.29, on the other hand, contains a negative definition
ofpuritanism(fol. 84v, cf. pp. 1-9), together with arguments against Arminianism
(fols. 85, 104v-105v) written during the 1620s. A notebook defending episcopacy
was not labeled Anglican without further evidence. Subordination of the authority
of the Scriptures to that of bishops, however, eliminated the possibility of a
'puritan episcopalian' label for such a document, however pious, and in combin-
ation with such sentiments as 'A Puritan is called the Pest of the Church' (e.g.,
Balliol, MS 337, n.f.), Anglican authorship was assumed.
16 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Having identified whose social ideology we shall be exploring in the

study that follows, let us turn now to the intellectual context in
which they found themselves. If puritans were a self-conscious com-
munity of zealous religious reformers, they were also possessed of a
clear and characteristic vision of godly social reform, a vision which
we associate not incorrectly with the * culture of discipline' and the
'spiritualized household' and the 'reformation of manners'. However,
they were not the inventors of this reformist vision. They did not see
themselves as intellectual innovators, nor did their contemporaries,
nor should we. The notion that they were truly innovative in their
social thought is as fallacious as the assumption that they represented
an early form of capitalist class consciousness, or that they com-
prised a bitterly alienated oppositionist group in Elizabethan
England. Puritans as social theorists were instead a vitally important
group of popularizers and practitioners of earlier ideas - more
properly associated with Renaissance than with Reformation.
It is because scholars have failed to see puritans as the heirs of a
complex intellectual legacy - classical, medieval, and Renaissance
humanist as well as Reformed - that the historiography of puritan
social thought has plodded along first in one direction, then in
another, through a muddle of contradictions and seemingly inex-
plicable inconsistencies. Were puritans genuinely charitable or
maliciously repressive of the poor?43 Were they patriarchalists or did
they lean toward egalitarianism in their attitudes toward women?44
Were they revolutionary or conservative in their political values?45 If
as historians we cannot make up our minds, it is doubtless because
puritan minds were simply not so neatly divided into logical
categories as we, and perhaps they, would wish. The intellectual
development of sixteenth-century protestants was no more mono-
chromatic than ours, and they were no better at drawing lines and
making distinctions than most people, contemporary or modern. So
we find their social and political treatises citing Xenophon and St
Paul in the same breath, Erasmus and Zanchius in the same marginal
note. Heretofore, our solution to this apparent paradox has been
simply to ignore half of their sources and insist that the other half
was exclusively formative - of a single, consistent, protestant
social ideology.
43
The opinions of Jordan and Hill, respectively.
44
cf. Hill, Society and Puritanism, pp. 450-8, with William and Malleville Haller's 'The
Puritan Art ofLove,' HLQ, 5 (1942), 235-72; Wright, p. 227; Keith Thomas, 'Double
Standard,* JHI. 20 (1959), 195-216.
45
cf. Walzer with his many critics: e.g. Lawrence Stone, 'The Century of Crisis,'
NYRB (3 March 1966), p. 13, and J. F. H. New in William and Mary Quarterly, 24
(1967), 478-9.
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 17
The time has surely arrived to discard this traditional approach
and to look at the other half of the puritan mind. We must recognize
that the Bible and Calvinist theology are not in themselves sufficient
sources for the development of a social ideology. Protestant theology
offers distinct alternatives for one's approach to society and politics.
One may conclude from God's sovereignty and man's subjection
that human action is powerless to affect the course of earthly events
or the conduct of human affairs; on the other hand, the Calvinist
view of the elect as God's instruments to implement his will in the
world necessitates an activist stance on the part of the believer.
Likewise, the Bible provides a text for every occasion: it may be
variously interpreted to imply that this world is not our home, or to
demand Christian involvement in mundane affairs. The Scriptures,
like the theological systems which derive from them, are ambiguous,
apparently contradictory, and particularly vague when it comes to
specifying the details of social regulation and relationship in the
Kingdom of Christ. It is, therefore, necessary to analyze in some
depth those ideas which conditioned the way puritans approached
Scripture and theology, those presuppositions which led them to ask
certain questions of the Bible and to derive certain conclusions from
texts which could be interpreted in a variety of ways.
The thesis of this study is that that conditioning influence, in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was Christian humanism,
and that one of the defining characteristics of puritan social thought
in the seventeenth century was its maintenance of Erasmian ideals
and methods in the face of growing conservatism and authoritarianism
on the part of its enemies. The importance of puritans as social
thinkers lies in the fact that they contributed heavily to the propa-
gation of a belief in social reform, which they, along with contem-
poraries both protestant and Catholic, had derived from the
Renaissance and its classical sources. Puritans were educated a la
mode, subject to assumptions and perspectives characteristic not so
much of protestantism narrowly conceived as of the northern Euro-
pean Renaissance. They were products of the same printed books,
tutors, and university curricula as other Englishmen; their world
view was spawned no more from Calvin's Institutes, which they
generally read as adults, than from Erasmus' Enchiridion and Cicero's
De Officiis, which they read as youths.46 Puritans were imbued with

46
See chapter 3, below. Leonard J. Trinterud, Elizabethan Puritanism (Oxford, 1971),
has suggested the importance of Erasmus to puritan piety and religious reformism
by including John Gough's prologue to Erasmus' Enchiridion in his collection of
excerpts from puritan documents; he is not interested in puritan social
ideology, however.
18 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

the presuppositions of early modern England, and those were, in the

final analysis, heavily Erasmian.
It is quite true, to use Geoffrey Elton's caricature, that'People did
not read Erasmus . . . and say, with a sudden inspiration: indeed,
indeed, this is what we will do.'47 But the generations of Englishmen
brought up on the Colloquies and Adages\ the Praise of Folly and the
Enchiridion, were people whose assumptions about the social order
and its prospects were subtly shaped by the presuppositions that
underlay all of Erasmus' works - that all is not well with the world,
and that change for the better is possible. The ideal of social reform
germinating in the generation of Colet and Vives and More would
not come to full fruition until the decades of Civil War and
Interregnum. But the landscape of the intervening generations was
enlivened by an increasingly lush growth of the practical divinity and
reformist ideology that characterized Christian humanism. Its color
was heightened by blossoming schemes for the abolition of poverty,
the reformation of manners, the expansion of educational oppor-
tunity. No social revolutionary, Erasmus would hardly have expected
quick results from his proposals; the inclusion of his works in the
ordinary curricula of grammar schools and universities and, in trans-
lation, in the libraries of increasingly literate tradesmen and
merchants, yeomen and artisans, meant that Tudor and early Stuart
Englishmen approached social problems from a different perspec-
tive from that of their medieval counterparts, with reformist
assumptions unknown to the Middle Ages, but now shared by
Catholic and Calvinist alike. While internal contradictions are to be
expected from an intellectual milieu which in England combined
humanist optimism with the Calvinist doctrine of human depravity,
it was the activism and the reformist ethic of Christian humanism
which proved most formative for protestant social theory. It was
Christian humanism which determined how protestants would apply
their biblicism and their theological grounding in their day-to-day
conduct in the family, in the market-place, in Parliament
This is not to suggest that puritan theology proper was in any
significant sense Erasmian. The famous exchange of 1524 between
Erasmus and Luther on free will best represents the radical theological
differences which would prevent puritans, however enamoured of
Erasmus' social criticism, from relying very heavily on his theological
perspective. They may well have borrowed certain elements of his

Elton's criticism ofJ. K. McConica's English Humanists and Reformation Politics in HJ,
10 (1967), 137-8.
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 19
religious thought: the adiaphorism of the moderate puritans recently
studied by Lake, Collinson and Dent, for instance, might be seen as
partly Erasmian in origin. Historians have also explored possible
connections between Lutheran ecclesiology and Christian humanist
thought in Germany which may have implications for England.48
Certainly the impact of Erasmian humanism on English protestant
theology is a promising field for further investigation. But the scope
of this study is limited to the continuity of humanism in puritan
social thought; the question of theological interaction between
humanism and puritanism must be left to other investigators.
An additional caveat should be offered. No attempt to trace the
intellectual roots of a reform movement can presume to be exhaus-
tive. It is not the intention of this study to rule out the possibility of
other pre-Reformation influences on puritan thought besides Chris-
tian humanism and its classical sources. The approach taken here
obviously presupposes the interaction of a multiplicity of traditions
in any intellectual development, but of the pre-Reformation roads
to puritan thought, the reformist ideology of Christian humanism,
itself an intellectual composite, stands out as the high road to protes-
tant social thought. It is an avenue badly in need of exploration by
those who seek to understand puritanism not by mythologizing it,
but by locating it in all the complexity of its historical context.
A second problem in intellectual history is addressed in this study,
and a second thesis about early modern social theory arises as that
problem is confronted. Ways of thinking (in this case, about the
nature of the social order) develop in history, but they also collapse
over time in the face of other historical change. Puritan social
thought, important in and of itself because of its impact on early
modern society and politics, also offers to intellectual historians a
proving ground for new methods of tracing the sources of idea sys-
tems. In addition, it provides an opportunity for explaining in con-
textualist terms how accepted ideas fall into disfavor.
Puritans emerge from an attempt to place them within the con-
text of their own intellectual milieu as part of a consensus in the six-
teenth century about possibilities for social reformation. Protestants
of all sorts adopted the hope of Catholic humanists like Erasmus for
a godly social order established through education and discipline.
48
See for example Wilhelm Maurer, Das Verhdltnis des Staates zur Kirche nach humanis-
tischer Anschauung, vornehmlich bei Erasmus (Giessen, 1930); W. Hentze, Kirche und
kirchliche Einheit bei Desiderius Erasmus von Rotterdam (Paderborn, 1974); and on
broader theological issues than just ecclesiology, Ernst-Wilhelm Kohls, Die
theologische Lebensaufgabe des Erasmus und die oberrheinischen Reformatoren (Stuttgart,
1969); cf. Kohls, Die Theologie des Erasmus, 2 vols (Basel, 1966).
20 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Puritans and Anglicans joined in the religion of protestants were

similarly joined in the social thought of Catholic humanism. In order
fully to understand the social reformism of puritanism, it has proven
necessary to examine not only the nature and development of that
consensus among protestants and between protestants and Catholics,
but also the decline of that consensus into conflict, first between
protestantism and Tridentine Catholicism, then between puritanism
and Anglicanism. It is only after the disintegration of the Renaissance
consensus that it becomes possible to speak first of a' protestant' and
then of a 'puritan' social ethic. To attempt to distinguish puritan
from other contemporary approaches to the family, to education or
to poor relief before that time is to separate them from their historical
context. It is also to ignore the fact that just as ideas influence his-
tory, history in turn affects ideas.
It was Pope Paul IV who sounded the retreat of Roman Catholic
thought from the arena of social reform to the immediate safety of
eccelsiastical authoritarianism and centralized control when, in
1559, he declared all of Erasmus' works anathema. A similar re-
action against social change and progressive ideology occurred in
seventeenth-century Anglicanism, particularly under the leadership
of Archbishop William Laud during the 1630s. Again, the hierarchy's
rejection of the reformist consensus can be understood as a
preference for enforced conformity as the safest means of insuring
social order in the face of increasing discontent with the establish-
ment in church and state. In Laudian sermons, as in Tridentine con-
ciliar and papal declarations, passive obedience to constituted
authority replaced the conscientious individual activism upheld by
Erasmian humanists as the proper response to the needs of the
commonwealth. Repression replaced innovation as the projected
cure for social ills. A genuine opposition was bound to emerge.
The intellectual pedigree of those English protestants who resorted
to arms in the 1640s helps to explain both the irenic nature of
church and society in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and the
conflict of Charles' ill-fated reign. The thesis that Erasmian assump-
tions about the social order were part of the protestant mainstream
in the pre-Laudian period renders comprehensible the consensus of
puritans and Anglicans before the 1620s on social issues; it also
illumines the radicalization of puritanism when those in authority
began to reject humanist reformism. As long as the mainstream of
English protestantism operated within the reformist assumptions of
Christian humanism, puritans and conformists could cooperate in
building the New Jerusalem in England. It was only when Laud and
 Introduction: The demythologizing ofpuritanism 21
Charles, in their drive for control and conformity, attempted to
divert the mainstream into an apparently absolutist channel, that
puritans found themselves in opposition. They were alienated not
by the religion of protestants, but by Laudian innovation and
Caroline enforcement. When this happened, when those in authority
rejected humanist reform, puritans and parliamentarians had a radical
social ideology at hand with which to legitimate their revolutionary
actions: the logical implications of humanist anticlericalism and
opposition to hereditary aristocracy and monarchy were released.
The reformist consensus that had held in check the hidden potential
of Erasmian social thought was destroyed by the authoritarianism of
the Caroline establishment.
By the beginning of the Civil War, then, the Erasmian social con-
sensus no longer existed. Only puritans were left holding the banner
of reformism. Christian humanist social theory had survived, and it
was to dictate the actions of its puritan advocates during the Civil
War and Interregnum to such an extent that later historians would
come to label it 'puritan' social theory. But let us follow the
preachers' example and give credit where it is due. When we do so,
we will have to acknowledge puritan social theorists as Christian
humanists of the hotter sort.
 Christian humanism as social ideology

The humanist social ethic which puritans would find so attractive

was biblical in its apologetic, eclectic in its sources, mundane in its
concerns but religious in its goals, practical in its methodology, and
activist in its approach. It was a distinctively Christian humanism,
aimed at formulating a model for godly behavior which would apply
equally to prince and commoner, clergy and laity. The moral
reconstruction of the social order was its ultimate objective- and its
supreme attraction for protestant reformers.
For humanists, both Italian and transalpine, a disdain for ecclesias-
tical corruption had combined with a veneration of ancient litera-
ture and the society which had produced it to bring forth a new
conception of human potential, social as well as individual. Christen-
dom, they agreed, had a bad track record as compared with the
intellectual, political and social achievements of ancient civilization.
In the Renaissance view, both Roman Stoics and primitive Christians
evinced more purity of life and a more godly social and political ethic
.than the despised medieval church had been able to achieve.
Humanists accordingly divided their time between satirizing their
own immediate social and intellectual milieu and reviving a true
knowledge of the Greco-Roman and patristic Golden Age. The cen-
turies between St Augustine and their own day were, in Renaissance
minds, uniformly dark, barbaric and intellectually stagnant. The
brilliance of the medieval schoolmen was among the casualties of
this not altogether enlightened perspective; however, we must
remember that the scholasticism of Erasmus' Paris was in fact a far
cry from that of St Thomas. The Renaissance reformer sought to res-
cue humanity from the shadow of the waning Middle Ages both by
condemning the darkness of tradition' and by rekindling the light of
ancient civilization. For northern humanists, rooted as they were in
22
 Christian humanism as social ideology 23
the lay spirituality of the late fifteenth-century devotio moderna, the
avowed aim of this endeavour was to achieve a reformation of
Christendom. They aspired to redesign individual, social, and political
behavior along the lines defined by what were regarded as the most
instructive of ancient texts- the Bible, and the works of the Church
Fathers and of Greek and Roman moralists. It was this intentionally
pious reformism which distinguished northern from southern Euro-
pean humanism in the sixteenth century.
Ideally, the Bible was to be the pre-eminent guiding force behind
this transformation of society. Northern or Christian humanists'
love of ancient literature was conditioned neither by abstract
aesthetic commitments nor by secularized philosophical inclin-
ations, but rather by their devotion to a biblical reformation of
Christendom. The Renaissance demand for a return to the sources
became for Christian humanists an imperative to apply the critical
assumptions and the exegetical techniques of the Italian humanists
to the Christian's most authoritative text, and to render the Scrip-
tures thus properly understood the chief guide to right living. Their
perceived motivation for scholarship and action was biblical; their
ultimate goals were also, at least in intent, biblical. An overriding
biblicism may be regarded, in fact, as a defining characteristic of
Christian humanists. It was their regard for the Scriptures which
guided their extra-biblical intellectual pursuits: their perception of a
biblical concern for individual morality attracted them to the
Roman Stoics; the need to understand the Bible contextually drew
them to the study of ancient history; the need for a purified text of
the Scriptures impelled them to pursue knowledge of Greek and
Hebrew and of classical grammar and rhetoric; and the Church
Fathers were revered, given their proximity to the first century, for
the light they shed on the Scriptures. l The text of the Bible itself
was, of course, paramount among Christian humanist concerns.
It is essential to recognize that for the Christian humanist there
need be no conflict between the teachings of the Bible and a belief in
great human potential for achievement. However serious the prob-

On Erasmian patristic studies, see Denys Gorce, 'La Patristique dans la reforme
d'Erasme,' Festgabe Joseph Lortz, 2 vols (Baden-Baden, 1958), voL I, pp. 233-76;
Robert Peters, 'Erasmus and the Fathers: Their Practical Value,' CH, 36 (1967),
254-6l;JohnC. Olin, Six Essays on Erasmus (New York, 1979), pp. 33^*7; and Olin,
'Erasmus and his Edition of St. Hilary', Erasmus in English, 9 (1978), 8-11. Charac-
teristic Christian humanist patristic editions include Erasmus' Hieronymi opera, 9
vols (Basel, 1516) and Vives' commentaries on De Civitate Dei (Basel, 1522). Erasmus'
Hieronymi Stridonensis vita is in Erasmi opuscula, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson (The Hague,
1933), pp. 178-80.
24 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

lem of human sinfulness, it did not preclude individual understand-

ing of the law of Christ within the context of a truly Christian
commonwealth; but for the philosophia Christi to be realized in the
commonwealth, a true understanding of the gospel must be made
available to every individual, at every social level. The dissemination
of biblical knowledge accordingly became a primary goal for
northern humanists, just as it would later become the obsession of
zealous English protestants. Humanist critics charged that true
understanding of the Bible was not being mediated to the people by
late medieval churchmen; rather, the church had for centuries kept
both itself and its charges in unconscionable ignorance of the truth.
It had maintained a monopoly of the Scriptures themselves by pro-
hibiting vernacular translations; moreover, it had neglected even to
take advantage of its own intellectual dominance to study the biblical
texts in its care. Erasmus' Praise ofFolly places scholastic theologians
in the vanguard of Folly's disciples, notable for
their happiness in their self-love . . . [being] fortified with an army of
schoolmen's definitions, conclusions and corollaries, and propositions both
explicit and implicit. . . Such is the erudition and complexity they all display
that I [Folly] fancy the apostles themselves would need the help of another
holy spirit if they were obliged to join issue . . . with our new breed of
theologian.
These 'argumentative Scotists and pigheaded Ockhamists and
undefeated Albertists' are in fact so preoccupied with their 'tom-
fooleries' that 'they haven't even a spare moment in which to read
even once through the gospel or the letters of PauL'2 Monks, who are
described by Folly as most nearly approaching theologians in happi-
ness, are unable to read the Scriptures even if they can find the time,
for 'they believe it's the highest form of piety to be so uneducated
that they can't even read.'3 The Enchiridion Militis Christiani, having
established a knowledge of Holy Writ as an essential weapon of the
Christian soldier, warns him against modern clerics who fail to read
the Scriptures but are entranced with the writings of Duns Scotus
instead: 'Duns Scotus gave them such confidence that they con-
sidered themselves master theologians without even reading the sacred
texts. But even if they do speak very cleverly, let other men judge
whether they have said anything worthy of the Holy Spirit' Erasmus
was careful to explain to his readers, 'I say this not because I reject
the moderns, but because I prefer what is more useful and conducive
2
Erasmus, Praise of Folly, tr. Betty Radice (New York, 1971), pp. 153, 156, 160-1.
3
Ibid., p. 164.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 25

to achieving your purpose . . . My intention was to outline a way of

life for you, not a course of study.' The ultimate objective of the
reading assigned in the Enchiridion was to 'make your character better
equipped for that kind of satisfactory living with others which the
ancients call "ethical".' 4
Given the church's failure to provide the knowledge of Scripture
which is requisite for the imitation of Christ and the biblical refor-
mation of society, the Christian humanists demanded that the Bible
be made available in accurate vernacular translations of the best
Greek and Hebrew texts to every Christian. They rejected the prin-
ciple of priestly mediation of the Bible, opting to campaign for suf-
ficient popular literacy and availability of the Scriptures that the
farmer might 'sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver
hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveler
lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind.'5 Every
Christian, whatever his social status, would thus be made respons-
ible both for his own spiritual status and for the godly transform-
ation of the social order.
The need for a more accurate text than the Vulgate and for a proper
use of the text for instruction in practical piety drove northern Euro-
pean scholars to apply the New Learning to the Bible and to theology.
A return to the sources, read in their original languages, contextually,
and in their entirety, was to replace what Erasmus saw as the flippant
proof-texting of the scholastics and so 'call back theology, sunk too
far in sophistical subtleties, to the sources and to ancient sim-
plicity.'6 Only thus could the purity of the primitive church be re-
stored to Christian society. Accordingly, Erasmus devoted his most
intense scholarly effort to the production of an accurate edition of
the Greek New Testament (the Novum Instrumentum, published by
Froben in 1516) with a Latin translation and simple paraphrases for
ordinary readers, and editions of the works of those Church Fathers
who best illuminated the sense of Scripture. But he hastened to
4
Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, tr. and ecL Raymond Himelick, The Enchiridion
of Erasmus (Bloomington, Indiana, 1963), pp. 53, 55. The 1534 English translation
has been edited for the Early English Text Society by Anne M. O'Donnell(Oxford,
1981). While Erasmus had theological quarrels with Duns Scotus, his objections
here are to the substitution of commentators for the Scriptures themselves, and to
the irrelevance of scholastic theology to practical concerns of daily Christian
living.
5
Erasmus, Paraclesis (1516), in Christian Humanism and the Reformation, e d John C
Olin (Gloucester, Mass., 1973), p. 97.
6
Erasmus to John Gacy, ca. 17 October 1527, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi
Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen and H. W. Garrod, 20 vols (Oxford, 1906-
1958), voL VII, ep. 1891, p. 208 (Theologiam nimium ad' sophisticasargutiasdelapsam, ad
fontes acpriscam simplicitatem revocare conatus sum).
26 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

remind his readers of the ultimate purpose for which this labor was
undertaken: to restore a theology 'far more conducive to Christian
learning and a pious life than that which is now treated far and wide
in the schools.'7
It was the hope of establishing the philosophia Christi in the daily
existence of individual and society which lay behind Erasmus*
scholarly endeavors. It was a hope fostered by the Scriptures and
implemented by studying the Scriptures, and a hope which would
later be eagerly adopted by protestants, in part because they shared
the biblicism of the Christian humanists. But it could not be
achieved by a narrowly biblical focus alone, as Erasmus well knew
and as his intellectual progeny would quickly discover. In good
humanist fashion, Erasmus recognized that just as an understanding
of the biblical text could be enhanced by examining the Church
Fathers and ancient history, so the effective application of Christ's
teachings could be aided by a study of other ancient moralists. The
truths discovered by the pagan philosophers of antiquity - those of
their doctrines not incompatible with the Scriptures- were not only
a permissible area of study for the Christian; they were essential for
the believer anxious to apply ancient wisdom to contemporary
problems.8 The Bible provided the outlines of Christian morality
and social ethics; for the details, the would-be reformer was directed
to the best ancient writers, those enlightened by the Holy Spirit only
slightly less than was St Paul.
It is in its regard for the pagan classics, of course, that Christian
humanism reveals its roots in the Italian Renaissance. Northern
humanists had learned from their southern mentors to look to the
ancients for exemplary Latin style and elegance of expression; they
followed the lead of the Italians in producing purified editions of
ancient texts, Greek and Latin, pagan and Christian. But for Christian
humanists, the pursuit of stylistic excellence was a secondary con-
sideration in the reading of ancient literature. Of primary impor-
tance to them was the content of that literature, and especially those
classical ideas which could be applied to the practical problems of

From the preface to his edition of St Jerome, tr. and quoted by Olin in Six Essays, p.
34. Erasmus produced editions of the complete works of Jerome (1516, 1524—6),
Cyprian(152O), Hilary of Poitiers(1523), Augustine(1529), Ambrose(1529), John
Chrysostom (15 30), Basil (15 32) and Origen (15 32), and select works of Irenaeus
(1529) and Gregory Nazianzen (1531).
The thesis of Erasmus' Antibarbari, tr. Margaret Mann Phillips in CWE 23 (Toronto,
1978), 16-122.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 27
9
godly living. Thus, while Erasmus wrote manuals of style and lauded
eloquence, he also satirized the idolatry of Cicero to which his Italian
colleagues were so prone, on Quintilian's premise that style is but
the 'dress of thoughts.'10 What should be imitated in Cicero is 'not
his words or what is on the surface of a speech', but his understand-
ing of the truth.11 John Colet similarly combined an Italian concern
for style with a northern focus on moral improvement: his final
statutes for St Paul's School read, 'I would that they were taught
always in good literature both Latin and Greek, and good authors
such as have the very Roman eloquence joined with wisdom... for
my intent is by this school specially to increase knowledge and
worshiping of God and Our Lord Christ Jesu and good Christian life
and manners in the children.'12 For Christian humanists the pagan
classics were servants of Christianity.
Their highest regard, therefore, was reserved for those ancient
writers who likewise put scholarship to the service of individual and
social reformation - the Roman Stoics.13 It was Erasmus' insistence
on an activist social ideology and his focus on the civic involvement
as well as the spiritual condition of the lay person which motivated
him to edit and publish Plutarch's works, Cicero's De Officiis (which
he called in the dedication of the first edition (1501) 'books of gold',
an 'enchiridion' to be 'learnt by heart'), and the complete works of
Seneca, 'whose writings are wonderfully stimulating and excite one
to enthusiasm for a life of moral integrity.' 'Nothing can excel the

9
It is partly for this reason that the Neo-platonism of the Italian Renaissance never
dominated the northern movement Erasmian humanists rejected the intellec-
tualism of the Neo-platonists and stressed action over contemplation. See for
example Sears Jayne,/^» Colet andMamie F'kino (Oxford, 1963), pp. 52-7, 75. This
is not to suggest, however, that there were no moral reformers among Italian
humanists, or that the humanists of northern Europe were all as socially aware and
reform-minded as the author of the Praise ofFolly. Erasmus is representative of the
best of Christian humanist activism, but his following was significant and (as it is
hoped that this study will show) effective in spreading reformist assumptions for
generations after his death.
10
Ciceronianus, tr. Izora Scott (New York, 1908), and the colloquy Echo (Coll., p. 376)
are both jibes at Ciceronians; De copia quotes Quintilian's maxim (CWE 24, p. 306);
cf. Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria 8, preface 20).
11
Ciceronianus, p. 129.
12
Quoted in Craig R. Thompson's introduction to CWE 23, pp. xxx-xxxi. On the
influence of Colet on Erasmus, see P. Duhamel, 'The Oxford Lectures of John
Colet,'/if/, 14 (1953), 493-510.
13
On the practical focus of Seneca's writings and his opposition to 'quibbling about
words' while making 'no progress toward real living,' see his Epistles to Lucilius, tr.
RichardM. Gummere(Cambridge, Mass., 1953), nos.45,48, 71,88 andlll (vol. I,
pp. 293, 321; vol. II, pp. 77, 373; voL lit, p. 277).
28 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

holiness of Seneca's teachings,' exclaims Erasmus' preface to his first

edition of this Stoic's works (1515). 'He alone lifts up our hearts to
heaven, inspires us with contempt for what is vulgar, instills in us a
loathing for what is base, and kindles in us the love for what is
good.'14
Part of Seneca's appeal to Erasmus, and later to protestants, lay in
the fact that Stoics, like Erasmians, were syncretistic in many of their
assumptions and objectives. They struggled, as their Renaissance
and Reformation followers would, to combine a sense of the gravity
of sin with their reformist optimism. They acknowledged the
individual's call to wage an internal spiritual war against evil, but
they also saw man as a political animal, called to live for the common
good. Philosophically no more consistent than their sixteenth-
century readers, the Stoics provided an ideal source for Christians
intent on fleshing out the ethical skeleton of the Bible in light of the
problem of sin.15
Accordingly, humanist editions of Cicero and Seneca formed the
most popular textbooks of sixteenth-century social speculation,
and it was primarily from those classical moralists that humanist
theoreticians drew their new vocabulary of virtue- terms descriptive
neither of the chivalric nobleman nor of the religious contempla-
tive, but rather of the godly layman, active in forum and market-
place. Words like prudence, temperance, gravity and fortitude form
the key descriptive terms of both Stoic and Christian humanist
manuals of behavior. Cicero's belief that man's rational soul, follow-
ing the law of nature, bids him subdue his selfish passions and act for

CWE 2, The Correspondence of Erasmus, tr. R A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson

(Toronto, 1975), no. 152, p. 30; preface to first edition of Seneca's works, tr. and
quoted by F. L. Battles and A. M. Hugo in John Calvin's Commentary on Seneca's De
Clementia (Leiden, 1969), p. 588. cf CWE 2, nos. 264 (Erasmus to Peter Gilles,
1512), 281 (Erasmus to Ammonio, 1513) and 284 (Erasmus to Wolsey, 1514); Erasmus
and Cambridge, tr. anded. D. F. S. Thomson and H. C. Porter (Toronto, 1963), nos.
205-11 (letters from Erasmus to Robert Aldrich, 1525-7); and Albert Hyma, The
Life of Desiderius Erasmus (Assen, The Netherlands, 1972), p. 53. Among Erasmus'
proverbial collections is a Flores Senecae. In his Institutio Principis Christiani, he cited
Cicero, Quintilian and Seneca, Kqui non solum absunt ab obscenitate verum etiam
saluberrimispraeceptis vitam instituunt - quoted in W. H. Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus
concerning the Aim and'Method'of Education (New York, 1964, first publication, 1904),
p. 112, n. 1.
Margo Todd, 'Seneca and the Protestant Mind: The Influence of Stoicism on
Puritan Ethics,' Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, 74 (1983), 182-99, and William
Bouwsma, 'The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in
Renaissance Thought,' in Itinerarium Ita/icum, ed. Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas
A. Brady, Jr. (Leiden, 1975), p. 9 etpassim.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 29
16
the common good, was echoed by Christian humanists.
Acknowledging with their classical mentors the power of sin,
Erasmians held tightly to the hope that the sort of guidance offered
by Seneca, Cicero, Sallust, Plutarch and others could liberate the
rational soul within the individual and allow it to respond to the call
of nature/God to act for the common weal.
Christian humanists were not exclusively dependent on Stoic
writers, of course. They were sufficiently eclectic and non-systematic
to combine elements of Aristotelian philosophy with Socratic ethical
theory and Roman moralism to achieve their reformist ends.
Humanist social theorists drew heavily on both Aristotle and Plato,
for instance, largely ignoring the differences among these and other
ancient Greek philosophers.17 Thomas Lupset's Exhortation to yonge
men (15 34) provided a reading list headed by the Bible, but including
Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Xenophon's Oeconomica,
Cicero's De Officiis, Seneca's works, and Erasmus' Enchiridion.™ But
perhaps because their syncretism was as great as that of the Roman
moralists, and certainly because their concerns were as practical as
those of Seneca and Cicero, the Christian humanists' dependence
on the Roman Stoics was second only to their deference to the
Bible.
The active reforming enthusiasm ofthephilosophia Christiwas to be
implemented, then, by the study of a variety of authors, though
always guided by Scripture. Erasmus, having defined the philosophy
of Christ as 'a rebirth. . . the restoration of human nature originally
well formed', went on to argue that
although no one has taught this more perfectly and more effectively than
Christ, nevertheless one may find in the books of the pagans very much
which does agree with His teaching . . . The Stoics understood that no one
was wise unless he was good . . . What shall we say of this, that many -

16
JerroldE. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton, 1968),
ch. 1 etpassim. Notes 5 and 6 of my 'Seneca and the Protestant Mind' give publi-
cation figures for Seneca's works in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.
17
Bouwsma, pp. 4-7. Contrasting Aristotle and Plato was, according to Bouwsma,
'not a major or a regular concern of humanism; hence it can hardly be expected to
illuminate its central concerns' (p. 5). The contradictions inherent in humanism
itself were in fact 'scarcely recognized by the humanists themselves, more frequently
latent than overt for even the most acutely self-conscious among them' (p. 4).
18
Lupset, Works, ed. J. A. Gee (New Haven, 1928), pp. 245-6, 250-1. Lupset trans-
lated Xenophon's Oeconomica into English (from Greek). Aristotle's Politics vii and
viii were recommended in the 1544 edition of his Exhortation (sig. Cii) on the rear-
ing of children.
30 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

notably Socrates, Diogenes, and Epictetus- have presented a good portion

of His teaching? . . , Christ both taught and presented the same doctrine.
The new, rational, humane social order which was to be created was
thus both Christian and humanist.19

The new biblicism, conditioned by revived classical moralism,

defined a new social type: a pious, self-controlled, industrious lay
person, active in civic and ecclesiastical affairs, seeking always the
common good. This combination of good citizen and Christian
soldier was to be the essential building block of the new society. The
formulation of the ideal had resulted from humanist textual studies;
the inculcation of the ideal became the goal of another humanist
literary genre (one whose popularity would continue in protestant
guise for the next two centuries) - the enchiridion, or handbook of
moral instruction.
The self-improvement manuals of Erasmus and his followers were
characterized by a deep concern with sin and by a Stoic conviction
that self-understanding and self-control were essential to overcome
evil. Erasmus' view of sin was derived from the Bible and the Fathers,
but it was at the same time conditioned by the humanism of the
ancient pagan moralists: the depredations of sin need not be merely
absolved or tolerated, but could be held in check and even reversed
by means of right instruction. He reminded the Duke of Cleves in
1529 that during children's earliest years,
their behavior is guided by instinct more than by reason, they are inclined
equally to good and evil- more to the latter, perhaps- and it is always easier
to forget good habits than to unlearn bad ones. This truth was already
known to pagan philosophers and caused them great perplexity, but their
speculations were unable to penetrate to the real cause, and it was left to
Christian theology to teach the truth that since Adam, the first man of the
human race, a disposition to evil has been deeply engrained in us. While this
is indisputably man's condition, however, we cannot deny that the greater
portion of this evil stems from corrupting relationships and a misguided
education.
Nevertheless, he said, God's human creation has been gifted with
reason, which, properly guided, can govern sinful human passion. * A
19
Erasmus, Paraclesis, pp. 100-1. On the less pietistic concerns of Italian humanism,
see Wallace K. Ferguson, Renaissance Studies (New York, 1970); or Walter
Ullmann, Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism (Ithaca, 1977), which ignores
northern humanism altogether in its exclusive stress on secularization. Craig
Thompson's definition of Christian humanism as 'the interaction between classical
culture and Christianity in the thought and work of Erasmus and like-minded men'
is broad but useful (Woodward, p. xiii).
 Christian humanism as social ideology 31
proper and conscientious instruction/ he concluded, 4s the well-
spring of all moral goodness.' The individual directed from early
childhood by reason rightly informed 'takes on the best possible
character.' The parent who properly educates his child 'will fashion,
if I may use such a bold term, a god-like creature.'20 The social order
can be reformed, but the initial appeal must be made to individual
reason, enlightened by the Scriptures and directed toward godly
behavior in all areas of daily living.
The humanist literary guides which were to offer this direction are
best exemplified by Erasmus' Enchiridion. Using the Pauline military
imagery which would be enthusiastically adopted by protestants
later in the century, Erasmus here portrayed life in this world as a war
against sin in which every Christian must be constantly urged to do
his duty. It is noteworthy that his duty is neither retirement from the
conflict to the cloister, nor simple obedience to hierarchical
superiors in the world of conflict, but rather positive individual
action in righteous response to specific moral dilemmas.21 Practical
moral instruction is no less visible, however, in Erasmus' other
works, even in such popular school texts as the Colloquies and Adages.
In these works as in the Enchiridion Erasmus consistently prescribed a
discipline at least as' puritanical' as that of the followers of Calvin or
Perkins, including a demand for daily self-examination. His godly
youth in the colloquy Confabulatiopia (1522) practices an extreme
form of religious self-discipline, and his comments on the adage Quo
transgressus recommend Pythagoras' advice to his disciples to correct
their lives by examining themselves each time they return home
with the questions, 'Where have I gone wrong? What have I done
that I should not have done? What have I left undone which I ought
to have done?' Erasmus urged that this discipline be followed since,
as his translator Richard Taverner rendered it, 'there be no affec-
tions so wild, so unruly, but discipline and awe may tame them.'22
20
Depueris statim ac liberaliterinstituendis declamatio, CWE26, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto,
1985), pp. 301, 305, 321. Erasmian divergence from the theology of the viamoderna
is most obvious here. It underlay the disagreement between Erasmus and Luther,
and would continue to be a problem for protestants who were attracted to Erasmian
reformism but convinced of the depravity of fallen humanity. But Luther's break
with Erasmus simply reveals that he was a more intellectually consistent protes-
tant than most. Puritans intent on social reform would either ignore the contradic-
tion between the doctrine of total depravity and the appeal to reason or add it to
the other theological paradoxes with which they lived. On the similarity between
their uneasy eclecticism and Seneca's on this and other issues, see my 'Seneca and
the Protestant Mind.' 21 Erasmus,Enchiridion, ed. Himelick, pp. 37-46 etpassim.
22
Coll., pp. 30-41; The 'Adages' of Erasmus, tr. Margaret Mann Phillips (Cambridge,
1964), pp. 33-4; Proverbes or adagies with newe addicions gathered out of the Chiliades of
Erasmus by Richard Taverner (1539), fol. xxxiii (Exercitatio potest omnia).
32 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

The list of those wild, unruly affections to be tamed is a traditional

one for the most part - drunkenness, lechery, gluttony, gambling,
blasphemy, avarice, pride.23 But the fact that a considerable amount
of space devoted to moralizing on these vices is to be found in nearly
all of Erasmus' writings, whatever the subject, illustrates his overrid-
ing concern with behavior in daily life. He condemned not only
lechery, but also the telling of'silly, bawdy stories' and the singing of
'dirty songs'. He condemned debauchery, but went to great lengths
to include in his censure the various forms of self-indulgence which
would lead to it - dancing, lute-playing, pipes, and jesters.24
Moreover, his obsession with idleness as the root of most other evils,
individual and social, foreshadowed an overarching concern of later
sixteenth-century moralizers.
Erasmus was not alone among the Christian humanists in his
demand for discipline. The behavior of More's Utopians won Erasmus'
wholehearted approval, and it has been aptly paralleled to the godly
discipline demanded by Calvin and his followers; in fact, 'so many
things that a good many people want are banned in Utopia that
Calvin's Geneva looks a bit frivolous by comparison.'25 Utopia
boasts no wine shops, no alehouses, no dicing, no hunting, no
'opportunity for corruption . . . On the contrary, being under the
eyes of all, people are bound either to be performing the usual labor
or to be enjoying their leisure in a fashion not without decency.'26 A
Utopian is, in short, of precisely that industrious, temperate, dis-
ciplined social type idealized by Erasmus.
In the same tradition, Erasmus' protege Thomas Lupset exhorted
his readers to flee idleness and to practice self-control and frugality;
and Thomas Starkey condemned'hunting, hawking, dicing, carding,
and all other idle pastimes and vain', extravagance, drunkenness,

23
For example, Proverbes, fol. xxxi; A sermon of the Chylde Jesus. . . to be pronounced and
preached of a chylde unto chyldren (n.d), sig. Bviii; Apophthegmes, tr. Nicholas Udall
(London, 1542), fols. 8—9; Enchiridion, ed Himelick,passim, and esp. pp. 177-200;
Folly, pp. 89-90, 124-5, 143, 176 etpassim; Coll., pp. 195-8, 380-1; Adages (1964),
pp. 185, 210-12, 217, 268; CWE 31 (Adageslil to IvlOO, tr. Margaret Mann Phillips,
Toronto, 1982), p. 230.
24
Convivium religiosum (1522), Coll., pp. 56, 76; cf Auris batava, Adages (1964), p. 210;
Liber de Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia, The Essential Erasmus, ed and tr. John P. Dolan
(New York, 1964), p. 335.
25
J. H. Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (New York, 1973), pp.
52-3, 125, 107-17; Hexter, More's 'Utopia': The Biography of an Idea (Princeton,
1952), p. 47; cf. D. B. Fenlon, 'England and Europe: Utopia and its aftermath',
TRHS, 5th ser. 25 (1975), p. 120, which sees Utopia enacted in More's
household.
26
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, ed Edward Surtz andj. H. Hexter
(New Haven, 1965), pp. 129, 147, 171.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 33
and gluttony, 'of the which things the officers [overseers of com-
munity morals] should have as much regard as of robbing and
adultery.' From the Bible and the 'wisdom of antiquity' Starkey con-
cluded that mankind is not born to idleness and pleasure, b u t to
labor, and to labor not in 'making and procuring things for the vain
pastime and pleasure of other' b u t rather in the production of
necessities for the commonwealth, in the education of youth, and in
the good government of the realm. 27 A like concern with the refor-
mation of manners is found in such humanists as More's friend
Richard Whitforde, Sir William Forrest, and Sir Thomas Elyot. The
latter, for instance, condemned idleness as a vice and parent of all
other vices and commended instead (with Cicero) the active life, 'in
business well occupied.' 28

The individual reformation of manners to which Christian humanists

devoted so much of their writing was aimed ultimately at the creation
of a godly society, and it is to the larger, social objectives of
Erasmianism that our attention must now turn. With Cicero,
humanists argued that the good man is a good citizen; he must sub-
due his inclinations toward self-indulgence in order to live and act
for the common good. This is the vocatus, the natural/divine calling
to which the truly pious individual must respond. Christian
humanism was a call to social action. It was not so much idealistic as
ideological, pious not in the narrowly devotional sense of the word
but with overtones of a zealously active godliness. Christian
humanists saw social ills rooted in individual sin; however, their re-
sponse did not stop at the sort of moralizing which had characterized
medieval social criticism. Rather, they extended their critique from
the individual to the larger society and demanded that the reformed
individual reform the corruptions of his society. They paralleled
individual sin to social evil; in fact, on occasion they sought the
causes of individual failure in the social structure itself.29
27
Lupset, pp. 245-6 et passim\ Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Reginald Pole and
Thomas Lupset, ed. K. M. Burton (London, 1948), pp. 79, 80-2, 123-5, 157.
28
Richard Whitforde, The werke for housholders (n.p., 1537), sigs. Avii, Dv-viii, Ei-ii,
Fiii; Sir William Forrest, Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise (London, 1548) in
England in the Reign ofKing Henry the Eighth, ed. S. J. Herrtage (London, 1878), p. xvi;
Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962),
vol. 1, pp. 42, 48, 105, 175, 270.
29
For example, Starkey, Dialogue, p. 146, said of the problems of division and social
disharmony, 'this disease riseth chiefly from lack of common justice and equity.'
cf Richard Morison, A Remedy for Sedition (London, 1536), ed. E. M. Cox (London,
1933), pp. 35-6; and TED, vol. 3, p. 112 (A treatise concerninge the Staple). On the
transition from medieval to Renaissance social analysis, see Arthur Ferguson, The
Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1965).
34 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Their stance was not simply neo-Stoic; nor is it accurate to identify

it simply with the civic humanism of Italy. Biblicism, patristic
influences, Stoicism and civic humanism were all tightly interwoven
in Erasmianism to produce a thoroughly distinctive movement,
religious and civic, Christian and humanist With Seneca and Christ,
humanists called for individual self-control; with Cicero, they called
for good government; with the Old Testament prophets, they called
for social justice. The search for practical solutions to real problems
in this world came to be seen by them as the believer's true calling.
This amalgam of pious yet practical social activism should be seen as
another hallmark of Erasmian humanism.
The vita activa is the prescribed model of behavior which emerges
from Erasmian writings. The reformed layman is called to act in the
context of an institutional framework itself subject to reformation.
The truly good life is not reserved for the next life; rather, it is to be
lived in the present world, in the here and now. Humanists clearly
rejected the contemplative ideal of the Middle Ages in favor of
action in a civic milieu. Christ at his judgment seat, said Erasmus, will
prefer common sailors and waggoners - men who live in the world
and are not 'segregated from civil life' - over the useless lives of
monks.30 Juan Luis Vives likewise urged the superiority of workshop
to cloister, as did More, who scoffed at those who think it godly to
'squat with the monks' believing that 'to reside forever in the same
spot like a clam or sponge, to cling eternally to the same rock is the
last word in sanctity.'31
It was no accident that John Colet chose to turn over the manage-
30
Folly•, p. 167; Convivium religiosum, Coll., p. 59. cf. the medieval viewpoint of
Langland, Piers the Ploughman, ed. J. F. Goodridge (Baltimore, 1959), pp. x, 300-1,
120-1; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936),
pp. 24-44, 84-6. A possible objection to the thesis of humanist activism is
evidence of the contemplative ideal in Erasmus' De contemptu mundi. This is,
however, a very early work (1490), and the chapter added in 1521 condemning
monasticism should be taken as much more representative of Erasmus' mature
thought. This chapter was apparently added when Erasmus' friends insisted on
publication of the little treatise despite the author's desire to dissociate himself
from it. See R. Bultot, 'Erasme, Epicure et le "De Contemptu Mundi",' Scrinium
Erasmianum, 2, edited by J. J. Coppens (Leiden, 1969), 205-19. Note also the pro-
gressively more anti-monastic editions of the Antibarbari between 1492 and 1520
(Hyma, pp. 22-8, 31). Erasmus explained in his Compendium Vitae (1524; included in
Olin, Christian Humanism, pp. 25-7) that he was himself forced into a monastery by
his evil guardian, who wanted only to be rid of his responsibility, cf. Beatus
Rhenanus' Life of Erasmus (1540) in Olin, p. 33.
31
On Vives' rejection of Plato's 'blind prejudice' in praising contemplation at the
expense of practical application, see R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern
Science (Grand Rapids, 1972), pp. 88-90, and the same author's Humanisme, science et
reforme (Leiden, 1958), pp. 28-31, 105-6; The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed.
E. F. Rogers (Princeton, 1947), p. 201.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 35

ment of St Paul's School to laymen (members of the Mercers' Com-

pany). The reformed Christianity of the northern humanists was in
fact centered on lay piety - the contemplative life had no intrinsic
value whatsoever in the modern, activist scheme of the sixteenth-
century reformer. Erasmus went so far as to charge that the religious
are all too often found to be fleeing the world because they are
'proud with a false conviction of their holiness. . . lacking in human
kindness, and incapable of doing anything' at all useful in the world.
Monasteries he saw as 'schools of impiety', conducive to a life of
depravity rather than one in which godliness is developed in res-
ponse to the challenges of everyday life:
And so those that verily need to live honestly in the world [and] should have
cause to use frugality, to have been diligent and industrious: in monasteries
they give themselves to sloth and luxury. And those that-were in the world
very poor, and of low degree, under the profession of poverty they follow
the pomp, the sumptuousness, and stately array of princes and great lords
. . . So that by feigned profession of poverty, they flee poverty, by feigned
profession of chastity, they provide for their carnal lust; and by feigned pro-
fession of obedience, they find the means that they will be constrained to
obey no man.
Erasmus recommended as an alternative to this misguided notion of
the 'good life' a doctrine of calling which required the individual to
'fulfill his proper duties' in this world; whether pope, magistrate,
tradesman or artisan, his calling is to 'carry on his business in good
faith.' 32
It was this positive, aggressive view of the Christian life in this
world which resulted in the practical questions with which humanist
(and later protestant) social theorists would concern themselves.
Because men are called to act out the Christian life in the market-
place, they must be instructed in the application of virtue to the
most mundane areas of life. Erasmus saw his own vocation as that of
an instructor in the principles of the reformed social order, and he
proceeded to publish seminal comments on all aspects of social
conduct.
Other humanists followed suit, b o t h in exhorting the laity to
action and in directing that action. The author of the Discourse of the
Common Weal urged men of all degrees to participate in the discussion
of public affairs and to offer solutions for social problems, and the
participation of such laymen as the London merchant Clement
Armstrong (who experimented with and offered to Thomas Cromwell

32
Liber de Sarcienda, Dolan, pp. 355, 378; De contemptu mundi^ fols. 86-7.
36 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

a plan for setting the poor on work) in practical civic involvement

reveals that this goal was not altogether unrealistic.33 Starkey's
Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (1533) also preached
the vita activa, since 'to this all men are born and of nature brought
forth: to commune such gifts as be to them given, each one to the
profit of others, in perfect civility, and not to live to their own
pleasure and profit, without regard of the weal of their country,
forgetting all justice and equity.' He decried the fact that
many men of great wisdom and virtue fly from it [wealth and worldly
involvement], setting themselves in religious houses, there quietly to serve
God and keep their minds upright with less jeopardy. Which thing surely is
not amiss done of them which perceive their own imbecility and weakness,
prone and ready to be oppressed and overthrown with these common and
quiet pleasures of the world, by whom they see the most part of mankind
drowned and overcome. Howbeit, meseemeth they do like to fearful ship-
men; which for dread of storms and troublous seas keep themselves in
the haven.
More praiseworthy is the mariner who braves the tempest and brings
his ship to port.34
The humanist model for social conduct, then, was characterized
by activism, laicism, and immediate concerns which were mundane
and practical. When Starkey listed his qualifications for service to
the prince in a letter to Cromwell, he included his education in
'natural knowledge' and the Scriptures, but he took care to point out
his opinion that 'all other secret knowledge not applied to some use and
profit or other' is 'but as a vanity... In diverse kinds of studies I have
occupied myself, ever having in mind this end and purpose at the last
in this commonality where I am brought forth and born to employ
them to some useP* The same judgment was expressed in the context of
practical treatises and correspondence by Elyot, Vives and many
other humanists.36 Their learning was to be an applied learning; its
usefulness to society was to be its justification.
33
A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, sometimes attributed to Sir
Thomas Smith and probably written in 1549, was first published in 1581. A mod-
ern edition by Mary Dewar has been published for the Folger Shakespeare Library
(Charlottesville, 1969). On some implications of the Discourse, see Arthur B.
Ferguson, 'The Tudor Commonweal and the Sense of Change,'/iSS, 3 (1963), 11-
35. On Armstrong, see Ferguson's Articulate Citizen, pp. 15 3-4.
34
Starkey, pp. 22, 5 3. Starkey, Pole's secretary when the Dialogue-was written, served
the government as chaplain to Henry VIII from 15 35 to 15 38.
35
Quoted in Mark Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition, 1358-1642 (Oxford,
1959), pp. 74-5 (emphasis mine).
36
For example, Elyot, Governour, passim; a statement of the Erasmian educational and
political program, according to James McConica, English Humanists and Reformation
Politics (Oxford, 1965), pp. 121-2. On Vives, see Carlos G. Noreha.,Juan Luis Vives
(The Hague, 1970); Simon, chapter 3; and Vives' On Education (De tradendis dis-
ciplinis, 1531), tr. Foster Watson (Cambridge, 1913).
 Christian humanism as social ideology 37

An additional characteristic of the humanist model was the con-

viction that institutional as well as individual reform is mandatory
and possible for the reformation of the social order. The social struc-
ture itself was as much a concern of Erasmians as was the problem of
sinful behavior by the individual. Social institutions were regarded
as legitimate objects of analysis, criticism, and reform. Partly
because of their perception of a biblical mandate to create a just
society, and partly because of the temporal perspective arising from
their study of ancient history and literature, humanists did not see
society or its institutions as changeless, either in theory or in fact.37
They saw b o t h Golden and Dark Ages in the past; it did not seem
unreasonable to them that with sufficient enlightenment and
reforming zeal, a 'Golden Age' would arise very soon in the future. 38
Accordingly, they addressed themselves to those institutional
defects of society which they held responsible for many social ills,
and their writings consistently embodied concrete recommen-
dations for structural changes to remedy those ills.
More's Utopia, for example, should be read as just such a practical
reformist document. More clearly believed that the goodness of a
commonwealth depends upon the structure and quality of its fun-
damental institutions. A properly structured social and political
order will encourage the development of godly citizens. More, like
other Christian humanists, agreed with the Stoic ideal of social vir-
tue based on rationalized social, rather than personal, ties. 39 Accord-
ingly, he established in Utopia the political equality of citizens, the
universal requirement of labor, and the communality of property as
consistent structural and institutional alternatives to the inequitable
and thoroughly corrupt social system of sixteenth-century England. 40
This is not to say that More did not attribute much social evil to
moral failure; however, in his ideal scheme he established social

The 'new historical consciousness' of sixteenth-century humanists is the subject

of a study by Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural
Past in Renaissance England'(Durham, NC, 1979). The implications of the new aware-
ness of the 'process of time' for theories of social order and hierarchy are discussed
more fully in chapter 6, below.
Erasmus to Wolfgang Capito, 26 February 1517, CWE 4, pp. 261-8.
Utopia, p. 245; Hexter, Vision of Politics, p. 117, notes More's use of the terms fun-
damentum, forma, vitae institutum, construes them together as 'social order' and
plausibly argues that the transformation that More desired was nothing less than
'social revolution.' On the Stoic conception of social virtue, see Bouwsma, pp. 24-
6. Fenlon, p. 119, stresses the influence of Plato, St Augustine and the Church
Fathers (especially in regard to meum ettuum), as well as pagan natural law tradition,
on More.
The nature and seriousness of his communitarianism has been treated by Hexter
in Vision of Politics, pp. 121-5, and Biography ofan Idea, pp. 3 5 ^ 3 ; cf Utopia, pp. 103-
7, 239-43. On labor, Utopia, pp. 127-31, 147.
38 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

institutions to deal with individual weakness. A sound educational

system was to be provided by the state, for instance, for the pro-
duction of righteous citizens, and censors of morals were set up as
overseers, guides, and disciplinary agents.41 Acknowledging the per-
vasiveness of sin, the Utopians 'brace weak conscience with strong
legal sanctions.'42 More's humanism thus evinced its biblical assump-
tions while rejecting the medieval conclusion that since social ills are
a divine punishment for sin, no human remedy for them is
conceivable.
Erasmus, too, bequeathed to Renaissance Englishmen the hope
that an intelligent re-structuring of society could curb the detrimental
effects of sin. Like More, he advocated creation of the office of
censor of public morals, and he commended the strict sumptuary
laws of the ancients not as reinforcers of social hierarchy, but as
restraints on extravagance.43 He traced social disorder and sedition
to such institutional defects as immoderate taxation and suggested
practical remedies: taxes should be kept low (by abolishing idle
ministries, avoiding wars, and suppressing graft among office-
holders), and a graduated taxation system should be instituted.44 His
typically humanist theory of crime saw the criminal as a victim of
man-made circumstances which could be changed for the better.
Erasmus told the Christian prince that the poor were being driven to
the gallows through' unrestrained despoilation of their goods' by the
idle aristocracy, suggesting that crime would decrease if this
exploitative situation were eliminated. Even if crime cannot be
eliminated, however, in the Erasmian scheme the criminal is not
inevitably destined to remain in his state of rebellion: through
exhortation, education, or in the last resort, punishment, he can be
reformed.45 Education is, of course, the most desirable of these
options. Erasmus instructed the Christian ruler faced with the prob-
lem of crime to try first education, then threat of punishment, then
mild punishment. It is only at the last extreme that 'the incorrigible
must be sacrificed by the law (just as a hopelessly incurable limb
must be amputated) so that the sound part is not affected.' Erasmus

41
Utopia, pp. 159, 227—9. Hexter parallels these censors to the Geneva consistory in
Vision of Politics, pp. 110-11. 42Hexter, Vision of Politics, p. 124.
43
Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio Principis Christian?), ed. and tr.
L. K. Born (New York, 1936), p. 227; cf Adages (1964), p. 215.
44
Institutio, pp. 158-9, 215-17; Adages (CWE 31), p. 235.
45
Institutio, pp. 184, 162. cf, for example, Emile Chenon's conclusion that the cruel
punishments employed in medieval France sought not to reform the criminal, but
above all to prevent those who might be tempted to imitate him. Histoire Generale
du droit francaispublic etprive (Paris, 1926), vol. 1, p. 687.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 39
repeatedly stressed that the good prince must have 'the attitude of a
friendly doctor, who amputates or cauterises the limb which he
despairs of healing' for the good of the social whole.46
The punitive system recommended by Erasmus operated on the
premise that the end of punishment is the instillation of virtue in the
criminal. Accordingly, it should be characterized by mercy, and not
by harshness. A good prince 'should strike fear into the hearts of
none but evil doers and criminals; and yet even to them he should
hold out a hope of leniency, if only they reform.'47 None the less,
when the good of society is threatened, Erasmus did not hesitate to
recommend punishment, either as a deterrent or, in the extreme
case, as a means of eliminating the criminal: 'If the really worthless,
who are not restrained by reason or shame, find that the law has a big
stick ready for them,' they may 'mend their ways.'48 In a case in which
the ultimate punishment is imposed, 'the example is before
everyone', and in addition, society is protected from further wrong
from the felon. Another discussion of the death penalty Erasmus
concluded with the remarkable understatement, 'it is morally right
to inconvenience a few for the sake of the public good.'49
Nevertheless, his primary concern was always with eliminating the
causes of crime and other social evil- ignorance (and the resultant
lack of virtue) and exploitation of the weak by the powerful.
More and Erasmus were typical of Christian humanist social
theorists - More in his structural approach to social problems, and
Erasmus in his common sense solutions. They were also sufficiently
influential on subsequent generations of English social theorists for
Renaissance England to have been aptly described as a common-
wealth in which the articulate citizen, recognizing the operation of
social mechanisms, functioned as an effective social critic.50 A litera-
ture of public discussion, diagnosis, and prescription arose in the
sixteenth century to address classical questions: how should the
commonwealth be ordered? What is the nature of the social
organism? To what extent can rational analysis shape public policy?
46
Institutio, p. 224; Aut regem aut fatuum nasci oportere, Adages (CWE 31), p. 231. T h e
colloquy Adolescentis et scorti (1523) shows a harlot reformed by persuasion (Coll.,
47
pp. 153-8). Institution p. 158; cf pp. 162, 224; Adages (CWE 31), p. 229.
48
Festina lente, Adages (1964), p. 184.
49
Duke bellum inexpertis, Adages (1964), p. 340; Coniugium impar, Coll., p. 4 1 1 . cf. Dicta
sapientu . . . Very necessary and profitable for children to lerne . . . [1527], sig. Biii.
50
Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, passim. Ferguson's definition of humanism is useful in
this connection: it is * the conscious reinterpretation of the literature and history of
Greece and Rome, oiliterae humaniores. . . made within the specific historical con-
text of a society in the process of transition from a medieval to a modern
form' (p. 162).
40 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Government came to be perceived as a constructive agency; the con-

cept of positive change dominated a literature devoted to adapting
classical precept and example to the demands of Christian ethics and
active citizenship.51
The tradition of More and Erasmus, in other words, was continued
in the generation of the commonwealth men (and beyond) by the
ideal social type of the Christian humanists - the lay intellectual,
educated in the classics with the aim of ordering the commonwealth,
exercising his virtue in practical social perception and action. And
the analysis offered by these humanists continued to focus on
institutional as well as individual corruption. Richard Morison's
location of the causes of sedition in the dearth of practical job train-
ing for those who must be skilled in crafts to get their living is typicaL
Rebels, beggars and thieves are the brood of a society unwilling to
provide education for its children, according to Morison, and he
echoed here the opinions not only of More and Erasmus, but also of
the Spanish humanist brought to prominence in England as a mem-
ber of Catherine of Aragon's circle, Juan Luis Vives.52 Vives' works
on education had consistently argued that society can be improved
to a significant degree by laws and teaching which repress man's evil
impulses and foster his good ones; but he had also argued that the
commonwealth must provide both mechanical training in the crafts
and a sufficiently well-ordered economic system for jobs to be avail-
able for those so trained. What is significant is that the emphasis in
both Morison's and Vives' works is on institutional solutions to what
had hitherto been interpreted as purely individual moral failure.
Thomas Starkey, Sir William Forrest and the author of the
Discourse of the Common Weal similarly focused their analyses on the
structural defects of English society. Starkey, for instance, devoted
much of his Dialogue to the dearth and poor distribution of popu-
lation, high rents and prices, the flourishing luxury trade, un-
employment, and enclosure as causes of social disorder.53 His

51
Ibid., pp. 42-69, compares with the humanist stance the typically medieval
approach of social critics like John Gower and William Langland: most medieval
commentary was negative, political issues were not put within the context of con-
structive policy, and the analysis of cause focused on the moral responsibilities of
individuals functioning socially according to their places in a static hierarchy, cf
Robert P. Adams, 'Designs by More and Erasmus for a New Social Order,' Studies in
Philology, 42 (1945), 131^6, esp. p. 135.
52
Richard Morison, A Remedy for Sedition (London, 1536), pp. 35 ff; Vives, De subven-
tionepauperum (1526) in Some Early Tracts on Poor Relief, ed. F. Salter (London, 1926),
pp. 4-31.
53
In the Discourse, see especially the Second Dialogue (pp. 38 ff in the Dewar edition);
Starkey, pp. 75-82, 93-4, 138-45.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 41
criminology was obviously Erasmian: having traced crime to its
social as well as its moral causes, he pleaded for the rehabilitation,
rather than the hanging, of criminals, observing, 'better it were to
find some way how the man might be brought to better order and
frame.' The proliferation of beggars he attributed to 'ill policy' as
well as idleness, and he prescribed a drastic economic re-ordering,
the redistribution of land, stricter laws, public works projects, the
implementation of Vives' system of poor relief (devised for the
Flemish city of Ypres), and an expanded and explicitly Erasmian
public education system to deal with this problem. Only God, he
concluded, can create a perfect man and a perfect society, but God
none the less requires human effort to remedy imperfection.54
Forrest agreed: in his Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practice he recom-
mended compulsory education (free to the poor and overseen by an
appointed official), rent control and the enforcement of higher wage
scales as solutions to the problem of social disorder.55
This literature of analysis, criticism, and prescription, indebted to
the Scriptures and the classics, characterized by a dual focus on
moral reform and institutional restructuring, comprised both a
model for behavior and a call to action. It embodied a clear challenge
to the contemplative ideal of scholasticism; its highest good was
identified with the vita activa. It looked forward to the establishment
of the regnum Christi in this world, by pious, educated, self-
disciplined, industrious laymen. Its call to action did not go
unanswered. Christian humanists were more than theorists. They
participated actively in government, in church reform, and (perhaps
most importantly for their puritan successors) in education.
More's activity in law and government is well known, as is Colet's
in educational reform and the establishment of new educational
institutions. Their circle of influence included city merchants, cor-
porations and publishers. (It is significant that the first English trans-
lations of the Praise of Folly and Utopia were made by two citizens of
London - a mercer and a goldsmith - at the request of London
entrepreneurs.) 56 Vives had similar connections, giving rise to his

Starkey, pp. 113-15, 89, 140-5, 160, 177, 185-6. The best educational system, he
said, is that outlined by 'the most famous divine, Erasmus, whose counsel I would
in our studies we might follow' (p. 187).
Forrest, pp. lxxxi, xcii-xcix. This work was written during the reign of Edward VI;
Forrest later became chaplain to Queen Mary.
McConica, pp. 258-9; J. A. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Brighton,
1980), passim; Richard Marius, Thomas More (New York, 1984), passim andesp. chs.
3-4, 13-14; Erasmus noted More's active 'commitments to the affairs of state' in
Depueris (CWE 26), p. 322.
42 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

development of practicable schemes for the reform of municipal

poor relief and education.57 Even Erasmus, usually pictured as a
'pure' scholar, was seen by his contemporaries as an activist. More
contrasted Erasmus with lazy, sedentary monks who contributed
nothing to the common good, boasting that Erasmus 'defies stormy
seas and savage skies and the scourges of land travel, provided it
further the common cause' of educating people to live as Christians.
He bears 'seasickness, the tortures of tossing waves, the threat of
deadly storms' and plods 'through dense forest and wild woodland,
over rugged hilltops and steep mountains, along roads beset with
bandits' - hardly the ivory tower scholar!58 His treatises on political
and social questions were more than speculative. The Querela pads
(1517), for instance, was composed at the express request ofJean le
Sauvage, Chancellor of Burgundy and a member of the court of
Prince Charles of the Netherlands. Erasmus himself had become a
councilor to Prince Charles in 1515, so that his pacifist doctrine was
conceived and developed as relevant advice, practical instruction for
a specific ruler in a very real ethical dilemma.59
In this and the next generation, the humanists Lupset, Pace, Elyot
and Clerk (all patronized by Wolsey) found jobs at court, and Cover-
dale, Cheke and Ascham (members of Catherine Parr's circle) par-
ticipated directly in church and educational reform. Thomas
Cromwell's recruitment of Starkey, Morison, Taverner, Cox,
Paynell, Berthelet, Vaughan and Marshall, among others, as propa-
gandists for Henry's divorce, had mobilized considerable humanist
influence at court during a period crucial for reformist interests.60 As
a patron both of second generation humanists seeking government
service and of published translations of Erasmian and classical
treatises, Cromwell created the necessary conditions for a humanist
reformation of church and state. This humanist influence was evi-
dent from the Erasmian attacks on clerical privilege in the reform

57
Norena, passim; Hooykaas, Humanisme, pp. 27-9-
58
More, Correspondence, pp. 201-3.
59
Olin, Six Essays, pp. 25-7; James D. Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus: A Pacifist Intellec-
tual and his Political Milieu (Toronto, 1978).
60
On these groups, see McConica, pp. 7, 58, 127-41, 206-13; cf Elton, Reform and
Renewal, pp. 26, 38ff. Taverner's translation of Erasmus' Encomium Matrimonii
[1531] was dedicated to Cromwell just before Taverner began writing to him to
request patronage (SP 1/73 [1532], fols. 143-5). Among the preferments that
Cromwell obtained for Vaughan were an absentee clerkship in Chancery and the
position of under-treasurer of the mint. Starkey was appointed the king's chaplain
in 1535 and was immediately commissioned by Henry to seek Pole's support for
the new order. Morison was a member of Cromwell's official household from 1534
to 1540, working as a professional propaganda writer (Elton, pp. 46—58).
 Christian humanism as social ideology 43

proposals of 15 29-30 and the Six Articles, to the official sponsorship

of a vernacular Bible and the adiaphoristic awareness in the Ten
Articles and the Injunctions of 1536 and 1538. 61 In the meantime,
translations of Erasmus' and Vives' writings continued to be
officially sponsored; new works by Morison, Taverner (who became
Clerk of the Privy Seal) and other humanists were commissioned;
and social reformers like Starkey corresponded directly with the
king on such matters as his choice of councilors, the leasing of
monastic lands by copyhold, and involvement in European wars. By
Cromwell's death in 1540, England could be described with some
justification as 'an Erasmian polity.' 62
Christian humanist influence continued during the reign of
Edward VI. It is visible in the King's 1547 Injunctions authorizing
Erasmus' Paraphrases of the Gospels and Acts to be chained in all
parish churches and requiring all clerks under the degree of B.D. to
own the Paraphrases of the Epistles and 'diligently study the same'. It
is visible, too, in the Erasmian social theorists who continued to be
added to the humanists at court: Sir Thomas Smith, for instance,
served as Principal Secretary to Edward and to Elizabeth, and he
both wrote and spoke volubly on everything from education to
sumptuary legislation.63 Long after protestants had parted ways with
Catholic humanists on issues like free will and the authority of
ecclesiastical tradition, they retained an Erasmian hope in the cor-
rective power of education and of godly social institutions.

If a single area of reform can be isolated as that in which Christian

humanists had their greatest effect on sixteenth-century English
society, that area would be education. In their authorship of new
pedagogical theory and in their participation in concrete reforms,
they acted upon their conviction that a good education is the best
means to combat social evil. Sin, they argued, springs at least partly

61
Lutheranism obviously functioned to mediate humanist influence here. Erasmian
influence on Lutheran theology and ecclesiology is described by Wilhelm Maurer,
Das Verbatims des Staateszur Kirche nach humanistischer Anschauung vornehmlich bei Erasmus
(Giessen, 1930).
62
McConica, pp. 108-10, 159-99. Zeeveld's Foundations ofTudor Policy (Cambridge,
Mass., 1948) also argues for a considerable humanist impact on political theory
during this period. Starkey's letters are included in England in the Reign ofKing Henry
the Eighth, ed. S. J. Herrtage (EETS, 1878), pp. liv-lxiii.
63
McConica, pp. 237-41; M. Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office
(1964), passim; Dewar, 'The Authorship of the "Discourse of the Commonweal",'
Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19 (1966), 388-400. The Erasmian protestant
Martin Bucer joined the theology faculty at Cambridge during this period, by royal
invitation.
44 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

from false opinions; therefore, education is requisite for the instil-

lation of virtue, whether individual or social.64 So convinced were
they of human potential for the achievement of virtue through
learning that they came close to the notion of the young child's mind
being a blank slate upon which the educator could write what he
pleased. Erasmus advised parents to provide that 'thine infant and
young babe be forthwith instructed in good learning, while his wit is
yet void from cares and vices, while his age is tender and tractable,
and his mind flexible and ready to follow everything.'65 He multi-
plied metaphors in Depueris: 'Press wax while it is softest; model clay
while it is still moist; pour precious liquids only into a jar that has
never been used before; and only dye wool that has just arrived
spotlessly white from the fuller.' He continued in his favorite mode
with a classical anecdote:
Antisthenes once made a witty allusion to this truth when he was asked by
the father of one of his pupils what he needed: 'a new book, a new pen, and a
fresh writing-tablet,' was his answer, meaning, of course, that he was looking
for a mind that was still raw and unoccupied. You cannot preserve this
quality of rawness and freshness forever; if you do not mould your child's
soul to become fully human, it will of itself degenerate to a monstrous
bestiality.66

H e instructed the educator of an infant prince to 'instil into this

childish mind, as yet blank and malleable, opinions worthy of a
prince.' 67

64
Paul A. Fideler,' Christian humanism and poor law reform in early Tudor England,'
Societas, 4 (1974), 169-86, p. 274, has located a source for the humanist correlation
of knowledge and social concord in Cicero's De Officiis: 'the knowledge of things
human and divine, which is concerned . . . with the bonds of union between gods
and men and relations of man to man'; cf. Fritz Caspari, 'Erasmus on the Social
Functions of Humanism,'////, 8 (1947), 78-106, pp. 81,84, on the classical notion
that education based on literae will produce virtus, morum integritas. Caspari men-
tions in passing the implication which Erasmus derived from this, that degree of
knowledge at least indirectly determines one's position in relation to God. See too
Bouwsma, pp. 10-11, on the Stoics' identification of reason with a divine spark
within mankind and their conclusion that virtue can be attained through rational
control: to know the good is to do it. The inconsistency of Stoic belief in the power
of inborn sin over human action with this optimistic view parallels that of Chris-
tian humanist thought.
65
E r a s m u s , That chyldren oughte to be t a u g h t . . . i n R i c h a r d S h e r r y ' s A Treatise of Schemes
and'Tropes(1550; Scholars' Facsimiles, Gainsville, Florida, 1961), sig. Gi; cf A ryght
frutefull Epystle. . . in laude andprayse of matrymony, tr. Richard Taverner, [ 1 5 3 1 ] , sig.
Diii. On the uneasy acceptance of both humanist optimism concerning reason and
the protestant doctrine of human depravity by early Lutheran pedagogues, see
Gerald Strauss, Luther's House of Learning (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 1-107.
66
Depueris, (CWE 26), pp. 305-6.
67
Aut regem autfatuum, Adages (CWE 31), p. 233; cf. Institutio, p. 140. Erasmus did not
quite deny the effects of original sin, of course: 'Since the natures of so many men
 Christian humanism as social ideology 45
Education of the future ruler, of course, was regarded as of special
importance for the well-being of the commonwealth; none the less,
the establishment of a system of public education was viewed as
essential if a truly well-regulated, virtuous society was to be created.
According to Erasmus,
A prince who is about to assume control of the state must be advised at once
that the main hope of a state lies in the proper education of its youth . . .
[Take care that] children may be placed under the best and most trustworthy
instructors and may learn the teachings of Christ and that good literature
which is beneficial to the state. As a result of this scheme of things, there will
be no need for many laws or punishments, for the people will of their own
free will follow the course of right.68
His concern for virtuous behavior in the individual was thus a reflec-
tion of Erasmus' hope of creating a truly good society.
Herein lay the reason for the Utopians' stress on the education of
citizens. As More's friend Vives argued (quoting Xenophon), for
children to become good, it is 'only necessary that they should be
placed in a well-directed state' where a sound educational system is
provided to instruct citizens in virtuous behavior.69 Later, Ascham's
Toxophilus, a treatise on the state of the realm, would promote edu-
cation as a means of national regeneration, and Starkey would call
the 'good education of youth in virtuous exercise . . . the ground of
remedying of all other diseases in this our politic body.' Cromwell,
well-versed in these humanist assumptions, accordingly sponsored
educational improvement' to the great advancement of the common
weal.'70 He was well aware of Erasmus' warning that parents who
neglect their children's education do no less wrong to their country
than to their children by giving it dissolute citizens. Erasmus had
insisted that it 'ought to be a public responsibility entrusted to the
secular magistrates and the ecclesiastical authorities' to provide fit
teachers for a nation's youth.71
Christian humanists addressed themselves not only to the
ultimate aims of education, but also to the best techniques by which

are inclined towards the ways of evil, there is no nature so happily born that it can-
not be corrupted by wrong training' (Institutio, p. 143).
68
Institutio, pp. 212-13. This system is to be supported by public funds, since it is to
benefit the commonwealth, cf. Festina lente, Adages (1964), p. 184.
69
Utopia, pp. 129, 159-61; Vives, On Education, Watson, pp. 266-67.
70
Starkey, p. 144; McConica, p. 191. Toxophilus was published in 1545.
71
Depueris, (CWE26), pp. 306, 333. He continued (p. 333): 'Appropriate training is
provided for those who are to serve in the army or sing in church choirs; the same
should be provided by the authorities for those who are to give the young people
of the nation a sound education based on humane ideals.'
46 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

those aims could be accomplished. Humanists were preoccupied

both with educational theories and with the production of text-
books which would simultaneously inculcate good grammar and vir-
tuous behavior into the student of letters. While Erasmus' Adages,
for example, was obviously a vehicle intended to convey classical
moralizing to early modern minds, its stated intention was to
'smooth the path to a knowledge of the classics for the mediocriter
literati* Erasmus produced 'Epitomes' of the Adages since they would
be accessible to students of limited means and therefore would
instruct a broader spectrum of the population in virtuous behavior.72
Likewise, the Colloquies were originally compiled as a combination of
social satire and advice and a pleasant means of learning Latin: 'if the
ancient teachers of children are commended who allured them with
wafers, that they might be willing to learn their first rudiments, I
think it ought not to be charged as a fault upon me, that by the like
regard I allure youths either to the elegance ofthe Latin tongue or to piety'11
Education must be pleasant, Erasmus argued in the Institutio, since
the child should not be 'cut by the severity of its training and learn to
hate worthiness [the goal of education] before it knows it.'74
The moral instruction thus pleasantly (and therefore firmly)
implanted in the student was intended by Christian humanists above
all to be practical and concrete; it was to be applied learning. The
most significant curricular changes in sixteenth-century grammar
schools and universities are attributable to this emphasis.75 It was the
drive to educate for living which motivated humanist reformers to
elevate moral philosophy over theology and metaphysics, and
rhetoric over logic. 'Let young men declaim, before their teachers,

72
Noted by Phillips in her Introduction to Adages (1964), p. 5.
73
Coll., Epistle to the Reader, p. 625 (emphasis mine). It is significant that Thomas
Cromwell's son was raised on the Colloquies, 'the most popular schoolbook of the
time,' and that by the following century, English puritans had made it required
reading in New England grammar schools: Simon, p. 72; Elton, p. 31; Samuel Eliot
Morison, The IntellectualLife of Colonial New England'(Cornell, 1936), p. 106. Erasmus'
other educational productions include De ratione studii, De copia verborum (both in
CWE 24, ed. C. R. Thompson), Deconscribendisepistolis and Conficiendarum epistolarum
formula (on writing good Latin letters), De recta latinigraecique sermonispronuntiatione
dialogus (on correct speaking of Latin and Greek), De civilitate morumpuerilium (on
good manners), Depueris(the last five in CWE 25 and 26, ed. J. Kelley Sowards), and
the voluminous collections of ancient wisdom explained for students, the Adages,
the Parabolae (in CWE 23), and the Apophthegmata.
74
Institution p. 142; cf. Depueris, (CWE 26), pp. 334-40.
75
The implementation of this concept at Deventer, St Paul's and the College de
Guyenne is noted by R. R. Bolgar, 'Education and Learning,' The New Cambridge
Modern History, vol. 3, ed. R. B. Wernham (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 430. See
also F. L. Schoell, Etudes sur I'humanisme continental en Angleterre a la fin de la
Renaissance (Paris, 1926), pp. 43-61 etpassim.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 47
on those matters which may afterwards be useful in life,' Vives
demanded of schoolmasters, 'and not, as was the habit of the
ancients in the philosophical schools, on matters which never
occurred in real life... let all eloquence stand in full battle array for
goodness and piety, against crime and wickedness.'76 While dialectic
remained part of the curriculum, a recent study of specific logic text-
books shows a corresponding change in emphasis, away from the
peculiar requirements of academic exercises, and toward a more
practical study of discourse. Peter of Spain's Summulae Logicales (the
favorite medieval text) was, for instance, replaced in most univer-
sities in the 1520s with the texts of Cicero, Quintilian and later
humanist dialecticians who favored 'persuasive types of argument as
crucial tools in "ordinary language" or oratorical discourse.'77 The
focus in rhetoric, too, shifted to stress the precise nature of the
discussion, the audience, the type of situation, and the extent of the
evidence- in short, the 'art of discourse' for practical ends.78
The demand for practical moral and ethical instruction in both
grammar schools and universities gave rise to a 'textbook revolution'
consisting in a revived use of ancient moralists and an enthusiastic
adoption of new humanist textbooks. The most admired classical
writers were used both as pedagogical guides and as instructors in
virtuous behavior. Plutarch's treatise on the upbringing of children
(first translated from Greek by Guarino in 1411), Quintilian's Education
of the Orator (first published in full by Poggio in 1417), and Cicero's
De Oratore (rediscovered in 1422) were among the most popular of
such dual-purpose manuals. Also widely used in England were the
works of Xenophon, Terence, and Isocrates on education. Sixteenth-
century grammar schools saw the replacement of such medieval
favorites as the Doctrinale of Alexandre de Villedieu with these and
other works of Cicero (especially the Epistolae, De Officiis, De Amicitia
and DeSenectute), Livy, Seneca, Quintilian, Virgil, Horace and Ovid.
Higher forms used such Greek authors as Isocrates, Demosthenes,
Plutarch, Lucian, Thucydides, Plato, the New Testament writers and
76
Vives, On Education, pp. 180,185-6. His complaint against the ancient'philosophical
schools' is the standard humanist/Stoic critique of the Sophists.
77
Lisajardine, 'The Place of Dialectic Teaching in Sixteenth Century Cambridge,'
Studies in the Renaissance, 21 (1974), 31—62, esp. p. 39. This move was presumably a
rejection both of the stilted formality of medieval methods of argumentation and
of Peter of Spain's corrupt Latin, although Jardine stresses the former. See below,
p. 77, for the implications of this change for the Elizabethan curriculum.
78
Paul O. Kristeller, 'The Aristotelian Tradition,' in Renaissance Thought (New York,
1961), pp. 24-47, points out (p. 40) that while Aristotle' sRhetoric had been treated
as part of moral philosophy in the Middle Ages, it became important in rhetorical
training in the sixteenth century because of this practical emphasis.
48 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

the Church Fathers.79 It is significant, moreover, that the works of

these authors were being read contextually (frequently in their
entirety) and in their original languages, with the explicit intent of
applying the wisdom of the ancients to modern living.
The other major aspect of the textbook revolution was the pro-
duction by Christian humanists of numerous new textbooks, many
of which have been discussed above. These emphasized not only
principles of grammar and style, but also the importance of classical
wisdom in learning to deal with the affairs of this world. When John
Colet 'set out to place learning at the service of living, to present it as
a means of preparing the individual to live well himself, and to do
good in society' at St Paul's School, he deliberately chose as the first
Master William Lily, a layman and author of both a humanist Grammar
and of the Carmen de Moribus, a book of instruction in good manners
and virtuous behavior for schoolboys. From Erasmus he com-
missioned the De copia verborum ac rerum, which was intended to
reform both language and behavior, and the school also made use of
the Colloquies and the Adages*0 Later examples of humanist textbooks
of piety and of grammar include Elyot's Dictionary (1538), and his
Banquette of sapience and Castel of helth (1539).
On the university scene, the most significant changes in favor of
the 'new learning' began upon Colet's return from Italy to Oxford in
1497. Colet's lectures on the Pauline epistles (1497-99), approach-
ing the Bible as a book to be read within its historical context and
designed to effect reform and a revival of godly living, had an in-
estimable influence on both curriculum and pedagogy at the univer-
sities. They provided a trend-setting example of humanist educational
assumptions in action. They were so marked a contrast to the biblical
exegesis dependent upon scholastic 'glosses' which had charac-
terized the previous centuries that they drew from Erasmus the com-
ment (in a 1499 letter to Robert Fisher), 'it is marvellous how
general and abundant is the harvest of ancient learning in this
country.'81 They caused the lines between humanist innovators and
the scholastic old guard to be drawn with great clarity. And, due to
the immediate popularity of humanist methods, those lines of division

79
Of 195 printed editions of the Doctrinale, only nine postdated 1525. Bolgar, pp.
433-5.
80
Simon, p. 80; De copia was published in 1512. See M. M. Phillips, 'Erasmus and the
Art of Writing,' Scrinium Erasmianum, I, 335-350. Phillips remarks that the dual
title, De copia verborum ac rerum, embodies Erasmus' assumption that the classics are
not merely a matter of style; they are also expressions of opinion (p. 342).
81
Erasmus to Fisher, 1499, (CWE 1), pp. 235-6.
 Christian humanism as social ideology 49
were sharpened in the ensuing decades. Erasmus wrote to Colet in
1511, 'Sometimes I have to do battle here on your behalf against the
Thomists and Scotists,' the 'most successfully complacent class of
men there is,' and in Colet'sown view a'swarm of flies.'82 To More in
1513 he exulted, 'Lupset thinks that with my help he has been
reborn and has fully returned from the underworld. But the Masters
are trying every trick to drag the youth back to their treadmill; for at
once on the same day he has sold his books of [scholastic] sophistry
and bought Greek ones instead!'83 Despite the impact of Christian
humanists upon Oxbridge curricula during the first decades of the
sixteenth century, More still found it necessary in 1518 to defend
secular learning, Greek studies, the hope of evangelical reform and
Erasmus himself against the attacks of the Oxford Trojans.84
The accomplishments of Christian humanist reformers at both
universities during this period were, none the less, significant and
lasting. This was, of course, particularly true in such new foun-
dations as Christ's and StJohn's Colleges, Cambridge, and Brasenose
and Corpus Christi Colleges, Oxford.85 The 1516 statutes of St John's
(based on the Christ's statutes of 1505) established Greek and Hebrew
as parts of the curriculum; fourteen years later, Arabic and Chaldaic
were added. At Corpus Christi, Foxe's public lecturer in Greek was
to read to the university three days each week from Lucian,
Philostratus or the orations of Isocrates; a humanities reader was to
give instruction in Valla's Elegantiae, Aulus Gellius (both favorites of
Erasmus) and Politian; and the reader in theology was specifically
instructed to exclude the Schoolmen in favor of the Church
Fathers.86 Between 1515 and 1520, both universities established
public lectureships in Greek. Furthermore, book inventories at a
variety of colleges show that scholars were investing in humanist
editions and treatises for their private libraries, indicating that these
works were forming part of the unofficial curriculum even in the less
82
Erasmus to Colet, 1511 (CWE, 2), no. 227, p. 170, and no. 278, p. 183. Colet'sreply
is CWE II, no. 230. 83 CWE 29 n o . 271, p. 249.
84
More, Correspondence, pp. 111-20, cf p. 60.
85
Lady Margaret founded Christ's and John Fisher St John's primarily as means of
reforming the secular clergy and establishing a vernacular preaching ministry;
Brasenose was founded by Bishop Smith and Sir Richard Sutton (steward of the
monastery of Syon) and Corpus Christi by Foxe (1517) explicitly as centers for
humanist learning. C E. Mallet, A History of the University ofOxford'(1924-7), vol. 2,
pp. 22-3; J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge from the Earliest Times . . .
(Cambridge, 1873-1911), pp. 423-552. On Renaissance foundations at Oxford,
see James McConica, 'Scholars and Commoners in Renaissance Oxford,' in The
University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, 1974), voL 1, pp. 151-81.
86
T. Fowler, History of Corpus Christi College (Oxford, 1893); Statutes of the Colleges of
Oxford (Oxford, 1853), vol. 2, p. 10.
50 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

progressive colleges. The Oxford bookseller John Dome recorded

selling more of Erasmus' works than of Aristotle's in 152O.87
The direct involvement of Christian humanists in the formation
and reformation of colleges is noteworthy, both as an explanation
for their relative success and as an illustration of their activism.
Aside from the founding fathers who have been mentioned, Erasmus
himself lectured in Greek at Queens', Cambridge, from 1511 to
1513; More's adopted son John Clement served as the first Greek
reader at Corpus Christi, Oxford; both Lupset and Vives lectured in
humanities at Corpus; and Wolsey's Cardinal College (later Christ
Church) was established as a humanist addition to Oxford in 1525. It
is hardly any wonder that the literae humaniores, with all of their
implications for social theory, became the dominant aspect of
university curriculum and that the scholastic approach to biblical
and patristic texts was widely rejected in favor of a genuinely
humanist biblicism. By 1514, Erasmus was able to write to Servatius
Rogerus that in England 4are colleges in which there is so much
religion and so marked a sobriety in living that you would despise
every form of religious regime in comparison, if you saw it' 88 Two
years later he recounted the history of this new regime:
About thirty years ago nothing was taught in the university at Cambridge
except Alexander, what they call the Parva logicalia, and the traditional doc-
trines of Aristotle with Scotistic quaestiones. As time went on the humanities
were added; then mathematics; then a new, or at least a new-fangled Aristotle;
then the knowledge of Greek; then all those authors whose very names were
unknown in the old days even to the brahmins of philosophy Iarcas-like
enthroned. And what, pray, was the effect of this on your university? Why, it
flourished to such a tune that it can challenge the first universities of the age,
and there are men there compared with whom those earlier scholars are
mere shadows of theologians, not the reality.89

In 1517 he was able to respond with equanimity to the criticism of

the New Learning coming from the University of Paris by contrast-
ing the situation at Cambridge: 'The extraordinary language they are
using in Paris causes me no anxiety. You will see a great part of this
pedantry sent packing. Cambridge is a changed place. The university
87
McConica, pp. 88-92. Erasmus' works similarly dominated the inventory of
Cambridge bookbinder Nicholas Pilgrim (1545): the 382 titles listed include
twenty-two works of Erasmus. G. J. Gray and W. M. Palmer, Abstractsfrom the Wills
and Testamentary Documents of Printers, Binders, and Stationers of Cambridge, from 1504 to
1669 (London, 1915), pp. 10-26.
88
CWE 2, The Correspondence of Erasmus, tr. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, p.
299 (8 July 1514).
89
CWE 4, p. 52 (Erasmus to Henry Bullock of Queens', Cambridge, 22? August
1516).
 Christian humanism as social ideology 51
there has no use for this frigid hairsplitting, which is more conducive
to wrangling than religion.'90
The pace of change increased under Cromwell's guidance during
the 1530s and under the influence of Edward VFs Royal Com-
missioners.91 Cromwell was responsible for the reforming injunc-
tions at both universities which proscribed late medieval scholasticism
from Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus on, instructed the more pros-
perous colleges to establish two daily public lectures in Greek and
Latin, and required that all students be allowed to study the Scrip-
tures for themselves. With the Reformation, canon law study was
abolished, and biblical readings were substituted for previously
required theological texts, to the delight of humanist reformers.
Masters of colleges in 15 35 received royal injunctions to guard their
students 'from the darkness worse than chimaera, from the frivolous
"quaestiuncula" and from the blind and obscure glosses of Scotus,
Burleius, Anthony Trombeta, Thomas Bricot, Brussels and others of
that pack.'92 The alternative, certainly evident in the newly endowed
royal colleges of Trinity, Cambridge and Christ Church, Oxford, was
a fresh, humanistic emphasis on moral reformation through edu-
cation and on the training of laymen for their civic responsibilities.
To the extent that this alternative was implemented in the univer-
sities, an important Christian humanist goal for social reconstruc-
tion was realized Education - in classical morality and Christian
piety, in the Scriptures uncontaminated by scholastic glosses, in the
civic consciousness and social responsibility of the ancients - was,
after all, the Christian humanists' first step to both individual and
social reform. Having involved themselves deeply in educational
improvement, and having injected elements of social criticism and
moral exhortation into the curriculum, they fully expected to see
the results of their efforts in meaningful social change.
Christian humanist social theory was in essence, then, a framework
for the reformation of the commonwealth. Its implementation in
the early Tudor period was perhaps spotty, but the availability of
printed editions of classical and humanist works, the reformed
pedagogy and curriculum of the humanist-infiltrated universities,
and the nature and practicability of the humanist reform program
itself would guarantee that the Erasmian vision would not die with
90
CWE5, p. 225 (Erasmus to LudwigBaer, 6 December 1517); a similar description is
found in Erasmus to Capito, also 6 December 1517, CWE V, p. 227.
91
The latter established a new curriculum based on the classics: see Simon,
chapter 10.
92
Curtis, pp. 6-29; Elton, pp. 33-5; William J. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at
Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 9.
52 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

its authors. In bookstores, in colleges and in the intellectual recep-

tivity of the earliest protestant reformers lay the mechanisms by
which the goals of the humanists would be transmitted to and even-
tually in some measure practiced by subsequent generations of
Englishmen. It is time now to look more closely at the actual
transmission of humanist ideas to Elizabethan and early Stuart
Englishmen in general, and to puritans in particular.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas

The impact of Christian humanist reforms on university curriculum

and pedagogy during the Henrician and Edwardian periods has been
described at some length because of the importance of the univer-
sity experience of later puritan divines for the formation of puritan
social thought. The sermon was, after all, the primary vehicle by
which ideas were propagated in early modern England, especially
among fervent protestants. An increasingly literate populace read
printed sermons (frequently aloud, to less educated auditors), and
sermon and lecture attendance was a popular form of entertainment
among the hotter sort of protestants. The sources of ideas being
transmitted to the puritan laity must, therefore, be traced to the
intellectual background of the preachers. Now while this can be
accomplished in some measure by looking at the marginal notes of
printed sermons, the puritans' predilection for Scriptural authority
often precluded a methodical listing of extra-biblical sources in their
notes. It is necessary, then, to discover the writings which con-
ditioned the way puritans used Scripture by looking at their library
catalogues, their commonplace books and correspondence, and
(most importantly) the curriculum to which they devoted their
university years.l It will be seen that for at least the century and a half
following Erasmus' death, puritan readers were entirely typical of
their less zealous contemporaries in imbibing large quantities of
1
On the importance of the university experience for puritan preachers, see Patrick
Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967), p. 127, and The
Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), ch. 3; Mark H. Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in
Transition, 1538-1642 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 195-206; William Haller, The Rise of
Puritanism (New York, 1938), pp. 52-3; and John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan
Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1540-1640 (Cambridge, 1986), chs.
6-7. The majority of puritan clergy, even in the north-western diocese of Chester,
for instance, attended Oxford or Cambridge: R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in the
North-West of England (Manchester, 1972), pp. 56-63.

53
54 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

humanist literature, and that their taste for it had been developed in
part by their educational experiences.
The similarity of puritan, early Anglican, and Christian humanist
social theory is explained in large part by the nature of university
curriculum, for the literature - both classical and contemporary -
that formed the basis of the humanist social program also formed a
major portion of the Oxbridge arts course throughout the period
with which we are concerned. There is scant evidence that changes
of consequence were made in the curriculum after the humanist
reforms of the Henrician and Edwardian periods; those which have
been suggested by historians were at most expansions of the essen-
tially classical curriculum advocated and made possible by humanist
publications. And while this curriculum was superimposed on a
scholastic framework and methodology2 and was never as thoroughly
reformed as its sponsors had desired, it still provided a continuous,
characteristically humanist emphasis on the development of practical
morality and true piety as the aim of education throughout the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Unfortunately, while few historians would deny the significant
humanist impact on curriculum and pedagogy at the early Tudor
universities, the continuance of that influence during the following
century has been denied in favor of a 'discontinuity pattern' for early
modern university studies. The inexorable drive of historians to
periodize and classify has produced a pattern which delineates
'scholasticism in the first generation of the sixteenth century,
humanism in the second, Ramism in the third . . . [and], in the last
decade of the century... a revival of scholasticism.' This version by
Hugh Kearney, following the lead of Mark Curtis and William
Costello, has Neo-scholasticism dominating the scene through the
1640s, giving way to 'Baconianism' in the later 1640s and 1650s.3
2
Demonstrated by William J. Costello in The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth
Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); cf. Curtis, pp. 86-92.
3
Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-Industrial Britain,
1300-1700 (London, 1970), pp. 77, 98-100. It should be noted that'generation' is
rather loosely defined to allow the second to continue to 1590 in Humphrey's
influence in Magdalen College, Oxford, apparently in the midst of an already
triumphant Ramism. Kearney's thesis rests partly on assumptions made by
Costello and Curtis; however, Costello's study focuses on scholastic methodology,
and Curtis' primary concern is not with curriculum, but with institutional reforms
and the social composition of the colleges. Christopher Hill, in The Intellectual
Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965), pp. 301-14, perceives a continuous
influence of scholasticism throughout the seventeenth century. The most impor-
tant recent illumination of early modern Oxbridge curricula is Mordechai
Feingold's The Mathematicians' Apprenticeship (Cambridge, 1984), which corrects
earlier historians' devaluation of mathematics and astronomy in both under-
graduate and graduate studies before the Civil War.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 55

Even the humanist phase itself has been subdivided chronologically:

a 'court' stage represented by Sir T h o m a s Elyot's The Boke Named the
Governour (ca. 1531), with its emphasis o n service to t h e king by an
educated gentry, allegedly gave way to a 'country' stage heralded by
Lawrence H u m p h r e y ' s The Nobles (1563) a n d characterized by
reformism and social criticism. T h e artificiality of this distinction
has b e e n successfully argued by (among others) Lawrence Stone and
James McConica. 4 B u t while this and other aspects of Kearney's
work o n t h e social history of the universities have b e e n criticized,
the accuracy of the discontinuity p a t t e r n itself has hardly b e e n ques-
t i o n e d T h e received version has humanism disappearing from
university curriculum by t h e 1580s, and (until McConica's recent
suggestion that the Aristotelians J o h n Case and J o h n Rainolds main-
tained a humanist tradition in Elizabethan Oxford) historians have
b e e n c o n t e n t to accept Ramism and Neo-scholasticism as the domi-
nant trends in university teaching during t h e Elizabethan and early
Stuart periods respectively. 5
McConica's work has provided a valuable first step for a reevaluation
of Elizabethan curriculum; however, in order fully t o address t h e
problems posed by Kearney's thesis, it is necessary to take another
4
Kearney, pp. 34-45. Lawrence Stone in 'The Ninnyversity?' NYRB (28 January
1971), p. 23, argues that the two 'merely represent different stages in the
acclimatization of an Italian prototype rather than distinctive intellectual
positions.' More incisively, McConica points out that John Case and John Rainolds
(the latter, according to Kearney, Oxford's leading Ramist) are typical of
humanists who combined elements of both 'court' and 'country' humanism:
'Humanism and Aristotelianism in Tudor Oxford,' EHR, 94 (1979), 291-317, p.
310, n. 3. Certainly the authors that Kearney (pp. 42-3) associates with court
humanism (Homer, Horace, Lucian, Ovid, Virgil [Aeneid], Catullus and Martial)
and country humanism (Seneca, Terence, Virgil [Georgics], Josephus and Calvin)
were read by humanists difficult to identify with court or country, as well as by
people whom Kearney would not call humanists at all, throughout the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries (see below, pp. 62-5, 82-94, and my 'Seneca and
the Protestant Mind: The Influence of Stoicism on Puritan Ethics', Archiv fur
Reformationsgeschichte, 74 (1983), 182-99). Moreover, if social criticism is charac-
teristic of country humanism, what do we do with Vives, Ascham, and Sir Thomas
Smith? Curtis (p. 57) incidentally sees Elyot as an exception to the humanist rule
on pedagogical issues. Were Kearney aware of Lawrence Humphrey's letter to
Elizabeth commending his Nobles as supportive of the authority of Crown and
Court (BL, Harl. 7933, fols. 351v-353v), he might question his own categories.
5
K R. Bolgar, in The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1958), sees a
continuation of humanist classicism after 1600 'partly as a survival, and partly as a
necessary adjunct to the education of the time' (p. 379). This, however, forms part
of the rather tentative conclusion of his book, which concentrates on the period
before 1550. For criticisms of other aspects of Kearney's book, see Stone's
'Ninnyversity?'; four articles by McConica- his review of Scholars and Gentlemen in
EHR, 87 (1972), 121-5, his 'The Prosopography of the Tudor University, 'Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 3 (1973), 543-55, his'Social Relations of Tudor Oxford,'
TRHS, 5th ser., 27 (1977), 115-34, his 'Humanism and Aristotelianism'; and
Elizabeth Russell, 'The Influx of Commoners into the University of Oxford before
1581: An Optical Illusion?' EHR, 92 (1977), 721-45.
56 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

look at those under-used sources upon which it allegedly rests- the

numerous, lengthy, and usually tedious student notebooks of
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Oxford and Cambridge.
The notebooks must be used with care; one must guard against con-
cluding too much from the relatively small number of volumes
which are extant But in combination with the data provided by
university and college statutes, tutorial directives, library inven-
tories, correspondence and other sources, they can contribute
substantially to answering some of the most obvious questions aris-
ing from earlier treatments of university studies: What was the
relationship of protestantism to humanist educational reforms?
How did humanist objectives and methods for education affect the
way and the extent to which classical sources were used in the
curriculum? Is Ramism an alternative to humanism? How and for
what purpose were the Schoolmen used by early seventeenth-
century protestant scholars? To what degree were students aware of
the conflict between humanism and scholasticism in the seven-
teenth century? Finally, does the weight of the evidence support the
idea that humanism indeed disappeared from the universities in the
mid-Elizabethan period, or has our search for change blinded us to
continuity in early modern university studies- a continuity based on
the use of humanist and classical literature?
The attraction which Christian humanism had for early protestant
reformers provides a good starting place for tackling these ques-
tions: it supplies us both with an indication of the close relationship
which could develop and would continue to exist between humanism
and protestantism, and with the identity of an important conduit
between early Tudor humanism and Elizabethan puritanism. Many
of the early Reformers, both continental and English, were explicitly
Erasmian. Zwingli and Calvin, whose works wielded great authority
in protestant England, were humanists by education and inclination:
Calvin called Erasmus the 'glory and the darling of literature' and was
clearly familiar not only with his edition of the New Testament, but
also with his Apophthegmata and Adagia. Viret and Beza illustrate the
ongoing influence of humanism on continental Calvinism.6 Illustrative
6
Calvin's Commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, tr. F. L. Battles and A. M. Hugo
(Leiden, 1969), pp. 37* (On Calvin's humanistic education), 108*, and 6/7. On
parallels between Erasmus' Adages and Calvin's Institutes, see Battles' New Light on
Calvin's Institutes (London, 1966). On the influence of Christian humanism on
Calvin, Viret, and Beza, see Robert D. Linder, 'Calvinism and Humanism: The
First Generation,' CH, 44 (1975), 167-81. On Zwingli's Erasmianism, see G. W.
Locher, 'Zwingli und Erasmus,' in Scrinium Erasmianum, ed. J. J. Coppens (Leiden,
1969), vol. 2, pp. 325-50. Erasmus' influence on the Reformers of the upper
Rhineland is the subject of E.- W. Kohls, Die theologische Lebensaufgabe des Erasmus und
die oberrheinischen Reformatoren (Stuttgart, 1969).
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 57

of the direct personal as well as literary influence of humanist prot-

estants in England is Martin Bucer, Regius Professor of Divinity at
Cambridge from 1549 until his death in 1552. Bucer was a close
acquaintance of Erasmus' biographer, Beatus Rhenanus, and of the
humanist protestants Wolfgang Capito and Peter Martyr (the latter
also brought to England by the Edwardian Reformers). H e began a
long correspondence with Erasmus himself in 1517, and a catalogue
of his library compiled in 1518 shows that he possessed nearly all of
Erasmus' then published works. H e wrote in 1520,'It gives me great
joy that the world is daily enriched with new writings of Erasmus; I
have managed several secret economies so that I might be able to
procure them all, if possible.' 7 After the Heidelberg disputation of
1518, Bucer described himself as 4 ErasmianerundMartinianer.' 8 His
humanist vision of social reform, DeRegno Christi, was written during
his tenure at Cambridge and must have inspired his auditors there as
it later would its readers, for he boasted that at Cambridge, 'I am per-
mitted to set forth the Kingdom of Christ with the most entire
freedom, in my lectures, disputations, and Latin sermons.' 9 Cer-
tainly the impact of this seminal work of humanist social theory on
subsequent generations of protestants was significant and illustrates
the importance of first generation protestants for the transmission
of humanist social ideas: we know that Edmund Grindal as Bishop of
London collected this and other materials written by Bucer in
England for Conrad Hubert's edition of the Scripta Anglicana (Basle,
1577), and a resume of De Regno Christi by the puritan Thomas
Sampson was sent to Lord Burleigh in 1577. T h e work was later

7
Nicole Peremans, Erasme et Bucer d'apres leur correspondance (Paris, 1970), pp. 9, 2 7 -
30; Henri Strohl, Bucer, humanistechretien (Paris, 1939), andE.-W. Kohls, 'Erasmian
Studies in Germany,' Erasmus in English', 3 (1971), 28-9. On the influence of Erasmus
on Bucer's theology, see F. Kruger, Bucer und Erasmus (Wiesbaden, 1970). Calvin
spent the years 1538-41 in Strasbourg with Bucer.
8
Kohls, 'Erasmian Studies,' p. 29.
9
Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. H. Robinson (Cambridge,
1846-7), vol. 1, p. 19. DeRegno Christi has been translated by Wilhelm Pauck and
Paul Larkin in the Library of Christian Classics, (Philadelphia, 1969), vol. 19. A copy
of the 1557 Basel edition was donated to the St John's College library in
Cambridge in 1632 (St John's, Cambridge, MS U.5; the volume is still there,
catalogue no. F.10.13). This was the first edition; a German translation was
published in Strasbourg and a French translation in Geneva the following year.
We know that John Cheke and Peter Martyr read this work in manuscript and
agreed with it John Strype, Life of Cheke (Oxford, 1821), pp. 55 f. It echoed Erasmus'
opinions on such diverse topics as marriage and divorce (cf. Erasmus' In laude and
prayse of matrymony, tr. Richard Taverner [1531] and his Censure and judgment. . .
Whyther dyvorsement betwene man and wyfe stondeth with the lawe of God, tr. Nycolas Lesse
[1550?]), education, wealth, and poverty (parallels detailed in chapter 5, below),
and the nature of true nobility. On the latter, cf DeRegno Christi, pp. 176-7, 267-8,
with Erasmus' Institutioprincipis Christiani, tr. L. K. Born (New York, 1936), p. 140,
and BL, Royal MS 17.A.xliv, fols. 2-2v.
58 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

quoted by such diverse protestants as John Whitgift and Thomas

Cartwright, its recommendations for poor relief were published in
1557, and the long section on divorce was translated and published
by John Milton in 1644.10
It has been convincingly argued that 4the Reformation in
Cambridge began with love of letters, among a company devoted to
the New Learning and whose excitement at the new text [of the New
Testament] established by Erasmus was the ferment of the new
reform.'11 The Cambridge of Fisher and Erasmus was also that of
Cranmer(A. B.Jesus, 1512) and Latimer (a fellow of Clare by 1510),
and the future Marian exile Edmund Allen (of Corpus) was one of the
translators under Udall of Erasmus' Paraphrases, Thomas Bilney of
Trinity Hall and the Corpus Reformer William Warner were first
known as despisers of scholastic subtleties 'and such fooleries';
Erasmus and Latimer alike advocated advancing the Gospel by de-
crying the Schoolmen.12 Also among the earliest Cambridge Refor-
mers were such prominent classical scholars as Robert Barnes, who
doubtless knew Erasmus when both were at Louvain (1517-21), and
who later numbered among his enthusiastic Cambridge students of
Terence and Cicero one Miles Coverdale.13 In both universities,
English Reformers from Thomas Cranmer and Alexander Nowell to
John Jewel and John Rainolds helped to build solid and long-lasting
bridges between humanism and protestantism.14
A more detailed examination of the humanism of these Reformers

' Wilhelm Pauck and Paul Larkin, Introduction to DeRegno Cbristi, pp. 172-3; Scott
Pearson, Thomas Cartwright (Cambridge, 1925), pp. 226, 409f; Martin Bucer, A
Treatise How by the Worde of God, Christian mensAlmose ought to Be distributed [1557]; The
Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce tr. John Milton (London, 1644). On
Bucer's influence see also August Lang, Puritanismus und Pietismus (Neukirchen,
1941), and Patrick Collinson, 'The Reformer and the Archbishop: Martin Bucer
and An English Bucerian,' Godly People (London, 1983), ch. 2. Collinson notes (p.
29) that a copy of the Scripta Anglicana was owned successively by John Field and
Thomas Coleman, but his focus is on episcopal Bucerians.
1
E. G. Rupp, Studies in the Making ofthe English Protestant Tradition (Cambridge, 1949),
p. 196. The more complete argument, however, is H. C. Porter's in Reformation and
Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958).
!
Porter, pp. 41-4, 80; Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England^ Cambridge,
1966), p. 87; cf Hugh Latimer, Sermons, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, 1844), vol. 1,
pp. 67, 334—5, and 46 (directly identifying himself with Erasmus) and Erasmus' An
Exhortation to the diligent studye of scripture (n.p., 1529), p. 12.
1
Rupp, pp. 17-19, 23, 31-2.
1
McConica, 'Humanism and Aristotelianism,' and English Humanists and Reformation
Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford, 1965), pp. 280-1. G. R Elton,
Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1973),
opposes McConica's view of the near-ubiquity of Erasmianism in the early protes-
tant Reformation, but see also J. P. Cooper's review of Elton's book in EHR, 92
(1977), 373-7.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 59

is unfortunately beyond the scope of this study; however, it is clear

from extant manuscript notebooks that the Reformers continued to
exercise great influence on subsequent generations of university
students, and that they provided one avenue by which the appeal of
the humanist reform ethic was passed on to later protestants. Peter
Martyr, for example, was read by arts as well as divinity students at
both universities through the mid-seventeenth century. T h e note-
books of such puritans as Arthur Hildersham, J o h n Rogers, the
Carnsew brothers, Alexander Cooke and Oliver St J o h n reveal,
furthermore, that his works were read not only for their insights into
the Scriptures, b u t also for their humanistic commentary on
Aristotle. 15 Zwingli's and Bullinger's treatises on education and
family government, based explicitly on classical, biblical and
humanist precepts, were translated into English and read b o t h by
students and by lay people. 16 T h e role of Bucer's De Regno Christi in
disseminating humanist social theory has already been mentioned,
and the ideas thereby transmitted will be analyzed in later chapters;
however, it should also be noted that his biblical commentaries,
based on Erasmian exegetical principles and aimed at inculcating
practical piety rather than scholastic subtlety, were also read by both
arts and divinity students through the early Stuart period. n It would
be an exercise in tedium to list all of the notebook citations of
Calvin, Beza, Bullinger, Musculus, Oecolampadius, Jewel, Humphrey
and Rainolds; suffice it to say that they are legion. 18

15
PRO, SP46/15; BL, Harl. 3230, foL 17v; Bodl., RawL D. 273, pp. 250-1; BL, Harl,
5247, fols. 53v, 103, 104; BL, Add. MS 25,285, passim; cf CUL, Add. MS6867. For
the seventeenth century, see CUL, MS Dd. 12.57 (Thomas Brathwaite), foL 38;
Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LC 11.16 (n.p.); CUL, MS Gg. 1.29 Emmanuel, 1583-
1628), p. 51 (also citing Bucer and Musculus). Peter Martyr's works were also
among those given to St John's College in 1623 (St John's, Cambridge, MS
U.5).
16
Ulrich Zwingli, Of the Upbringing and Education of Youth in Good Manners and Christian
Discipline (1523), in Library of Christian Classics tr. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia,
1942) vol. 24; Heinrich Bullinger, The Christen state of matrymonye, tr. Miles Cover-
dale (London, 1541). The impact of these will be discussed further in chapter
4, below.
17
For example, BL, Harl. 3230, fols. 19, 52v; CUL, MS Gg. 1.29, pp. 51, 103; CUL,
MS Dd. 3.85(5), a sermon of Overall's at Emmanuel in 1600, quotes Peter Martyr,
Beza, Oecolampadius and Musculus as well as Bucer on the interpretation of Scrip-
ture (n.p.). The Cambridge bookbinder Bennet Waulker's 1588 inventory
included works of Bucer and other Reformers: G. W. Gray and W. M. Palmer,
Abstracts from the Wills and Testamentary Documents of Printers, Binders, and Stationers of
Cambridge, from 1504 to 1699 (London, 1915), p. 72.
18
It is important to note, however, that the influence of these first and second
generation protestants continued to make itself felt in the Stuart universities: see
Balliol, MS 438; Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LC 11.16; and St John's, Cambridge,
MS S.20, pp. 14-15, 52, 132, and 409. The latter is a puritan notebook which also
60 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Of more significance than numbers of citations are the reasons for

which the Reformers' works were read, and the contexts in which
citations of them are found. Of course, they were being read
primarily for their theology and biblical commentary, not for their
social theory, but their biblical scholarship was the product of the
New Learning, and as such it was concerned both with exegetical
sophistication and with the application of learning to behavior. As a
result, the Reformers' names are frequently found among those of
Christian humanists and ancients in student notes on social ques-
tions and on techniques of biblical interpretation. John Stone, an
Elizabethan puritan student at Christ Church, Oxford, for example,
kept a theological commonplace book which combined the
authority of Italian and northern humanists, ancient authors, and
protestants (Peter Martyr, Oecolampadius, Jewel and Rainolds in
particular). The issues discussed in the notebook are very frequently
just the sort of practical problems with which Stone's humanist
authorities (Erasmus, Petrarch and Ascham) were most concerned-
the education of children in piety, for example, and the necessity to
advance learning throughout society in order to achieve reform. His
notes on a 1580 sermon of Humphrey's indicate the approval given
by his protestant mentors to humanist authority: Humphrey argued
for the expansion of educational opportunity by quoting Erasmus'
colloquy Abbatis et eruditae.19 The notebook of the puritan Alexander
Cooke of University College, Oxford, is very similar both in con-
cerns and in authors quoted Petrarch, Sir Thomas More and Erasmus
figure among the humanists; Seneca, Cicero, Juvenal and Lucian
among the ancients; and Rainolds, Peter Martyr and Thomas Becon
among the protestants. From these, Cooke derived such typically
humanist sentiments as 'ignorance makes men strangers from the
life of God.' The conclusion of his discussion of fasting, in which
Erasmus is frequently quoted, identifies the anti-humanist Bellarmine
as 'the wrangling Sophister' in the tradition of the despised
Schoolmen.20 Humanist methods of textual analysis- a major aspect

quotes Erasmus' Paraphrases and Cicero, Seneca, Pythagoras and Plato on the godly
life: e.g., pp. 52, 54. CUL, Add. MS 6314 contains an encomium of Calvin in the
midst of commentary on a text of Demosthenes; see also Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge, Ward MSS A-C, F, G, and I. The Ward manuscripts are classified and
described in my 'Samuel Ward Papers at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,'
Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1985), 582-92.
19
Bodl, Rawl. D.273, pp. 31, 51, 78, 111, 149, 152, 180, 208, 232, 276, 342-345. He
quoted Erasmus on pp. 118-135, 343; Petrarch on p. 345; Ascham on pp. 185,264,
and 276. Humphrey's sermon is on pp. 265-6. cf. Coll., p. 221.
20
BL, Harl. 5247, fols. 109, 76v-80; cf. fols. 2-3, 37, 46v-51, 53v, 103, 104, 136v-
137v.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 61
of the appeal of Erasmianism to early protestants - are likewise evi-
dent in Stone's notebook and in that of his puritan colleague at
Christ Church, Anthony Parker. Both students were admirers of
Rainolds' approach to Scripture, which was in turn that of Vives. As,
in Parker's words, Christ' freed the law from the false interpretations
and glosses of the scribes and Pharisees,' so Erasmus, Vives and their
protestant progeny freed the Bible from the Thomists and Scotists.21
Herein lay the core of the humanist reformation of Oxford and
Cambridge, and the point of greatest affinity between Erasmians and
protestants. The Bible, among other ancient texts, had been abused
and its meaning obscured by late medieval scholastic commentary
and glosses. But after the humanist reforms, academicians would no
longer be satisfied with snippets of Aristotle or the New Testament
in Latin interspersed in voluminous, esoteric commentary. Com-
mentary was not thought to be unnecessary or irrelevant; however,
it was to be subordinated to the text itself. Now all classical litera-
ture, from Aristotle to the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, was to
be restored to its proper glory and clarity by applying humanist prin-
ciples of interpretation: the text must be read contextually, in its
original language, with an understanding of its historical and literary
milieu, and with an eye toward practical application. In urging these
principles, university educators showed unflagging zeal in carrying
what was in essence a humanist banner throughout the Elizabethan
and, as will be seen, the early Stuart period. Moreover, they and their
students were well aware of the techniques which they were using
and of the goals which they wished to achieve.
Looking first at the Elizabethan period, it is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that the reading of ancient texts in their original
languages formed the basis both of the arts course and of theological
studies. The latter were, of course, to be based primarily upon the
Greek and Hebrew Scriptures, and only secondarily on past
theologians. Lawrence Chaderton's lectures at Emmanuel exem-
plify the use of such humanist techniques (including use of Greek,
Hebrew and Arabic texts of the Psalms) and the goal of practical
application. Similarly, Anthony Parker rejected all commentators in
21
BL, Harl. 4048, pp. 37-93, and especially pp. 83, 88; cf. Rainolds' annotated work-
ing copy of Aristotle' s De arte dicendi libri tres (Paris, 1562), Bodl., Auct. S.2.29, and
his MS lectures, Queen's, Oxford, MS 354, fol. 5; McConica, 'Humanism and
Aristotelianism,' pp. 303-9. Kearney asserts that Parker had 'no interest in classical
literature' (p. 44); if so, it was not due to the curriculum at Christ Church. But it
does not seem unlikely that Parker divided his notes on theology from his classical
commonplace book, and that the latter may have been lost: note Simonds D'Ewes'
division of his notebooks by authors as well as topics (below, pp. 88-9).
62 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

his theological notebook, relying solely on Scripture.22 As for the

arts course, the medieval structure of trivium (grammar, rhetoric
and dialectic), quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and
music), and the three philosophies (moral, natural and metaphysical)
was maintained by the statutes, as were medieval pedagogical
methods (lecture, disputation and declamation). But the way in
which such integral parts of the medieval curriculum as the
Aristotelian texts were presented to undergraduates had changed
drastically. The reformed statutes themselves embody some of the
changes, for they were written by men who saw the inculcation of
virtue, rather than of logical subtlety, as the proper end of
education.23 Thus, students at Elizabethan Oxford were to hear two
terms of grammar lectures on the humanist Linacre's Rudiments, with
extensive readings from such ancient moralists as Cicero, Horace
and Virgil. Aristotle or Cicero were to be read in connection with
four terms of rhetoric, and Aristotle or Porphyry were to be the
sources for five terms of dialectic.24 The Elizabethan statutes for
Cambridge established first year lectures on rhetoric from texts of
Quintilian, Hermogenes or Cicero; second and third year studies
devoted to Aristotelian dialectic and Cicero's Topics; and fourth year
philosophy lectures treating Aristotle's Ethics or Politics, Pliny or
Plato. A lecturer in Greek, to read Homer, Isocrates, Demosthenes
and Euripides, among others, was also to broaden the older course of
study.25
But the crucial step forward was in how these classical texts were
to be taught. The statutes for both universities emphasized the
necessity of Greek (Hebrew and Arabic would be added in the next
century). Thus, Aristotelian texts, beloved but (from a Renaissance
perspective) abused by the Schoolmen, were now read in Greek, in
their entirety, and in connection with other Greek literature and his-
tory. The presbyterian Thomas Cartwright, in a letter to Hildersham
on the study of divinity, emphasized not only knowledge of
languages, but also the humanist requirement of knowing 'the
22
Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LC 11.164; fols. 78-148v; fols. 26-26v and 36v apply
biblical injunctions to marriage and to visitation of the sick and disabled. In
Parker's notebook (BL, Harl. 4048), see pp. 37-93 etpassim.
23
J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge from the Earliest Times to the Decline of the
Platonist Movement (Cambridge, 1873-1911), vol. 2, pp. 109-12; C E. Mallet, A His-
tory of the University of Oxford (1924-7), voL 2, pp. 83-6; Curtis, pp. 70-92.
24
Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, ed. Strickland Gibson (Oxford, 1931), p.
320. Contrast the medieval grammar course based on Priscian and Donatus, with
their dialectical glosses.
25
George Dyer, The Privileges of the University of Cambridge (1824), vol. 1, pp. 161-
5.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 63
26
stories of the times wherein the writers lived.' Elizabethan logic
notebooks like those of Richard Morton of Queens', Cambridge,
Robert Batti of Brasenose and University College, and J o h n Day of
Oriel all rely on the complete Greek text of Aristotle. 27
The notebooks reveal, moreover, the Erasmian aims of dialectic
teaching. T h e most frequently used dialectic handbooks of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries were humanist productions -
Agricola's De inventione dialectica (1515), Melanchthon's Dialectices
(1527), Seton's Dialectica (1572 edition) and Ramus' Dialecticae
institutiones (1543). All of these challenged medieval pedagogy and
insisted that dialectic instruction ought to be concerned with practical
ways to communicate knowledge to others. Agricola's work, which
was required by the Cambridge statutes of 1535, was modeled on
Cicero and Quintilian, de-emphasizing the use of syllogistic logic
and focusing rather on the selection and classification of material on
given subjects to be used in discussion (hence the importance of the
commonplace book in early modern education). Melanchthon,
Seton and Ramus all identified their works explicitly with that of
Agricola, while espousing a purified Aristotle. The development of
late sixteenth-century dialectics is thus accurately interpreted as *a
direct response to a humanist view of learning. . . the art of reason-
able discourse,' and the core of a continuing program of reading
classical literature.28
The statutes provided only a bare outline for student reading;
tutors were expected to assign considerable additional readings
from the literae humaniores. The bulk of the actual curriculum, then,
went beyond the statutory requirements, and its content, methods
and goals can only be determined from student notebooks and
tutorial directives.29 These sources reveal that for the period under
consideration, in tutorial as in statutory studies, both humanist and
classical authors were consistently read and regarded as authorita-
tive - and they were authoritative no less on social and theological

26
Cartwrightiana, ed Albert Peel and L. H. Carson (London, 1951), p. 113.
27
Queens', Cambridge, MSHorne43 (ca. 1600); Bodl., Rawl. D.985 (1581-4); Bodl,
Rawl. D.274, fols. 3-125.
28
Lisajardine, 'The Place of Dialectic Teaching in Sixteenth Century Cambridge,'
Studies in the Renaissance, 21 (1974), 50-62. The notion that Aristotelian logic is
inherently a scholastic enterprise (e.g., Costello, p. 8) is absurd Erasmus himself
had approved the study of logic, stipulating that one should 'learn his dialectic
from Aristotle and not from that prolix breed, the sophists.' See his De ratione studii
ac legendi interpretandique auctores, (CWE 24), tr. Brian McGregor, ed. Craig R.
Thompson (Toronto, 1978), p. 670.
29
The importance of tutorial as opposed to statutory education has been very
properly emphasized by both Curtis and Kearney.
64 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

questions than on matters of style and interpretation. It will be seen

that students read the classics as Christian humanists: that is, not
merely for the rhetorical or grammatical principles they might con-
vey, not even solely for their linguistic purity, but for instruction in
virtuous and godly living, for answers to practical ethical questions,
and for political precepts and directions on civic involvement. They
collected commonplaces, as Erasmus had urged in his De duplici copia
verborum ac rerum commentarii duo,30 n o t merely as an academic exer-
cise, but as a means of filing away the wisdom of the ages (under use-
ful, frequently very mundane headings) for future reference in
debate or as handy guidelines for action. This is not to say that it was
the avowed intent of every tutor to preach an Erasmian message to
his students; some tutors were surely more interested in pure Latin
style than in Ciceronian political theory, and others doubtless
assigned classical texts simply because those texts had become a
traditional part of the curriculum by their day. However it is clear
that there was a tradition of classical studies at both universities, and
that the net effect of the sources themselves and the humanistic
methods prescribed to study them was the exposure of generations
of English students to Erasmian ideas.
Virtually all of the extant Elizabethan notebooks quote ancient
authors, so that it would be an exercise in futility to attempt an
exhaustive list of the references. Among the most popular were
Cicero (notably theDe Officiis), Seneca, Isocrates, Xenophon, Plato,
Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plutarch, Euripides and Sophocles. The pro-
priety of making pagan authors so central to the curriculum and
therefore such important sources for the preachers produced by the
universities was occasionally questioned, but the answer given by
puritans as well as conformists was the humanist one. The
Cambridge Vice-Chancellor's Court registers for 1596, for instance,
record the agreement of puritan as well as conformist heads of
colleges on the utility of classical pagan writers to modern
preachers: when John Rudd of Christ's suggested in a sermon at
Great St Mary's that the works of pagan authors might not be
appropriate sources for reforming preachers to use, he was ordered
by the court to affirm that the works of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch,
Seneca, and the 'poeta' could be 'used to good and profitable ends
for the belief of the auditory.'31
It is worthwhile to analyze how these authors were being used and

30
Translated by Betty I. Knott in CWE 24 (Toronto, 1978).
31
CUL, MS CUR 6.1, fols. 25-7.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 65
made useful and on what issues they were regarded as authoritative.
Of particular interest to this study, of course, is the use of ancient
authors as sources for social theory, and in fact all of the 'favorites'
were important authorities for the social ideas which would come to
characterize puritan sermons. John Stone's notebook is typical, for
instance, in relying on Isocrates and Cicero for a discussion of the
education of children. Hildersham's notebook quotes Plutarch on
the same issue, as does Lucas Challoner's, kept in the far-off
Elizabethan foundation of Trinity College, Dublin.32 It is interesting
to note that Hildersham's notebook also shows a broad interest in
pagan theology as relevant and instructive to Christians, and so great
was his admiration for Cicero that he could not bring himself to
argue with Erasmus' inclination 'to think that Cicero was saved.'33
Robert Batti praised Cicero's elegance of language, but in good Eras-
mian fashion commended him more for his concern with the
realities of daily living in the political world.34 John English of St
John's, Oxford, quoted extensively from Greek and Roman Stoics in
his discussions of such varied topics as frugality, the veneration of
age and the usefulness of education to governors. His conclusion on
the last topic is a civic humanist's apology for education: 'Learning is
necessarily requisite to state government; for the experience of one
man's life cannot produce examples or precedents enough for the
events of one man's life.'35 A student at King's likewise depended
heavily in his 1597 notebook on Seneca's Epistles and De dementia
and Cicero's Republic for insight into social and political regulation:
from Cicero he derived a humanist definition of political leadership
as care of and service to the commonwealth, and from the Stoics,
Pliny, Quintilian, Xenophon and Pythagoras he took advice on
everything from the discipline of children to the control of such
social evils as blasphemy and poverty.36 The problem of how to pre-
vent and relieve poverty was obviously an important one to
Elizabethan students, and their veneration for the opinions of
Cicero and Seneca on this subject is reflected not only in their
commonplace books, but also in the poor laws which they would
eventually see through Parliament.37

32
Bodl., Rawl. D.273, p. 149; BL, Harl. 3230, fol. 48v; TCDMS 357 (1595-ctf. 1612),
fols. 85v, 139.
33
BL, Harl. 3230, passim, and esp. fol. 114, citing Erasmus in the margin.
34 35
Bodl., Rawl. D.985, fols. 69-79. Bodl., Rawl. D.1423.
36
Bodl., Rawl. D.318(6), fols. 1, 4, 6, 14, 17, 25, 28, 36, 39-40. Kearney identifies
this student as a typical Ramist.
37
St John's, Cambridge, MS S.31, fol. 43 (Christ Church, ca. 1600); BL, Add. MS
25,285 (Oliver St John); see chapter 5 below.
66 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Elizabethan students were well aware of the way they were using
the classics. They stood squarely in the tradition of Erasmus; accord-
ingly, their opposition to the Schoolmen was scarcely less vehement
than that of their humanist predecessors. Gabriel Harvey of
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, rejoiced that 'scholars in our age are
rather now Aristippus than Diogenes: and rather active than con-
templative philosophers'; he dated the happy transformation from
when Duns Scotus and St Thomas 'with the whole rabblement of
schoolmen were abandoned our schools and expelled the Univer-
sity.' He was exultant that Aristotle's Organon was as little read as
Duns Scotus' works, while his Oeconomica and Policraticus, of which
humanist social theorists thoroughly approved, 'every one hath by
rote.'38 Robert Batti's notebook contains a diatribe against Duns
Scotus, St Thomas, and such latter-day 'barbaros' as the Neo-
scholastic Joseph Scaliger. He concluded that true wisdom is quite a
different thing from what passes for philosophy, and that Aristotle,
even correctly interpreted, conveys only a small portion of the
truth.39 John Day's notebook, which pits the ancients (especially
Cicero, Quintilian, Plutarch and a purified Aristotle) against
Aquinas and such modern scholastics as Zabarella, gives similar
warnings against being 'taken in by philosophy': the only true
philosophy is 'sound knowledge attained by natural. . . reason.'40 A
late sixteenth-century Emmanuel student, enamored of ancient
authors and clearly familiar with both medieval and contemporary
scholastics, likewise condemned the subtle distinctions of the
Thomists and declared his preference for the methods of the 'new
writers', especially the 'reformed': Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli,
Musculus, Oecolampadius, Calvin, Bucer, a n d - Erasmus!41
Student use of classical literature was thus conditioned by
humanist assumptions regarding the methodology and purpose of a
literary education. And it should not be assumed that these
humanist assumptions were mediated to students solely by their
tutors and lecturers. The notebooks demonstrate that the influence
was much more direct: it is unusual to find a notebook in which
Erasmus is not cited, and references to Vives, More, Petrarch,
Agricola and other humanists are far from rare. The authority
attributed to Erasmus, More and Petrarch by John Stone and
38
The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, 1573-1380, ed. E. J. L. Scott (London, 1884), pp.
78-9.
39
Bodl., RawL D.985, fols. 9, 66v-67v. • BodL, Rawl. D.274, fol. 126 etpassim.
41
CUL, MS Gg. 1.29 (1583-1628), fols. 17-17v. This student incidentally regarded
Erasmus' Greek and Latin Proverbs as a useful source for correctly understanding
angels (fol. 44).
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 67
Alexander Cooke has already been documented; in addition, John
English, Gabriel Harvey and John Walker all quoted Erasmus;
Walker further cited the opinions of the humanists Johannes Sturm,
Conrad Pellican and Rudolph Agricola; Harvey cited Ascham, Sturm
and Castiglione; and John Day of Oriel deferred to Beatus Rhenanus
on the position of women in a godly social order.42 Even in a pre-
dominantly theological notebook like that of Arthur Hildersham,
deference to Erasmus is evident on a variety of issues, exegetical,
theological and social.43 The correspondence of university dons
bears out the same theme: when John Rainolds of Corpus Christi,
Oxford, wrote to Dr Thornton concerning the inappropriateness of
women players on the stage, he cited Vives' treatise on Christian
womanhood.44 Perhaps the most remarkable indicators of the Eras-
mianism of Elizabethan curriculum, however, are some statistics
derived from the extant book inventories of members of Oxford and
Cambridge colleges in the respective University Archives: of the
eighty-one Oxford lists dating from 1558 to 1603, sixty-eight
(eighty-four percent) contain at least one work of Erasmus.45 Of the
eighty-five surviving Cambridge inventories from the same period,
fifty-six (sixty-six percent) contain at least one Erasmus work Erasmus
appears in the Cambridge lists more often than any other single
author; the next most frequently cited is Cicero, whose works
appear in forty-eight lists. By contrast, works of St Thomas appear in
only eight lists, and Ramus appears in only fourteen of the lists.46
In the light of these data, it is impossible to conclude that
Elizabethan Oxbridge saw the replacement of humanism with
Ramism. But it is a curious understanding of Ramism which would
demand such an interpretation in any case. Pierre de la Ramee, or
Petrus Ramus (1515-72), was hardly (as Kearney implies) an opponent
42
Bodl., Rawl. D.1423 Qohn English), foL 41; Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey\ pp. 66,
134, 167; CUL, Add. MS 6867, fol. 17 etpassim; Bodl., RawL D.274 (John Day),
43
fol. 234. BL, Harl. 3230, e.g., fols. 11, 24, 114.
44
Bodl., MS Tanner 77, fol. 43v (1592). He also cited Plutarch and Xenophon in
the letter.
45
Booklists from Wills and Inventories in Chancellor's Court Registers, Oxford
University Archives. Nine of these contain between five and thirteen Erasmus
titles; forty-one contain two or more different works. Eight include works of
Vives, four of More.
46
Cambridge University Archives, Booklists from Wills and Inventories in Vice-
Chancellor's Court Registers. I am grateful to Elizabeth Leedham-Green for
invaluable assistance in locating, deciphering and evaluating the Cambridge
inventories; her forthcoming edition of them will be an enormous boon to
scholars of early modern university curricula. Lucas Challoner's booklist at Trinity
College, Dublin, also includes nearly all of the published works of Erasmus, in
addition to those of predominantly Calvinist theologians and of the ancients. Very
few Neo-scholastic works are listed: TCD, MS 357, fols. 2-15v.
68 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

of ancient literature or humanist exegesis. He was in fact a

thoroughgoing humanist, in his opposition to the Aristotle of the
Sorbonne, in his drive to apply dialectical principles to practical
problems, in his dislike of superfluous commentary and glosses on
classical texts, and in his de-emphasis of metaphysics.47 Ramist logic,
like that of Vives, Agricola, and Ramus' mentor at Paris (1529-37)
Johannes Sturm, was both humanist and empiricist; in fact, the
Ramist concept of the essential unity of rhetoric and logic has been
described as the link between the literary humanism of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries and the scientific empiricism of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth. Ramus' Aristotle, like Vives', was not that of
the medieval sophists, but the * true' or' purified' Aristotle understood
from a careful and complete reading of the original sources in
Greek. His attitude toward Aristotle was ambivalent: having under-
mined the absoluteness of the philosopher's authority as a scholastic
invention, Ramus none the less joined other humanists in citing
Aristotle's authority whenever he agreed with him. He charged the
Sorbonnists with ignorantly condemning him for following the true
Aristotle, rather than for refuting him.48
Ramus' Socrates was that of Xenophon, rather than of Plato,
which at least partly explains his very humanistic emphasis on the
practical. The ancients are there to be used, said Ramus, not to be
worshipped; the liberal arts should therefore be reformed to render
them practical. The sophistical subtleties of Paris should give way to
47
cf. Kearney, pp. 46-70. Note that whereas such puritan Ramists as William
Perkins are used by Kearney (p. 53) to illustrate Ramus' anti-Aristotelian bias,
Perkins, like the puritan Ramist William Gouge of King's, actually drew freely and
approvingly from Aristotle for his social theory (see, for example, the Aristotelian
derivation of their concepts of the nature of the family and of parental duties in the
following chapter), cf. Curtis, p. 118. Curtis' overall assessment of Ramus is much
more accurate:
In a very real sense Ramus was a humanist reconstructing logic in line with the insights
humanistic linguistical studies had brought to the learned world of his time. He stands in a line
of intellectual descent collateral to that which for England runs from Valla through Colet to
Erasmus and then to English humanists of the second and third generations of the
sixteenth century (p. 254).
48
R. Hooykaas, Humanisme, science et reforme: Pierre de la Ramee (Leiden, 1958), pp. 1, 5 -
16, 27-9. Ramus criticized the University of Paris for forbidding the reading and
discussion of 'impious' passages of philosophy, even that of Aristotle. He
espoused the necessity of reading texts in their entirety and gleaning what is true
and useful from them (Hooykaas, p. 8). Richard Bauckham puts William Fulke of
St John's, Cambridge, in the same category as Ramus: he was 'characterized b y . . .
attempts to return to a purer Aristotelianism than was to be found in the scholastic
commentaries' and was not slavishly bound to Aristotle. Fulke's works of natural
philosophy, according to Bauckham, 'sprang naturally out of his broad humanist
interests.' Richard Bauckham, 'The Career and Thought of Dr. William Fulke,'
(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1972), pp. 8, 28.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 69
the simple explanation of principles and their practical appli-
cation.49 Theology should likewise be studied in good Christian
humanist fashion as 'doctrina bene vivendi. . . Finis doctrinae non est notitia
rerum ipsi subjectarum, sed usus et exercitatio.'50
Such humanist sentiments were as characteristic of Ramists as of
Ramus. A classic example is provided by John Rainolds, the puritan
reader in Greek at Corpus Christi College, Oxford from 1572 to
1578, who has been portrayed as the leading Ramist of Elizabethan
Oxford. While Rainolds was actually far from indiscriminate in his
praise of Ramus, he did defend the Frenchman by correctly pointing
out that he had attacked not Aristotle, but the Sorbonne's Aristotle;
Ramus' position was comparable to the earlier criticism of the
Ciceronians by Erasmus and Bude. Rainolds himself was best known
for his lectures on the Greek text of Aristotle's Rhetoric, in which he,
like Ramus and other humanists, expounded the 'true Aristotle.'
McConica has demonstrated clearly that' Vives, not Ramus, was his
true master in the teaching of Aristotle.'51 The two commentators
who dominated his lectures were Vives and Cicero: he echoed Vives'
opinion that the finest Greek is that of Aristotle and Isocrates, and
he followed his explanation of the practical benefits of rhetoric in
the attainment of the good life.52 Ramus, of course, also espoused
explicitly Vivesian views on the study of classical literature. But it is
significant that Rainolds spoke from a direct knowledge of the
Spanish humanist's writings, and not from a Ramist mediation.
Rainolds, like Ramus, was a thoroughgoing humanist.
But one need not be a Ramist to be a humanist in Elizabethan
Oxbridge. John Case, whose treatises and commentary on Aristotle
served as the 'unofficial textbooks of the Elizabethan faculty of
Arts,' was both a humanist critic of sophistical subtlety and an
explicitly anti-Ramist Aristotelian.53 Case's combination of
49
Hooykaas, pp. 2, 23—5, 59—61, 105. Later puritan reliance on Xenophon as a
source for social theory is noteworthy, cf. Vives' De tradendis disciplinis, in Opera
(Basel, 1555), vol. 1, p. 439; W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700
(Princeton, 1956), chapter 4. That such goals were communicated not only to
students, but also to the ordinary auditors of sermons by university-trained
divines, is implied by the charge of one Aristotelian that 'because of Ramus, every
cobbler can cog a syllogism, every carter crack of propositions. Hereby is logic
prophaned,' in A. Fraunce, The Lawiers Logicke (1588), quoted in Hill, Intellectual
Origins, p. 32. One is reminded of Erasmus' desire for a knowledge of the Scriptures
to descend to weavers and plowmen— Paraclesis, p. 97, in Christian Humanism and the
Reformation, ed John C Olin (Gloucester, Mass., 1973).
50
Ramus, Commentariorum de religione Christiana (Frankfurt, 1576), p. 6. cf. Bucer's
definition of the end of a theological education: to learn 'bene beateque vivere' {De
51
Regno Christi, p. 166). McConica, 'Humanism and Aristotelianism,' p. 309.
52 53
Ibid., pp. 305-6. Ibid., pp. 299-302.
70 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Aristotelianism and the humanist traditions of Elizabethan Oxford,

the subject of a recent study by Charles Schmitt, provides perhaps
the best illustration of the need to modify old historiographical
categories to take into account the eclecticism of Renaissance thinkers.
Case's Aristotelianism was such that he is often labelled 'scholastic.'
Yet in analyzing his intellectual milieu, Schmitt notes the impor-
tance of peripatetic works in the thought of humanists from Bruni
on and portrays Erasmus accurately as an enemy not of Aristotle, but
of the 'subtle Scotist metaphysics' and modernist logic of the late
Middle Ages. Case's Aristotelianism he locates in line with this
humanist criticism, vigorously opposed to those aspects of late
medieval scholasticism that had in any case largely disappeared from
the curriculum by the mid-sixteenth century.54 Elizabethan edu-
cation, he says, 'represents humanism run rampant,' and one of the
products of its philological renaissance was 'an eclectic brand of
Aristotelianism.'55 The 'reinvigorated logic' of Case's generation was
closer to the reformed humanistic dialectic of Agricola and
Melanchthon than to the terminist logic of the later Middle Ages;
not only was it based on a' purified' Aristotle, but its emphasis was on
the logic of moral discourse rooted in rhetoric.56 And it is clear from
Schmitt's work that Case used and taught his understanding of
Aristotle as a humanist, that is, as an illuminator of contemporary
events, politics, society and morality. He retained the scholastic
organizational unit, the quaestio, but frequently related discussions
to current problems. Like other humanists of his generation, Case
had come to accept the value of Aristotelian logic, but had translated
it into humanistic terms, with the focus on practical application of
classical principles.57 Schmitt concludes that there were many ten-
dencies within the peripatetic tradition in the sixteenth century,

54
Charles B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in the Renaissance (Montreal, 1983),
pp. 5,15, 17-19, 33. He notes that Costello and Kearney seem to have forgotten
that post-Reformation 'scholasticism' in England was radically different from that
of the earlier period, and nothing like continental protestant scholasticism
emerged in England until the end of the sixteenth century (p. 20). A caustic
criticism of Scotus, Schmitt notes (p. 153), characterized all of Case's work.
55 56
Schmitt, p. 20, n. 24 and p. 28. Schmitt, pp. 38, 141.
57
Schmitt, p. 147. On the mundane issues addressed in disputations set by Case and
his colleagues, see pp. 135-6, 142, 144-5, 180. Schmitt himself is equivocal about
Case's humanism: at one point he emphatically denies that Case should be seen as a
'humanistic interpreter of Aristotle' but immediately qualifies this with an ac-
knowledgement of Case's 'awareness of humanistic critical method' (p. 178). And
much of his work deals with Case's rhetorical intent and practical focus - both
hallmarks of the humanist approach to any classical text. McConica's more
straightforward admission of Case as humanist does not seem seriously threatened
by anything in Schmitt's study.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 71
ranging from slavish dependency on medieval interpretations of a
limited range of Latin texts to a philologically sophisticated and
highly selective use of that in Aristotle which could be construed as
useful in the contemporary situation.58 The stereotypic 'scholastic'
does not fit the latter end of the spectrum, which produced
Aristotelianisms opposed to many of Ramus' conclusions but none
the less recognizably both Aristotelian and humanistic.
The example of Case illustrates not only that one need not be a
Ramist to be a humanistic Aristotelian in Elizabethan Oxbridge, but
also that Ramism may not have held as prominent a position in the
Elizabethan universities as has been assumed. Case's reputation
alone would have guaranteed that Ramus was taken with a grain of
salt by Oxford students of his day; indeed, student notebooks reveal
that many who cited Ramus' opinions were not in wholehearted
agreement with them. Robert Batti, having castigated the Schoolmen,
questioned whether the interpretation of Aristotle offered by
Ramus had any more valid claim to being seen as eternal truth. Of
course, even Rainolds himself vigorously condemned Ramus'
immoderate criticism of Aristotle.59 Moreover, while humanist and
ancient authors are ubiquitous in Elizabethan notebooks, citations
of Ramus' works are frequently absent- even from notebooks which
have been identified as characteristically Ramist.60 Where Ramus is
found in the notebooks, hi5 works are cited among those of Christian
humanists and the humanists' favorite classical authors. Hildersham
outlined Ramus' dialectic, but quoted Erasmus just as often on
theological questions; and Batti was much more a Ciceronian than a
Ramist Accordingly, Cambridge bookbinders like John Denys stocked
many of Ramus' works, but many more of Cicero, Seneca, Isocrates,
Plutarch and Aristotle; Denys' 1578 inventory also includes nine dif-
ferent Erasmus titles, More's Utopia, and the works of Valla and
Vives.61 Ramus certainly functioned to some extent as a conduit for
Christian humanism in the universities, but the fact is that he found
his way into a prominent place in relatively few Elizabethan
notebooks. If number, length, and weight attached to citations are
to be the criteria, the direct authority of Erasmus and Vives, Cicero
and Seneca, and Aristotle far outweighed that of Ramus in the six-
teenth century. If anything, his popularity may have been somewhat
58
Schmitt, pp. 218-19. 59 Bodl., MS RawL 9.85, fols. 66v-67; McConica, p. 307.
60
Bodl., MS Rawl. D.318(6), a classical commonplace book by a student at King's,
Cambridge, dated 1597; cf. Kearney, p. 63.
61
BL, MS Harl. 3230, fols. 2-4, 11, 24, etc.; Bodl., MS Rawl. D.985, fols. 66v-67, cf
14-15 v, 69-79; Gray and Palmer, Abstracts, pp. 35-60; note also Thomas Thomas'
1588 inventory, pp. 64—71.
72 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

greater in the Stuart universities.62 But by this time, we are told, the
universities had become irretrievably enmeshed in the web of Neo-
scholasticism, a vastly more pernicious enemy of humanism than
even Kearney's version of Ramism.63 Let us turn now to the
curriculum of the seventeenth century and pursue the fate of
humanism in this new, more hostile environment.

There is no doubt that after 1600, Oxbridge students were

increasingly being exposed to the writings of Jesuit and other
Neo-scholastic theologians and dialecticians. References to both
contemporary and medieval scholastics abound in early seventeenth-
century notebooks. In Cambridge, for instance, Robert Boothe of
Trinity was obviously acquainted with Zabarella as well as St
Thomas; Alexander Bolde of Pembroke knew Bellarmine, St
Thomas and Peter Lombard; and Nicholas Felton of Pembroke cited
Vasquez, Cajetan, Molina and Durandus, along with Duns Scotus.64
The phenomenon was characteristic of distinctively puritan colleges
as well: William Saner oft of Emmanuel noted his purchase of works
of Suarez in one notebook and in another cited Molina repeatedly on
Aristotelian logic, and another Emmanuel student recorded having
read Cajetan, the Dominican de Soto, St Thomas and Peter
Lombard. As Master of Sidney Sussex Samuel Ward noted his
purchase of Medina's and Bellarmine's books (at Blackwell's) and in
his theological and logic notebooks frequently cited Bellarmine,
Becanus, Molina, Mendoza, Canisius, Banez, Zabarella, Cajetan,
Suarez and other 'Scholastici? both medieval and contemporary.65
Oxonians like Thomas Brathwaite of Queen's likewise knew the
opinions of Bellarmine, Medina, Zabarella and Albertus Magnus,
and the examples could easily be multiplied from anonymous
notebooks from both universities.66
62
Sidney, Ward MS A; BL, MSS Harl. 5356 (1605), Harl. 190 (1618), Landsdowne
797 (mid-seventeenth-century); BodL, MS Sancroft 87 (1630-40), pp. 1-66.
63
Kearney, pp. 77-90; Costello, passim; Curtis, pp. 1-2, cf R. R. Bolgar, 'Education
and Learning,' in The New Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge, 1968), vol. 3,
p. 441.
64
BL, MS Harl. 5356, e.g., fols. 2-5v; St John's, Cambridge, MS S.34; Pembroke,
Cambridge, MS LC II.5. On the new Thomists, see Quentin Skinner, The Foun-
dations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 2, pp. 135-73.
65
BodL, MSS Tanner 467, fol. 39, and Sancroft 87, pp. 67-91; CUL, MS Gg. 1.29;
Ward MSS A, B, C, D, G (fols. I4v-15), I, J, L.3-5, L.15, M . l ^ , P, S. See also
Holdsworth's instructions for students, Emmanuel College, MS 1.2.27(1), published
as an appendix to H. F. Fletcher's The Intellectual Development of John Milton (Urbana,
1961), vol. 2, pp. 623-55.
66
CUL, MS Dd.12.57, fols. 9v-10,14, 38, 67, 73; Queen's, Oxford, MS 196 (notes on
Crackenthorpe's Z,0£/<:) cites Zabarella, St Thomas and Scotus (fols. 3, 54, 116-17,
etpassim)\ BL, MS Harl. 977 (Exeter) cites Bellarmine and'Scholastics' (e.g., fols. 1,
26, 37v); BL, MS Landsdowne 797 cites Cajetan, Tolletus, and Zabarella, along
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 73

Of more significance than the fact that scholastic authors were

being read, however, is the issue of why and how they were being
used in the curriculum. Scholars have concluded from the reading
habits of the students and from the continuation of a medieval pat-
tern of education (dialectical, Aristotelian, and organized around
lecture, disputation and declamation) that seventeenth-century
Cambridge 'held with, and understood, the scholastics.' 67 'Under-
stood,' yes, but 'held with?' It has been argued above that a dialectical
education can be humanistic, rather than scholastic, and that the
Aristotelianism of Ramus, Rainolds, Case and others was rather
Vivesian than Thomistic. Why, then, must the reading of Jesuit and
Dominican authors and the use of their opinions in declamations
and disputations automatically imply agreement with their ideas and
techniques? O n the contrary, there is considerable evidence that
students and their tutors viewed the reading of Neo-scholastics as a
necessary evil- and many students even questioned how necessary it
was. The revival of Thomism in the sixteenth century was, after all,
the response of papist enemies to the protestant doctrines of sola
scriptura and the priesthood of all believers: it was the philosophical
counter to the perceived anti-authoritarianism of the Lutherans.
The reason for protestant students to read these authors was their
need to know the enemy. 'Read also the Adversaries/ Thomas
Cartwright had recommended to Elizabethan divinity students. 68
His hope, and that of his successors, was n o t that divinity students
would internalize scholastic assumptions about theology or logic,
but that they would come to understand those assumptions in order
to refute them. They were to study scholastic argumentation to
equip themselves to participate in debate; b u t their position in the
debate was squarely opposed to that of Bellarmine or Cajetan or
Suarez, and their opposition was based b o t h on their protestant con-
victions and on their humanist intellectual foundations.
Many of the theological notebooks which have been used to
demonstrate the scholasticism of seventeenth-century Oxbridge are
thus in fact substantially devoted to refutations of scholastic

with the medieval Schoolmen; Overall noted opinions of Suarez and Cajetan,
CUL, MS Dd.3.85(5); one Trinity, Cambridge student cited Cajetan (St John's,
Cambridge, MS S.18, p. 57), and another (Trin. MS JL16.19) cited Zabarella,
Suarez, St Thomas and Albertus Magnus.
67
Costello, p. 121; cf. Kearney, pp. 77-90; Hill, Intellectual Origins, pp. 301-14.
68
Cartwrightiana, p. 114. On theological reasons for the revival of Thomism, see
Skinner, vol. 2, pp. 138-48. Humanists confronted with the perceived anti-
authoritarianism of Lutherans were forced to take sides at the Council of Trent:
see Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy (Cambridge, 1972), and
chapter 7 below.
74 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

theology.69 These arguments are generally couched in good Thomistic

style and cite the sort of evidence not unlikely to convince the popish
opponent - the authority of medieval and contemporary scholastic
theologians, the Church Fathers, and councils. The object was, after
all, to liberate minds enslaved by Romish superstition and error as
efficiently as possible. Occasionally the guidelines for discussion
were broadened: Thomas Brathwaite of Queen's, for example,
added to his conservatively styled argument against Bellarmine's
doctrine of the efficacy of the sacraments a demand for greater
fidelity to the Greek text and context of Scripture.70 But even where
the grounds for disagreement were not so explicitly humanistic,
both the content and the context of such arguments belie the con-
tention that their proponents were wedded to scholasticism. Their
positions are protestant, however pragmatically Catholic their logic.
Arts and divinity students were well aware that 'most of these books
of logic we use were written by popish authors' and must, therefore,
be used with great care; their tutors had warned them that only
'when you are of ripe understanding, to read them with some judg-
ment' would the Schoolmen (from Lombard to Cajetan) be useful.
But there was no doubt as to their usefulness as illustrations of how
to handle theological controversies. The tutor who penned this
advice certainly had no intention of converting his students to
scholasticism. He was careful to have them also read such 'practical
lively English authors' as Perkins, Bolton, Preston, Rogers, Sibbes,
Dod and Gataker; furthermore, he regarded as essential parts of the
curriculum the writings of Vives, Erasmus and the ancients.71
As a matter of fact, the seventeenth-century Oxbridge logic,
theology and commonplace books which cite Neo-scholastics never
do so apart from citations of Christian humanist and/or classical
authors,72 and this humanistic context must not be disregarded

69
BL, MS Harl. 977, fols. 26, 37 v, etc. (with an outline of scholastic definitions and
methods on the unfoliated flyleaf); BL, MS Harl. 3230, fols. lOv, 15v, 21, 49, 64,
73v, etc. (fol. 110 is a brief summary of scholastic methodology); Ward, MSS F, I,
L.15, M.3 and4,J, K, S; see also, e.g., St John's, Cambridge, MSS. 34 andCUL, MS
Dd. 12.57, fols. 9v-10,l4,38,^>m/w. 70 CUL, MS Dd.l2.57,fols.9v-10(l642).
71
A 'Library for Younger Schollers' Compiled by an English Scholar-Priest about 1655, ed.
Alma Dejordy and H. F. Fletcher (Urbana, 1961), pp. 1-2, 49; <^ pp. 43-4, 10, 18,
23, 32-3,66. The editors of this selection from St John's, Cambridge, MSK.38 sug-
gest that the document was written by Thomas Barlow, librarian of the Bodleian
from 1642 to 1660.
72
Notebooks combining Christian humanist and Neo-scholastic sources include BL,
MS Lansdowne 797; Bodl., MSS Sancroft 87 and Tanner 462; Sidney Sussex,
Ward MS G; St John's, Cambridge, MS S.34; and CUL, MSS Gg. 1.29 and Dd
12.57. Notebooks combining ancient and Neo-scholastic sources include BL, MSS
Harl. 5 356 and Add. 25,285; Sidney Sussex, WardMS F; Queen's, Oxford, MS 196;
St John's, Cambridge, MSS S.I8 and S.34; and Trin. MS R. 16.19.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 75

when gauging the effect of scholasticism on students. It was in part

the continuity of humanist influence on the curriculum which con-
ditioned the way students would approach the new Thomists. This is
perhaps most apparent in the Erasmian critique which many
students leveled at the methods and content of Neo-scholasticism.
William Bright of Emmanuel, for instance, criticized 'contentious
learning, as that of the school m e n . . . fantastical, full of imposture/ 7 3
H e expressed very humanistic objections to the proof-texting often
required of students, in a poetic introduction to his 1644 notebook:
Here's many an author torn in many pieces;
Instead of abstracts, these are ragged fleeces;
Nothing but linsey-woolsey; ropes of sand:
In methodical notes. I'd best disband
This ragged regiment at least confess
To every author a debt more or less.
It should come as no surprise that Bright acknowledged his greatest
debts to Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, and the usual array of classical
authors.74 Nor was he alone among seventeenth-century Cantab-
rigians in despising the scholastic aspects of the curriculum. Bacon's
description of scholasticism as the 'cobwebs of learning, admirable
for the fineness of the thread and work but of no substance or profit,'
and Milton's Vivesian criticism of scholasticism, are doubtless too
well known to need discussion.75 Less known, however, is that of
Samuel Ward. In a notebook kept during his years as a fellow of
Emmanuel, Ward copied a lengthy letter of humanistic advice which
said of the Schoolmen,
One had need to beware of these writers that do give their resolutions so like
magistrates with a respondeo dicendum, as if they were arbitrators; and rather to
read them which deliver their opinion with reservation and in matters not
decided do not play the pedants over others . . . If you will read the con-
troversies that do at this present time exercise the world, you shall do well to
bear in mind that the writers do all of them exceed in affection to their own
side, and do accommodate matter to their own taste, and in the ancient
writers do see not that which is there, but that which they desire.

73
CUL, A d d . M S 6 1 6 0 , p . 142.
74
Ibid., unfoliated flyleaf; pp. 21, 96, 166 (More); fols. 15 3v-154v (Erasmus). Bright
also indicated admiration for Richard Pace (p. 110), Pico della Mirandola (p. 176),
and a host of ancient, mostly Greek authors. (This MS is partly foliated, partly
paginated; much of it is blank.)
75
Francis Bacon, 'The Advancement of Learning,' in Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. Ellis
and D. Heath, 15 vols (Boston, 1863), vol. 6, p. 122; John Milton, Of Education
(1644); see also comments by Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (New York,
1975), p. 190. Milton is also known for his criticism of humanism; however, it was
that branch of the humanist movement which inspired a mere imitation of the
ancients in style (an aspect despised by Erasmus himself) which drew his fire.
76 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

The author explained Jesuit reliance on St Thomas 'as a writer very

easy, and who doth not entangle the mind of the reader with doubts,
but resolves him indeed too much.' The letter concludes in the same
sardonic manner with 'a general and infallible rule' which goes far
toward explaining the function of scholasticism in the seventeenth-
century curriculum: 'for all the difficulties that may occur in the pro-
cess of your studies, I take it to be the best to consult with the Jesuits,
to resolve the clean contrary to that which they say.'76
When students failed to see the error in the popish authors
assigned them, their masters made it very clear that those who 'held
with' the enemy had no place in the reformed universities of
England. John Pocklington of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, was per-
mitted in 1616 to 'articulate before divers young gentlemen and
young students of Pembroke Hall with great earnestness of words
and countenance to argue for pontifical doctrines' - until his master
and colleagues noticed that he never drew 'to any contrary con-
clusion whereby to inform them otherwise.' Then he was charged
with error by the heads of colleges assembled in consistory. The
court acknowledged that for the pedagogical technique of dis-
putation to work, the arguments of Neo-scholastic theorists of papal
supremacy must be understood thoroughly and even expressed
clearly, but they made it very clear that the outcome of such a dis-
putation must not be a defense of their views.77 John Normanton of
Caius was similarly hauled before the Vice-Chancellor's court in
1635 for'commending of Bellarmine his books of controversies and
disparaging the protestant writers who have refuted him and
charged him with contradictions, whom he compared to mice nib-
bling at him, but were not able to hurt him.' The court forced his
recantation - the pedagogical principle, 'know the enemy,' had
clearly backfired in this case.78 But very few such cases came to the
Vice-Chancellor's court; for the most part it seems to have been
made very clear to students that they were to read the works of
Bellarmine and the rest critically, with an eye to the defense of the
true faith.
Criticism of Neo-scholasticism was not limited to Cambridge.
Thomas Newnan of Exeter, an avid reader of Isocrates, recorded his
reaction when his tutor read Duns Scotus and Keckerman's com-

76
Sidney Sussex, Ward MS I (1608?).
77
CUL, MS VC Ct 1.8 (1616), fols. 255-8, quote from fol. 257v. Pocklington was
ordered to recant.
78
CUL, MS Com Ct 1.18, fol. 130.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 77

mentary on Aristotelian logic: 'such divisions, subdivisions, and a

crew of terms and words, such as I never knew! Yea, I remained in
that amazed plight. . . ashamed to find myself still mute and other
little disputants disputing that. . . could by heart, like parrots, in the
schools stand prattling, though some. . . were pretty foolish.' Henry
Vaughn of Oriel denounced the 'Schoolmaster, or untrusser' who
'though otherwise he hath but little skill in logic, is well read in
Aristotle's Posteriors, [and whose] rod is the syllogistical trident,
which ever concludes in the angry mood offecio, under the figure of
human nakedness.' His notes on Aristotelian logic are punctuated
by lengthy passages on ancient history and quotes from Seneca,
Cato, Demosthenes and Isocrates.79 Other Oxonians condemned
the useless logical subtleties of the new Thomists in terse marginal
notes indicating their preference for the' evident and plain words' of
the text rather than the 'scholastic distinction-making' which they
associated with the Council of Trent.80 Some students, however,
broadcast their dissatisfaction beyond the privacy of their own
notebooks- and suffered the consequences for doing so. A Corpus
Christi student named Ganning was kept from his graces in 1631'for
railing in his Clerum against school divinity, whereas King James and
King Charles commanded young students here in divinity to begin
with Lombard and Thomas.' Ganning was reinstated after moderat-
ing his criticism, professing that 'he had no ill meaning against
school divinity, but against too much of it in sermons' and claiming
that in any case he had never heard of the royal orders. The
Cambridge student Thomas Randolph reaped more positive conse-
quences from his 'Catch against the Schoolmen': the volume which
included it, Aristippus or theJovialPhilosopher (1631) proved immensely
popular among seventeenth-century students and so profitable for
its author. 81
Certainly someone was pushing a scholastic curriculum in the
seventeenth century, and Ganning's case would tend to support
Kearney's contention that it was the court.82 The exalted status
accorded to the authority of Aristotle by the Laudian statutes was
certainly an attempt to foster conservative interpretations of

79
Bodl., Top. Oxon. fol. 39 (Newnan, 1624), fols. 19-19v; StJohn's, Cambridge, MS
K.38 (Vaughn, 1634-9), p. 140 etpassim.
80
For example, BL, Sloane MS 1981; St John's, Cambridge, MS S.34 (Oxford, 1635-
6), pp. 71, 78-81 (my pagination).
81
PRO, SP 16/193/91 (14 June 1631); Randolph's work was published in
London.
82
Kearney, pp. 78-9.
78 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

hierarchy and obedience.83 Unconvincing, however, are Kearney's

further arguments that scholasticism was revived with any great deal
of success, that it was an effective support for the authority of cen-
tral government, or that it was intended as a weapon against
puritanism. Neo-scholastics were used in puritan as in non-puritan
colleges for instruction in theological debating techniques, and it is
impossible to identify all of their critics as puritans. Furthermore, if
it was indeed 'in its emphasis on religious and social authority that
the great power of scholasticism lay,'84 then the absence of a consen-
sus on the locus of religious and social authority and the political
upheaval of Caroline England would certainly indicate that the new
interest in scholasticism was at best a partial, tenuous, ineffective
and short-lived phenomenon.
It would seem, then, that if any aspect of the scholastic revival
demands explanation, it is its abortive nature. And while theological
objections to Thomism presented major barriers to its acceptance in
the universities, these were surely buttressed by the continued pre-
dominance of Christian humanism and its classical sources in the
university curriculum during the period. Early Stuart scholars were
not less avid readers of Erasmus, Vives, More and the ancients than
their predecessors had been; moreover, they evince the same
humanist assumptions about the nature and aims of education which
the Christian humanists had preached a hundred years earlier.
Just as humanist presuppositions and methodology had created a
distinctively Vivesian Aristotelianisrn in Tudor Oxbridge, so they
would determine the way students in the next century would
approach Aristotle and other ancient authors. The Aristotelianism
of humanist commentators did not necessarily imply a 'conservative
view of government and society,' as Kefcfftey has asserted; it was no
more indiscriminate in its application of Aristotelian ideas than in its
analysis of the text And there is no evidence that the Aristotelianism
83
cf. the Thomist Aristotelianism of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity (Folger Library edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1977-81). Hooker lectured on
Aristotelian logic at Corpus Christi College and has been appropriately called 'the
precursor of the movement towards scholasticism' (Kearney, p. 81; cf Schmitt, p.
65) in his defense of authority. Laud was Chancellor of Oxford from 1629, and cer-
tainly made it his mission to increase the control of central authority over the
universities: Kevin Sharpe, 'Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford,' in
History and Imagination, ed Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden
(New York, 1982), pp. 146-64. See also ch. 7, below.
84
Kearney, pp. 81-2. Kearney asserts (p. 90) that puritans generally seem to have
been anti-scholastic. This is quite true of Milton, the early Ward and others. But I
have not been able to identify Ganning, Randolph, Vaughn, or Bright as puritans,
although there is no evidence to the contrary other than their silence on usual
puritan issues.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 79
of the Stuart universities was any more scholastic than that of
Rainolds and Case. In fact, the commentaries of these Elizabethan
humanists continued to be used by seventeenth-century tutors
along with the more recent works of Keckerman, Crackenthorpe,
Brierwood and Sanderson.85 The works of these seventeenth-
century commentators, while occasionally criticized by their
students as dry and overly subtle,86 none the less evinced con-
siderably more humanistic assumptions than did the Jesuit commen-
taries. Keckerman, for instance, argued that the works of Aristotle
must not be judged 'from the interpretations of commentators,
scholastics or Sorbonnists, but from the intention of the author, the
collation of texts and the agreement and harmony of the whole of
peripatetic philosophy.'87
A comparison of the notes of Oxbridge logic students with those
of contemporary members of Catholic universities reveals some-
thing of the extent to which this humanist presupposition per-
meated the teaching of Aristotelian dialectic in England. Extant
notebooks of English Catholic students at Cagliari, Rome and
Salamanca consist either of unadulterated Thomistic commentary
on the Latin text of Aristotle, or of the combined comments of the
medieval Schoolmen and such contemporary figures as Cajetan,
Tolleta, de Soto, Medina, Molina, Suarez, Becanus and Vasquez.88
References to the Aristotelian text are only rarely direct; most are
mediated by commentators. The Salamanca notebook which sur-
vives in the Cambridge University Library is unusual in that it goes
beyond straight commentary on the text and whenever possible
attempts to demonstrate Aristotelian support for Tridentine or
papal rulings on theological issues; however, it is remarkable among
85
The German Bartholomew Keckerman's Gymnasium logicum (1606) and Systerna
ethica (1607) were both very popular in the seventeenth century. Richard Crac-
kenthorpe, a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, wrote Introductio in metaphysicam
(Oxford, 1619) and Logicae libri quinque (London, 1622). Edward Brierwood (or
Brerewood), first Gresham professor of astronomy, published his Elementa logicae
in 1614 in London. The Logicae artis compendium of Robert Sanderson, logic reader
in Lincoln College from 1608, appeared in 1618. Ranking with these works in
popularity was another sixteenth-century Catholic humanist commentary, the
Dialectica of John Seton (1545).
86
CUL, MS Dd. 6.30, fol. 1; Randolph, Aristippus, p. 21.
87
Keckerman, Systema Systematum, ed. J. H. Alsted(Hanover, 1613), p. 23. (/Ward's
belief that it is 'best to read those histories which rely on contemporary sources. . .
[and] in reading to bear a neutral affection' (MS I, 1608).
88
Balliol, MS 332 (Cagliari, a Jesuit seminary in Sardinia); St John's, Cambridge, MS
1.37 (Rome, 1623) does contain a handful of references to Seneca; CUL, Add. MS
4359 (Salamanca, 1652) also has a few references to Plato, Pythagoras and Seneca
(p. 70); the real authorities in all three, however, are clearly the scholastic and
Neo-scholastic philosophers.
80 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

English notebooks in that even when theology is discussed, the

Scriptures are never cited.89 Contrast the heavy reliance of protes-
tant theological notebooks on the Bible and of Oxbridge logic
notebooks on the Greek text of Aristotle read contextually and in
light of other ancient literature and history.90 James Duporfs advice
to his students at Trinity, Cambridge, might have been written by
Erasmus: 'Greek and Hebrew,' he said, 'are two eyes for seeing God's
word . . . Read an author in his own language . . . You cannot be a
scholar without Greek.'91 Humanist veneration of the ancient texts
in their original languages had clearly permeated the English
universities.
Having attempted to determine Aristotle's intentions, Cambridge
and Oxford students were also discriminating in their acceptance of
his conclusions. Again, Duport's advice is typical of the conditional
respect accorded the philosopher in seventeenth-century
Cambridge: having told his students to quote Aristotle always in his
own words and in Greek, he added, 'reject not lightly the authority
of Aristotle if his words willpermit of afavourable and a sure interpretation?
The goal, in other words, is first of all a correct textual analysis, and
secondly an acceptance of only those ideas which are in accord with
Christian truth.92 Aristotle continued to be used as he had been by
Case and Rainolds to prepare students to argue the truth; logic was
to be stripped of late medieval technicalities and suited for use in
public debate. But, as one Oxford student asserted, "tis not Aristotle
but truth that should be the rule of our opinions.'93
English students were aware, furthermore, of the differences be-

89
CUL, Add. MS 4359, pp. 17, 93-5, 118, 190 and 226 comment on orthodox
Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation, faith and free wilL This notebook is also
unusual in containing several folios of complaints in English about the length and
pace of the lessons and the faults of the master, written covertly in the form of
appendages of two to ten words at the end of each paragraph of Latin commentary
on Aristotle. Thus, for example, 'I have seldom felt a more piercing cold at any.. .
time than I felt when I writ this lesson... I believe our Master.. . was a little more
than half weary with dictating... In the. . . precedent leaf you may behold the true
. . . shape of a very handsome blot' (pp. 77-9). One wonders whether this student
has some prescience of a twentieth-century scholar in need of relief from the
tedium of reading scholastic logic notebooks.
90
The Aristotelian notebooks of Robert Boothe(BL, HarL 5356,1605), John Robinson
(Queen's, Oxford, MS 200, 1625), Richard Seymes (Queen's, Oxford, MS 438,
1622), Edmund Sheapheard (Queen's, Oxford, MS 437, 1617), Simonds D'Ewes
(BL, Harl. MS 191, 1619), and Daniel Foote (BL, Sloane MS 586, 1646), among
others whose authors are less easily identified, all rely on the Greek text
91
James Duport, Rules for Students (1660), Trin. MSO.10A.33, pp. 3, 12.
92
Ibid., p. 11 (emphasis mine); cf. p. 14.
93
McConica, 'Humanism and Aristotelianism,' pp. 313-14; Wilkins, Discovery of a
World in the Moone (1683), pp. 30-32.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 81
tween Aristotle and his master, frequently noting Plato's divergent
opinions (again, usually from the Greek text) in their marginal
notes.94 Robert Boothe's notes on Aristotle's logic, physics, rhetoric
and ethics include not only analysis of the Greek texts and com-
parisons with the opinions of Plato, Euripides, Plutarch, Pythagoras,
and a variety of Roman rhetoricians and moralists, but also commen-
tary and attempts at application by such various authors as Scaliger,
Zabarella, Ramus and Perkins. The notebook is very appropriately
entitled Synopsis totius philosophiae, and it is not at all atypical of the
sort of humanist analysis which Cambridge students of the seven-
teenth century were applying to Aristotle.95 The logic notebook of
Richard Seymes of Wadham is similarly filled with the opinions of
Plato, Socrates, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca and Quintilian. And
Aristotle is by no means the sole authority in John Cole's Logical
Exercises: in addition to contrasting the opinions of ancient Greek
and Roman authors, he quoted medieval and contemporary scholas-
tics; English commentators like Brierwood and Sanderson; and
(perhaps most significantly) the textual analyses of the humanists
Valla, Agricola, Sturm, Melanchthon, Piscator and Ramus.96
Seventeenth-century English students were using the exegetical
techniques developed by those Renaissance humanists to under-
stand Aristotle- examining his historical and literary context, using
the Greek text critically, rejecting the distorted Aristotle of the
Thomists, and accepting as authoritative only those conclusions
both genuinely Aristotelian and consonant with Christian doctrine
and morality. The Aristotelianism of seventeenth-century Oxbridge
was clearly of the Christian humanist variety.
Aristotle, therefore, was no more the reigning authority for bud-
ding social and political theorists at the universities than were the
Neo-scholastics. By 1654, as a matter of fact, Seth Ward observed
that while Aristotle was respected at Oxford, the university did not
insist that his works be studied. Thomas Barlow in 1655 opined that
'Aristotle's Metaphysics is the most impertinent book {sit venid) in all
his works; indeed, a rhapsody of logical scraps.'97 The sources most
widely used by students for advice on behavior in forum, market-
place and household were instead the Erasmian favorites- Isocrates,

94
Sheapheard of Queen's cited Plato, Xenocrates and Cicero in conflict with Aristotle
(Queen's, Oxford, MS437); Queen's, Oxford, MS 196 (notes on Crackenthorpe's
Logic) cites Plato and Socrates; CUL, MS Dd. 5.47 cites Plato, Socrates and
95
Virgil. BL, Harl. 5356.
96
Queen's, Oxford, MS 438 (Seymes, 1622); BL, Lansdowne 797.
97
Vindiciae Academiarum, pp. 32, 58—60; Library for Younger Schollers, p. 4.
82 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Xenophon, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca and Quintilian. As in the pre-

ceding century, students were referred directly to the ancients for
practical instruction on mundane matters, and the notebooks
devoted to such a use of classical authors are more characteristic of
seventeenth-century college curricula than the handful of strict
logic notebooks which have misled previous historians.
Of particular interest in this context is the proliferation of classical
commonplace books by early Stuart university students. While the
recording of favorite quotes on particular subjects in more or less
organized books was not a seventeenth-century innovation, the
number of extant commonplace books by Cambridge and Oxford
students of this period points to a contemporary consensus among
educators on the importance of such an activity as part of one's
university training. Tutors like Thomas Barlow and Richard
Holdsworth went into some detail on methods of commonplace-
keeping: Barlow emphasized the need to keep two separate
commonplace books, one to list references, the other to record
notes on the authors. Holdsworth told his students to
Get some handsome paper books of a portable size in octavo, and rule them
so with ink or black lead that there may be space left on the side for a margin
and at the top for a title. Into them collect all the remarkable things which
you meet with in your historians, orators, and poets . . . These collections
you shall render so ready and familiar to you by frequent reading them over
on evenings, or times set apart for that purpose, that they will offer them-
selves to your memory on any occasion.
The keeping of a commonplace book was intended partly to inform
the tutor of a student's progress in reading assigned works,98 but
more importantly to provide an organizational technique which
would render the opinions of the authors read more readily available
for later disputation or other discourse. A glance at puritan sermons
of the Elizabethan and early Stuart period reveals one of the uses to
which commonplace books were eventually put. Marginal notes on
virtually every subject include a vast number and variety of authors-
more than the most literary of preachers would be likely to read in
the usual course of sermon preparation. Commonplace books kept
during a divinity student's college days thus provided an efficient
means of filling out later sermons and incidentally highlight for the
historian the sorts of authorities that shaped a preacher's interpret-
ation of Scripture and theology on a variety of issues.
The dependence of seventeenth-century tutors on the Greek and
98
Library for Younger Schollers, p. 50; Emmanuel, MS 1.2.27(1), pp. 5 0 - 1 .
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 83
Latin classics and the writings of Christian humanists as guides for
behavior in virtually every area of life - from marriage to the
accumulation of wealth to the punishment of criminals to the rear-
ing of children - is perhaps most strikingly illustrated by a remark-
able collection of commonplace books in the library of Trinity
College, Cambridge." The fourteen immense volumes (the longest
contains 725 closely-written folios) would seem by their similarity to
each other and their distinctive size and organization as compared
with other student commonplace books to have been written by
several students of the same tutor. Only three indicate authorship
on the flyleaf, two being signed * Edward Palmer,' the third showing
the monograph *W. Ga.' 100 Two others 101 are written in a hand
similar enough to Palmer's to have been his as well, a hypothesis sup-
ported by the fact that each of these four contains a different set of
authors or works. But it is impossible to conclude too much about
the number of students responsible for the extant collection. What
is certain is that the putative common tutor of Palmer and his
colleagues instructed his pupils above all to make their collections
incredibly large and their topical organization strictly alphabetical
Thus, all fourteen volumes proceed with their Latin or Greek topical
headings in strict alphabetical order (amicitia . . . dives . . .
matrimonio . . . rex, or dyo>v . . . bcnapxai . . . yajios . . . Oeds),
with as many as eighty folios devoted to a single topic. Each page is
divided into a narrow and a wide column, the former containing not
marginal comments on the contents of the latter, but simply further
commonplaces on the topic at hand. Roughly the same topical divi-
sions are common to all fourteen books, and all rely heavily on the
same collection of authors, the vast majority classical and patristic.
N o t all are as dominated by Seneca as the two explicitly attributed to
Palmer; all but Palmer's and three others show extensive reliance on
Erasmus' Adages; some are more consistent than others in quoting
Greek authors and the New Testament in Greek; a few attempt to
translate Greek authors into Latin and Latin into Greek (a favorite
humanist pedagogical device). But these variations are not as
obvious as the common characteristics of the notebooks. 1 0 2 And
the most apparent of these is the fact that all of these students
devoted the bulk of their study time to the reading of classical
authors for instruction in practical as well as theoretical matters.

99 10
Trin. MSS R.16.6-19. ° Trin. MSS R.16.6-19.
101
Trin. MSS R.16.12 and R16.13.
102
Trin. MSS R.16.6, 11-13, 16, 18 and 19. The most heavily Erasmian is R.16.7;
R.16.18 is dominated by Vives and the ancients.
84 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

In addition to the headings listed above, the students responsible

for the Trinity commonplace books were without exception con-
cerned with such topics as love, adultery, luxury, poverty, family,
nobility, education, ignorance, work, charity, justice: the notebooks
are effectively highly organized compendia of ideas on all aspects of
social theory. And the authors used most frequently and consistently
by all of the students - Seneca, Cicero, Quintilian, Ovid, Virgil,
Plutarch, Pythagoras, and Isocrates - guarantee that most of the
conclusions drawn about the social order are in line with Christian
humanist thought, even in those notebooks where humanists are
not cited. Seneca, for instance, is almost inevitably the source of
most of the commonplaces related to wealth and poverty; his
requirement that charity be given with discrimination as to the
character of the recipient (an assumption introduced to sixteenth-
century England by humanist admirers of Seneca) was recorded in
more than one book.103 Quintilian is the most common authority
on education, Plutarch on motherhood; Cicero on government 104
Trinity students were certainly using the ancients as Erasmus had
prescribed.
The majority of the Trinity commonplace books, furthermore,
provide irrefutable evidence that an integral part of the seventeenth-
century Cambridge curriculum was composed of a direct reading of
Christian humanists for the purpose of drawing conclusions in the
area of social theory. Erasmus and/or Vives predominated among
the modern authors cited in eight of the volumes (three of the
remaining six volumes cite no contemporary authors at all).105
Students obviously attached a great deal of importance to their
opinions on wealth and poverty, work and idleness, war and peace,
education, marriage, parental responsibilities, the government of
servants, friendship, justice and political authority. Under the head-
ing Educatw, they copied Vives' humanistic advice that education
aim at learning to live simply and righteously, rather than at master-
ing endless dogmatic subtleties and logical curiosities; under many
other headings, they acted upon this advice.106

103
For example, Trin. R.16.6, fols. 89-129v; R.16.9 (foL 152v on charity); R.16.17,
fol. 72v.
104
For example, Trin. R.16.6, fol. 535v; R.16.9, fol. 336v; R.16.18, fols. 378v-382;
R.16.17, fol. 126v.
105
Trin. R. 16.6, R. 16.12 and R. 16.13 restrict citations to classical and patristic sources;
Casaubon is the only modern writer quoted in R. 16.16; Lipsius and Brisson are
occasionally cited in R.16.11.
106
Tria R.16.9, fols. 129-129v. This volume, incidentally, also quotes Valla,
Machiavelli and Montaigne, the latter in English.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 85
While the Trinity commonplace books do include theological sec-
tions, theology would seem to have been a subordinate concern;
where it is the subject, the Bible, ancient moralists, Church Fathers
and humanists still outnumber the contemporary theologians cited.
The section headed Trinitas in one notebook, for instance, supple-
ments Scriptural citations with quotations from the Church Fathers,
Virgil, Pythagoras and other ancient monotheists; Evangelica is
almost exclusively biblical in content; Conscientia quotes Chrysostom,
Gregory Nazianus, Juvenal, Cato, Plutarch, Seneca, Ovid, Plato,
Aristotle, and only three modern authors - Erasmus, Luther and
Montaigne.107 In only one commonplace book do scholastics
appear at all, and even in this clearly philosophical commonplace
book, ancient Greek authors (cited consistently in Greek) pre-
dominate.108 The Trinity students doubtless maintained separate
logic, philosophy, and theology notebooks which, had they sur-
vived, might have given evidence for their familiarity with Neo-
scholasticism; however, to assume that the focus of early Stuart
curriculum was Neo-scholastic rather than humanistic is to dis-
regard thousands of folios of evidence in the Trinity College library
alone. It is inconceivable that the time devoted by the Trinity stu-
dents in question to scholastic philosophy and syllogistic logic could
have been greater than that devoted to the reading and recording of
commonplaces from the works of Christian humanists and ancients
during the period when these notebooks were being kept (The
internal consistency of the notebooks suggests that this period was a
relatively short o n e - perhaps a year or two of undergraduate work.)
It seems clear that at least one seventeenth-century tutor had not yet
gotten wind of scholastic revival having displaced the classical
curriculum of the sixteenth-century.
Other tutors and other commonplace books show that this Trinity
tutor was not alone in his ignorance. Richard Holdsworth, Master of
Emmanuel College from 1637 to 1649, may have assigned medieval
and Neo-scholastic authors to his charges, but he was careful to con-
struct for them a list of fundamental readings drawn from Erasmus
(the Colloquies, Adages, De lingua and Moriae Encomium are specifically
mentioned), Cicero (portions of whose works were to be committed
to memory), Quintilian, Seneca, Ovid, ancient history, and the
Bible. Curtis has aptly described Holdsworth on the basis of his
107
Trin. R.16.9, fols. 210ff, 318ff, 193-194v.
108 TriiL R.16.19 is the only vaguely 'Aristotelian' notebook in the group (R.16.10—
19) whichCostello(p. 155) describes as especially Aristotelian. In all of the others,
as in & 16.6-9, Aristotle takes at best second place to the Roman Stoics.
86 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

tutorial directive as 'a humanist who wholeheartedly accepted the

principle of Quintilian that. . . the man proficient in rhetoric needs
learning and character as well as facility in expressing himself.'109
Joseph Mead of Christ's College, Cambridge, likewise required his
students to read the works of Erasmus (Adages, Apophthegmata, Col-
loquies, De conscribendis epistolis, De lingua, Institutio principis christiani
andMoriae Encomium), Ascham, Vives and the ancients, in addition to
contemporary theologians and logicians.110 Thomas Barlow followed
suit at the other university, including Erasmus, Vives and the
ancients among the Neo-scholastics and puritans in his 'Library for
Younger Schollers.'111 James Duport of Trinity, Cambridge, pro-
vided a short list of the 'best authors' for his students to read -
Demosthenes and Cicero for oratory, Homer and Virgil for poetry,
Aristotle, Seneca and Plutarch for logic and ethical instruction- and
specified that at least one entire book of each of these writers was to
be read, in the original language.112
These are thoroughly humanistic instructions, and they were
given for humanistic reasons: the concern of seventeenth-century
tutors was that their students should learn to live virtuously.
Duport, for example, echoed Erasmus when he told his charges not
only to read the ancients, but also to follow their advice for living
godly lives: 'Call yourself to an account at night, what you have done
the day past, and wherein you have failed, according to the Greek rule of
Pythagoras,'111 Sir Simonds D'Ewes, who had read the ancients and
Erasmus under Holdsworth's guidance during his own undergraduate
years at St John's, sent his brother Richard to 'a very religious tutor,
called Mr John Knowles, of Catherine Hall, Cambridge,' in 1632
because it was his 'chief care to have him religiously and virtuously
educated.'114 Milton likewise defined 'the end of learning' to 'repair
the ruins of our first parents'; he read Bacon and More not to 'sequester

109
Emmanuel, MS 1.2.27(1), pp. 7-13, 23, 24, 27, 41, 43; Curtis, pp. 112-13.
Holdsworth's directive for students also recommends the protestant theologians
Hall, Sibbes, Preston, Bolton, Davenant and Perkins (p. 28); Crackenthorpe,
Keckerman, Molina, Sanderson and Burgerdicius for logic (pp. 20-21); and Valla
as well as Erasmus for grammar (p. 30). 'Short memorial notes in Greek' are to be
gathered from Aristotle (p. 33), and the student is repeatedly instructed to 'collect
some idiotisms [sic]' from Cicero for his paper book and to memorize portions of
Cicero's works (p. 39). More's Utopia was also commended (p. 44).
110
H. F. Fletcher, Milton, Appendix I, 'Book Purchases in Mead's Accounts, 1614-
1637,' pp. 562-3, 588, 620-1. Case's Logic was also recommended by Mead (p.
1U
597). Library for Younger Schollers, pp. 10, 18, 32, 44, 66.
112
Trin. MS O.10A.33, pp. 9, 13.
113
Ibid., p. 3 (emphasis mine); cf. Erasmus' Confabulatiopia (Coll., pp. 30-41), and Quo
transgressus in Adages (1964), pp. 33—4.
114
D'Ewes, Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. J. O. Halliwell(1845), voL 1, pp. 1 2 1 -
40; vol. 2, pp. 6 9 - 7 1 .
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 87
out of the world into Atlantic and Utopian polities/ b u t to achieve
insight into social and political reform. 115 His undergraduate edu-
cation at Christ's College had been as Erasmian as any: he reported in
1628 that 'we are all familiar with that sprightly encomium of Folly,
composed by an author of no small repute.' 116
If the goals of many tutors were as humanistic in the seventeenth
century as they had been in t h e preceding era, so were t h e accom-
plishments of their students. Milton and the student authors of the
Trinity College commonplace books were not at all atypical of their
contemporaries in applying humanist learning to everyday life. An
anonymous student at Pembroke, Cambridge, n o t only read, b u t
also painstakingly copied into his notebook, long passages from
Erasmus' Enchiridion militis christiani on the practical value of ancient
literature. Other portions of the notebook discuss the harvest of
philosophical truth to be gleaned from Erasmus and his editions of
ancient proverbs, and list commonplaces on a variety of subjects by a
very catholic group of authors - ancient pagans, Reformers, Neo-
scholastics and Christian humanists. 117 Another Pembroke student
applied his extensive reading of Greek authors to such mundane
problems as parental education of children and t h e necessity for
maternal nursing of infants. 118 Alexander Bolde, also of Pembroke,
quoted Sir Thomas More on respect for parents, Erasmus on the
practice of piety, Seneca on poor relief, Cicero on dealing with mis-
fortune, and Xenophon, Pythagoras, Epictetus, Democritus,
Diogenes, Virgil, Cato and Ovid o n other practical and theoretical
issues. 119 The classical commonplace book of an early seventeenth-
century St John's student quotes Cicero, Cato, Pliny and Aristotle,
but is most heavily reliant on Seneca for opinions on the virtue of
frugality, the use of reason and the nature of providence. 120 Seneca's

115
John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1953), vol. 1, p.
934; vol. 2, pp. 366-7, 527; cf. vol. 1, p. 296 and Webster, Instauration, p. 100, com-
paring Milton's view of education with Vives' and Ascham's. Note the motivations
of Camden and Lord Brooke for the establishment of chairs in history at Oxford
and Cambridge, respectively- for 'observations . . . useful and profitable for the
younger students of the university' (Curtis, pp. 116—17).
116
Milton, 'Prolusion VI,' in Complete Prose Works, vol. 1, pp. 273^4. Erasmus' Colloquies
was also a textbook at St Paul's when Milton was there.
117
Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LC 11.16 (n.p.).
118
Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LC 11.12, pp. 38-46.
119
St John's, Cambridge, MS S.34, fols. 2-4,10,12-12v, 18 etpassim. All Greek authors
are carefully quoted in Greek.
120
St John's, Cambridge, MS 1.34, e.g., pp. 61-2, 160, 348; Bellarmine was known to
this student (e.g., p. 240, but the ancients predominate in the notebook. Pre-
sumably for this reason, Costello calls this volume 'a curious philosophical
medley.' It is actually much more typical than the straight logic notebooks which
he apparently finds less 'curious.'
88 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

comments on wealth and poverty, Quintilian's on ambition and

Erasmus' on religious self-discipline are among the commonplaces
of William Sancroft of Emmanuel, and another of Sancroft's
notebooks commends Erasmus' Colloquies and Cicero's De Officiis for
instruction in daily living.121 William Bright of Emmanuel cited
More's [//^Nongovernment, education, clothing and war, Xenophon,
Diogenes and Plato on gambling; Pythagoras on self-examination;
and Erasmus and Richard Pace on the education of children. Samuel
Ward, during his sojourn at Emmanuel, cited Quintilian on family
government and Seneca in criticism of those who 'live otherwise
than they teach'; one should study philosophy, he insisted in good
humanist fashion, 'as a handy work, to make advantage of it.' In a
1606 notebook he recommended the reading of Demosthenes,
Isocrates, Plato, Cicero, and Cato as a means of learning 'vel bene
vivendi praecepta'111
The extant notebooks of Simonds D'Ewes reveal that he, too,
followed his tutor's directions and spent a great deal of time gleaning
practical advice from the ancients. This group of five school and five
college notebooks in the British Library is of interest, too, as an illus-
tration of the error of concluding from a given scholastic logic
notebook that a student is non-humanistic in his interests or that the
curriculum of his college is exclusively scholastic. D'Ewes' is the
most nearly complete set of notebooks surviving for a single college
student in this period. If only one had remained to u s - say the 1619
logic notebook- historians might easily surmise that the education
of a St John's student in the early seventeenth century consisted
exclusively in scholastic treatments of Aristotelian logic, physics
and metaphysics, and that Costello, Kearney, Hill and others are
correct in stressing the importance of a Neo-scholastic revival in the
early seventeenth-century university curriculum.123 If another124 had
been the sole survivor of D'Ewes' notebooks, one might wonder at
the tenacity of Ramism in Stuart Cambridge. But taken together
with the other notebooks kept by D'Ewes during his student years, a
rather different impression is formed of the breadth of curriculum
available to early seventeenth-century scholars. D'Ewes clearly had a
firm grasp on Christian humanist and classical writings before he
matriculated at St John's, and Erasmian assumptions about the ends

121
Bodl., Sancroft 87, pp. 92ff, 189-201; Bodl., Sancroft 25, pp. 122-3.
122
CUL, Add. MS6160, pp. 21, 76-7,110,131,142; fols. 153v-154v; WardMSF, fols.
9v-10.
123
BL, Harl. 191; the school notebooks are Harl. 118-21, 185; notes taken at St
124
John's are Harl. 182, 190-2. BL, Harl. 190.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 89
of learning had become a deeply rooted part of his expectations. He
had spent much of the period from 1615 to 1617 translating Ovid,
Virgil and Cicero (into both English and Greek), and Isocrates, and
writing essays on virtue, education, discipline, respect for parents,
temperance, friendship, work, ambition, wealth, and other aspects
of social behavior which quoted these and other classical authorities
(Seneca, Xenophon, Pythagoras, Pliny, Cato). Erasmus was clearly
one of his chief guides in learning bene vivere\ thirty-six folios of one
notebook are devoted to discussing the social implications of Erasmian
Adages™ The concerns of his Cambridge notebooks are not for the
most part noticeably different: he evinced a growing interest in
ancient and medieval English history and in logic, but all of the
university notebooks are replete with obviously respectful citations
of classical authorities on practical issues.126
The same humanist curriculum is visible in notebooks from the
other university. Seymes of Wadham regarded Cicero as the pre-
eminent authority on education and noted Seneca's disparagement
of idleness among his other classical commonplaces.127 Thomas
Brathwaite of Queen's quoted Plutarch on fortune, Quintilian on
fame, Sophocles on government, Seneca (and William Perkins) on
conscience, and Vives on reason, truth, friendship, sleep and
death.128
Numerous other examples could be given;129 the notebooks supply
a superabundance of evidence for the continuity of the humanist
curriculum into the seventeenth century. It is clear, moreover, from
the nature as well as the number of citations that Erasmus and Vives
were not quoted lightly, but that they were regarded as genuinely
authoritative teachers of doctrine and of virtuous behavior. For
125
BL, Harl. 118,119,120,121,185; Erasmian advice is found (e.g.) inHarl. 120, fols.
18, 27, 30; Harl. 121, fols. 31-67v; Isocrates' advice on child-rearing, temperance
in the execution of disciplinary action, and the virtue of hard work is translated in
Harl. 185 (1615), fols. 12-27.
126
Historical notes are found in BL, Harl. 192 (with morals continually drawn from
Roman examples), Harl. 182, and the post-collegiate commonplace book, Harl.
186. Notes on logic are restricted to Harl. 190 (citing mainly Cicero, Plutarch,
Quintilian, and occasionally Ramus, Zabarella, Keckerman, Molina and Aristotle)
and Harl. 191 (Aristotelian). The most apparently respected ancient writers are
Cicero, Plutarch, Quintilian and Pythagoras. Harl. 182, e.g., cites Plutarch on
poor relief, drunkenness, social hierarchy, crime, and punishment (fols. 25 ff).
127
Queen's, Oxford, MS 438, fols. 67, 110-110v, etpassim.
128
Queen's, Oxford, MS 423 (n.p.); cf. CUL, MS Dd. 12.57 (also Brathwaite) citing
Erasmus, Seneca and Plutarch.
129
Bodl, Rawl. D.947; St John's, Cambridge, MS S.44 (Oxford, 1635-6); Queens',
Cambridge, MS Home 41; BL, Sloane MS 586 (Daniel Foote); BL, Sloane MS
1981. Ward MS B (1600) moralizes about ignorance, drunkenness, and blasphemy,
citing Xenophon and Plutarch.
90 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

both the puritan Ward and his conformist enemy Wren, Erasmus
had the last word on questions of authorship or textual authenticity. 13°
For Thomas Laurence of Balliol, Erasmus* authority was a sufficient
reason to study ancient wisdom, and the Adages were portrayed as the
best textbook of ancient thought. 131 Sancroft called Erasmus a doc-
trinal luminary, stimulating to study and understanding, and worthy
of honor as a great scholar. Vives he described as the author of many
great books and as *wr doctissimus.9132
As Ward and Wren illustrate, humanist assumptions were restricted
neither to Arminian Anglicans, as Morgan asserts, nor to puritans, as
Webster believes.133 Students at such non-puritan colleges as Caius
listed Erasmus' Colloquies and Adages among their books and cited a
variety of classical authors in their notes. But the record of book
loans kept by the young puritan Samuel Ward at Christ's College
includes Seneca's Tragedies', Cicero's De Officiis, Plutarch, Quintilian
and other ancient writers, along with Perkins and other Reformed
theologians and the scientific works of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe
and Erastus.13 4 An Arminian puritan student at St John's, Cambridge,
read Erasmus and the ancients as avidly as he read protestant
theologians; in fact, he noted in a discussion of female fashion that
Erasmus and William Perkins could be found 'of the same mind.'135
And the notebooks of seventeenth-century Emmanuel students
leave no doubt about the humanist emphasis of the tutorial
curriculum at that puritan college: Hegimus Seneca et antiquissimi
graecorum sapientes\ one Emmanuel student wrote (in admittedly
inelegant Latin), and when he forgot to bring his books on a holiday
trip home, he requested his chamberfellow to send his volumes of
Horace, Juvenal and Sir Thomas Smith's Commonwealth of England.136
130
Ward MSS M.3, G (foL 26); Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LC 11.134.
131
Balliol, MS438 (1615), pp. 15,47, 86. Petrarch's authority is also highly regarded
132
(p. 65). BodL, Sancroft MS 25, p. 124.
133
Irvonwy Morgan, Prince Charles's Puritan Chaplain (London, 1957), p. 39; Webster,
Instauration, pp. 1,100. On the other hand, Webster (p. 106) also mistakenly thinks
that classical authors and their Renaissance commentators faded from the univer-
sity scene during the 1640 s.
134
BL, Sloane MS 3308 (F. Glisson, Caius, 1638); Sidney Sussex, MS Ward A.
135
St John's, Cambridge, MS S.20, pp. 51-3. The Arminianism of this student is
deduced from his statements on free will and reprobation (pp. 159-61), his
puritanism from his strong condemnation of blasphemy, drunkenness, and
'ceremonies' (pp. 14-15, 131-2, 175ff). cf BL, Harl. 1779 (Balliol, 1637), a non-
puritan notebook which Kearney describes as 'scholastic' (p. 82) but which in fact
relies most heavily on the Greek texts of Plato, Pythagoras, Hesiod, Homer and
the Bible.
136
BodL, Tanner 462 (Sancroft), fols. ll-12v, 19; he quoted Seneca, Cicero, Quin-
tilian and Plutarch in his letters (e.g., fols. 1-3, 21, 23, 32-3); cf BodL, Sancroft 25,
which lists Sancroft's studies at Emmanuel as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, history,
mathematics and physics and contains no references to scholastics or Neo-
scholastics. cf. also CUL, MS Gg. 1.29 (Emmanuel).
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 91
Humanism was, in short, pervasive in collegiate curricula at
puritan and non-puritan colleges of both universities; furthermore,
it continued to be the defining characteristic of English university
studies throughout the Civil War and Interregnum.137 The library
listings, like the notebooks, of Anglican as well as puritan students
of the 1640s and 1650s bear witness to the continuity of humanism
in the midst of very catholic curricula. John Patricke of Peterhouse,
Cambridge, later a bishop, compiled a book inventory which
included both puritan and anti-puritan theology, medieval School-
men and a few Neo-scholastics, Erasmus' Colloquies and Greek New
Testament, and the Greek and Roman classics.138 At Royalist
Oxford, Robert Barrell of Magdalen, Thomas Cole of University
College and John Hutton of New College all listed works of Vives or
Erasmus and the ancients among their meager possessions.139 The
instructions of Cambridge tutors of the period insured that students
in the Parliament-occupied university were reading the same
works. 14° Oxford Visitors commissioned by the Saints Parliament of
165 3 encouraged the humanist combination of'godliness and learn-
ing' and criticized monkish aloofness from the public concerns of
the commonwealth; however, they found no reason to interfere with
the curriculum.141 Those who proposed to reform the universities of
the Commonwealth focused their criticism on the same kinds of
abuses to which Erasmus had objected: scholastic techniques, the
narrowness of traditional academic exercises, and an overemphasis
on metaphysics.142 To the extent that the more radical of the would-
be reformers wished to subordinate the study of humane letters to a
mechanical education they were unsuccessful; both grammar
schools and colleges remained faithful to the Erasmian tradition of
classical studies throughout this period.143

Graduates of the arts and divinity courses of Cambridge and Oxford

were thus well prepared to disseminate the humanist evangel in
Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Whether self-consciously
137
See the Civil War notebooks of Brathwaite (Queen's, Oxford, MS 1423; CUL MS
Dd. 12.57), Bright (CUL, Add. MS 6160), and Daniel Foote (BL, Sloane MS 586);
the notebook kept from 1650 to 1657 by a University College, Oxford, student (St
John's, Cambridge, MS O.64), citing especially Greek authors and Erasmus' Adages
(e.g., pp. 1-37, 65, 70-2); and such undated mid-seventeenth-century notebooks
as Queens', Cambridge, MS Home 41 (kept by a puritan student); Pembroke,
Cambridge, MSS LC 11.11, 12, and 16; and BL, Sloane MS 1981.
138
CUL, Add. MS 84; cf. Sidney Sussex, MSS Ward B, F, G.
139
Oxford University Archives, Inventories dated 1651, 1652, and 1653, respectively.
140
Trin. MS O.10A.33; Emmanuel MS 1.2.27(1).
141
Charles Webster, Instauration, pp. 197-8.
142
John Webster, Academiarum Examen (London, 1654), passim.
143
Charles Webster, Instauration, pp. 205-9.
92 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Erasmian or not, they had been exposed to the key documents of

Christian humanist ideology, and the reform-minded among them
did not come away unaffected. How influential were they in turn on
the adoption of humanistic values, and more particularly Erasmian
social thought, by their less educated lay audiences?
The evidence of sermons (which will be considered in detail in the
following three chapters) and of commonplace books certainly indi-
cates that university-trained divines retained the assumptions of
their humanist education and preached accordingly long after their
university careers had ended. William Rawley, Francis Bacon's
chaplain and spiritual advisor to Bacon's household, provides one
example. After his graduation from Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, a brief stint as rector of Bowthorpe, and several years'
service to Bacon, Rawley began a commonplace book which clearly
indicates his continued respect for Erasmus, his disdain for
Aristotelianism, and his acquaintance with the opinions of other
ancient writers on social theory. His admiration for his patron's
reformist ideas and his devotion to seeing Bacon's works into print
after the latter's death in 1626 are surely explained in part by
Rawley's humanist training.144
University-educated preachers transmitted classical and Christian
humanist ideas through both the spoken and the written word.
William Gouge, trained at St Paul's School, Eton and King's
College, Cambridge, preached and published sermons on practical
topics liberally sprinkled with ancient and humanist authorities.
These were frequently purchased by puritan heads of families con-
cerned with the instruction of children in godly behavior: Nehemiah
Wallington, for instance, recorded,
This year 1622, my family increasing and now having a wife, a child, a man
servant, and a maid servant, and thus having the charge of so many souls, I
then bought Mr. Gouge's Book of Domestical Duties that so every one of us
may learn and know our duties and honor God every one in his place where
God had set them . . .145
Sir Robert Harley and Sir Simonds D'Ewes purchased the same
volume when their children began to arrive on the scene.146
144
Lambeth Palace, MS 2086, pp. 3, 16, 40 (Plutarch on wealth and women), 42, 68;
on p. 30 he remarks, 'Will you tell any man's mind, before you have conferred with
him? So doth Aristotle, in raising his axioms, upon Nature's mind.' On Rawley's
career, see the DNB.
145
Wallington, Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.436, pp. 13-14 (I am grateful to
Derek Hirst for this reference); Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622).
Gouge's academic career is recounted in the DNB.
146
Andrew G. Watson, The Library of Sir Simonds D'Ewes (1966), p. 168; Harley's
library catalogue is BL Loan 29/202 (from the Duke of Portland), 1637 (mistakenly
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 93

But these university-educated lay puritans also exposed their

children first hand to Christian humanist and ancient literature.
Harley, a graduate of Oriel College and a parishioner of John
Stoughton (the Emmanuel-educated curate of St Mary Alderman-
bury), possessed not only a large collection of puritan literature, but
also writings of Cicero and the complete works of Seneca. D' Ewes'
library, much of which was acquired explicitly for the edification of
his family, included much classical literature and such humanist
works as Erasmus' Adages and Colloquies, More's Utopia, Ascham's
Epistles and The Scholemaster, the grammars of Lily and Colet, and Sir
Thomas Smith's DeRepublica Anglorum; moreover, the commonplace
book which he kept from 1622 to 1646 reveals his dependence on
these authors for advice on parental duties and on various aspects
of social ethics.147 The humanist education of both preachers and
laymen at Cambridge and Oxford was thus disseminated to their
congregations, to their readers, and to their children and servants.
While the universities were a signally important transmitter of
humanist social theory, a direct exposure to humanism and to classical
literature did not require a university education. The English
publishing history for Erasmus' works reveals that their market was
far larger than the university educated portion of the English popu-
lation. Looking only at some of the most popular works: seven
editions of the Adages were printed on English presses between 1539
and 1622, six editions of the Apophthegmata between 1540 and 1564,
and ten editions of the Enchiridion militis christiani between 1533 and
1576. Partial or complete editions of the Colloquies appearing be-
tween 1540 and 1639 number fourteen; twenty more were published
between 1643 and 1699, seventeen in English translation. Of course,
these figures account only for those editions published in England;
many English readers purchased continental editions. 148 This data
would seem to lend some credibility to McConica's argument for a
deliberate resolve on the part of Tudor government to bring Erasmian
reformism before the general public. Whether or not such a policy
existed, however, it is clear that Englishmen- and women- from the
royal household down were reading Erasmus, and reading him for
very Erasmian reasons: Catherine Parr directed the Princess Mary to

listed under July, 1627). I am indebted to Jacqueline Levy for the latter reference.
147
BL, MS Loan 29/202; Andrew Watson, pp. 101, 117, 139, 177, 180, 190,196, 309,
etpassim; cf. BL, MS Harl. 186, passim.
us STQ D'Ewes' two copies of the Adages were published in Venice (1508, acquired by
D'Ewes in 1624) and Florence (1575), and his copy of the Colloquies was the 1621
Amsterdam edition. He also had a 15 36 Leyden edition of De ratione conscribendi epis-
tolas (Andrew Watson, pp. 101, 117, 139, 190.)
94 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

read Erasmian editions of the ancients no less for the usefulness of

his advice than for the accuracy of his textual rendition.149
Vives' works were also remarkably popular: his Ad sapientiam
introductio went through twelve editions between 1539 and 1623
(eleven in translation), and nine English printings of Richard Hyrde's
translation of his Instructio of a christen woma were produced between
1529 and 1592. More's Utopia, to list one more representative
humanist publication, appeared in seven English (as well as count-
less continental) editions from 1551 to 1639.15°
If space allowed, even more striking figures could be provided for
the publication of classical texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. These were available in both Latin and Greek for scholars
and in English translations for the less erudite. 'Scholars,' further-
more, need not be restricted to the university educated: such well-
instructed women as Lady Mary Fitzalan not only collected
commonplaces from Greek and Roman authors, but also took
extensive notes on Roman history and produced volumes of trans-
lations from Greek authors on ethical issues- in this case, Euripides,
Demosthenes, Pythagoras, Xenophon, Democritus, Plato, Plutarch,
Isocrates and Sophocles, on such subjects as temperance, gratitude,
luxury and prodigality.151 Noteworthy, too, are the numerous
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collections of excerpts from
ancient writers - works patterned after Erasmus' Adages and
Apophthegmata. Because of the ready availability of such publications,
a direct familiarity with Christian humanist ideas was possible even
for the relatively uneducated populace. The puritan Brilliana Conway
did not know Greek or Latin, but her commonplace book is replete
with excerpts from Seneca's Epistles, as well as from protestant
theologians and the Bible, on most aspects of everyday behavior.152
The impact of humanist writings and editions of classical works on
early modern social theory cannot be ignored. It must no longer be
regarded as an adequate explanation of sixteenth-century inno-
vations in social regulation and seventeenth-century political
activism to point to the protestant response to a perceived Scrip-
tural mandate. Protestants, and particularly puritans, were certainly
strongly motivated by their faith to reform the social order and
149
BL, Vespasian F.III. no. 35; McConica, English Humanists, pp. 68-9.
150 57Y7- the first edition of Utopia was printed at Louvain in 1516.
151
BL, Royal 12A.1-4; DNB under Mary Fitzalan (b. 1541).
152
Nottingham University, Conway MSS, Box 166 (inconsistently foliated). See, e.g.,
the sections headed 'Of the duty of children to their parents,' 'Of conscience,' 'Of
good works.' I am grateful to Jacqueline Levy for drawing my attention to this
manuscript.
 The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 95
establish a godly commonwealth, but for specific instructions on
how to accomplish this feat, they turned to the Christian humanist
authors who populated their libraries. There they discovered the
same regard for the Scriptures and for the hypothetical Golden Age
in which they were written, the same compulsion to criticize the
degenerate status quo, the same drive for godly reformation of the
social and political order which lay at the roots of the protestant
Reformation itself, and to which they as protestants laid claim.
Accordingly, they seized the Christian humanist banner of their
Catholic mentors and marched with it against the forces of Catholic
reaction. They might not have consciously identified themselves as
Christian humanists; they were certainly aware of their theological
divergence from Erasmus and More. But in at least one area- social
thought- they were deeply and often explicitly indebted to the biblical
and classical interpretations of the humanists. If, as a result, they
cannot be credited with innovation, they nevertheless deserve
recognition as humanist activists in the realm of social reform. And
when so recognized as products of a definable intellectual milieu,
they begin to lose the proportions of protestant giants and to
acquire instead the human dimensions of rather ordinary, if morally
earnest, sixteenth-century people.
 The spiritualized household

Among the innovative social ideas with which puritans have been
credited is the doctrine of the family, rather than the parish, as the
fundamental spiritual unit of society. To protestantism, and par-
ticularly to protestantism of the hotter sort, are attributed the
exaltation of marriage over virginity, the requirement for parents to
occupy a religiously didactic and disciplinary role, and a slight ten-
dency toward sexual egalitarianism in light of the spiritual role of
women within the household. We are told, for example, that 'the
Reformation, by reducing the authority of the priest in society,
simultaneously elevated the authority of lay heads of households,'
and that the stress on household religious instruction and discipline
'was part of the protestant inheritance.' 1 We are told that since the
Reformation, the family has become the basic and most essential
unit of church government, and that the head of the protestant, and
especially of the puritan household is expected to oversee the
spiritual welfare of his family and to conduct daily worship in the
home.2 Furthermore, it is asserted that 'until Puritan ideals came to
have some influence, the average characterization represented
women as at best a "necessary evil" for the propagation of the race/
and that it was puritanism which heralded the shift from the

Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism (New York, 1964), pp. 445-6.
Keith Thomas, 'Women and the Civil War Sects', Past and Present, 13 (1958), 42-62, p.
42. More recently, Richard Greaves (Society and Religion in Elizabethan England
(Minneapolis, 1981), Parts II and III, esp. ch. 7, has maintained the spiritualized
household as a puritan distinctive. Levin L. Schiicking, The Puritan Family, tr. B.
Battershaw (New York, 1970), argues that before the Reformation marriage was seen
as a 'necessary evil' (p. 21).

96
 The spiritualized household 97
3
patriarchal to the conjugal family. Both Catholics and conforming
Anglicans can be found who minimized the religious responsibilities
of householders - ergo, the spiritualization of the household was a
puritan accomplishment. 4
This thesis is temptingly neat, but the foregoing discussion of
Christian humanist social thought in protestant England should sug-
gest the danger of attributing these ideas exclusively to puritanism.
A close examination of Christian humanist conceptions of the
family and recommendations for domestic conduct in those areas
dearest to puritan hearts will reveal the extent of the danger. In
regard to the family, the biblicism of Erasmus led to many of the
same conclusions which protestant biblicism would derive, and the
common classical sources of humanists and protestants produced
common assumptions and ideals. In the marginal notes of domestic
conduct manuals by Bartholomew Batty, William Gouge and Heinrich
Bullinger (whose Christen State of Matrimonye, translated by Miles
Coverdale, was the source book for much of puritan domestic
theory), references to Erasmus and the ancients are frequently found
among the admittedly more numerous citations of the puritans'
ultimate a u t h o r i t y - Scripture. 5 As a result, the writings of Christian
humanists, puritans and many Anglican conformists are found to be
in substantial agreement regarding the superiority of the married
state over virginity, the religious duties of householders, the
necessity for parents to catechize their children and the spiritual
equality and didactic responsibilities of women in the family. N o t
3
Chilton Powell, English Domestic Relations, 1487-1653 (New York, 1917), p. 147;
Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, NY, 1935), p.
203; Schiicking, p. 40; Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York,
1972), p. 188. Walzer here opposes Hill's emphasis on puritan patriarchy.
Greaves, p. 739, asserts that 'much more than Anglicans, the Puritans developed
marriage as a partnership.'
4
Hill, chapter 13.
5
Bartholomew Batty, The Christian mans Closet, tr. William Lowth (London, 1581),
passim; e.g., he quoted Vives and 'Erasmus, that worthy man' (fol. 41) on the godly
education of children (fols. 17v, 18v, 33v-34v, 41, 74v, 89v, 98v); Aristotle's
Oeconomica, Plato's Laws and Cicero's De Officiis in arguing that fathers should
instruct their children for the good of the commonwealth; and Seneca, Plutarch,
Pliny, Epictetus, Xenophon and other ancients throughout the treatise on these
and other aspects of child-rearing. Gouge's Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622)
cites Erasmus, as does Bullinger's The Christen State of Matrimony e, tr. Miles Cover-
dale (London 1541), fol. 89v. Bullinger also quoted from the ancients, cf citations
in Vives' Instruction ofa Christian Woman, tr. Richard Hyrde (1540) in Foster Watson,
Vives and the Renascence Education of Women (New York, 1912), pp. 29-136; or the
humanist Thomas Lupset's Exhortation to Yonge Men (1544), which attributes to
Aristotle (Politics, vii and viii) the last word on child-rearing (sig. Cii). The use of
classical authors by puritans and humanists is precisely parallel.
98 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

only is puritan domestic conduct theory indistinguishable from that

of the protestant mainstream, but the spiritualized household of
protestant England proves to be flowing in precisely the same direction
as Catholic humanist thought about the family in the sixteenth
century.

The influence of classical domestic theory on both humanists and

puritans explains the most basic of those common assumptions
underlying their doctrines of the family.6 Aristotle, in the Oeconomicd
(I, 3) stated that the association of man and wife is based on reason
and that its purpose is not merely existence, but the good life. The
humanists combined this idea with elements of Stoic egalitarianism
and with the biblical doctrines that marriage was created by God and
that woman, redeemed by Christ as man is, is also possessed of a
reasonable soul and of religious responsibility.7 The result which
emerged in humanist writings was a concept of marriage as a state of
intellectual and spiritual companionship. Reacting partly against
monastic abuses, the humanists exalted the married state over
unnatural (in the Aristotelian sense) and unbiblical celibacy. Thus,
Erasmus, in a treatise translated into English by Richard Taverner
and dedicated to Cromwell, called religious bachelorhoods form of
living both barren and unnatural,' and he commended marriage on
the biblical basis of Christ's presence at the wedding at Cana. Even
the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, and St Paul were married, he said
(contrary to medieval Catholic orthodoxy), and matrimony was
advised by Scripture and practiced by the ancients, animals and
trees, precious stones (according to Pliny), Indians, Italians,
Persians, Britons and Jews.8 'Dame nature herself hath enacted
marriage,' according to Erasmus, and he even went so far as to
equate celibacy with infanticide: 'for there is small diversity betwixt
him that murdereth that which begin[s] to be borne, and him which
procureth that nothing can be born.' 9 In the Erasmian tradition,

6
Blair Worden, 'Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution,' History and
Imagination, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (New York, 1981), 182-
200, notes in passing the 'classicism of the household' (p. 188).
7
Noted by Paul Siegel in 'Milton and the Humanist Attitude toward Women,' JHI
11 (1950), 42-53, p. 45.
8
Erasmus, A ryght frutefull Epystle . . . in laude and prayse of matrymony, tr. Richard
Taverner ( n . d ) , sigs. Aiii-Av, Bi-Bvi. In An Exhortation to the diligent study e ofscripture
(1529), he suggested that St Paul was a widower (sigs. Diii ff).
9
Erasmus, Prayse ofmatrymony, sigs. Aiiii, cv. He went on to say, 'This that in your
body either dryeth up, or with a great danger of your health putrifieth and corrup-
teth, which in your sleep falleth away, had been a man if ye were a man
yourself.'
 The spiritualized household 99
Juan Luis Vives, tutor to the Princess Mary, devoted the second
book of his Instruction of a Christian Woman (1523) to the theme of the
superiority of the married state, particularly commending his
parents' happy union.10 Thus, Bartholomew Batty was saying nothing
distinctively protestant when he asserted that 'marriage is the most
excellent state and condition of life . . . which all the godly both by
preaching and example have commended unto us, and placed the
same in the top of all good works.'11
Marriage was seen by all of its sixteenth-century commentators as
having three primary goals: companionship, procreation and
avoidance of fornication. In both Prayer Books of Edward VI, the
last two purposes were placed before companionship. It has been
argued that, during the course of the seventeenth century, puritans
gradually rearranged this order to place mutual help or com-
panionship first.12 This argument is suspect in view of the order
given in the new homily on matrimony which was authorized in 1562
by Elizabeth: matrimony was 'instituted of God, to the intent that
man and woman should live lawfully in a perpetual friendship, to
bring forth fruit, and to avoid fornication.'13 But even the notion
that protestantism is at the root of the stress on companionship is
wide of the mark. Here, too, the humanist contribution has been
ignored. Vives, in his treatise on the duties of husbands, told the hus-
band that he should regard his wife 'as a most faithful secretary of thy
cares and thoughts, and in doubtful matters a wise and a hearty coun-
sellor. This is the true society and fellowship of man. . .'14 Erasmus,
in his encomium of matrimony, called it 'an especial sweetness to
have one with whom ye may communicate the secret affections of
your mind, with whom ye may speak even as it were with your own
self.' So vital was companionship as an end of marriage in Sir Thomas
More's vision of the ideal commonwealth that his Utopians allowed
divorce by mutual consent for 'intolerable offensiveness of dis-
position' or 'when a married couple agree insufficiently in their dis-

10
Vives, Instruction ofa Christian Woman, in Watson, pp. 116-19. Hyrde's translation of
this work ran into eight editions by 1592.
11
Batty, foL 4v.
12
James T. Johnson, 'Ends of Marriage,' CH, 38 (1969), 429-36; William and
Malleville Haller, 'The Puritan Art of Love,' Huntington Library Quarterly', 5 (1942),
235-72, pp. 265-6, 270.
13
Sermons and Homilies Appointed to be Read in the Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth
(1840), p. 506. In any case, H. C. Porter has drawn my attention to the fact that the
Prayer Book ordering of 1549 remained unchanged down to 1662.
14
Vives, The office and duties of an husband, tr. Thomas Paynell (1550), in Watson,
p. 209.
100 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

positions.'15 Sir Thomas Elyot, citing Aristotle's Oeconomica, wrote

that 'the company most according to nature, is that which is
ordained of man and wife, which was constituted, not to the intent
only to bring forth their semblable, but for love especially, and
mutual assistance.'16 It would seem, then, that the puritan Robert
Cleaver was merely restating a humanist ideal when he said, 'There
can be no greater society or company, than is between a man and his
wife.' n In the sixteenth century, the assertion that companionship is
pre-eminent among the ends of marriage was an innovation of Chris-
tian humanism, rather than of puritanism.
But procreation as an end of marriage was not much diminished in
importance because of its subordination to companionship. The
exalted ideal of the family which was held by most puritans rather
expanded this goal into the production of good commonwealthmen
and citizens of the Kingdom of God. The family was raised to the
level of a church and commonwealth in microcosm. Batty taught
that 'Marriage is the origin and fountain of all private and public
government... [It is] for the procreation and virtuous education of
children, to the preservation of his Church and common wealth.'18
Daniel Rogers believed marriage to be 'the seminary of the
commonwealth, seed-plot of the church, pillar (under God) of the
world. . . supporter of laws, states, orders, offices, gifts and services
. . . the foundation of countries, cities, universities, succession of
families, crowns, and kingdoms.'19 Gouge's parallel statement that
'families are the seminaries to Church and Commonwealth' rested
on the argument that since families 'were before other polities, so
they are somewhat the more necessary: and good members of a
family are like to make good members of Church and common-
wealth.' The origins of this supposedly puritan idea should be

15
Erasmus, Prayse of matrymony, sigs. Cvi-Cvii; The Complete Works of St. Thomas More,
ed. EdwardSurtzandj. H. Hexter(NewHaven, 1965), vol.^(Utopia), pp. 189-91.
cf. Erasmus' Whythe dyvorsemente betwene man andwyfe stondeth with the lawe of God, tr.
Nycolas Lesse, London [1550], sigs. D-Dii
16
Elyot, Defence of Good Women (ca. 1531-8), in Watson, p. 225.
17
Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of housholde government (1598), p. 151.
18
Batty, fol. 3v; see also Cleaver, p. 1, and Thomas Cartwright Cartwrightiana, ed.
Albert Peel and Leland H. Carson (1951), p. 159; cf p. 59.
19
Daniel Rogers, MatrimoniallHonour (1642), p. 7; Samuel Ward traced all'scandals
and enormities' in the commonwealth to parental neglect of religious education
and discipline of children and servants (Sidney Sussex, MS Ward O.8.a, early
hand, n.f.). cf. William Jones, A Briefe Exhortation to all men to set their houses in order
(1612), p. 3; Richard Baxter, Christian Directory (1673), p. 514; 'most of the mis-
chiefs that now infest or seize upon mankind throughout the earth consist in, or
are caused by, the disorders and ill-governedness of families.'
 The spiritualized household 101
obvious from Gouge's premise: they lie not in protestant theology,
but in the Aristotelian notion that the household is the primary
essential human association, out of which the highest form of
human society, the state, grows {Politics, I, 2). Perkins, who clearly
saw family government as part of the natural order, actually cited
Aristotle as his source when he used the image of the family as the
'seminary of all other societies' and concluded,
It followeth that the holy and righteous government thereof, is a direct
means for the good ordering both of Church and Commonwealth; yea that
the laws thereof being rightly informed, and religiously observed, are avail-
able to prepare and dispose men to the keeping of order in other govern-
ments. For this first society is as it were the school, wherein are taught and
learned the principles of authority and subjection.20
These are classical ideas, transmitted to the puritans by humanist
authors and editors, and not drawn from protestant theology.21
Christian humanism is responsible for the combination of Roman
civic-mindedness and Greek notions of the family as the natural
basic unit of society - the seminary of the Kingdoms of God and
man. Vives identified the household as a commonwealth writ small
and a training-ground for church and state. And Erasmus described
one of the purposes of marriage in the words of a young man to
his love:
We will get subjects for the king and servants for Christ, and where will the
unchastity of this matrimony be? . . . I will be your king, and you shall be my
queen, and we will govern the family according to our pleasure . . . We will
do our endeavour to be good ourselves, and then take care to instruct our
children in religion and piety from the very cradle.
In another colloquy, a would-be nun is advised to find 'an agreeable
husband, and set up a college in your own house, of which he should
be the abbot and you the abbess.'22 Likewise, Elyot saw the early vir-
tuous education of children in noble households as necessary for
them to be made 'apt to the governance of a public weal.'23 Precisely
because of these didactic functions of the household, marriage was
portrayed by the Elizabethan humanist Edmund Tilney as some-

20
Gouge, Dedicatory Epistle. Gouge also used Aristotle's beehive analogy for the
family (pp. 16-17); William Perkins, Workes (Cambridge, 1618), vol. 3, pp. 669,
698; cf. Gouge, p. 5.
21
cf. Hill (pp. 458-9), andWalzer(pp. 183-7), who thinks that the idea of the family
as the source and principal constituent of the commonwealth derives from
Bodin.
22
Vives, Duty of Husbands in Watson, pp. 202-3; Coll., pp. 95-7, 106.
23
Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531), fols. I5v-16.
102 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

thing akin to civic duty, a necessity for the preservation of the

realm.24
Later in the century, this humanist concept of the household as
the seminary of church and commonwealth became an important
basis for the puritan stress on household education. The puritans
saw a purpose of marriage in the procreation of children to be
brought up 'in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and praise of God,
that they may be meet for his Church and the commonwealth'; only
with godly instruction in the household, they warned, will 'your
families... be reformed, your town happily governed/ 25 For Gouge,
the family was 'a school wherein the first principles and grounds of
government are learned.' Nor was this humanist tradition passed on
only to puritans. The seventeenth-century Anglican Jeremy Taylor
differed from neither puritans nor Catholic humanists when he de-
scribed the family as 'seminary of the church' and 'nursery of
heaven.'26

It is significant that a stress in both humanist and puritan writings

(and, as will be seen, in Anglican as well) is on education in the
household, by parents. Not only is this education for the benefit of
church and commonwealth, but the family is itself church and
commonwealth in microcosm. The significance of marriage, the
family and the role of parents- king and queen of the little common-
wealth- is thereby greatly increased. This emphasis on religious and
moral education within the context of the family has been attributed
by historians to the Reformation, with its requirement that
everyone be able to read the Bible, appreciate his need for faith in
Christ, and acquire the means of participating in a direct com-
munication with God, independent of the mediation of the
priesthood. The constant urging, by puritan authors of domestic
conduct manuals, of parents to catechize their children and to con-
duct daily prayer and Bible-reading sessions in the home is seen as
evidence that, since 'a special caste of priests no longer mediated
between God and man, the residuary legatee was (or in the puritan
view should be) the father of the family.' The insistence of puritans
24
E d m u n d T i l n e y , A brief. . . discourse of duties in Marriage, called the Flower of Friendshippe
(1568), sig. Aviii.
25
Batty, fol. 4v; Bartimeus Andrewes, A very short and pithie Catechisme (1586),
Dedicatory Epistle (to the author's congregation at Yarmouth). A puritan student
at St John's, Cambridge, in 1635 also called the family a'little church' (St John's,
Cambridge, MS S.44, p. 49), as did Thomas Brathwaite of Queen's, Oxford
(Queen's, MS 423, n.p.).
26
Gouge, p. 18; Taylor, Works, ed. R. Heber(1828), V, pp. 252-3.
 The spiritualized household 103
on the father's religious responsibilities is incidentally seen as
increasing the dependence of the wife on the husband.27 Thus, it is
allegedly puritanism- extreme protestantism- which has spiritual-
ized the family and sacerdotalized the role of the father by entrusting
him with the responsibility for household religious education.
This interpretation is understandable in view of the prominence
of household instruction in puritan theory and practice. The insis-
tence of early protestants like Bullinger, Becon and Latimer on
parental responsibility for religious instruction, was followed later
by, for instance, Thomas Gataker, who called parents 'instructors
under him [God], for the framing and molding of our minds and
souls,' and by Robert Cleaver, who required that the governor of a
household 'set an order in his house for the service of God, to wit,
that morning and evening, before meals and after meals, prayers and
thanks may be made unto God.' He was to be responsible for
the private instruction [of his family], and dealing with them in matters of
religion, for the building of them up in true faith and for the inuring and
bringing of them to a conscience toward God, that they may not only know
and profess religion, but also feel and show the power of religion in their
lives . . . So it is not enough to bring thy children to be catechised at the
church, but thou must labor with them at home after a more plain and easier
manner of instruction, that so they may the better profit by the public
teaching.
Scripture was to be read daily by the assembled household, accord-
ing to Cleaver, and the father was to prepare his children to receive
the sacraments with short lectures followed by examinations of what
they had learned from this instruction.28 William Perkins also dis-
cussed the frequency and composition of household worship: the
master of the family was to call the house together at the beginning
and end of each day and before and after meals for prayer and 'a con-
ference upon the word of God, for the edification of all the mem-
bers, to eternal life,' and he should designate periodic fast days,
particularly during family crises.29 William Jones, Perkins and
27
Hill, pp. 466, 457.
28
Bullinger, fols. 81v-82v; Thomas Becon, Catechism (Cambridge, 1844), pp. 348,
519; Hugh Latimer, Sermons, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, 1844), p. 107; Gataker,
Certaine sermons (1637), p. 4; Cleaver, pp. 35, 38^40.
29
Perkins, p. 670; cf. John Dod, Bathshebaes Instructions to her Sonne Lemue/(1614), pp.
1-2,61, 64; William Jones, Briefe Exhortation, pp. 7,14,18-19, 20-24, &ndApithie&
short treaties whereby a godly Christian is directed how to make his last will (1612), sig. Aiii.
Laurence Chaderton, in a 1590 sermon at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, said
that godly parents who train their children in the principles of religion and right
behavior are not responsible for their subsequent profanity (Pembroke,
Cambridge, MS LC 11.164, n.f.).
104 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Dorothy Leigh instructed householders to pray for as well as with

their children and servants several times each day.30 Finally, when
the dislocations of the 1640s allowed puritans to establish a pres-
byterian system of discipline, their exhortations were embodied in
the resolutions of church governing bodies. The provincial synod
meeting in London in November of 1648 ordered ministers to
exhort parents and masters to catechize their children and servants
at home, and a meeting of presbyterians and independents at
Manchester in 1659 resolved that in order to be admitted to com-
munion, householders must be 'such as maintain the exercises of
Christianity, viz., pray in and instruct their families, reading the
word . . .'31
Ardent protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
were diligent in carrying out these instructions. Sir Anthony Cooke
taught his own five daughters as well as the young Edward VI, and it
was said that his goal for his family was' to embue their infancy with a
knowing, serious, and sober religion, which went with them to their
graves.'32 The seventeenth-century puritans Simonds D'Ewes, Ralph
Josselin and Richard Baxter all received much of their religious
education from their parents and in turn catechized their own
children at home.33 When Bulstrode Whitelocke's family began to
increase, he 'began to think indeed, that every man ought to be a
priest in his own house, and he formed a resolution of reading
prayers daily to his wife and servants - a custom that he never after
neglected to observe.'34 In London, the godly Nehemiah Wallington
took to heart his minister's exhortation to 'governors of families to
imitate God, to be to those of our family as God is unto us . . . [for]
those that you entertain into your family you take not only a charge
of their bodies but also of their souls too.' He prayed with his family
30
Perkins, p. 698; Dorothy Leigh, The Mother's Blessing (1621), p. 62; Jones, Briefe
Exhortation, p p . 20—4.
31
Minutes of the Manchester Presbyterian Classis, ed. W. Shaw (Chetham Society, 1890),
pp. 117, n. 1; 400.
32
Quoted in D. M. Meads' introduction to The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1930), p.
13. That his goal was amply realized is evident from the godly households ruled in
turn by his most prominent daughters, Mildred Cecil, Lady Burghley, and Lady
Anne Bacon. See Pearl Hogrefe, Women of Action in Tudor England (Ames, Iowa,
1977), pp. 3-56.
33
Sir Simonds D' Ewes, Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. J. O. Halliwell (1845), vol.
1, pp. 104, 177; cf D'Ewes' commonplace book, BL, Harl. MS 227, fol. I4v; Alan
Macfarlane, The Family Life ofRalph Josselin (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 109, 122, 124.
Baxter, Autobiography (1931), pp. 4-5.
34
K H. Whitelocke, Memoires of Bulstrode Whitelocke (I860), p. 67. He did so despite
the fact that he maintained a household chaplain (p. 83).
 The spiritualized household 105
and servants daily, reading to them from the Scriptures and instruct-
ing them in points of doctrine.35 The more moderate puritan
Simonds D'Ewes is also noteworthy for his devotion to praying and
fasting with his young wife, and later in the century, Baxter's work
with the congregation at Kidderminster was aimed at training
householders to teach their own children. His instructions to pas-
tors exhort them to

have a special eye upon families, to see that they are well ordered, and the
duties of each relation performed . . . if you could but get the rulers of
families to do their duty, to take up the work where you left it, and help it on,
what abundance of good might be done! . . . Go occasionally among them
. . . and ask the master of the family whether he prays with them, and reads
the Scripture, or what he doth? Labour to convince such as neglect this, of
their sin . . . Persuade the master of every family to cause his children and
servants to repeat the Catechism to him, every Sabbath evening, and to give
him some account of what they have heard at church during the day.36

The notion that women were repressed by the religious significance

of the father's role, however, is difficult to support given the didactic
responsibilities bestowed on mothers or on parents as joint governors
of the household by puritans. Wives were given the responsibility by
Cleaver for early education of children, for 'a child wisely trained up
by the mother in the young years will be the easilier brought to good-
ness, by the Father's godly care.' Dod, Jones and Batty gave mothers
the responsibility for older as well as younger children. Mothers
were to oversee the development of a religious vocabulary in young
children: the child's first word should be 4God,' 'from whence as
from a most lucky lot, all the whole web of speech should begin. For
this motherly care and discipline shall be very profitable to all
children of young and tender years, and shall make them more apt
and ready for the attaining of greater studies.' The mother's duty to
older children was' to teach them the true knowledge and worship of
the Almighty . . . the duty they owe to their country, the reverend
love they should bear toward their parents and kinfolk'; further-

35
BL, Add MS4088, fols. 121v-122; cf. fols. 14, 21v, 78v, 84, 104v, 105v, 127, 128v,
129v-l 30v, 136v, 138v. He purchased a copy ofGouge''s Domesticall Duties in 1622
to aid him in this task: Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.436, p. 13. I am in-
debted to Derek Hirst for this reference; it is also noted by Paul Seaver, Wallington's
World (Stanford, 1985), p. 79.
36
D'Ewes, Autobiography, vol. 1, pp. 363, 375,409,429-30,435; Baxter, The Reformed
Pastor (1656), ch. 2, section i, 4; The Catechising of Families (1683), passim.
106 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

more, mothers were to teach both sons and daughters.37 Gouge

addressed husband and wife jointly as 'parents' and 'masters' when
informing them of their religious duties, and he gave both of them
responsibility for the instruction of children and servants.38 So
exalted was the spiritual role of the mother in Brilliana Conway's
estimation, that she called godly mothers 'living images of God' for
their families.39
Puritan women took their religious responsibilities as seriously in
practice as in theory. Cleaver's work on household government was
dedicated to three puritan gentlemen and their wives, in view of the
'holy exercises daily used and exercised in all your houses,' and in
such puritan households as that of Lady Margaret Hoby, the role of
the mistress in maintaining the daily regimen of family prayer and
Bible study is apparent. Despite the fact that the Hoby household
seems to have maintained a chaplain, Lady Margaret frequently took
it upon herself to supervise the catechizing of her servants, hear
their repetitions of Sunday sermons, or read to them from the works
of puritan divines. She was responsible for the religious education of
Hoby's heir, John Sydenham, and of her young relation, Jane Lutton,
and herein she followed the godly pattern of the puritan Countess of
Huntingdon, who had been entrusted with Margaret's own upbring-
ing.40 Similarly, Mildred Cecil supervised the religious education of
her son and stepson, and her sister Lady Anne Bacon's spiritual over-
seeing of her own two sons even after they had attained adulthood is
well known.41 In the next century, Simonds D'Ewes' mother and
grandmother, Ralph Josselin's wife, Samuel Clarke's wife and Mrs
Ratcliffe of Chester provide other examples of puritan women who
occupied a didactic role in the household.42 Grace Wellington's

37
Cleaver, pp. 40-1; Batty, fol. 55; cf Dod, Bathshebaes Instructions, p. 3, and Jones,
Briefe Exhortation, pp. 10-11. D'Ewes pointed out that the mother was 'ordinarily
the chief bringer up of children in their tender years' (BL, Harl. MS 227, fol. I4v);
this was a commonplace frequently drawn from Plutarch (e.g., by the author of
Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LC 11.12, p. 41). Thomas Brathwaite noted the impor-
tance of mothers catechizing daughters as well as sons in his commonplace book,
Queen's, Oxford, MS 423, n.p.
38
Gouge, Dedicatory Epistle, pp. 253-66, 497-505, 518-83, 646-93.
39
Nottingham University MSS, Box 166 (Conway), fol. 53v, my translation of her
1
Meres sont les images des dieu . . . les vives images de died [sic].
40
Cleaver, Dedicatory Epistle, p. 13; Hoby, Diary, passim, p. 238, n. 12; cf. Claire
Cross, The Puritan Earl (1966), pp. 24-7, 57.
41
Hogrefe, pp. 7, 35, 46-9.
42
D'Ewes, vol. 1, pp. 104, 112-13, 117; BL, Harl. 227, fol. 14v, Harl. 118 (fol. 26v is
D'Ewes' note of thanks for his mother's letter of'grave counsel'), BL, Harl. 373;
Macfarlane, pp. 109, 122; R. C. Richardson, Puritanism in North-west England
(Manchester, 1972), pp. 105, 107-9, 134, 179.
 The spiritualized household 107
religiously didactic role extended to instruction of her husband in
accepting as providential the disasters that befell the family.43
But a glance at the domestic activities of Catholics and Anglicans
of both sexes will once again reveal that the puritans were not unique
in their theories of household religious education. Lettice, Lady
Falkland, surely no puritan, was as devoted to public prayers and lec-
tures as Lady Margaret Hoby, and she usually spent an hour with her
maids each morning, praying with them and catechizing them. The
Anglican Lady Danvers, 'with her whole family . . . did, every
Sabbath, shut up the day at night with a general, with a cheerful sing-
ing of Psalms,' and the Laudian John Cosin's eulogy of Dorothy
Holmes recorded that 'as of herself, so she was sedulous and very
affectionate in the education of her children, that they might serve
God and the commonwealth.'44 The predominantly female household
of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding was certainly characterized by
pious domestic activities.45
Clearly, a consensus on parental responsibility for catechism existed
among protestants of all stripes, from the author of the sermons on
marriage in the Elizabethan Book of Homilies, to the puritans, to such
inveterate opponents of puritanism as Cosin.46 But the basis of the
consensus is not to be found exclusively in protestant doctrine.
Once again, protestants are indebted to Christian humanism for
their household teaching. It was the humanist promotion of
religious and classical education, at least as much as protestant
biblicism, which established the strong trend of household instruc-
tion that characterized religious families of early modern England.
Erasmus, in his commentary on the Ten Commandments, directed
children to honor their parents, 'by whom he [God] hath instructed
and taught us unto the knowledge of God'; and in a sermon on the
wedding at Cana, he informed parents that 'to have brought up or
taught their child well is the office more properly belonging to the
father and mother than to have begotten it or to have born it.'47 The

43
Seaver, pp. 86-9.
44
H. C White, English Devotional Literature, 1600-1640 (Madison, 1931), pp. 60, 63;
John Donne, A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers (1627), p. 133; John
Cosin, Works (Oxford, 1863), I, p. 27. John Donne, Sermons, ed. G. R Potter and
E. M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1955), vol. 2, pp. 223ff, also lauded household prayer
and religious instruction.
45
A. M. Williams, Conversations at Little Gidding (Cambridge, 1970), Introduction.
46
Book of Homilies, p. 507; cf also the official catechism of Alexander Nowell, tr.
Thomas Norton (1570), fols 9v-10, 73; Cosin, Works, I, p. 184.
47
Erasmus, A playne and godly exposytion or declaratio of the comune Crede and of the x.
comaundementes(1533), fol. I62v; cf Prayse of Matrymony, sig. Diii, and Sermon. . . in
the second chaptyre of the Gospell of saynt Johan (n.p., n.d.), fols. 12-13 v.
108 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Erasmian Richard Whitforde, in his Werke for housholders (1537),

urged parents to begin religious instruction of their children' as soon
as they can speak,' adding that for householders, 'a very good sure
pastime upon the holy day, is to read . . . and gather thereunto as
many persons as you can.'48 The educational responsibilities of
mothers as well as fathers were set forth by the Christian humanists:
Erasmus and Whitforde addressed their instructions to 'parents,'
not just to 'fathers,' and Hyrde, Elyot and Tilney commended Christian
women who taught their children.49 Vives specifically told Christian
women to teach their children. Men, he said, should choose their
wives carefully, for 'a woman well brought up is fruitful and profit-
able unto her husband, for so shall his house be wisely governed, his
children virtuously instructed, the affections less ensued and
followed, so that they live in tranquility and virtue.' A century later,
the puritan Brilliana Conway echoed this humanist advice, stressing
the spiritual benefits that would accrue to the husband himself from
his wife's wise counsel and religious guidance: a man, she said,
should choose a wife who can 'further him in religion and serving
God purely.'50
The Catholic humanist, Nicholas Harpsfield, in his biography of
Sir Thomas More, has provided a picture of a truly ideal religious
household, one that (theological contents aside) would surely have
been admired by Gouge, Cleaver and Perkins as much as by devout
Anglicans and Catholics. More had one son and three daughters,
'which children from their youth he brought up in virtue, and
knowledge both in the Latin and the Greek tongues, whom he would
often exhort to take virtue and learning for their meat and play for
their sauce.' The family gathered daily to say psalms and litanies, and
before bedtime, More again gathered them- children, wards and ser-
vants included- to say psalms and collects with them. His renowned
daughter Margaret was to her own children a 'double mother':

as one not content to bring them forth only into the world, but instructing
them also her self in virtue and learning. At what time her husband was upon
a certain displeasure taken against him in King Henry's days sent to the
Tower, certain sent from the king to search her house, upon a sudden run-

48
Richard Whitforde, The werke for housholders (1537), sigs. Biii, Eii.
49
Hyrde in Watson, p. 50; Elyot, Defence, p. 233; Tilney, sigs. Ciii, Cv, Cviii.
50
Vives, Duty of Husbands in Watson, pp. 202-3, 209; Instruction of a Christian Woman,
Watson, p. 128; Conway MS, foL 176. Vives had also recommended that fathers
teach their children {Duty of Husbands, p. 201).
 The spiritualized household 109
ning upon her, found her, not puling and lamenting, but full busily teaching
her children.51
She followed the example of her father, lauded by Erasmus because
'despite his commitments to the affairs of state [he] did not hesitate
to serve as tutor to his wife, son, and daughters, beginning with their
religious education and then advancing to their Greek and Latin
studies.'52 Vives' advice and Margaret More's example were later
followed by the protestant humanist Catherine Parr, who was chided
by the king for her didactic role in the 'royal nursery.'53
Both Catholics and puritans argued that religious education
should begin as soon as possible, and that it should be made a pleasant
experience for the child Erasmus urged that Christians 'be instructed
with the doctrine of Christ, being yet tender infants in our parents'
arms and wanton children at our nurse's teat, for it is imprinted most
deep and cleaveth most surely which the rude and unformed shelf of
our soul doth first receive and learn.' His sermon on Jesus' childhood
was written 'to be pronounced and preached of a child unto
children,' since 'no age is unripe to learn holiness, nay rather none
other age is more timely and meet to learn Christ than that which
knoweth not yet the world.'54 Richard Whitforde likewise recom-
mended that 'as soon as they can speak, we must also teach our
children to serve God,' and Elyot argued that the formation of a
future governor must begin at birth.55
So convinced were they that 'no age is unripe to learn holiness'
that they even directed their attention to the catechetical potential
of the nursing period. Despite a recent historian's attribution of the
sixteenth-century concern with maternal nursing to puritanism, it
was Erasmus and Vives who first demanded an end to the common
practice of wealthy mothers of sending their infants out to wet nurses
51
Nicholas Harpsfield, The life and death of Sir Thomas More . . . written in the tyme of
QueeneMarie, ed E. V. Hitchcock(1932), pp. 19. 75, 79; cf. pp. 83, 92; More's 1521
letter to Margaret (Watson, p. 185), reveals that he considered the education and
discipline of his family more important than any other duty:
I pray thee, Meg, see that I understand by you, what your studies are. For rather than I would
suffer you, my children, to live idly, I would myself look unto you, with the loss of my temporal
estate, bidding all other cares and businesses farewell, amongst which there is nothing more
sweet unto me than thyself, my dearest daughter.
52
Erasmus, De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio, CWE 26, ed. J. K.
Sowards (Toronto, 1985), pp. 322-3.
53
J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965), ch. 7.
54
Studye of scripture (n.p.); A Sermon of the chyldeJesus (n.d.), title page, sig. Bviii; cf De
pueris, CWE 26, passim.
55
Whitforde, sigs. Biiii-Bv; Elyot, Governour, citing Quintilian, Plutarch and
Erasmus.
110 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

during their earliest formative years. Erasmus' Magister, in his com-

mentary on the Ten Commandments, answering the student's ques-
tion regarding the woman who ' refuses the irksomeness of giving
her children suck, and. . . doth [not] teach and nurture them to good
manners,' replies that the less diligently parents perform their duty
to their children, the less honor is due to them.56 The juxtaposition
of nursing and education here is noteworthy. Vives, in his Instruction
of a Christian Woman (1523), used Quintilian and Plutarch as his
authorities when he advised that children 'have all one both for their
mother, their nurse, and their teacher.' And Richard Hyrde, in his
introduction to Margaret More's translation of Erasmus' Precatio
dominica in septem portiones (1524), dedicated to Frances, daughter of
Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, concluded from the fact that
Frances had been nursed by her mother that she would probably
turn out well.57
Zealous protestants accepted all of these humanist precepts
wholeheartedly. Batty explicitly cited Erasmus and the ancients
when he urged an early start on domestic religious instruction and
insisted that education must not be a negative experience, and
Perkins echoed the motivation of Erasmus' Colloquies and the
explicit instruction of his pedagogical treatise, De pueris statim ac
liberaliter instituendis declamatio, when he taught that 'the first instruc-
tion of children in learning and religion must be so ordered, that
they may take it with delight.'58 Perkins, Batty, Gouge and Elizabeth
Clinton (the puritan Countess of Lincoln) likewise drew on the
humanist tradition in recommending that mothers nurse their own
children because of the effects of this early experience on the child's
spiritual development. Batty was certain that 'odious errors' would
be sucked in with the milk of'lewd Nurses,' and he repeated Vives'
exhortation to nurses not to sing silly songs and rhymes to their
charges, lest' they be nouseled in folly, and fraught with corrupt con-
ditions.'59 Thus, in the very crucial area of household religious teach-

56
R. V. Schnucker, 'The English Puritans and Pregnancy, Delivery, and Breast Feed-
ing,' History of Childhood Quarterly, 1, 4 (1974), 637-58; Erasmus Playne and godly
exposytion, fols. I63v-164; cf De pueris, CWE 26, p. 315.
57
Vives, Instruction of a Christian Woman, Watson, pp. 39-40, 123; Hyrde in
Watson, p. 172.
58
Batty, fols. 10-13v; Perkins, p. 694; Leigh, pp. 46-7; cf. Erasmus, Colloquies, Pref-
ace, and De pueris, passim and esp. pp. 339ff.
59
Perkins, p. 693; Batty, fol. 54 {cf Vives, Instruction of a Christian Woman, Watson, p.
125); Gouge, pp. 513, 515; Clinton, Countess of Lincolns Nurserie (1622), passim; cf.
Erasmus, De pueris, 315- An apparently puritan student at mid-seventeenth-
century Pembroke College, Cambridge, devoted several pages of his theological
notebook to this subject, citing the authority of Plutarch in favor of maternal
 The spiritualized household 111
ing, puritan doctrine varied little, if at all, from that of Catholic
humanists.

In addition to their stress on the didactic responsibilities of parents,

the puritan emphasis on the householder's disciplinary duties has
been interpreted as spiritualizing the family and sacerdotalizing the
role of the father. To 'the preachers' is attributed the idea of the
father as governor of a little state and priest of a little church; accord-
ingly, protestantism is credited with the logical implication of this
idea - a spiritually authoritarian household.60
Undeniably, puritan domestic conduct books without exception
urged children to show deference to their parents and parents to
exercise strict control over their charges; furthermore, it is clear that
discipline was seen as a religious responsibility: the child was to be
corrected 'in zeal of God's glory.'61 The parent, rather than the
priest, was made responsible for the child's spiritual state, so that
Batty could call parents God's vicars on earth, while Perkins equated
masters of families with bishops.62 But the acknowledged Augustinian
sources for this 'puritan' doctrine had been utilized both by protes-
tants and by Catholics, and especially by Christian humanists, so that
once again the originality of puritan domestic conduct theory must
be denied. More's deference to his father is well known, and the sub-
mission required of children by the Erasmian Whitforde was neither
less extreme nor less religious than that demanded of puritan
children. Whitforde recommended that children kneel before their
parents each evening and request their benediction, and he provided
formulae both for the request by the children and for the parents'

nursing (Pembroke MS LC 11.12, pp. 42-45; cf. Trin. MS R16.9, fols. 336-336v,
also citing Plutarch.) The preachers' exhortations were heeded by such puritan
wives as Mrs Josselin, who nursed all of her children (Macfarlane, p. 83), and
D'Ewes' mother (Autobiography, voL 1, pp. 24, 26). It is interesting to note that the
Anglican bishop Jeremy Taylor followed the humanist/puritan tradition on this
point: in a discussion of early education by parents, he judged the nursing of
children to be 'the first, and most natural and necessary instance of piety which
mothers can show to their babes' (Works, vol. 4, p. 157).
60
Hill, pp. 458-62.
61
Becon, Catechism, pp. 353-5; Baxter, Christian Directory, p. 543; Dod and Cleaver, A
Godly Forme of Householde Government (1598), p. 279; Cleaver, p. 43; Batty, foL
22.
62
Batty, fols. 15, 57v, 65v; Perkins, p. 699. Both cited Augustine: Quilibetpater
familias, quia superintendit domui, episcopus dice [sic] potest (fol. 15 in Batty). Brilliana
Conway drew the more extreme analogy, 'Peres et meres sont les Images des dieu. Nous
sont diuedomestique [sic]. . .' (foL 5 3v). Batty came to the not very protestant conclu-
sion that parents who acted diligently on his advice would thereby save their own
souls, even if their children rebelled against their authority (fols. 22, 58).
112 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

response which clearly placed mothers and fathers in a quasi-priestly

role.63
Humanists and puritans further agreed on the nature of cor-
rection, both showing a decided preference for reasoning with the
wayward child or servant, rather than executing corporal punish-
ment, and both emphasizing the need for justice, understanding and
mercy to be shown. Elyot's discussion of early education urged the
use of kindness, rather than stripes, and Vives told mothers to
balance correction of disobedience with affectionate rewarding of
good behavior.64 Whitforde's statement that
Whosoever do the correction, whether it be in lashes or in words, let it be
done with the charity of our Lord and with a mild and soft spirit, that ever it
be done for the reformation of the person, rather than for the revenging of
the fault; and therefore should you never do any manner of correction while
you be vexed, chafed, troubled, wroth, or angry . . .
was later echoed by the protestant Batty: 'Teach not by means of
threatenings and blows, but by persuasion . . . It is the part of wise
parents, to rebuke their children without contumely, cheek, or
taunt, and to praise them without flattery or adulation. . . that their
children reverence them for their gravity of life, and love them for
the pleasantness of their manners.'65 Puritans agreed that above all,
parents should never correct a child in anger. Perkins ordered that
disobedient children 'be restrained by the bridle of discipline. First,
by reproof in word, and when that will not help, by the rod of cor-
rection. Yet in this point two extremes are carefully to be avoided:
that the parents be not either too severe, or too indulgent to the
child.' Cleaver urged that discipline be consistent, just and mercifuL
Ignorance of the law should be taken into account, as should the
offending child's motive, age and general habits.66 Gataker urged
gentle discipline to 'entice and allure' children to good behavior,
since 'the name of children is a most sweet name, savouring strongly
of love,' without which 'there is little hope of learning.'67
63
Schiicking, p. 6; cf Stjohn's College, Cambridge, MS S.34 (1620), p. 10; Whitforde,
sigs. Eiii-Eiiii.
64
E l y o t , Governour, foL 32; Vives, Instruction, Watson, pp. 126-7, 129-32.
65
Whitforde, sig. Dvi; Batty, fols. 7-8, 24-27. cf. Erasmus' long diatribe against the
corporal punishment of children which comprises much of De pueris, CWE 26.
66
Perkins, p. 694; Cleaver, pp. 43, 46-7.
67
Gataker, pp. 4-5; cf. Dod, Bathshebaes Instructions, p. 6. It is noteworthy, given
recent literature on the supposed absence of affection in the early modern family,
that both humanists and puritans found it necessary to caution parents against the
opposite extreme: Batty, fol. 55; Perkins, p. 694; D'Ewes, vol. 1, pp. 30, 36, 63-4;
BL, Harl. 227, fol. I4v; cf Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England
(New York, 1977), chs. 3 and 5. Lucy Hutchinson noted her mother-in-law's
'indulgent tenderness to her infants' in her Memoires of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson,
ed. Julius Hutchinson (1822), vol. 1, p. 63.
 The spiritualized household 113
Both likewise held the mother's role in family discipline to be as
important as the father's. Whitforde, for instance, made mothers
the primary domestic disciplinarians, and Harpsfield recorded
approvingly that More married his second wife 'for the ruling and
governing of his children, house, and family.'68 Gouge, therefore,
did little more than echo humanist sentiments when he wrote to his
parishioners at Blackfriars that the husband ought to make his wife
'a joint governor of the family with himself, and refer the ordering of
many things to her discretion, and with all honourable and kind re-
spect to carry himself toward her.' Perkins similarly called the wife
* the associate, not only in office and authority, but also in advice, and
counsel' of her husband, and one of the ways in which she was to
govern the household was 'by ordering her children and servants in
wisdom, partly by instruction, partly by admonition, when there
is need.'69
The importance of women which has been noted in puritan theories
of domestic conduct, as well as the exaltation of marriage and the
household- the woman's primary sphere of influence- obviously
belies the thesis that protestantism reduced the significance of
women when it banned veneration of the Virgin and the saints (many
of whom were female) and gave the father a semi-priestly role upon
which the wife was dependent. 70 In fact, puritans vehemently
renounced the notion that the wife's salvation depended on her hus-
band's priestly intervention. The puritan woman was as responsible
for her degree of sanctification as was her husband for his, since
'most true it is, that women are as men are, reasonable creatures, and
have flexible wits, both to good and evil.'71 Men and women were
seen by puritans as spiritually equal, and this equality was to be
manifest in the marriage relationship. More than one puritan ser-
mon argued that
The husband is also to understand, that as God created the woman, not of
the head, and so equal in authority with her husband, so also he created her
not of Adam's foot that she should be trodden down and despised, but he
took her out of the rib, that she might walk jointly with him, under the con-
duct and government of her head.72
68
Whitforde, foL Dvi; Harpsfield, p. 93.
69
Gouge, p. 5; Perkins, pp. 7OOff; cf. Cleaver, pp. 85ff; Batty, fol. 3v. Mrs. Josselin
certainly functioned as a joint governor: Macfarlane, p. 96.
70 71
Hill, pp. 450, 457. Gouge, p. 35; Batty, fol. 3v; Cleaver, p. 157.
72
Cleaver, p. 201; Perkins, p. 691; Griffith, Bethel (1633), p. 289; cf the very
different conclusion of the Anglican John Donne that Eve was taken from Adam's
side, 'where she weakens him enough, and therefore should do all she can to be a
helper,' in Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1955), vol. 2, p.
346 {cf pp. 337, 344-5).
114 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Daniel Rogers taught that woman was created * of man, equal to him
in dignity . . . Hence, marriage is called a match.'73 The idea of
spiritual equality which the puritans held militated against popular
notions of female inferiority:
Such statements as 'It is better to bury a wife, than to marry one' or 'if we
could be without women, we should be without great troubles': These and
such like sayings, tending to the dispraise of women, some maliciously, and
indiscreetly, do vomit out, contrary to the mind of the Holy Ghost, who
saith that she was ordained as a helper, and not a hinderer.74
Historians have naturally adopted the position that the necessity of
education for women and the allowance of freedom of conscience
for women resulted from this theological stance.75 It explains the
fact that Bale not only lauded Anne Askew for her knowledge of
Scripture, but he also excused her desertion of her husband since he
persecuted her for her true faith.76
The principle of obedience to God before husband has been
regarded by historians of puritanism as 'the camel's head of liberty
within the tent of masculine supremacy.'77 It has even been very
plausibly suggested that the women petitioners of the Civil War
period used sexual equality before God as their legitimation for
political action by women, arguing that women and men have an
equal interest in the affairs of the church, since they have been
equally redeemed by Christ 78 In most circumstances, however,
public activity by women was not considered at all proper. Puritans
agreed with the majority opinion of their day that a woman's place is
in the home.79 Nevertheless, the fact that the home had been raised
to the level of church/commonwealth in microcosm and that the
mother's duties within that home in the areas of discipline and
instruction were so strongly emphasized by puritans indicates a
relatively high position for women in their social scheme. Gouge
elevated the mother's status within the household to that of a public
servant* a calling to be joint governor of a family must be as signifi-
cant (and as time-consuming) as a public calling, he said; otherwise

73 74
Rogers, p. 60; cf. pp. 61-71. Batty, foL 156.
75
For example, Powell, pp. I47ff; Hallers, passim and especially p. 249; cf. Becon,
Catechism, pp. 376-7; Batty, fol. 75v.
76
John Bale, Examinationsof'AnneAskew'^(1547) inSelect Works (Cambridge, 1849), pp.
77
155-6, 198-9. Hallers, p. 252.
78
Patricia Higgins, 'The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women
Petitioners,' in Politics, Religion, and the English Civil War, ed. Brian Manning (1973),
p. 215.
79
For example, H. Smith, Preparative to Marriage (1591), p. 46; Cleaver, p. 19.
 The spiritualized household 115
* what comfort in spending their time should most women have, who
are not admitted to any public function in Church or common-
wealth? Indeed, in that proper fulfilment of household duties
benefits both church and commonwealth, the mother's role 'may be
accounted a public work.'80 A note of caution should be injected
here, however. It must not be concluded that the puritan marriage
relationship was in actuality egalitarian, or that puritan women were
completely 'liberated' from the control of their spouses. Obedience
to husbands was strongly enjoined and surely expected under most
circumstances, and the authority of the woman in the household,
however exalted, was still even in the most liberal theory a slight
degree less than that of her husband. Cleaver taught that the charge
of household government lay unequally on husband and wife, the
husband being the 'chief governor' and the wife a 'fellow helper,'
exercising maximum authority in her husband's absence; however,
Gouge pointed out the 'smallness of the disparity' between spouses
in light of spiritual equality of the sexes and of the significance of
female domestic responsibilities.81
It would seem logical to conclude that puritans, by teaching sexual
equality before God and a wife's duty to obey God before her hus-
band, by encouraging female education on the basis of equal
rationality and spiritual responsibility of men and women, and by
elevating the marriage relationship and the woman's spiritual role as
educator and governor within the household, can be considered re-
sponsible for the first tentative steps toward a modern vision of sexual
equality. However the thesis that it was protestantism, and
especially protestantism of the hotter sort, which raised the position
of women to a level only slightly inferior to that of men, fails to
account for all of the data. If protestant theology is the source of the
idea of spiritual equality of the sexes in puritan thought, then one
would expect Catholics writing about domestic conduct to be teach-
ing spiritual inequality and female inferiority. In fact, this is not the
case; there is no evidence that protestants in the sixteenth century
were saying anything about women and their role in the household

80
Gouge, p. 18.
81
Gouge, p. 27 3; Cleaver, p. 9. Kathleen Davies, 'The Sacred Condition of Equality-
How Original Were Puritan Doctrines of Marriage?', Social History, 5 (1977), 563-
78, argues that puritan marriages were altogether traditional in their patriarchy;
however, Edmund Leites, 'The Duty to Desire: Love, Friendship, and Sexuality in
Some Puritan Theories of Marriage,' Journal of Social History, 15 (1982), 384-408,
has presented evidence to the contrary in puritan practice, as has Richardson, pp.
107-9. One must conclude that the ambivalence toward egalitarianism in theory
was reflected in uncertain and various practice.
116 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

which Catholic humanists had not already said. Erasmus posited

long before the puritans that wives should obey God's command
over that of an ungodly husband; Hyrde urged women's education
since * they are the one half of all mankind'; and Vives, in words directly
copied (but not attributed to Vives) by Cleaver, said that 'the
woman, even as man, is a reasonable creature and hath a flexible wit
both to good and evil.'82 Not only do women share rationality with
men, according to Vives, they are also spiritually men's equals: 'The
Lord doth admit women to the mystery of his religion . . . and he
doth declare that they were created to know high matters, and to
come as well as men unto the beatitude, and therefore they ought
and should be instructed and taught, as we men be.' 83 Furthermore,
the opinion that marriage was seen by Catholics as a necessary evil
and by protestants as a positive good, and that 'this difference of
attitude toward marriage accounts to a large extent for the dif-
ference in the way woman was regarded, the Puritan conception
being much the higher,' is nonsense if the very positive humanist
views of marriage and housewifery are taken into account.84
Thus, rational and spiritual equality of the sexes, as well as the
elevation of marriage and the household as spiritual entities, are
humanist, rather than puritan, propositions. To say this is not to
diminish the importance of either the propositions themselves or of
puritanism as a means by which they were transmitted to gener-
ations of English protestants. The impact of these ideas on the lives
of the godly and of their neighbors was significant, perhaps even
transformative.85 The fact that puritans devoted so much sermon
time to humanist ideas about the family helped to create a vital area
of consensus in Tudor and early Stuart England, one intimately
related to the larger puritan goal of establishing a truly godly
commonwealth. But puritans did not invent these ideas; they were
82
Erasmus, Studye of scripture, sig. Fii; Hyrde, in Watson, p. 30; Vives, Duty of Hus-
bands, Watson, pp. 198, 201; cf Cleaver, p. 157. Similar sentiments were expressed
by Elyot and More (Watson, pp. 228, 179).
83 84
In Watson, p. 201. Powell, p. 121.
85
To say this, on the other hand, is not to suggest that humanism was the only
transformative influence on the puritan household Peter Lake, 'Puritan Iden-
tities,'/£//, 35 (1984), 112-23, p. 117, is correct to observe that in many of its
activities the puritan household was 'a center not of Christian humanism but of an
aggressive style of puritan piety, actively concerned to confront and face down the
"superstitions" of the surrounding populace.' Puritans added their own peculiar
accretions to the humanist intellectual tradition of which they were a part. Lake's
example of family acts of iconoclasm directed by the patriarch is obviously irrele-
vant to the humanist assumptions that underlay the more pacific aspects of John
Bruen's family religion.
 The spiritualized household 117
simply carrying the Erasmian tradition of the family as church and
commonwealth in microcosm into the next century. In similar
fashion, they would transmit humanist ideas about reforming the
larger society to ensuing generations, ultimately becoming so iden-
tified with that body of reformist social thought that it would come
to be labeled 'puritan.'
 Work, wealth and welfare

The assumption that puritan concern with discipline led to a

stereotypically bourgeois disdain for the idle as social parasites and
the poor as justly condemned of God has become an historiographical
commonplace. The material prosperity which in at least some cases
accompanied the puritans' single-minded devotion to labor in a call-
ing has brought against them charges of greed, uncharitable
attitudes and exploitative business practices, from both contem-
porary opponents and modern historians. Richard Bancroft accused
puritan preachers of complacent unconcern with gentry oppression
of the poor and failure to exhort their congregations to charity. And
in a 1636 sermon preached in Great St Mary's, Cambridge, John
Normanton of Caius charged that the love of money would 'make
the puritan leave ruling of the rest amongst his sisters and singing of
preserve us, lord, from Turk and pope, and turn bishop and put on a
rochet. This is that which makes the rich city cormorant, he that
pays the poor water man by the statute of Harry the eighth . . . to
devour the widow and the orphan.' 1
The assertions of the enemy ought to be viewed with some sus-
picion; nevertheless, historians since Weber and Tawney have
followed the lead of the anti-puritans and attributed to the hotter
sort the doctrines that wealth is a sign of God's favor and poverty an
1
Richard Bancroft, Tracts, ed. Albert Peel (Cambridge, 1953), p. 72. Normanton's
sermon is recorded in Sidney Sussex, Ward MS F, foL 28v; Ward and the other
heads reviewed the sermon in consistory court on 14 March 1636 because of its
popish leanings on a number of points. There is no evidence, however, that Nor-
manton was censured for this judgment against the precisians, or that he failed to
satisfy the heads as to his orthodoxy at this time. He was finally deprived of his
fellowship in 1639 and subsequently joined the Roman church. See Normanton
entry in John Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922), Part I, vol. 3, and
Venn's Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, 1349-1897 (Cambridge,
1897), p. 248.

118
 Work, wealth and welfare 119
indication of divine disapproval. They have concluded that puritans
were indeed proponents of a ruthlessly capitalist ethic. Louis B.
Wright traced the growth of bourgeois culture in England in part to
the 'gospel of work as outlined by Perkins. . . [which] became a fun-
damental dogma in the religion of the Puritan middle class of the
seventeenth century.'2 Christopher Hill has elaborated the theme,
arguing that it is since the Reformation that'the sordid sin of avarice
has been transmuted into the religious and patriotic duty of thrift';
labor, formerly a curse, is now a religious duty, and poverty is no longer
a holy state, but presumptive evidence of wickedness.3 Puritan
employers, carrying the preachers' innovations to the extreme, are
said to have set the poor on work in order to expand industrial pro-
duction and enrich their own rising class: 'there is the very closest
connection between the protestant ideology of hard work and the
economic needs of English society,' according to Hill.4 While
Catholics maintained the merit of indiscriminate generosity, a sys-
tematic repression of the poor, its roots 'deep in protestant theology,'
is laid at the feet of puritans.5
Of course, this thesis has not been without its critics. It has been
modified by historians who find puritans and Anglicans in broad
agreement on economic issues, and significantly undermined by
those who question whether Elizabethan and early Stuart theorists
(whatever their religious orientation) were in any sense capitalistic
or even very business-like in their economic theory. C. H. and
Katherine George admit the development of an 'acquisitive
rationale' and a'work ethic' (the corollary of the doctrine of calling,
they tell us) in the sixteenth century, but they insist that the intellec-
tual precursors of the full-blown capitalist society of the later seven-
teenth century were not exclusively puritans. Timothy Breen agrees
that a consensus on proper attitudes toward work and wealth existed
between puritans and Anglicans; moreover, he argues that the
capitalistic spirit of the pre-Civil War period was as non-existent as
2
Louis B. Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, 1935), p. 185.
On the Weber thesis, its modifications and its critics, see Protestantism and
Capitalism, ed. Robert W. Green (Boston, 1959); for a recent defense of it, see
Gordon Marshall, Presbyteries and Profits (Oxford, 1980).
3
Hill, Puritanism andRevolution (New York, 1958), p. 218; cf. Richard Greaves, Society
and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), p. 751.
4
Ibid., p. 221, and Society and Puritanism (New York, 1964), p. 276. Perkins, according
to Hill, 'inherited, and developed, a tradition of Protestant thought on the subject'
of poverty (p. 219 of Puritanism and Revolution, emphasis mine).
5
Hill, Society and Puritanism, p. 271. Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during
the Puritan Revolution (1930), pp. 249-51, charges that puritan severity
toward the poor produced a drastic decline in poor relief during the 1640s and
1650s.
120 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

was the puritan/Anglican economic controversy. C. John Sommer-

ville has recently gone further and produced evidence for a work
ethic only after 1660, and then with stronger Anglican than dissenter
support.6 Other historians have followed suit, describing Elizabethan
and early Stuart attitudes as monastic, anti-entrepreneurial and
traditionalist.7 One recent contribution to the argument assumes
puritan economic conservatism and suggests that the London spon-
sors of many puritan sermons were struggling artisans, rather than
those wealthy merchants whose economic ethics were clearly in con-
flict with the instructions they received from the pulpit.8
Undeniably, some light has been shed on puritan attitudes in the
course of this scholarly conflict. However the intellectual origins of
puritan ideas have been rather obscured by the smoke of battle than
illuminated by the occasional flashes of historiographical insight. It
seems reasonable to expect that an investigation of the puritans'
sources would reveal a great deal about the nature and context of
their economic ethics, about the puritan/conformist economic con-
sensus, and ultimately about the relationship between protestant-
ism and capitalism. Accordingly, let us examine what those Christian
humanists who informed puritan household theory had to say about
work and idleness, getting and spending, poverty and poor relief,
and evaluate the extent to which puritan thought in these areas of
social theory was derived from Erasmian humanism.

We have seen that while humanist domestic conduct theory was in

most of its aspects a radical departure from medieval values, it still
maintained a degree of traditional patriarchalism. In similar fashion,
Christian humanists can be seen continuing a medieval campaign
against idleness and avarice, but with a distinctively Renaissance

6
C. H. George, 'The Making of the English Bourgeoisie, 1500-1700,' Science and
Society, 35 (1971), 385^*12, andC H. and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of
the English Reformation (Princeton, 1961), pp. 120-73. The Georges argue for the
growth of a spirit of work, frugality and rationality before 1640, but reserve for the
post-war period the 'spirit of capitalism.' cf Timothy Breen, 'The Non-Existent
Controversy: Puritan and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth, 1600-1640,'
CH, 35 (1966), 273-87. C. John Sommerville, 'The Anti-Puritan Work Ethic,'/5S,
20 (1981), 70-81.
7
Irvonwy Morgan, The Godly Preachers ofthe Elizabethan Church (1965), pp. 138-5 2; cf.
Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge,
Mass., 1955), who also describes puritan social theory as 'medieval' (p. 39 in the
1964 Torchbook edition). Laura Stevenson O'Connell, 'Anti-Entrepreneurial
Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature,'/££, 15 (1976), 1-20; C.
John Sommerville, 'Religious Typologies and Popular Religion in Restoration
England,' CH, 45 (1976), 32-41.
8
Paul Seaver, 'The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited,' JBS, 19 (1980), 35-53.
 Work, wealth and welfare 121
focus on calling, discipline and the proper use of wealth, and with a
new campaign to abolish poverty altogether.
A brief look at Piers Plowman will serve to illustrate the attitudes of
medieval English moralists toward work and idleness, wealth and
poverty. Piers roundly condemned the traditional vice of sloth. His
vision gave short shrift not only to 'wolfish wastrels' and sturdy
beggars pretending illness or injury to get alms, but also to hermits
'that loth were to work.'9 On the other hand, the medieval moralist
did not exalt workperse. For Langland, work was simply the requisite
means to stave off hunger, and Henry Parker followed suit a century
later when he assured readers of Dives et Pauper that in heaven there
will be no work. Neither writer disapproved of mendicity: Parker
included begging friars among the deserving poor, and Piers gave
alms willingly to hermits, anchorites, and friars, however idle, as well
as to the sick and disabled poor.10 As for healthy idlers and wastrels,
the only solution provided by Langland was put in the mouth of
Repentance; when desperate, even the dissolute received Piers'
alms.11
The medieval English approach to poor relief seen in Piers Plowman
was dictated by two assumptions - first, that alms-giving paves the
way to heaven whether discriminate or not, and second, that poverty
is an intrinsically holy state, neither possible nor appropriate to
target for elimination.12 It is a difficult condition, in Langland's
words a 'hateful blessing'; none the less, 'it is the gift of God; it is
mother of health; it is a road of peace. . . and it is happiness without
care.'13 The opposite state, wealth, was practically synonymous with
greed, and was remedied only by renunciation. That Langland's view
was not atypical for his day is apparent in the countless medieval
hagiographies that praised the wealthy man who gave up riches for
sanctity, and in the sermons of popular preachers from at least the
twelfth century recounting the merits of spiritual poverty. The men-
9
William Langland, The Vision ofPiers Plowman, ed. Arthur Burrell (1949), pp. 5,112-
13; cf. pp .90-1, 109-11.
10
Piers Plowman, pp. 112-17; Henry Parker, Dives et Pauper (1493; Scholars' Fac-
similes, Delmar, New York, 1973), sig. HI.
11
Piers Plowman, p. 120; cf. pp. 90-1. Dives et Pauper also approved almsgiving to those
whose poverty could be traced to their own sin (sig. HI).
12
Ibid., pp. 20-1, 95, 100, 105, 115. Only God knows the true poor, according to
Langland (p. 124). Alexander Gieysztor has presented the twelfth- and thirteenth-
century apologia for poverty and asceticism as responses to the harsh realities of
life, positing the inability of medieval thinkers to envisage a world without poverty,
let alone to develop programs to eliminate it, as a factor underlying their vener-
ation of it. 'La Legende de Saint Alexis en Occident: un ideal de pauvrete,' in Etudes
sur I'histoire de lapauvrete, ed. Michel Mollat (Paris, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 125-39, and
especially pp. 133-4. " Langland, p. 145.
122 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

dicant orders found in deliberate poverty and asceticism the road to

salvation, and they joined the secular clergy and such moralists as
Langland, Gower and Parker in assuring the destitute that theirs was
the better part 14 Canon lawyers and church doctors agreed with
popular preachers and moralists that voluntary poverty was a form
of asceticism good in itself, and they made it clear that those who
were born poor and willingly endured their hardship for the love of
God would share with monks and friars the spiritual rewards of
voluntary poverty.15 And if alternative views of profit became avail-
able as such theorists as St Thomas, Peter the Chanter and
(ironically) some mendicant preachers began to respond to the com-
mercial Renaissance of continental European towns from the thir-
teenth century,16 very little of this sophisticated economic theory is
apparent in popular English sermons and moralizing tracts in the
Middle Ages. Moreover, scholastic speculation about the just price
seems not to have done much to offset the exaltation of poverty in
medieval doctrine.17 Accordingly, while Langland located the causes
of some involuntary poverty in individual moral failure, either on
the part of the poor themselves or in the exploitative practices of the
rich, he failed to seek solutions in institutional change or new
economic policy, as the humanists would. He was concerned not
with social structure, but with spiritual goodness, and the merit to be
found in poverty, both religious and involuntary, placed limits on his
social criticism which would not be effectively surpassed until the
sixteenth century.18
Christian humanists diverged sharply from much, although not
all, of this medieval opinion. They continued to condemn sloth as
14
Piers Plowman, pp. 126-7; Gieysztor (Mollat, vol. 1, pp. 125-39); Bernard Metz, 'La
Pauvrete religieuse dans le "Liber de diversis ordinibus",' Mollat, voL 1, pp. 247-
54; Jean Longere, 'Pauvrete et richesse chez quelques predicateurs durant la
second moitie du XIIe siecle,' Mollat, vol. 1, pp. 255-72.
15
Piers Plowman, p. 140; Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory
andits Application in England'(Berkeley; 1959), p. 11; cf. St Thomas' Summa Theologica,
II—II, qu. 25, art. 1; qu. 66, art. 2; and qu. 184, art. 1.
16
Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca,
New York, 1978), and' Evangelical Poverty, the New Money Economy and Violence,'
Poverty in the Middle Ages, ed. David Flood (WerL Westphalia, 1975), pp. 11-26;
John Wesley Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: The Social Views ofPeter the Chanter
and his Circle (Princeton, 1970).
17
John Wesley Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and
Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1959).
18
See the discussions of Langland and Gower in Arthur Ferguson, The Articulate
Citizen and the English Renaissance(Durham, NC, 1965), pp. 42-69, andH. C. White,
Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature ofthe Sixteenth Century (New York, 1944),
pp. 3-40. Wyclif is the obvious medieval English exception to this rule (White, pp.
15, 24).
 Work, wealth and welfare 123
conducive to sin. But for Erasmus and his colleagues, labor in a
secular vocation was seen as no less holy than a clerical calling,
religious vocation was found to be no excuse for mendicity, and dis-
cipline was urged on aristocrat and cleric as well as on the
traditionally laboring population. The object of these new emphases,
moreover, was to insure the common weal. Industry was held to be a
value not only as a deterrent to sin at the individual level, but also as a
benefit to the larger society. Discipline was required for social
reform in both an economic and a moral sense, both for the
individual and for the group. As a result, Christian humanists waged
a literary campaign against idleness out of a Renaissance concern for
the reformation of the commonwealth.
The works of Erasmus and More exemplify this transitional state
between medieval and modern attitudes toward work and idleness.
As moralists, they followed in the footsteps of medieval preachers
against sloth. * There's no wickedness sloth does not teach,' Erasmus
said; among its progeny are gamblers, revellers, gluttons, drunkards,
quarrelers, and whore-hunters.19 As reformers, they continued what
had by the sixteenth century developed into a well-established
tradition of popular anticlericalism by condemning religious men-
dicity and its abuses,20 but as Renaissance advocates of social change,
they went further, evaluating the social implications of idleness and
offering an alternative model of discipline and industry for emu-
lation by clerics, nobles and commoners alike. They clearly saw idle-
ness as more than an individual failing: it is rather an offense against
the commonwealth- in Erasmus' opinion, the source of most evil in
the state.21 Erasmus compared idleness to a contagious disease,
which infects the whole society with poverty, exploitation and in-
equity.22 What intolerable injustice that great lords should waste
19
Confabulatiopia, Coll., p. 40; Apophthegmes, tr. Nicolas Udall(1542), fol. 11; Ignavis
semper feriae sunt, The 'Adages' of Erasmus, tr. Margaret Mann Phillips (Cambridge,
1964), pp. 267-8; cf Herilia (1522), Coll., pp. 16-19-
20
For example, More, Utopia, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed.
Edward Surtz andj. H. Hexter (New Haven, 1965), p. 131; cf. Simon Fish, The Sup-
plication of Beggars (1524), identifying the real 'sturdy beggars' - monks and priests.
St Francis had, of course, commended manual labor to his followers (Opuscula
Sancti Patris Francisci (Quaracchi, 1904), p. 79); however, the ideal seems to have
been largely discarded by his order by the next century: cf Piers Plowman, pp. 4-5,
and Wyclif s opposition to charity for begging friars (White, pp. 15, 24).
21
Institutio principis Christiani (The Education of a Prince), tr. L. K. Born (New
York, 1936), p. 37, cf pp. 212-13 (on education as a solution), pp. 225-6; Adages,
pp. 261-S. Colloquies particularly concerned with idleness include UvioxoXyia
('Beggar Talk', 1524), Confabulatiopia (1522), Herilia (1522), and Diluculum (^ 529).
cf. Sir William Forrest, Pleasant Poesye of Princelie Practice (1548), ed. Sidney}.
Herrtage, England in the Reign of Henry the Eighth (1878), p. xci.
22
Ne bos quidem pereat (1526), Adages, p. 370.
124 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

their time in dancing, gaming and revelry while being supported by

the labor of the poor! More charged that the idle nobility, living 'like
drones on the labors of others,' not only failed to contribute
positively to the welfare of the state, they were in fact responsible for
driving their tenants to poverty, vagrancy and crime.23 Lest the idle-
ness of the nobility undermine the common weal, Erasmus warned
the Christian prince to 'keep the proportion of idlers down to a
minimum among his courtiers and either force them to be busy or
else banish them from the country.'24 Relic-peddling clerics, money-
lenders, brokers, procurers, and wardens of large estates catering to
frivolous pleasures should also be suppressed. All were considered
idlers by Erasmus because their activities were non-productive; all
preyed on the social order to support their own sloth and
extravagance.25
Industry and productivity were to be imposed on all social estates
because they were good per se in Christian humanist eyes. For this
reason Erasmus presaged the protestant Reformers in his condem-
nation of the Church's proliferation of holy days. These times of
enforced idleness were an offense to God, contributing only to the
poverty of wage-earners.26 For this reason, too, humanists made
labor a regular feature of their visions of society perfected. While
medieval theorists had eliminated toil both from Eden and from
Paradise, More extolled the virtue of labor in Utopia-. Every Utopian
was taught a craft and was expected to labor daily in his vocation,
idlers were driven from the commonwealth, and free time was
devoted to intellectual pursuits. In Utopia, manual labor was not
despised, and, as in Erasmus' scheme, no social group was exempted
from the ban on idleness.27
More and Erasmus were followed and refined by later humanists
on this point. Thomas Starkey, expanding on Erasmus' theme of
non-production as idleness, offered a closer analysis of the types of
sloth which plagued all levels of the English social order. He con-
23
More, Utopia, pp. 63-7.
24
Institutio, p. 225; Liber de Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concord/a, in The Essential Erasmus, tr.
John P. Dolan (New York, 1964), p. 378.
25
Institutio, p. 225; cf More's condemnation of goldsmiths, money-changers and
merchants as useless to the commonwealth in Utopia, pp. 2 3 9 ^ 1 .
26
Erasmus, An Epystell.. . concerning the forbedinge of eatynge offleshe, [tr. Richard Taver-
ner; ca. 1530], n.f.
27
More, Utopia, pp. 113, 125-31; R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science
(Grand Rapids, 1972) attributes the development of modern science partly to the
Renaissance demise of a 'scholastic' disdain for manual labor and the mechanical
arts.
 Work, wealth and welfare 125
demned the 'idle rout' maintained by nobles and prelates to wait on
their tables, the 'ill-occupied' who manufactured and procured luxury
goods, singers and composers of'new songs which tend only to vanity,'
importers of wine, lawyers ('cormorants of the court'), 'idle abbey-
lubbers' and priests who 'patter up their matins' - all because their
activities were non-productive.28 All estates were subject to the
humanists' insistence on productive, profitable industry, 'profit'
being understood as recognizable benefit, either moral or material,
to the community. Every citizen of Starkey's ideal realm was
required to set his children to letters or to a craft, so that they might
contribute to the common weal, and a person without such a calling
should be banished from the city.29 Richard Whitforde agreed,
instructing every householder to 'appoint yourself, by a continual
course, unto some certain occupation that may be profitable(.'30
Profit, productivity, industry- 'bourgeois' values in our eyes, but
in Christian humanist opinion they should be the goals of nobles and
priests no less than artisans and merchants. The exaltation of these
values, moreover, made humanists wary of many leisure activities
long condoned or tolerated by the church. Dancing, feasting and
hunting were increasingly held to be suspect as a new critique of
frivolity emerged from the Northern Renaissance. The notion of
pastimes- non-productive activities undertaken solely to while away
the hours- was inimical to the humanist valuation of work. The doc-
trine of temporal steward5hip is visible in humanist diatribes against
non-productive leisure long before it became a staple of protestant
thought: Richard Whitforde warned his readers that they would
have to account on the Day of Judgment for each moment of the
time allotted them to live; therefore, they should 'beware of such
occupations as [have] been called commonly pastimes.'31 Vives
urged that those who haunt gaming booths and wine shops, even
'youths and sons of rich families,' be forced'to give an account to the
magistrates, as to their fathers, of the way in which they spend their
time.'32 Among More's retainers, as in his Utopia, dice, cards, tip-
pling and hunting were cpnspicuous by their absence, and Starkey
condemned cards and dice not because they are intrinsically evil, but

28
Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset(l5 3 3-6), ed. K.
29
M. Burton (1948), pp. 79, 82, 92-3, 123-5. Ibid., p. 142.
30
Richard Whitforde, The werke for housholders (n.p., 1537), sig. Avi, verso (emphasis
31
mine). Ibid., sigs. Avi, verso-Avii.
32
Juan Luis Vives, De Subventione Pauperum (Bruges, 1526) in Some Early Tracts on Poor
Relief, ed F. & Salter (1926), p. 20.
126 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

because they are 'unprofitable games and idle exercises.'33 The hard-
working, disciplined life of the godly citizen precluded all pleasures
not immediately conducive to health, knowledge, virtue, or the
material well-being of the commonwealth - the humanists' usual
understanding of'profit.'
A constantly recurring humanist theme is that the goal of replac-
ing idleness with discipline is the good of the commonwealth.
Starkey argued that idlers should be banished because they are 'per-
sons to the common weal utterly unprofitable.'34 The humanist
author of the scheme of poor relief adopted by the city of Ypres con-
demned those who 'nourish idleness... to the great undoing of the
common wealth', and for the advancement of the public wealth, he
encouraged replacement of'the tickling of pleasure with the exer-
cise of sparing.'35 The English humanist who submitted his treatise
on poor relief to Queen Elizabeth around 1580 went a step further
and offered a sort of cost analysis of the effects of idleness on the
commonwealth: 'A man is not well able to be a good and a profitable
member unto the Realm, until he be xxi years of age,' he estimated.
Those who 'through the folly and abuse of their parents' are allowed
to 'play in the streets til xii or xiii years of age' and are thereby reared
with an aversion or inability to work are a drain on the community
even beyond their first twenty-one years. Furthermore, these 'old
idle beggars breed young thieves,' and the cost to the realm each
time such a one is put to death may be estimated at £100 (counting
the expense of his bringing-up, non-productive adulthood, crimes,
arrest and trial, execution and burial).36 Accordingly, 'the conquer-
ing of idleness is a greater, and a more acceptable conquest to God,
yea and more profitable and commodious to the Realm than the win-
ning of castles, cities, and forts, yet obtained with less dangers, cares,
and troubles.'37
Idleness, then, was for Christian humanists more than the
individual sin which medieval moralists had condemned. It was an
offense against the commonwealth, a drain on the economy, and
33
D. B. Fenlon, 'England and Europe: Utopia and its Aftermath', TRHS, 5 th ser., 25
(1975), 115-36, p. 120; Utopia, pp. 69, 147, 171. Robert P. Adams, 'Designs by
More and Erasmus for a New Social Order', Studies in Philology, 42 (1945), 131-46,
notes that all' anti-social' pleasures are forbidden in Utopia, but More defined anti-
social even more broadly than Adams did. Starkey, p. 148; cf. Whitforde, sig. Ei,
and Bernard Silvester, A breve or shorte monycio or counseyle ofthe cure and governaunce ofa
housholde (appended to Whitforde's Werke), sig. Hiii, also condemning wineshops
34
and alehouses. Starkey, p. 79.
35
Forma Subventionis Pauperum (ca. 1515), tr. William Marshall as The Forme andManer of
Subvetion or Helpyngfor Pore People devysed andpractysed i the Cytie ofHypres in Flanders
36 37
(1535), pp. 15, 28. BL, LansdowneMS95, 3, pp. 24-6, 29. Ibid., p. 122.
 Work, wealth and welfare 127
poor stewardship of the divine trust of time. It was a denial of the
new profile of virtue in which hard work, discipline, and productivity
for the common weal were prominent features.

Material gain was the next hurdle confronted by humanist economic

ethicists. Prosperity was certainly the most troublesome side-effect
of the Erasmian exaltation of work and discipline. The ideal of care-
fully regulated living which the Middle Ages had known only in mon-
asteries (at least in theory) had now been broadened and secularized.
In the already expanding economic setting of the sixteenth century,
adherence to this ideal was likely in many cases to produce wealth,
and the moral implications of that wealth had to be addressed by
Christian humanists. Accordingly, a philosophy of getting and
spending was developed in which the medieval idealization of
poverty was discarded while traditional condemnation of luxury and
greed was maintained.
Christian humanists were not altogether unsympathetic to the
medieval notion that poverty is more conducive to holiness than is
wealth. They were well aware of the temptations posed by pros-
perity. Erasmus' paraphrase on 'Blessed are the meek' calls him
blessed who' rather desireth quiet poverty than troublesome riches,'
and Starkey noted that worldly prosperity is full of'manifold perils
and dangers.' Christ chose poor men for his disciples, Starkey con-
tinued, 'showing us how hard it was to use that [wealth] well and couple
thereto his celestial and heavenly doctrine.'38
But material prosperity was never condemned as intrinsically evil
by the humanists.39 Starkey qualified his fear of riches: it is to have
one's heart fixed in wealth (or pleasure) which is wrong, he said.
In fact,
it may not be doubted that the most prosperous state of man standeth in the
virtues of the mind coupled with worldly prosperity. . . if we have regard not
only of the soul but also of the body, saying with Aristotle that man is the
union and conjunction together of them both, and if we have regard also not

38
The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testamente (1548;
Scholars' Facsimiles, Delmar, New York, 1975), foL xviii; Starkey, pp. 52-3.
39
They responded to the expanding commercial economy of the sixteenth century
as some medieval theologians (notably St Thomas) had to that of the thirteenth
century. But the humanists went further, not only justifying limited profit (if used
for the common weal), but also denying the hierarchy of callings which in medieval
thought made the successful businessman, however just in his dealing, a second-
class citizen in the Kingdom of Heaven. As long as the upper echelons of the godly
social hierarchy were occupied by propertyless clerics, profit would remain at
best suspect
128 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

only of the life to come but also of the life present, then it is true that I say,
that felicity in the highest degree is not without worldly prosperity.40
Likewise, Erasmus' critique of'troublesome riches' and of the mer-
cantile classes could not be read as an unqualified condemnation of
either as inherently evil. He admitted that 'A man may be rich and
not put his confidence in his riches.'41 Merchants are criticized not
because involvement in trade is beyond sanctification, but because,
as Folly remarks, they use 'the meanest methods' to achieve finan-
cial gain: 'their lies, perjury, thefts, frauds and deceptions are
everywhere to be found.'42 Elsewhere, however, Erasmus drew freely
on business terminology and mercantile imagery to press an argu-
ment for pacifism, and in the adage A mortuo tributum exigere he even
remarked that he had nothing in particular against usurers, 'whose
skill I can see some reason for defending.' He was not unaware of the
facts of sixteenth-century economic life and growth, nor was he
ignorant of the benefits which wealth can bring to the community.
He was merely calling for an end to the honor given to wealth and to
inhumane behavior for the sake of profit. In the same adage, he
remarked that
I would sooner approve of an usurer than of this niggardly class of dealers
who are on the hunt for profits from every possible source, by trickery, by
lies, by fraud, by cheating, buying up here what they sell for more than double
there, and robbing the wretched poor with their monopolies- and yet these
people, who never do anything else than this in their lives, are the ones we
think almost the only people worthy of honour.
Merchants are not the only estate guilty of profiteering; priests

40
Starkey, pp. 5 3-4; cf. the Jesuit Robert Parsons' The First Booke of the Christian Exer-
cise, appertayning to resolution (n.p., 1582), pp. 299, 315 (condemning wealth out of
h a n d ) , a n d h i s Second Part of the Booke of Christian exercise... Or a Christian directorie
(n.p., 1591), pp. 16,164 (against accumulation). Starkey used Aristotle much as St
Thomas had, but the Thomistic approach is as hard to find in English Jesuit
thought as in that of Langland, Gower and Parker. For justifications of wealth
sixteenth-century English protestants would tend to look neither to medieval nor
to post-Tridentine Catholicism, but to classical literature mediated by Renaissance
humanism.
41
Paraphrases, fol. xviii; Proverbes, fol. xxvii (on Dives aut iniquus est, aut iniqui
haeres).
42
Erasmus, Praise of Folly, tr. Betty Radice (New York, 1971), p. 142; Adages, p. 213.
Clarence H. Miller, * Some Medieval Elements and Structural Unity in Erasmus' The
Praise of Folly', Renaissance Quarterly, 27 (1974), 499-511, has suggested that Erasmus
shows a typically medieval bias against the mercentile classes in this satire;
however, merchants receive far less negative attention from Folly than do rulers
and especially churchmen, and, as Erasmus notes in his preface, 'If every type of
man is included [in criticism], it is clear that all the vices are censured, not any
individual' (p. 60).
 Work, wealth and welfare 129
refuse to communicate the Body of Christ or provide a Christian
burial except for a profit:
Among Christians it is not permitted to dig a hole in the earth for the dead,
unless you have leased a little bit of ground from the priest, and if you pay
more (but only then) you can have a larger and grander place. If you have
paid a great deal, you may lie and rot in the church near the high altar; if you
have given stingily, you can be rained on with the common herd
outside.43
Profit, here defined in the narrower sense of material gain,44 was
legitimate in humanist eyes if, as Sir Thomas Smith argued, it did not
harm the interests of others. 'Harm,' however, was defined very
stringently: profit is implicitly harmful if retained by the individual
rather than invested in the common weal.45 Entrepreneurs are con-
demned when they become, in Starkey's words, 'so blinded with
singular [individual] profit and vain pleasure that they never con-
sider this common weal,' when they regard their 'own pleasure and
profit, without any respect had of any other.' Otherwise, profit may
be condoned. In fact, Starkey noted that individual profit and com-
mon benefit may go hand in hand: in what seems to be a calculated
appeal to the insistent profiteer, he argued, 'If men knew that when
they look to the common profit, that they therewith also regard
their own singular and private, surely they would not so negligently
look thereunto as it is commonly seen they now do.'46 When the
businessman's yen for personal profit overcomes his responsibility
to the commonwealth, his activity is interpreted as greed, and the
wealth obtained by it is regarded as illegitimate. But neither business
nor possessions were thereby condemned; rather, the process of get-
ting must be regulated by the clear ethical perspective to be derived
from a humanist education. And the possession of wealth must
likewise be regulated by a concern for social justice, by rational
governmental action, and by the instilling of a reasonable standard
of possession.
That Christian humanist standard aimed at an equitable economic
43
Dulce bellum inexpertis, Adages, pp. 341, 350; A mortuo tributum exigere, Adages, pp. 226,
228-9. cf the adages Sileni Alcibiades (p. 282) and Scarabeus aquilam quaerit (p. 323);
the latter notes the benefits of prosperity for a society. It should be said that even
the mild defense of usury offered by Erasmus is atypical of humanists and of
protestants. cf., for example, Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury (1572),
passim.
44
The two definitions of 'profit,' material rewards, or the general well-being -
spiritual and material- of the community, seem to vie with each other in the six-
teenth century, as one would expect in a rapidly expanding money economy.
45
A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlottes-
ville, Va., 1969). " Starkey, p. 70.
1 30 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

system. If the Erasmians never instructed the rich man to renounce

his possessions, neither did they throw poor men the sop of patient
indigence as a means of grace. Although they lauded those who were
able to live content with few possessions, they were under no illusions
about the inherent goodness of material deprivation. Poverty was
rather perceived as an evil which must and can be eliminated, not
simply by the spiritual mechanism of preaching charity to the rich,
but by means of positive, rational action on the part of lay rulers of
the Christian commonwealth. Such action is to eliminate the two
primary causes of poverty- the ever-present vice of idleness, and
extreme social inequities which result in oppression and exploit-
ation of the lower orders. Accordingly, Erasmus recommended the
exile of idlers, the enforcement of strict sumptuary laws, and the
creation of the office of censor of public morals in part to enforce
frugality on the rich. Moreover, he proposed a graduated taxation
system so that the burden of public administrative costs should fall
on the wealthy, whom it is 'desirable to bring to a simple life.'47
This' simple life' was one in which mediocritas was the ideal in regard
to possessions.48 The standard by which Christian humanists
measured legitimate gain was neither wealth nor poverty, but a
mean between the two. The humanists recognized, with the
ancients, that neither wealth nor poverty is conducive to the good
life: the former is nearly always accompanied by such vices as
avarice, pride and an exploitative attitude toward one's fellows; the
latter does not allow leisure for the pursuit of letters or for civic
involvement. The mean between luxury and deprivation, on the
other hand, would allow the development of individual virtue, pro-
vide for the sustenance of life and status, and create a situation in
which people of all levels of society can contribute to the good of the
community. It is mediocritas, agreed the author of the Ypres scheme,
which will produce virtue in the commonwealth.49
The Christian humanists conceded that the ideal of mediocritas
would be fully realized in the Christian state only by means of com-
munity of property. As Vives opined, 'If charity had any power over
us, she herself would be a law for us (although love needs no law) to
hold all things in common.'50 It was More's disgust at the fact that in
England the rich 'extort a part of their daily allowance from the
poor,' that 'alongside . . . wretched need and poverty you find ill-
47
Institution p. 227; cf. Adages, pp. 215-17; Discourse of the Commonweal, pp. 81-2.
48
For example, Summum cape, etmedium habebis, Adages, p. 264; Philodoxus(1531), Coll.,
pp. 478-88; Apophthegmes, foL 39.
49 50
Forma Subvention's Pauperum, p. 13. Vives in Salter, p. 10.
 Work, wealth and welfare 131
timed luxury . . . ostentatious sumptuousness of dress and . . .
excessive indulgence at table' which inspired his vision of com-
munity of goods.5 * In Utopia there is' equality in all respects' because
property is not private.52
Erasmus' marginal notes to the Basel edition of More's Utopia indi-
cate his approval of this theoretical communism. It is because of the
equality of goods in Utopia, he said, that all are adequately provided
for; he saw More's ideal as a 'holy commonwealth that Christians
ought to imitate' and drew the reader's attention with approval to
More's description of European commonwealths as 'conspiracies of
the rich.'53 He opened his collection of adages with Amicorum com-
munia omnia 'since there is nothing more wholesome' than this prin-
ciple: 'If only it were so fixed in men's minds as it is frequent on
everybody's lips, most of the evils of our lives would promptly be
removed.' In his further discussion of the adage, he cited the
authority of Plato, Terence and Cicero, but he made the point that
Christians should be put to shame by the fact that these pagans were
advocating the same economic system to which Christ and the Apostles
had given their endorsement
But it is extraordinary how Christians dislike this common ownership of
Plato's, how in fact they cast stones at it, although nothing was ever said by a
pagan philosopher which comes closer to the mind of Christ. . . [Pythagoras]
instituted a kind of sharing of life and property in this way, the very thing
Christ wants to happen among Christians. For all those who were admitted
by Pythagoras into that well-known band who followed his instruction
would give to the common fund whatever money and family property they
possessed. This is called in Latin, in a word which expresses the facts,
coenobium, clearly from community of life and fortunes.54
The sixteenth-century English translator of this adage, Richard
Taverner, selected for his edition of the Adages the latter portion of
Erasmus' lengthy commentary on it, in which he condemned the two
contemporary distortions of this principle, 'monkry' and'the wicked
Anabaptistical sect, which will have no Rulers, no order. . ,'55 Erasmus
held the ideal of community of property in the larger society, not
merely in a few other-worldly communities, and he held in contempt

51
Utopia, pp. 241, 69, 131.
52
Ibid., pp. 103-5, 121. J. H. Hexter has argued persuasively in More's 'Utopia': The
Biography of an Idea (Princeton, 1952), esp. pp. 35-^3, that More's communitarian
ideals are genuine, and not to be either dismissed as a mere literary device or re-
interpreted as a conservative defense of monasticism or a curiously roundabout
bourgeois defense of private property. 53 Hexter, Biography of an Idea, pp. 46-7.
54
CWE 31, tr. Margaret Mann Phillips (Toronto, 1982), pp. 29-30.
55
Proverbes, fol. liii.
1 32 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

those communities which combined communism with anarchy and

so undermined the public image of that most perfect economic
system. He attributed to the Schoolmen the erroneous connection
between Aristotle's judgment that 'human felicity cannot be com-
plete without earthly goods - physical or financial' and the con-
clusion that 'a state cannot flourish where all things are held in
common. We try to combine all his [Aristotle's] doctrines with the
teaching of Christ, which is like mixing water and fire.'56 Instead,
Aristotle's approval of wealth can be accepted by Christians only in a
biblically amended form. Wealth has potential for evil as well as for
good; it can be a means to a good life for all if it is used properly and
distributed as equitably as it was in Pythagoras' community or the
early Christian church. Clearly, for Erasmus, a strictly ordered com-
munism was the ideal economic order.57
Nevertheless, the Christian humanists as social critics were not
mere visionaries. Erasmus recognized that his contemporaries were
no more receptive to communitarianism than they would be to the
republican political ideal which he also embraced; consequently,
just as he compromised his anti-monarchical stance by writing
instructions for princes, so he made only half-way suggestions for
the equalization of wealth. He did not want community of property
at the expense of order. Because he was aware that past attempts to
revive the economic practices of the primitive Christians 'led only to
sedition', he concluded that 'concord will be achieved if we agree
that property should remain in the hands of its legal owners and its
common use be directed, when occasion arises, out of charity.'58
Only in the New World did humanists have a chance to put their
most radical economic theories into practice.59 But the ideal was by
no means completely discarded when the time came for Erasmus to
instruct the Christian prince:
56
Paraphrases, Acts of the Apostles, fol. xii; Scarabeus aquilam quaerit, Adages, p.
331.
57
It is worth noting that in Erasmus' scheme, as in More's and Plato's, those who
have given themselves over to wickedness are excluded from the economic, as well
as the other, benefits of the community (e.g., Amicorum communia omnia, CWE 31,
pp. 29-30); puritan elitism of the godly would follow suit.
58
Liber de Sarcienda, pp. 386-7.
59
F. Benedict Warren, 'The Idea of the Pueblos of Santa Fe,' in The Roman Catholic
Churchin Colonial Latin America, ed. RichardE. Greenleaf (New York, 1971), pp. 37-
46, discusses the application of the socio-economic principles of More's Utopia in
New Spain by Vasco de Quiroga, the bishop in charge of Michoacan affairs from
15 36 to 1565. His Ordinances for the pueblo-hospitals of Santa Fe, written^. 1554,
outline a six-hour work day for all members of the pueblo, the equitable distri-
bution of goods according to need, the familia as the basic political unit, and com-
mon tenure of real property, cf. Marcel Bataillon, Erasmoy Espana, 2 vols (Mexico,
 Work, wealth and welfare 133

The prince should try to prevent too great an inequality of wealth. I should
not want to see anyone deprived of his goods, but the prince should employ
certain measures [in the context, graded taxation, sumptuary laws, etc.] to
prevent the wealth of the multitude from being hoarded by a few. Plato did
not want his citizens to be too rich, neither did he want them extremely
poor, for the pauper is of no use and the rich man will not use his ability for
public service.60
Responsible stewardship of wealth for the common good thus
became an overriding concern for the humanists. They were con-
vinced that if the ideal is not immediately foreseeable, some pro-
gress can still be made toward a significant reconstruction of the
socio-economic order by the enlightened magistrate in the Christian
commonwealth.
That progress would necessitate not only regulation of wealth, but
also elimination of poverty. Among the socio-economic theories of
the Middle Ages which Erasmus and his followers had rejected was
the notion that poverty is inexplicable, insoluble, and (despite its
difficulties) sacrosanct. On the contrary, the Christian humanists
saw poverty as an intolerable social evil, and they did not hesitate to
trace its roots to the most venerable social institutions and to pro-
pose sometimes drastic but often very practicable reforms in those
institutions in order to alleviate the problem. Their communitarian
ideals may have been far-fetched; however, in their capacities as
advisers to princes and towns, educators, and occasionally adminis-
trators, they attacked the problem of poverty directly and produced
a radically new theory of poor relief which was implemented over the
following century in towns from Venice and Lyon to the New World,
and on a national level in the Netherlands and England.
The humanist plan to eliminate poverty differed sharply from the
personal and rather haphazard charity of the Middle Ages.61 It was

1950), Appendix, 'Erasmo y elNuevo Mundo,' vol. 2, pp. 435-4; Silvio Zavala, 'Sir
Thomas More in New Spain,' Essential Articlesfor the Study of Thomas More, ed. R- S.
Sylvester (Hamden, Connecticut, 1977); and Zavala, 'The American Utopia of the
Sixteenth Century,' HLQ, 10 (1947), 337-47, who summarizes Quiroga's vision of
the Golden Age established in the New World thus: 'Once political order and
humane relations were established, the roots of all discord, luxury, covetousness,
and sloth would be cut out, and peace, justice, and equality would reign' (p. 344).
Warren (p. 45) notes that laziness was one of the grounds for expulsion from
60
a pueblo. Institutio, p. 217.
61
JoelT. Rosenthal's possibly overstated thesis in The Purchase of Paradise: Gift-Giving
and the Aristocracy, 1307-1485 (Toronto, 1972) is that medieval philanthropy was
purely personal, motivated not by defined hopes for social improvement, but by
the desire of noble benefactors to expiate their own sin. He argues partly from the
vast sums given to chantries and churches rather than alms for a relative absence of
social conscience and sense of social responsibility before the Tudor period.
1 34 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

conditioned by the Erasmian stress on industry, discipline, careful

stewardship of time and money, and rationalized solutions to social
problems. By contrast, as W. K. Jordan has observed, 'The Middle
Ages were acutely sensitive to the spiritual needs of mankind while
displaying only scant, or ineffectual concern with the alleviation or
cure of the ills that beset the bodies of so large a mass of humanity.'
Monastic almsgiving was 'casual and ineffective in its incidence,
never seeking to do more than relieve conspicuous and abject suffer-
ing.'62 Medieval charity was indiscriminate, and much of it took the
form of ritualized kindness little adapted to real material need.
Charitable institutions frequently succored a ritual number of poor
(usually twelve), and historians have noted the apparent incapacity
of thirteenth-century modes of thought for questioning the struc-
tures which fostered injustice and poverty.63
The High Middle Ages saw increasing popular criticism of
vagrants, healthy beggars, and mendicant friars as drains on the
resources of Christian charity.64 Secular governments concerned
about the disruptive effects of an increasingly mobile laboring popu-
lation and aware of the apparent inability of traditional ecclesiastical
charity to address the problem of poverty and mendicity among
them, attempted to control vagabondage by prohibiting almsgiving
to able-bodied beggars and ruthlessly punishing the wandering
poor.65 Yet churchmen like Henry Parker continued to preach
charitable obligations toward not only friars and the impotent poor,
but even toward the undeserving poor, those whose poverty could
be traced to their own profligacy and gluttony. Monastic rules, too,

62
W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 (New York, 1959), p. 17.
63
Pierre-Andre Sigal, 'Pauvrete et charite aux XIe et XIIe siecles d'apres quelques
textes hagiographiques,' Mollat, vol. 1, pp. 141-62, and especially pp. 151-2; cf.
Michel Rouche, 'La Matricule des pauvres,' Mollat, vol. 1, pp. 83-110; Andre
Vauchez, 'Charite et pauvrete chez sainte Elisabeth de Thuringe, d'apres les actes
des proces de canonisation,' Mollat, vol. 1, pp. 163-73.
64
Jean Batany, 'Les pauvres et la pauvrete dans les revus des "estats du monde",'
Mollat, vol. 2, pp. 469-86; Philippe Grand, 'Gerard d'Abbeville et la pauvrete
volontaire', Mollat, vol. 1, pp. 389^*09.
65
For example, 36 Edwardlll, c.8; 7 Richardll, c.5; 12 Richardll, c.3, c.7; 11 Henry
VII, c.2. The 1349 Statute of Labourers was the first English law to prohibit
almsgiving to 'valiant beggars, who . . . as long as they may live of begging, do
refuse to labour, giving themselves to Idleness and Vice, and sometimes to Theft
and other abominations' (Statutes of the Realm, vol. 1, p. 308). 12 Richard II, c.3
(1388), aimed at the fugitive peasant problem which followed the plague, ordered
the able-bodied beggar to be placed in the stocks until 'he hath found surety to
return to his service, or to serve or labor' (Statutes ofthe Realm, vol. 2, p. 56). See also
Tierney, pp. 128-9, on the Statute of Labourers.
 Work, wealth and welfare 135
continued explicitly to disallow discrimination among paupers - all
were to be received as Christ.66
The problem did not lie in the church's refusal to recognize the
categories of worthy and unworthy poor: St Thomas had made the
distinction in his Summa contra Gentiles, and the Decretum and its
glossators recommended charitable discretion on the assumption
that the two categories existed.67 But the discrimination suggested
was limited by the overriding medieval veneration of poverty and by
the Catholic conviction that almsgiving eased the benefactor's entry
into heaven regardless of the nature of the recipient. As we have
seen, even popular works of social criticism like Piers Plowman defended
the sanctity of poverty, and canonists like Rufinus agreed, opposing
indiscriminate charity only if the deserving poor were thereby de-
prived. Humanists would later argue that the impotent poor always
suffered thereby, but in any case, the distinctions of the canonists
apparently seldom filtered down far enough to influence monastic
or private practice.68
Historians of poor relief theory have concluded that the medieval
heritage incorporated theoretical reverence for voluntary poverty
with practical suspicion of the poor.69 The merger, if it existed at all,
was an uneasy one. The former position was clearly held by the
church, the latter by secular authorities. Not until the sixteenth cen-
tury was any attempt made to reconcile the paradox by joining com-
passion for the poor to practical reformism in a rationalized program
of social reconstruction.
In the meantime, the problem of poverty continued to plague
English society, for the charitable burden borne by the church in the
later Middle Ages was slight as well as inefficiently administered.
Even historians whose intent is to refute the charge that medieval
poor relief was haphazard and ineffective admit that parochial relief

66
Parker, sig. H i , and D. Willibrord Witters, 'Pauvres et pauvrete dans les
coutumiers monastiques du Moyen Age,' Mollat, vol. 1, pp. 177-215. In fifteenth-
century France, Howard Solomon has discovered city gates closed to foreign poor,
healthy beggars being branded and whipped or set to galley service, and towns
refusing to bury the poor in hallowed ground (Public Welfare, Science, and Propaganda
in Seventeenth Century France (Princeton, 1972), p. 24); however, these actions of
secular governments contrast sharply with the theory of poor relief provided by
contemporary churchmen in France, as in England
67 68
Summa contra gentiles, chs. 133, 141; Tierney, pp. 55-60. Tierney, p. 60.
69
Paul Fideler,' Christian Humanism and Poor Law Reform in Early Tudor England,'
Societas, 4 (1974), 273—84; cf. J. Depauw, 'Pauvres, pauvres mendiants, mendiants
valides ou vagabonds? Les hesitations de la legislation royale,' Revue d'histoire mod-
erne et contemporaine, 21 (1974), 402-7.
1 36 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

mechanisms, which from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries do

seem to have included investigations of recipients, had disintegrated
by the fifteenth. The three to five percent of monastic revenues
which Brian Tierney estimates were intended for the poor did not
amount to a great deal, and his apologetic for monasteries as
primarily liturgical rather than eleemosynary institutions is a weak
defense of their diversion of revenues intended by the canonists for
the poor into spiritual activities in magnificent buildings. Tierney's
figures, moreover, may be exaggerated: other estimates for early
sixteenth-century England indicate that monastic almsgiving averaged
only two and a half percent of their gross annual income.70 But even
if Tierney's more generous figures are correct, medieval assump-
tions about the 'good life' served to undermine physical social
welfare, whatever the church's charitable intent. Furthermore, it has
been demonstrated that monasteries, whose charity was less dis-
criminate and effective than parochial relief, frequently appro-
priated parish revenues for their own use,71 and if we are to believe
contemporary social critics, the already inadequate amount of
charity available from the church was being diminished further by
monastic and clerical abuses.72 The consensus of historians is that
parish handouts, monastic hospitality, and personal holiday and
funeral almsgiving were simply unequal to the task of curbing
poverty in the early modern period.73
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a drive finally got
underway to reform this state of affairs. Historians have naturally
tended to identify the'great moving impulse' behind this movement
with 'the emergence of the Protestant ethic.'74 As we shall see, the
protestant Reformers were certainly active in the restructuring of
poor relief; however, their sources of inspiration in this area of their
social theory, as in their doctrine of the family, were the Catholic
humanists.

1
Tierney, pp. 73, 80-2; cf. pp. 68-80. Tierney admits that his figures are somewhat
conjectural, cf. Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire
(Cambridge, 1975), p. 120; Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and'Projects(Oxford, 1979),
p. 123. John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England'(197'1), finds the average
for English monasteries at the beginning of the sixteenth century less than two and
71
a half percent (p. 22). Tierney, pp. 109-32.
For example, Mum and the Sothsegger (ca. 1403-6), ed. M. Day and & Steele (1936),
pp. 4 3 , 46—7; Piers Plowman, pp. 4-5 etpassim.
Jordan, p. 59; Solomon, p. 24.
1
Jordan, p. 151. He sees no clear break from the medieval system until Latimer and
his cohorts 'laid forever on the English conscience a sense of the shame of poverty
and a moral responsibility for the enlargement of the ambit of opportunity'
(p. 156).
 Work, wealth and welfare 137
The poor relief schemes developed by Christian humanists are
characterized by discriminating, rationalized and secular adminis-
tration; innovative methods of attacking the causes of poverty; the
enforcement of discipline and industry on the poor; and faith in the
corrective power of education. Renaissance humanists vociferously
denounced the disorder implicit in begging as disgraceful, un-
methodical and ultimately ineffective. Personal alms doled out on
the church steps or at the wedding feast to all and sundry evinced
more concern with the merits which would accrue to the giver than
with the actual needs of the recipients. Unregulated almsgiving sup-
ported what humanists saw as a malevolent institution - begging.
Denying the medieval attribution of merit to mendicity (as to poverty),
the author of the Ypres scheme argued that begging is in fact a self-
perpetuating evil: beggars develop no sense of past or future, no dis-
cipline or industry, no understanding of the necessity to save money
for harder times to come. Their children are reared in idleness and
ignorance and so turn to begging themselves.75 Where begging is
allowed, he lamented, 'such gathered most not that had most need
but that had most boldness,' and when the rich saw unworthy
beggars (often fraudulently presenting themselves as blind or
maimed) spending alms on riot and pleasure while the genuine poor
went hungry, many began refusing alms altogether, to the detriment
of the truly needy.76
Personal doles to beggars were perceived, quite simply, as poor
stewardship. Proper use of the wealth with which God has entrusted
benefactors must be directed toward the common weal, and the
good of the community was hardly served by diverting funds
necessary for the life and health of the impotent to that 'right great
multitude of strong valiant beggars, vagabonds, and idle persons of
both kinds men and women which, though they might well labor for
their living if they would/ instead beg alms, to the 'displeasure of
almighty god' and 'the hurt of the common wealth.' It should be
emphasized that this complaint by an early Tudor humanist is found
in the context of a lament for 'impotent persons not able to work,
dying of want.'77 The humanists' concern for discriminate charity
was deeply rooted in their compassion for the genuine poor, rather
than in an isolated impulse to repress beggars and punish vagrancy.
But charity cannot effectively guarantee the right of the poor to sus-
75
Forma Subventions Pauperum, pp. 11-12, 17, 19. Prudent accumulation seems to
76
have been regarded highly by this author. Ibid., pp. 5-6, 8, 17.
77
BL, Royal MS 18, Cvi (an anonymous poor relief treatise dated 1531), fols. 1-
2.
1 38 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

tenance without guarding the income which is their due from the
encroachments of the unworthy. The humanists reasoned that since
4
alms should be given to feeble and weak persons, to such as are
broken with sickness or foregone in years, and to them that through
impotency be not able to get their living. . . those whole and strong
persons that take alms [should be regarded] as thieves and robbers'
and be banished from the realm.78 True generosity will firmly reject
the pleas of the valiant beggar.
In addition to worthy and undeserving poor, a refined system of
sub-categories of poverty was developed by Christian humanist
theorists to facilitate discrimination in giving and efficiency in
administering relief. The quality and condition of the pauper, his
geographic origins, his behavior, the causes of his poverty, and his
age and health were all considerations in defining these categories,
and appropriate actions were specified for each type. In Vives' plan
for Bruges, the foreign poor were sent back to their towns of birth,
unless they were from war-stricken areas (a recommendation which
was followed in most sixteenth-century relief schemes).79 The elderly,
blind, invalid and dull-witted were to be housed and provided with
easy work in municipal institutions, and the more seriously ill
(whose sickness or injury required verification by a physician to
avoid fraud) were to be hospitalized and treated.80 The insane were
also to be housed in hospitals, where the cause of insanity would be
determined and, in Vives' plan, nothing would be done 'to increase
insanity or cause it to persist- such as irritating or mocking the suf-
ferer. How inhumane that is!' Vives recommended instead a highly
individualized regimen involving a varied diet, gentle treatment,
bonds, or education, depending on individual needs. Abandoned
children formed the final category of impotent poor to be hos-
pitalized and educated.81
The unemployed but able poor comprised a separate set of

78
The canonical judgment was that 'superfluous' wealth, that not needed to main-
tain life and status, is owed to the poor. The canonists had even argued that a man in
extreme want who steals to maintain life is not guilty of theft, since he has taken
what is rightfully his own (Tierney, pp. 37-8; 147, n. 30). cf. Forma Subventionis
Pauperum, pp. 23-4, and More, Utopia, pp. 61 and 73. 79 Vives, in Salter, p. 12.
80
Vives, in Salter, pp. 12-13,15-16. Fraud was punishable by imprisonment. Erasmus
had likewise admonished the Christian prince that those 'broken through old age
or sickness and without any relatives to care for them . . . should be cared for in
public institutions for the aged and sick,' rather than having to roam the country-
side begging or rely on the inconsistent aid of the church or pious individuals
{Institution pp. 225-6). Starkey commended the institutionalization of this plan in
Ypres, 'the which I would wish to be put in use with us' (p. 160).
81
Vives, Salter, pp. 16, 18-19.
 Work, wealth and welfare 139
categories. One of these consisted of* persons of good breeding' who
had fallen on bad times. Vives suggested that they be treated with
special tact and receive relief in secret lest they be humiliated.82 A
second group, non-noble victims of the developing but unstable
market economy who were willing to work if work were available,
were to be relieved at home and provided with work on public con-
struction or in hospitals so that they could be as self-sufficient as
possible. The humanists recognized the problem of unemployment
and under-employment and strongly suspected that most of the
poor really desired work. 'Yet', as one would remark to Queen
Elizabeth, 'no man will set him on work, but say unto him, work,
work, when he knoweth not where to have work for his life.'83 Finally,
a hard line was to be taken toward the immoral poor, those 'sturdy
beggars' who, as Erasmus said, 'need a job rather than a dole' but,
due to their love of idleness and riotous living, must be compelled to
accept work. Vives outlined a program aimed at their reformation:
Those who have ruined themselves in disgraceful and base ways, such as
gambling, immorality, luxury, greed, must indeed be fed, since no one
should die from starvation, but the more disagreeable tasks are to be allotted
them bring all these details to the Consuls and Senate in their court. Let
those who have endured poverty at home be put on a list with their children,
by two Senators in each parish, adding their needs and their means of
living hitherto.89
The enforcement of morality on the poor was an essential aspect
of the humanist program. Vives instructed the Senate of Bruges to
appoint two censors annually to 'investigate the life and conduct of
the poor,' oversee 'what their children are doing,' and punish those
found haunting gaming booths or wine shops. He noted earlier in his
treatise that the corrupt opinions and morals of beggars exclude
them from church and civic involvement; however, he blamed not
the poor themselves for this, but the magistrates who had neglected
to instruct, provide for and discipline them. If his plan of censorship
82
Ibid., p. 27.
83
Ibid., p. 17; BL, Lansdowne95,3, p. 24. More noted that many tenants deprived by
enclosure of their livelihood were driven to poverty, vagrancy, and crime because
'though they most eagerly offer their labor, there is no one to hire them' (Utopia, p.
67). Solomon (p. 25) remarks that by the beginning of the sixteenth century, city
officers in France, too, had begun to see the poverty problem as one of urban
economy as much as public morality, since skilled, dependable city workers were
often chronically unemployed but willing to work.
84
Erasmus, Convivium religiosum, Coll., pp. 70-1; cf. p. 254; Vives, in Salter, p. 13. cf.
Lynn Thorndike, 'The Historical Background,' in Intelligent Philanthropy (Chicago,
1930), pp. 27-31, tracing the distinction between employable and derelict poor to
the late sixteenth century.
140 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

were put into effect, beggars could be integrated into the social
order and be of service, rather than harm, to the commonwealth.85
Vives' system of categorization and censorship of the poor was all
part of his program to rationalize and secularize poor relief in the
interests of social reformation: chief responsibility for charity was
transferred by all of the Christian humanists from the church to the
state in order to render the welfare system more efficient. This
transfer is evidence of humanist distrust of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy and is reflected, too, in their entrustment of education to
the laity (for example, by Colet at St Paul's School); but it is also
evidence of their conviction that the governors of the city are the
natural caretakers of the poor, sick and insane.86 In addition,
humanists from Erasmus to Sir Thomas Smith recognized that the
lay magistrate or the prince is the only possible agent for the reform
of many causes of poverty. 'The original cause in everything is to be
searched for/ according to the Erasmian reformer, and the locus of
'divers sorts of causes' of poverty- inequitable taxation, enclosure,
debasement of coinage, conspicuous consumption, rack-renting,
inflation and unemployment- demanded government intervention.87
Starkey's lay censors, for instance, were to oversee not only the
education and discipline of youth, but also municipal craft regu-
lation; import/export policies; and the number, substance and dis-
tribution of the nation's population in order to 'conserve the
common weal.' He recommended to Henry VIII that the crown lease
monastic lands not to a few great lords and gentlemen, whose tenure
would not benefit the commonwealth, but rather 'by copyhold, and
of a mean rent, to younger brethren living in service unprofitably,
and to them which be of lower state and degree' as a preventive
means of dealing with the poverty problem.88
Humanists also considered secular rulers more appropriate and
better equipped to regularize the collection and oversee the fair dis-
tribution of alms. Vives outlined the system which was to be more or
less adopted by many sixteenth-century towns, both English and
continental, and in many of its aspects by the Elizabethan Parlia-
ments which produced England's poor laws:
Wherefore, let two Senators, accompanied by a scribe, visit each of all of
these houses [hospitals, asylums, workhouses] and investigate; let them
85 86
Vives, in Salter, pp. 19, 9. Vives, in Salter, p. 10.
87
Discourse of the Commonweal, pp. 96-7; cf pp. 49-50, 67-77, 81-2, 101-10, 144-5;
Erasmus, Institutio, p. 227; More, Utopia, p. 67; Starkey, pp. 92-3, 95, 140-1.
88
Starkey, pp. 144, 183; Starkey to Henry VIII in England in the Reign of Henry
VIII, p. lviii.
 Work, wealth and welfare 141

make a note of the places of origin, numbers, and names of those who are
maintained there, and also of what cause brought each of them there. Let
them bring all these details to the Consuls and Senate in their court. Let
those who have endured poverty at home be put on a list, with their
children, by two Senators in each parish, adding their needs and their means
of living hitherto.89
The Senators, or overseers, were to check with neighbors of welfare
recipients to determine the cause of their poverty, their previous
status and present condition, and their moral standards and
behavior. Vives was careful, however, to charge them to conduct
their investigations 'in a humane and kindly manner,' just as their
counterparts in Ypres were to hear the complaints of the poor
'without any sour or grim countenance.'90
In addition to determining eligibility to receive aid, the Senators
or overseers of the poor were responsible for the collection of alms
into a common chest and for fair and honest distribution. No com-
pulsory rate was levied by Vives' plan; his hope was that alternative
fund-raising schemes and good administration of established
revenues would render even church donation boxes unnecessary. If
the able poor themselves were set on work, for instance, their own
production should help to pay for both their own sustenance and
that of the hospitalized. The city fathers were told to decrease the
amount of money spent by the city on public banquets and fes-
tivities: instead, they were to spend the revenues thus saved at
workshops for the poor, which were to produce statuary, building
materials and other commodities useful to the municipality and its
wealthier members.91 Priests should exhort the dying to limit their
funeral pomp in favor of charity, and Vives provided them with a set
of pragmatic incentives to voluntary almsgiving which they could
incorporate into their sermons: he painted the portrait of a city
blessed by God, populated by men reclaimed for Christ, and renowned
for its peace and concord as a result of its implementation of his
plan.92 God would bless investment in charity by a sort of celestial
89
Vives, in Salter, p. 11.
90
Ibid., pp. 11,17; Forma subventionispauperum, p. 32. In Ypres, 'four prefects and over-
seers of poor folks [were] ordained by the rightwise senate for the common profit,'
with four sub-prefects and under-officers in each parish, to visit the homes, shops
and cottages of the poor to determine need {Forma, pp. 26-8, 31-5). They were to
be 'like common parents to the poor of our city and bear toward them such
fatherly favor as they should do to their adoptive children' (p. 27).
91
Vives, in Salter, pp. 14, 21, 23-5.
92
Ibid., pp. 22, 30—1. In Ypres, it was noted that many of the poor began receiving the
sacraments after the implementation of a plan which both succored and enforced
discipline upon them (Forma, p. 56).
142 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

interest on the communal level. Vives reminded the less visionary

that a city uncluttered by beggars not only looks better, it is less
troubled by crime and vices: for this reason, the ancient Athenians,
who lowered rents to the poor and provided jobs as well as doles for
them, 'considered it as good security to part with their money as to
keep it.'93 In Ypres, where city officials collected 'voluntary* alms
from each household in the town once a week, the subsequent de-
crease in noise, odors and ugliness at the church gates, in crime and
deception of the citizens by rogues, and in contagious disease, were
all offered as practical incentives to further giving.94 In similar
fashion, that Elizabethan reformer who estimated the cost to society
of individual idleness in pounds and pence assured the queen that
while the commons were presently charged with at least £1,000,000
per annum in keeping the poor, half that amount would suffice if
idleness were suppressed, and even that £500,000 would return to
the commons by increasing the wealth of the kingdom.95 The
humanists were also aware that an efficient and honest administra-
tive system would stimulate almsgiving by those concerned that
unscrupulous beggars would waste their dole. For this reason, city
officials were to investigate how goods bequeathed to the church
were used, and overseers of the poor were required to render regular
public accounts of receipts and disbursements.96 Such a system may
have been less personal than the direct almsgiving of the Middle
Ages, but it was surely of more use to the poor.
The ultimate aim of the system, of course, was to reform the poor
themselves through a program of education and discipline.97 The
'good education of youth in virtuous exercise is the ground of the
remedying of all other diseases in this our politic body,' Starkey
claimed, and he included poverty and vagrancy among those ills.
Both he and the Ypres reformer traced the problem of theft to idle-
ness and bad example: children of the poor turn to evil ways, 'in their
first and tender years being unhappily brought up in idleness and
sloth and taught evil touches by the fellowship of lewd persons
93
Vives, pp. 7, 30.
94
Forma, pp. 36, 57-60. It is questionable how 'voluntary' a donation was when per-
sonally solicited by the authorities, cf. the 1552 English poor law which stipulated
that anyone 'obstinately and frowardly' refusing to give would be sent to the
bishop to be 'persuaded' to reform: 5 and 6 Edward VI, c.2, inj. R. Tanner, Tudor
Constitutional Documents (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1948), p. 471. Note also the heavy-
handed 'persuasion' used in sixteenth-century Rouen, where those whose 'volun-
tary' gifts were too small were threatened with distraint of goods in 1544
95
(Salter, p. 107). BL, Lansdowne, MS 95,3, pp. 120-1.
96
Forma, pp. 49-50; Vives, p. 23.
97
The ideal was expressed by Erasmus in the Institutio, pp. 212-13.
 Work, wealth and welfare 143
among whom they were conversant; they sucked even as of their
nurse most unthrifty manners. . .'98 Accordingly, every boy in Ypres
should be sent to school or, 'if their wit will not serve them there-
unto,' to learn a craft" Sir William Forrest also called for com-
pulsory education, free to the poor, beginning at age four, as a
solution to poverty, among other social disorders.100
The education of children abandoned by poor parents was of especial
concern to Vives. Lest such children perpetuate the problem of
poverty in the next generation, he recommended that at age six both
boys and girls should be moved from their hospitals to public
schools, where they should' not only learn to read and write, but. . .
first of all learn Christian piety, and the right way of thinking.' They
would thereby be rescued from a life of undisciplined idleness and
enabled to serve, rather than drain, the commonwealth.101 These
were the goals of sixteenth-century humanist founders of free
schools in the New World as well as the Old. The Franciscan Bishop
of Mexico, Zumarraga, who possessed a heavily annotated edition of
Utopia and several of Erasmus' works, sponsored public grammar
schools for girls and boys, hospital job training programs, and a
Latin college at Tlatelolco, with these ends in mind.102
Vives recognized that there were those for whom an educational
regimen was an inappropriate method of reform. These were to be
subjected to the discipline of work, not only for the material benefit
of the system, but also for their own reformation. Everyone worked
in Vives' scheme. Adults as well as children were to be taught a trade
('that for which they declare themselves most inclined') if at all poss-
ible. The untrainable should be given unskilled work, and the elderly
and invalid, light work. Even the blind were to be employed, and
Vives' reasoning here reveals again the high valuation of industry in
humanist thought: 'Some are capable of education, let them study
. . . others are musical, let them sing . . . let some turn lathes or
wheels. . . or blow bellows in smiths' forges, or make baskets. . . Let
this be so arranged, in order that the idle thoughts and base desires
98
Starkey, pp. 144,177; Forma, p. 5; cf. Morison, A remedyfor sedition, condemning the
'evil education' of the poor. " Forma, p. 29.
wo Forrest, Pleasaunt Poesye, pp. lxxxi, xcii-xciii.
101
Vives, in Salter, pp. 18-19. Vives specified that * if any girl show herself inclined for
and capable of learning, she should be allowed to go further with it.' Boys with
academic aptitude should pursue teaching or clerical careers; others should enter
workshops, 'according to their individual bents' (p. 19).
102
Richard E. Greenleaf, Zumarraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1343 (Washington,
DC, 1961), pp. 33-40, and Woodrow Borah, 'Social Welfare and Social Obligation
in New Spain: A Tentative Assessment', in XXXVI Congresso Internacional de
Americanistas (Seville, 1966), vol. 4, pp. 45-57.
144 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

that are born of idleness may be checked by occupation and absorp-

tion in work.'103 It is in this reformist light that the prohibition of
begging and the enforcement of work on vagrants must be
understood. The Ypres law against begging (which was based,
incidentally, on the recommendation of Seneca) was praised as a
device which would 'bring these unthrifties from idleness to labour,
from pleasure to profit, from wasting to sparing.' This list of goals is
of course strikingly reminiscent of Hill's working definition of the
'capitalist spirit,' an 'ethos which, within the framework of a market
economy, emphasizes productive industry, frugality, and accumu-
lation, as ends in themselves.'104 Work was to the humanists, too,
both morally therapeutic and socially beneficial.
The poor relief plans which have been discussed here were much
more than armchair speculation. The Ypres scheme was implemented
with an apparently high degree of success by the city fathers from the
early 1520s, although the order against begging (only finally passed
in 1529) and the abolition of indiscriminate almsgiving were ordered
to be repealed by the Sorbonne in 1531.105 Charles V requested a
copy of the plan in 15 31 and a month later issued a Pragmatic Decree
forbidding begging throughout the Empire. The Ghent and Brussels
ordinances of 1534 were based on the Ypres scheme, and the
Spanish legislation of 1540 drew elements from it. Starkey was
clearly indebted to it and based the recommendations for England
which he submitted to Henry VIII on it. Its publication in London in
1535 certainly influenced the passage of the 1536 English poor
law.106 Vives' proposal, not implemented in the city for which it was
written until 1560, likewise formed the basis of poor relief programs
actually implemented elsewhere. From the 15 20s to the 1540s, cities
including Nuremburg, Augsburg, Altenburg, Zurich, Lyon, Rouen,

103
Vives, pp. 13, 15-16; cf such medieval foundations as the twelfth-century
almshouse of Reading, St Johns House, in which twenty-six people were provided
with shelter, food and clothes with no labor required: Original Letters, and Other
Documents, relating to the benefactions of William Laud to the County of Berkshire, ed. John
Bruce (1841), pp. 1-4. Contrast this with BL, Royal MS 18, Cvi, whose humanist
author demonstrates the usefulness to society of setting vagrants on such public
work as highway construction, maintenance of harbors and fortresses, etc. (fols.
lv-4).
104 porma^ pp 4o? 44; Christopher Hill, 'Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism,' in
Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England in honour of R. H.
Tawney, ed F. J. Fisher (Cambridge, 1961), 15-39, p. 16, n. 1.
105
The University's January, 15 31 response to the scheme is printed in Salter, pp. 76-
9; on conservative Catholic interference with humanist poor relief schemes, see
chapter 7 below.
106
Salter, pp. 3 3-6; England in the Reign ofHenry VIII, p. 176. On the benefits reaped by
Ypres from its implementation of the scheme, see the Forma, pp. 54—60.
 Work, wealth and welfare 145
Paris and Venice put into effect poor relief schemes very similar to
that of Ypres and to Vives' plan.107 The French monarchy followed
humanist advice and imposed on local secular authorities respon-
sibility for the poor; laws effecting this secularization include the
ordinances of Moulins (1566) and Blois (1579).108
Most significantly for our purposes, both Vives' tract and an
account of the Ypres scheme were translated and published in
England in the sixteenth century. These clearly formed a basis for
English legislation and for the economic theory of sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century English protestants.109 William Marshall, even
before publishing his translation of the Ypres plan, was drafting
legislation aimed at eliminating the pernicious evil of mendicity
according to the humanist program which he so admired. His 1531
proposal called for the appointment of overseers of the poor for
each parish, the apprenticeship of children of the poor, and a pro-
gram of public works to employ paupers at reasonable wages. no The
1536 Beggars Act was apparently modeled on his proposal. It
ordered that 'no manner of person. . . shall make. . . any such com-
mon or open dole, or shall give any ready money in alms, otherwise

107
On similarities between Vives' tract and French, German and Swiss poor relief, see
Salter, pp. 81-2, 88-119- Luther's Ordinancefor a Common C/?est(1^22) for the city of
Leisneck is very similar to Vives' plan for education of boys and girls, for at-home
relief where possible, and for strict financial accountability of guardians of the
poor (Salter, pp. 92-3, 95-6). The Rouen legislation (1535) is likewise strikingly
similar in its inclusion of charity schools, relief works for the unemployed, at-
home relief, and careful categorization of the poor (Salter, pp. 104-19); it may
have been directly based on Vives' proposals.
On the humanist-inspired Aumone-Generale of Lyon, see Natalie Davis, Society
andCulture in Early Modern France(Stanford, 1975), pp. 17-64. Brian Pullan, Richand
Poor in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), has treated the influence of
Erasmus on Italian poor law reform, 1528-9 (Part II, chapter 2). It should be noted
that parallel reforms took place in Florence in the fifteenth century - see Marvin
Becker's essay 'Aspects of Lay Piety in Early Renaissance Florence,' in The Pursuit of
Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A.
Obermann (Leiden, 1974), 177-99; however, this is to be expected, since it was
the humanist tradition of social criticism and reform which provided the driving
force behind all these movements.
108
Emmanuel Chill, 'Religion and Mendicity in Seventeenth Century France,' Inter-
national Review of Social History, 3 (1962), 400-25, p. 4 0 1 .
109
More detailed accounts of the laws discussed in this paragraph and their humanist
origins can be found in Fideler, pp. 269-70, 278-84; Jordan, pp. 84—7; andTierney,
pp. 130-2.
110
BL, Royal MS 18, Gvi. According to this proposal, refusal to work was to result in
forced labor or a felony conviction. G. R Elton (EcHR, 2nd ser., 6 (1953), p. 57)
has tentatively identified Marshall as the author. A statute passed in the same year,
apparently inspired by continental humanist theory and experimentation, was the
first English law not only to separate the worthy poor from lusty vagabonds but
also to fine persons giving alms to unlicensed beggars. On the 1531 law, see Tierney,
pp. 120-4, and Jordan, p. 84.
146 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

than to the common boxes and common gatherings.' Instead, parish

or municipal overseers were to use donations to the common fund
discriminate^ to maintain the impotent at home if possible, to edu-
cate and apprentice poor children, and to compel*sturdy vagabonds
and valiant beggars to be set and kept to continual labour, in such
wise as by their said labours they . . . may get their own livings with
the continual labour of their own hands.' U1 Unfortunately, no public
works system was incorporated, with the result that when vagrancy
increased in the wake of the bad harvests of 1545 and 1546, the
vicious Vagrancy Act of 1547 decreed the enslavement of able-
bodied beggars. The extremity of this law brought about its repeal
two years later in favor of continued progress toward the more
humane ideal of Vives and Erasmus.112
Progress was made on both local and national levels. The year
1547 saw the first compulsory poor rate in London, and five years
later, citizens of that city presented the Privy Council with a rational,
sympathetic argument for publicly-financed employment of the
poor: 'It hath been a speech used of all men, to say unto the idle,
work! work!', they noted. But the poor, frequently victims of mis-
fortune, cannot comply when opportunities are not made available
to them:
we considered also that the greatest number of beggars fallen into misery by
lewd and evil service, by wars, by sickness, or other adverse fortune, have so
utterly lost their credit, that though they would show themselves willing to
labour, yet are they so suspected and feared of all men, that few or none
dare, or will receive them to work: wherefore we saw that there could be no
means to amend this miserable sort, but by making some generous pro-
vision for work, wherewith the willing poor may be exercised . . .
Their proposed solution was not the punitive institution which
Bridewell ultimately became, but a home for * the poor child, that he
might be harboured, clothed, fed, taught, and virtuously trained up,'
where, if unapt to learning, he, along with the weak and lame, acquitted
prisoners, and the able beggars, could find work appropriate to his
abilities.113 Such relief schemes as this were put into effect at the
municipal level long before they were considered by Parliament;
111
Quoted in Salter, pp. 125-6; cf. Fideler, p. 269.
112
C S. L. Davies, 'Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547,'
EcHR, 2nd ser., 19 (1966), 533^9.
113
Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power (1924), vol. 2, pp.
305, 307-8. Their language would be echoed by the anonymous humanist who
proposed to Elizabeth the scheme of national relief discussed above. Bishop
Ridley wrote to Cecil in 15 52 in support of this suit, arguing the need for 'a place to
house Christ' (TED, voL 2, p. 312).
 Work, wealth and welfare 147
however, national legislation passed in 1551 and 1552 did authorize
a census of the poor in each parish and delineate the election process
for overseers of the poor throughout the realm.114
The rest of the program remained to be realized after the restor-
ation of protestantism to England. After the middle of the century,
progressive continental and American relief programs began to
languish and finally to change their nature as Catholic conservatives
rejected and attacked humanist social values- a phenomenon which
will be analyzed in some detail later. But in England (as, apparently,
in the Netherlands, some German towns, and certain Huguenot
communities), the humanist vision of a disciplined, industrious, pro-
ductive Christian society unencumbered by mendicants and vaga-
bonds, free of poverty and ignorance, continued to inspire protestant
reformers. The Elizabethan poor laws, praised by puritans as
'wholesome laws,' 'being in substance the very law of God,' came
closer than any other sixteenth-century legislation to implementing
the Vivesian ideal.115

The relative success with which the English addressed the poverty
problem at the turn of the century was due in large measure to the
enthusiastic adoption by protestants of the reform program of
Christian humanism and of the humanist philosophy of work and
wealth upon which it was based. The sanctification of work, the
exaltation of discipline and the drive to repress idleness and frivolity
have been properly labeled hallmarks of puritanism. The ideal of
mediocritas in getting and spending, the doctrine of stewardship, and
the demand for discriminate, rationalized, secular poor relief cer-
tainly characterize puritanism. All of these principles, however, can
be found in the puritans' inheritance from Christian humanism. The
inheritance was transmitted in part by earlier English and continental
protestants; its authorities were biblical as well as classical; but its
form and application were derived from Christian humanism. It was
bequeathed, moreover, to protestants of all liturgical and ecclesi-
ological persuasions: humanist economic and social theory formed a
common ground for puritans and Anglicans during most of the
period that we are considering. Historians have written a great deal
about puritan veneration of industry, vocation and discipline,

114
Jordan, p. 86. There was no national compulsory poor rate until 1597, although
London established one in 1547, Norwich in 1549.
115
Ordinance for the Constant Reliefe and Imployment of the Poore (17 December 1647) in
Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (1911), vol. 1, p.
1042; Perkins, Works, voL 1, p. 755.
148 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

although only occasionally do they recognize that puritans shared

this stance with Anglicans.116 In fact, protestants of all varieties
carried on the denunciation of idleness which can be found in the
earliest Reformers.117 But scant attention has been paid to their
common sources, Christian humanist and classical, and it was those
sources which defined the nature of puritan analysis of and prescrip-
tion for the problem of idleness.
The ultimate goal of the work ethic, for protestants as for their
Catholic humanist mentors, was the common weal. Both relied on
the Roman Stoics, who understood vocatus in civic, rather than
individual, terms. William Perkins might have been quoting Starkey
or Elyot when he defined a legitimate vocation as one 'ordained and
imposed on man by God, for the common good' Christians 'may not live
idly,' he argued, 'and give ourselves to riot and gaming, but labour to
serve God and our country, in some profitable course of life.' The
only vacation from work which God allows, according to Perkins, is
the sabbath, which itself benefits the commonwealth by allowing
time for study and religious exercises.118 Thomas Cartwright inter-
preted the eighth commandment to forbid idleness, since one who
does not labor to maintain both himself and the poor steals from the
commonwealth.119 Earlier in the century Hugh Latimer had urged
Edward VI to set his subjects on work 'that the commonwealth be
advanced,' and Martin Bucer called 'slothful and pernicious idleness'

116
Breen, pp. 273-9, cites such Anglicans as George Herbert, Robert Sanderson,
Lancelot Andrewes, Nicholas Ferrar, John Donne and Thomas Fuller on the doc-
trine of particular calling and on the intrinsic goodness of work.
117
From Luther's railing against begging friars in his 'Address to the Christian
Nobility' (Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and S. Lehmann (Philadelphia, 1955), vol.
44, pp. 189-90); Zwingli's definition of indolence as 'the mother of all mischief:
Of the Upbringing and Education ofYouth (1523), in Library ofChristian Classics, vol. 24,
ed. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 117, cf p. 113; and Hugh Latimer's
traditional censure of sloth and gluttony (Sermons, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge,
1844), pp. 52,65-7,117-20); to the more sophisticated plans of Bucer to eliminate
idleness, unemployment and luxury in DeRegno Christi (pp. 171,182, 335-40, 346,
354). Bucer's sources were frequently classical: he noted (p. 354) Draco the
Athenian's opinion that laziness should be punishable by death (Plutarch, Vita
Solonis, XVII, 1-2). It is significant that the only section of De Regno Christi to be
translated and published in England in the sixteenth century was that dealing with
work, wealth and charity, translated as A Treatise How by the Worde of God, Christian
mens Almose ought to Be distributed [1557].
118
Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of Man (1597-1601) in Workes(l6l6),
vol. 1, p. 750 (emphasis mine), pp. 774-5; cf The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Con-
science in William Perkins: His Pioneer Works on Casuistry, ed. Thomas F. Merrill (The
Hague, 1966), p. 206; Cicero, De Officiis, I, 29; Seneca, De dementia, in Moral Essays,
tr. J. W. Basore (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), vol. 1, pp. 365-9.
119
A shorte Catechisme, in Cartwrightiana, ed. Albert Peel and Leland Carson, (1951),
p. 165.
 Work, wealth and welfare 149
a 'pest of the community.' In the next century, Nehemiah
Wellington opined that an idle citizenry can bring divine judgment
on the whole nation. 12°
For the sake of the commonwealth, then, puritans followed the
standard Christian humanist recommendations to instill discipline
into the social order: productivity must be encouraged, time dis-
cipline imposed and frivolity restrained. Productivity, or profit, was
the value which John White hoped to teach in his Dorchester parish,
by establishing a school for the poor supported in part by their labor
in a municipal brewhouse. His apology for the scheme assumed the
principle of'knowledge causing piety, piety breeding industry, and
industry procuring plenty.'121 While puritans credited God for their
material blessings, they were fully convinced of their responsibility
both to engage in productive and honest work in order to keep the
windows of heaven open, and to use their wealth for the common
good, to the glory of God. Wallington, whose diary is replete with
thanksgiving to God for 'good trade,' vowed none the less to strive
to 'please my loving God that sends me all my customers and gives
me freely all that I enjoy' by laboring uprightly in his appointed call-
ing: God's blessings to Job, he noted, came not directly, but'in bless-
ing his labor. So much as you get honestly by your faithful labors and
endeavors, so much you may say God hath given you.'122 Samuel
Ward of Ipswich made it clear that legitimate profit was not merely
material gain for the seller, but the good of the community, in this
case, of both parties in an economic transaction: 'Let the mutual
profit of buyer and seller be the rule of buying and selling, and not
the gain of one of them alone.'123
Far from despising manual arts, puritans agreed with Erasmus and
Vives that they were to be highly regarded as profitable to individual
and society. The puritan William Bright quoted with approval
Morison's observation that the citizens of Nuremberg lived plen-
tifully despite sparse natural resources 'by industry and skill in
manual arts.' The notebook which Bright kept during the 1640s
graphically illustrates the importance of Morison and other Christian
120
Latimer, pp. 99-100; Bucer, p. 335, cf. p. 216; Wallington, Diary, BL, Add. MS
40883, fols. 44, 74.
121
Quoted in Charles Webster, The Great Instauration (New York, 1975), p. 34. The
brewhouse also served to police the assize of ale and prevent profiteering, cf. Paul
Slack, 'Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597-1666,' in Crisis and Order in English
Towns, 1500-1700, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (Toronto, 1972), pp. 164-
203.
122
BL, Add. MS40883, fols. 78v,46v; cf. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, tr. and
ed. John Eusden (Boston, 1968), p. 323.
123
Samuel Ward, A Balme from Gilead to Recover Conscience (1612), p. 81.
150 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

humanists for the puritan doctrine of work: in addition to quoting

censures of idleness by Seneca, Cicero and Plutarch, Bright collected
numerous Erasmian adages on the subject. His conclusion might
have been uttered by Erasmus himself: 'The Angels, beasts and
inanimate creatures will not afford one patron or president of idle-
ness. How, then, can it be fancied a privilege and dignity to be one
jarring string in this great instrument, and to become the only
unprofitable useless part of the creation?'124
Occupations which are unprofitable to the commonwealth are not
legitimate callings. Perkins, John Dod, Arthur Dent and other
puritans accordingly followed the Erasmian lead in condemning
monks and friars, dealers in luxuries, profligate aristocrats and their
servants no less than rogues and vagabonds for not serving the
commonwealth with their time and abilities. Simonds D'Ewes, for
instance, called intemperate livers 'vagabonds by their life-leading.'125
When the House of Commons debated the definition of'vagabond'
for the 1572 legislation against vagrancy, they resolved to include
players, bearwards, fencers, minstrels, jugglers and begging scholars
as unprofitable to the society, and, therefore, lacking a legitimate
calling.126 But this censure of non-productive occupations was
obviously not leveled only by puritans - Anglicans like Robert
Sanderson and John Earle joined the attack on 'idle gallants' pre-
cisely because they shared with puritans the humanist association of
productive work and the common good.127
Non-productive recreation was similarly condemned as unprofit-
able to individual or to commonwealth. Protestants, like their
Catholic humanist forebears, quoted Cicero's opinion that'We have
not been so fashioned by nature that we seem to have been made for
sport and games, but rather for hardship and for certain more
serious and more important pursuits.'128 Advanced protestants
agreed with Erasmus in objecting to holidays because they lure men
124
CUL, Add. MS 6160, fols. 153v-154v, 157, p. 229.
125
Perkins, Works, vol. 1, pp. 755-6, cf. pp. 748, 752, 764, andvoL 2, p. 126; John Dod,
Bathshebaes Instructions to her Sonne Lemuel (1614), pp. 32-3,40-6; Arthur Dent, Plaine
mans Pathway to Heaven (1601), pp. 171-2; BL, HarL 182(D'Ewes, 1618), foL 22; cf.
Bucer, p. 335.
126
Simonds D'Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth
(1682), Part I, p. 220 (30 May 1572); TED, vol. 2, p. 329 (14 Elizabeth I, c.5).
Wallington reported in 1643 his contempt for the Royalist army marching against
London, composed as it was of fiddlers, players, ballad singers and rogues (BL,
Add MS 40883, foL 85).
127
Robert Sanderson, Works, ed. Jacobson (Oxford, 1854), Vol. Ill, pp. 108-109;
Sanderson, XXXIV Sermons (1661), pp. 245-246, 248-249; John Earle, Micro-
cosmographie (1628), Chapter 19.
128
Cicero, De Officiis, I, 29, quoted by Bucer, p. 346.
 Work, wealth and welfare 151
from labor to frivolity, from productivity to sloth. While John
Gough advocated moderate use of'lawful, healthy games,' he regarded
Christmas as a sure temptation to feasting and card-playing, neither
of which could benefit the Kingdom of Christ 129 It was for this
reason that puritans also attempted to regulate or repress alehouses,
church ales, dancing, holiday revelling and communal feasting - all
forms of popular culture which it was felt were of no profit to the
commonwealth and in fact contributed only to idleness, poverty,
ungodliness and disorder. The Long Parliament's offensive against
'country disorders' must be understood at least in part as the logical
culmination of the Christian humanists' drive to extirpate 'pastimes'
and institute instead a hard-working, disciplined social order. 13° This
is not to say that the puritans opposed recreation per se. Activities
'derived from the musical and gymnastic art' which could contribute
to health, grace and piety were condoned as beneficial to church and
commonwealth- as long as they were used in moderation and not on
the sabbath.131
Puritans analyzed both work and recreation carefully because
zealous protestants shared with humanists the doctrine of steward-
ship of all things, including time. For them, as for Whitforde and
More, time was a divine trust for which the trustees would be held
responsible on the Day of Judgment George Webbe charged his
auditors to be diligent in their callings, to shun idleness, and to
examine their behavior daily for failure to use time well, because

129
Quoted in Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley, 1967), p.
75. Gough was StAntholin's lecturer and rector of St Stephen's, Cornhill; Perkins,
Works, voL 3, pp. 512-13, criticized the papists, who add fifty-two saints' days to
fifty-two sabbaths 'and so spend more than a quarter of the year in rest and
idleness.'
130
Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling,
1523-1700 (New York, 1979), pp. 133-7,180-2; William Hunt, The Puritan Moment
(Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 79-84, 130-55; Wrightson, 'The Puritan Refor-
mation of Manners,' Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1973), passim. On the
'proscriptive zeal of the Long Parliament and its local manifestations,' see
Wrightson, 'Reformation of Manners,' pp. 133-63. It should be noted that much
of the social legislation passed during the Civil War and Interregnum was merely a
strengthening of early Tudor legislation: for example, in 1657 the Henrician act
against gaming was reinforced, and the Elizabethan legislation against vagabond
fiddlers and minstrels was repeated; the sabbath laws of 1650 and 1657 were
innovative only in their somewhat more stringent penalties (F&R, vol. 2, pp. 383,
1098, 1162, 1249). The increase in regulative activity at local and national levels
under puritan rule is an indication of the zeal, rather than the imagination, of the
hotter sort
13
* Some moderate puritans even defended Sunday sports which would aid in prepar-
ation for war, as legitimate in God's eyes because profitable to the common-
wealth: e.g., Samuel Ward, BodL, MS Tanner 279, fol. 352. cf. Bucer, pp. 347-53;
Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 206.
152 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER
4
you must give account.'132 Puritans like Richard Rogers took such
advice seriously: Rogers kept careful records both of his sins in
'taking too much ease' and 'not rising early' and of his occasional
successes in achieving'freedom from sottish idleness.'133 Wellington
likewise confessed 'backwardness in duty' and 'misspending my
precious time' on the one hand, and rejoiced in his disinclination to
tipple, bowl, play cards or dice, see plays or read vain books on the
other hand.134

Time, then, was to be jealously guarded and carefully used, vocation

was legitimated by productivity, and diligent labor was enjoined on
all. Nevertheless, the focus of all this activity was to be not wealth,
but commonwealth. Protestants who followed the preachers' advice
were confronted, as humanists had been earlier, with the resultant
problem of wealth. They dealt with the problem in good humanist
fashion- holding mediocritas as the ideal, analyzing motives and defin-
ing ethical limits in getting and spending, and prescribing thrifty and
discriminate use of material profits for the commonwealth.
It has been suggested by Christopher Hill that puritan preachers
articulated a doctrine of'justification by success' which distinctly
appealed to 'a class for whom the accumulation of capital had
become an absolute good in itself.'135 Hill has somehow managed to
conclude from William Perkins' sermons that' the fundamental con-
cepts of puritan thought are bourgeois,' and that among them is the
notion that accumulation of wealth is appropriate and, indeed, a
good sign of election. More recently, Richard Greaves has found
puritans 'more receptive than Anglicans to the idea that prosperity
could be a reward of godliness.'136 Certainly, the preachers did argue
that work ought to be productive, and they were aware that diligence
and thrift were likely to bring material rewards. But in the puritan
view, profit was intended for the community of Christ, rather than
for the individual; capital was not to be accumulated, but to be used.
Accumulating excess wealth was, according to Henry Bedel, not
only a temptation to sin; it was a blatant denial of God's providence.137

132
George Webbe, A short Direction for the dayly exercise of a Christian in A Garden of
spirituall Flowers (1610), sig. Fiiii.
133
Richard Rogers, Diary, in Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. M. M. Knappen
(Gloucester, Mass., 1966), pp. 82, 85, 101.
134
BL, Add. MS 40883, fols. 6v, 44, 69, 112.
135
Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, p. 229; Society and Puritanism, p. 292.
136
Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, p. 236; Greaves, Religion and Society, p. 7 5 1 .
137
Bedel, A sermon exhortyng to pitie the poore (1572), sig. Biii, verso. H e quoted
Seneca here on God's providence, cf Hunt, p. 139.
 Work, wealth and welfare 153
Samuel Ward of Ipswich called wealth a curse, inevitably leading to
4
gaming and riotous living.' He called profit, in this context,
material rewards for labor, a 'vile chain and easily broken,' held
together with 'the sordid cement of avarice.'138 Those who had
labored productively were to retain for themselves only what was
needed to maintain life and status- 'necessary riches,' as opposed to
abundance.139 Those whose incomes exceeded their needs were
called on to dispense their excess wealth in educating their and the
community's children, relieving the poor, and serving church and
state, for 'whatsoever is unserviceable is of no worth, and that which is
of no use, is of no estimation.' What may be valued is that which is
'profitable for mankind,' that is, for the community.140 Money was
not condemned. If wealth was not necessarily a sign of divine
approval, neither was it intrinsically bad. As Arthur Hildersham
pointed out, if this were the case, Abraham could not have been the
godly man portrayed by the Scriptures. Riches, said William Ames,
are neither good nor evil in themselves; all depends on their use.141 If
properly acquired and well-spent, wealth could in fact be a great
boon to the commonwealth.
But an appetite for money was condemned, and selfish accumu-
lation and conspicuous consumption were denounced in no un-
certain terms. Moderation was the rule by which the good life was to
be lived, and this curb to whatever acquisitive spirit there may have
been in early modern England was reinforced not only by puritan
sermons, but also by the immensely popular Stoic literature which,
as part of the Erasmian legacy, filled early modern libraries.142
Seneca's exhortation to be content only 'to have what is necessary'

138
Samuel Ward, The wonders of the load-stone (1640), pp. 9-10, 136-7.
139
Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 189; cf Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde
Government (1598), p. 62. The increasing fluidity of the social hierarchy during the
sixteenth century, and the importance of money in gaining entrance to a higher
status group, may have made this rule more open-ended than its author intended
(Wrightson and Levine, pp. 103-9). But the intent of the preachers' definition of
legitimate gain as necessary income was apparent, and warnings against ambition-
lack of contentment with one's own estate (Cases of Conscience, p. 193) - must have
given second thoughts to aspiring entrepreneurs of a religious bent.
140
O'Connell, pp. 6-7; Perkins, Works, vol. 2, p. 126; Ward, Wonders, p. 214,
emphasis original.
141
BL, Harl. MS 3230, fol. 90; William Ames, Conscience with Power and the Cases Thereof,
p.253; cf. John Ball, The Power ofGodliness(1657), passim. Richard Sibbes, Light from
Heaven (1638), p. 101, also suggested the moral neutrality of material goods, as did
Simonds D'Ewes, BL, MS Harl. 227, fol. 9. Robert Hill, The Pathway to Prayer and
Pietie (1613), pp. 78-83, advocated a 'modest prosperity.'
142
See my 'Seneca and the Protestant Mind: The Influence of Stoicism on Puritan
Ethics,' Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte, 74 (1983), 182-99.
154 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Seneca's exhortation to be content only 'to have what is necessary'

was read with approval by Brilliana Conway, Oliver St John and
D'Ewes, as it had been by Seneca's Christian humanist editors and
translators early in the sixteenth century.143 The warnings of Stoics,
Erasmians and puritans alike against the dangers inherent in
excessive wealth were taken seriously. The economically successful
were, after all, among those Parliamentarians who legislated against
luxury and excess and the oppression and fraud which produced
them. It was the puritans who had 4made it' in the community of
Terling, moreover, who outlawed Sunday work - a move hardly
calculated to line their purses further.144
Material abundance was regarded not as a sign of justification, but
as a temptation to other forms of excess. While an adequate income
was cause to thank God, riches were generally interpreted as a test all
too likely to be failed. God may grant material blessings in his wrath,
Perkins warned, observing that the hearts of rich men were generally
enslaved to the joys of hawking, hunting, riotous gaming, fine
apparel and good cheer, rather than to God.145 Bedel, Gataker and
Greenham all saw wealth as a trial to faith.146 Greenham argued that
riches 'have been ever greater causes of harm than of good.' Poverty,
he said, 'hath been the decay of many a man, but riches of a far
greater number. . . [for they] are evil commonly in either getting, or
in keeping, or in using, or in loving them. . . Riches are not signs of
God's favor.' He commended instead the mean between austerity
and excess, the humanist ideal of mediocrity.147
Puritans also concerned themselves with godly methods of getting
and spending 'necessary wealth'. Wellington's confession illustrates
their approach to business:
I must one day give account before the great God as how I have got my
money. So I must give an account how I have improved and laid out every
penny I have got. My conscience tells me I have been very remiss and unwise
in some kind both in getting and in spending. But I hope and trust the Lord
hath forgiven me this and all other of my sins... It is the desire of my heart
143
Seneca, Epistle, 2, tr. Richard Gummere (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), vol. 1, p. 9;
Nottingham University MSS, Box 166 (Conway), fol. 115; BL, Add. MS 25,285,
fols. 19v, 37v; Simonds D'Ewes notebooks, BL, Harl. 121, fols. 5Ov-51; cf fols. 22
(an essay on Horace's Dives miser est), 25, 41; BL, Harl. 182, fol. 24v.
144
F&R, vol. 1, p. 80 (15 February 1643); Wrightson and Levine, p. 157.
145
Perkins, Works, vol. 1, pp. 754, 769; cf D'Ewes' equation of riches with snares to
sin, BL, Harl. MS 227, fol. 17v.
146
Henry Bedel, A sermon exhortyng topitie thepoore (1572), sig. Aiii; Gataker, Certaineser-
mons (1637), p. 155; Richard Greenham, Workes (1601), p. 30.
147
Greenham, pp. 269, 392. cf. Brilliana Conway, who said that the wealth of wicked
men is 'poison, and serves to make them more inexcusable' (fol. 115).
 Work, wealth and welfare 155

that in everything I either buy or sell that I take God with me in the lifting up
of my heart to God saying shall I buy this or shall I sell that, or thus, Lord
give me wisdom in my buying and my selling... to deal with an upright heart
as I would have others deal with me, not seeking my own ends only, but as
the good of them I deal with.148
The most basic of the guidelines which were established was a clear
sense of priorities in which work and wealth were firmly sub-
ordinated in importance to godly living. Again, Wellington's diary
provides the best illustrations. Despite his concern with his income
and indebtedness, Wellington recorded numerous instances of clos-
ing his shop in order to attend public fasts or lectures; one Monday
morning he decided to stay home from work in order to pray, having
discovered during his 4.00 a.m. devotions that he 'did find. . . more
sweetness to tarry at home and solace my soul with the Lord than
there could be in going abroad and taking all the delight and pleasure
the world could afford me.' He realized that the 'rich fall into
temptation and snares and into many foolish and noisome lusts
which drown men in perdition and destruction. For the desire of
money is the root of all evil.' He prayed to be neither rich nor poor,
for'outward comforts are vain and will fail us.'149 He was in fact well
on the way to losing what comforts he had by reducing his prices so
as not to blemish the godly name of puritan. 15°
Wallington was extremely concerned with business ethics,
scrupulously avoiding such' sins of buying and selling' as false adver-
tising of his wares. On one occasion he refunded the price of some
trenchers which his servant had misrepresented to a customer as
being of maple, and he repeatedly reprimanded his servants for
'lying, though it be for my profit' During his self-examination,
however, he once confessed that he had himself'multiplied more
words than I need with some lying words' in order to sell his goods.
He found it altogether just that 'I should lose my customer for it,'
and he seems to have regretted this loss less than his having offended
God Far from separating the duties of the Two Tables of the Law,
Wallington's goal was 'to see my God in the fire, in the water, in the
air, in Liberty, in peace, in health, in kindness of friends . . . in my
buying and selling.'151
The puritan guidelines for proper business behavior include
traditional denunciations of all forms of economic exploitation, by
unqualified physicians, greedy magistrates, merchants using gloss or
inadequate lighting to disguise faulty merchandise, rack-renting
148 149
BL, Add. MS 40883, foL 15v. Ibid., fols. 24, 32.
150 151
Ibid., foL 9. Ibid., fols. 7v, 32v, 29v.
156 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

landlords, enclosers (driven by 'want of sobriety and temperance in

diet and apparel,' according to Perkins), grain-hoarding hus-
bandmen ('shedding the blood of the poor'), or printers of unprofit-
able books.152 But the basis for these censures is not traditional: it is
the humanist conviction that a secular vocation need not be less holy
than a clerical one, just as marriage is not inferior to celibacy.
Perkins criticized usurers, oppressors, engrossers and users of
fraudulent weights and measures because they fail to unite their two
callings, the general (to Christian faith) and the particular. 'They
prophane their lives and callings,' he charged, 'that employ them to
get honours, pleasures, profits, worldly commodities, e t c ' because
they thereby serve themselves, not God or their fellows.153 His aim
was not to denigrate business, however, but to sanctify it by bringing
its benefits to church and commonwealth. As Bucer had reasoned
earlier, 'Marketing is a business which is honest and necessary for the
commonwealth if it confines itself to the import and export of things
that are advantageous to the commonwealth for living well and in a
holy way, but not those which encourage and foster impious pomp
and luxury.' Only the 'crooked kind of merchants and tradesmen,'
those so highly regarded by Erasmus' Folly, placed their own profits
over the welfare of the community.154
Some historians have suggested that the subordination by
Wallington and his advisers of money-making to godly living for the
common good reveals the traditionalism of puritan economic
attitudes.155 Certainly, the evidence of Wallington's diary, in com-
bination with the advice literature and sermons to which he was
exposed, militates against the notion that puritanism sanctified
economic expediency and argued justification by success. Puritans
were manifestly equivocal about their profit-making. If we can ven-
ture onto the uncertain ground of dream interpretation, Wallington's
nightmare of having a large volume of business but experiencing 'no
peace with it' - a dream from which he was startled by a vision of a
man in black - illustrates the psychological effects of their mis-
givings.156 On the other hand, as part of the Erasmian tradition,
puritans represent a departure from medieval economic traditional-
ism in their concerted efforts not simply to justify, but to sanctify,
the diligent, hard-working life of the entrepreneur. Wallington, well
aware of the role of his own labor, none the less credited God for
152 153
Perkins, Works, vol. 1, p. 771. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 757.
154
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 773; Bucer, pp. 342-3, 344.
155
Seaver, 'Puritan Work Ethic,'passim, and his Wallington's World(Stanford, 1985), ch.
156
5; Green, pp. 283-7. BL, Add. MS 40883, foL 9v.
 Work, wealth and welfare 157
every shilling he earned; he apparently had no second thoughts
about this confluence of the sacred and the mundane.157 Earnings
from business were far from evil in his eyes.158 Perkins was quick to
preach what godly entrepreneurs had learned in practice, that ethical
business activity (work for the glory of God rather than personal
gain) was actually more profitable for the worker in the long run; he
thereby encouraged honest entrepreneurship on practical as well as
theological grounds.159 Recent research on seventeenth-century
Scottish capitalist practice reveals the considerable encouragement
given by Calvinist preachers to entrepreneurial callings there. The
stimulation of business was understood on both sides of the
northern border to be of potential benefit to the whole realm, so
that business loans at interest were justified by protestants as they
had been by Erasmus.160 The point of departure was obviously pre-
Reformation; puritans were simply expressing what had become the
consensus of economic moralizers by their day. By examining
motives, setting priorities and establishing ethical guidelines, the
theorists of Renaissance and Reformation provided a Christian
mean between medieval economic traditionalism and modern
capitalist aggression.161
Their mean clearly allowed considerable profit-making, so that in
addition to defining Christian getting, puritans also addressed them-
selves to Christian spending. Like their Catholic mentors, they
preached the doctrine of stewardship. The wealth which men held
was a trust from God, and to spend it on' things contributing more to
the delight of the flesh than to the virtue of the spirit and the true
utility of the commonwealth' was 'unworthy of those who profess
piety/ and, for that matter, 'the greatest pitfall for healthy indus-
157
Ibid., fols. 9, 12-14, 26, 29, 34v, 45, 78v, 87v, 115, 117v, 120v, 129v-131v.
158
Seaver, Wallington's Worlds describes the transitional position of Wellington on
economic issues: 'If Wellington was suspicious of economic success, he was
equally dubious about the moral worth of economic failure, and he alternated in
explaining his periodic bouts of poverty between attributing them to his own
"idleness and negligence" in his calling, and attributing them to God's attempt to
wean him from an inordinate love of the world.' Seaver concludes that his 'values
and attitudes neither preserved the past nor anticipated the future'; he might as
well have said that they did both (p. 130).
159
Perkins, Works, vol. 1, p. 757.
160
Martin Bucer argued for this in the Marburg Disputation of 15 38, tr. F. H. Littell in
Reformation Studies (Richmond, Va., 1962), p. 156. On Scottish Calvinism and
capitalism, see Marshall, Presbyteries and Profits.
161
Renaissance thinkers were not, of course, the first to justify business loans at
interest See, for example, Baldwin,/«J/ Price and his Masters, Princes and Merchants,
and Little, Religious Poverty. But even in the most forward-looking theorists, the life
of the merchant was second in sanctity to that of the cleric, particularly the volun-
tarily poor monk or friar.
158 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

try.'162 God's stewards, said Cartwright, are to 'live soberly with our
own, not lavishing, nor greedily keeping goods gotten, but to be
liberal to the poor.' The wealthy are to be honored 'not for their
riches simply, but for the right use of riches; namely, as they are
made instruments, to uphold and maintain virtue.'163 As William
Jones warned, the successful businessman will be required to give an
account of his stewardship (of goods no less than time) before God's
judgment seat.164 Accordingly, a Christian's wealth must be used as
the Christian humanists had prescribed, with prudence, discrimin-
ation and generosity. The most obviously Christian use of excess
profits - the relief of poverty - was regulated by all of these
considerations.

Prudence and discrimination were not, as we have seen, character-

istics of medieval hospitality. But puritans were apparently con-
vinced by humanist arguments that the result was not truly
generous, that is, genuinely beneficial to the poor. Their stress on
prudence and discrimination by no means eliminated their com-
passion. Sympathy and liberality were still considered virtues. The
'living affection to the poor' shown by Chaderton was held up by
Samuel Ward for emulation as a 'certain token of a sound Christian';
Ward recognized his own failures to remember the poor as a serious
sin.165 Richard Rogers recorded visiting the poor in Bridewell, and he
exhorted the prosperous among his parishioners to give interest-
free loans to their impoverished neighbors and to remit the principal
if they proved unable to pay.166 It was said that Richard Greenham
'approached fanaticism in his zeal for charity.'167 Countless puritan
preachers exhorted their congregations to give generously to their
unfortunate brethren.168 Research on poor relief during periods of
162 163
Bucer, p. 354. Cartwrightiana, p. 165; Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 237.
164
Jones, Apithie and short treatise whereby a godly Christian is directed how to make his last will
(1612), pp. 20-1; cf. Richard Rogers, A Garden of spirituallflowers, Part II, sigs. Avi,
Bv; Gataker, p. 300; and Perkins' argument that works of charity enable the rich
man to 'lay up a good foundation in conscience, against the evil day' (Cases of
Conscience, p. 196).
165
Ward, Diary, in Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, pp. 107-9, 116.
166
Rogers, Diary, p. 77; Hunt, p. 138.
167
M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), p. 382, cf p. 344.
168
Henry Arthington, Provision for the Poore (1597); Laurence Chaderton, An Excellent
and Godly Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the xxvi Day of October 1378 [1580], sigs. Cvi,
verso-Cvii; John Dod, Bathshebaes Instructions, pp. 48-9; Dent, p. 197; Greenham,
Workes, p. 41; Rogers, Spirituallflowers, Part II, sig. Fv; George Walker, Exhortation
for contributions in Miscellany, ed C W. Sutton(Chetham Society, Machester, 1902),
n.s., 1, p. 47; John Milton, Commonplace Book, in Complete Prose Works (New Haven,
195 3), vol. 1, p. 418 - among many other examples. See also Collinson, Religion of
Protestants, p. 159, on the generosity of West Suffolk puritans in the Elizabethan
period.
 Work, wealth and welfare 159
puritan ascendancy has demonstrated that local relief during the
Civil War and Interregnum was dispensed on a scale unmatched in
previous decades: JPs in Warwickshire handled nearly three times as
many relief cases from 1649 to 1660 as they had from 1630 to
1 6 4 1 . m The poor also received a higher percentage of total charit-
able contributions in that county from 1641 to 1660 than ever
before.170
As means to encourage giving, the preachers used not only the
doctrine of stewardship and the argument that generosity to the
poor provides evidence of election, but also the compelling notion
of celestial usury which Vives had used to good effect decades
earlier. 'He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord, a sure dis-
charger of his debts to the uttermost,' Edwin Sandys preached in
1585. His text, Proverbs 19.17, was a favorite of preachers on
charity from the Church Fathers to the seventeenth century. Robert
Allen quoted St John Chrysostom in his Treatise of Christian
beneficence: 'He that hath mercy on the poor, lendeth to the Lord, as it
were upon usury. He that receiveth, that is, the poor man, is
altogether another from him who bindeth himself to pay the loan, to
wit, God.'171 Richard Sibbes used the same biblical text, buttressed
by patristic approval, in a 1637 sermon; D'Ewes included it in a list of
his favorite classical quotations on giving; and Wallington used it in
1642 to reason that he should give to the poor even though he was
himself in debt, since 'there is never anything lost in doing for God
(or his children).'172 There was, of course, a negative version of the
commonplace. It was expressed by the English translator of Bucer's
work on poor relief: 'Remember the poor, and God will remember
you; forget the poor, and God will not forget you.'173
The final argument used by the preachers was that alms were the
poor man's due. William Bright expressed it in connection with
stewardship:
Though God hath not disposed so immediately to the poor, yet he gives
them as it were bills of assignment upon the plenty of the rich . . . If a rich
169
A. L. Beier, 'Poor Relief in Warwickshire 1630-1660,' P&P, 35 (1966), 3-29, p. 78.
The difference is surely too great to be explained solely by the dislocation result-
ing from the Civil War: cf. Valerie Pearl, 'Puritans and Poor Relief: The London
Workhouse, 1649-1660,' in Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. Donald Pennington
and Keith Thomas (Oxford, 1978), 206-32. See also chapter 7, below.
170
Beier, pp. 84, 98.
171
Sandys, Sermons, (1585), sig. Niii, verso; Allen, A Treatise (1600), p. 221, citing
Chrysostom, Horn. 3 on the first chapter of Genesis.
172
Sibbes, pp. 144-5, explained that although the giver 'hath cast away his bounty,
yet he hath cast it upon God, and Christ, that will return it again; he knows he doth
but lend to the Lord.' D'Ewes, BL, Harl. MS 182, fol. 25; BL, Add. MS 40883,
173
fol. I6v. Christian mens Almose, p. 29-
160 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

man leaves the poor destitute, and suffers either his riot, or courteousness
[pleasure, or hospitality] to feed upon their portions, what more detestable
falseness can be committed, not only in respect of them whose right he thus
invades, but of God also whose trust he abuses.174
Christians are bound to give to the poor, according to Perkins, since
4
it is God's will that the poor should have title to a part of every man's
goods; and for this cause it is a shame if they have not relief without
roving, begging, or crying.'175
The poor were not to be despised, but rather accepted as brothers
and co-heirs of Christ, so that, far from denying them their rights,
Christians should share their goods with them willingly and without
condescension. The popular tendency to regard the poor as accursed
and despicable was criticized by Sibbes, who observed that'the poor
man is trod on at all hands; men go over the hedge where it is lowest'
This was clearly sinful: Sibbes urged Christians 'not to despise the
brother of low degree.'176 Bedel likewise charged his congregation to
respect as well as care for the poor, and his sources were not limited
to the Scriptures: 'Let Christians learn a lesson of the heathen orator
Tully. . . poverty (saith he) compelleth many a good and honest man
to take in hand vile and slavish businesses, for which cause they
deserve mercy and succour, rather than destruction.'177
This perspective stemmed partly from the puritans' understand-
ing of the nature of poverty. Just as wealth was not considered a sign
of divine approval, so poverty was not presumptive evidence of
reprobation. 'We may not ask earthly blessings as signs of God's
favour; neither must we esteem the want of these things as tokens of
his displeasure,' Greenham taught. Poverty was understood to be an
affliction, but affliction was in some senses 'proper to the godly.'178 It
could actually be of more help to salvation than riches could. 'God
sanctifies outward affliction and poverty,' according to Sibbes, 'to
help inward poverty of spirit... he takes away the fuel that feeds
pride.' Indeed, for the haughty rich to be brought low may be their
only means to salvation: if we use wealth' as clouds to keep God from
us, and to fasten, and fix upon the things themselves,' there may be
'no other remedy, but God must strip us naked of them.'179 Even in

174
CUL, Add. MS 6160, p. 231 (emphasis Bright's). This passage occurs in a discussion
of the evils of luxury and self-indulgence (pp. 230-2).
175
Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 224; Works, vol. 1, p. 775.
176 177
Sibbes, pp. 98, 103. Bedel, sigs. Aiv, Div, verso.
178
Greenham, Workes, p. 270; D'Ewes, Theological Observations, BL, Harl. 227, fol. 21; cf.
Dent, p. 197. Job provided a ready example for the preachers of a godly man
179
oppressed by poverty. Sibbes, pp. 98-9.
 Work, wealth and welfare 161
this case, poverty was not so much a punishment for sin as God's
device to rescue those who might otherwise be drawn to perdition by
their excesses.
But poverty was not automatically interpreted as a result of or
remedy for the wickedness of the victim. Sometimes it was the end
product of the rapaciousness of the wealthy or of the evil in the
economic system itself. The duty of the Christian, whether puritan,
Anglican or Catholic humanist, was to analyze the causes of poverty
in every particular and to address the problem at its source. Accord-
ingly, Perkins found the true 'bane and plague of a commonwealth
. . . they that make beggars and vagabonds' in those who lend money
at interest to the poor 'till they have sucked their bones'; it is usury
which should be repressed, rather than the poor who are created by
it 18° In 1603, Richard Stock attacked poverty in a sermon at Paul's
Cross by charging the Lord Mayor and aldermen of the city with
oppression of the poor:
I have lived here some few years, and every year I have heard an exceeding
outcry of the poor that they are much oppressed of the rich of this city, in
plain terms, of the Common Council. All or most charges are raised by your
fifteenth, wherein the burden is more heavy upon a mechanical and handi-
craft poor man than upon an alderman, proportion for proportion. . . You
are magistrates for the good of them that are under you, not to oppress them
for your own ease.181
In early Stuart Salisbury, the puritan magistrates recognized the
unemployed and under-employed as a legitimate category of deserv-
ing poor, able-bodied but deprived of work by social and economic
dislocation beyond their control. Their approach to poverty
thoroughly accorded with that of the humanists, expanding and
adapting the conventional categories of'sturdy' and 'impotent' as
the scale and nature of the poverty problem changed.182 In 1649, the
puritan Council of State launched a two-pronged attack on the prob-
lem of poverty, one aimed at employing the poor, the other at abat-
ing the price of corn.183 Their action, reminiscent of the 1630/31
Book of Orders, illustrates that in both puritan and non-puritan
eyes, if poverty resulted from evil, that evil did not necessarily
characterize the poor themselves.
Puritans saw the poor as unfortunates to be served, vindicated and
protected, rather than despised. Lucy Hutchinson included in her
180
Perkins, Works, vol. 1, p. 774.
181
Richard Stock, A Sermon preached. . . in HMC Salisbury (1910), vol. 12, p. 672.
182
Slack, pp. 173-8, 180-1.
183
CSPD, 22 November 1649, ed. M. A. E. Green (London, 1875), p. 402.
162 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

definition of a puritan the qualities of being 'grieved at the gripping

of the poor' and devoted to their relief and protection, and however
idealized her view, it may well be a more accurate portrait of the
puritan than is the usual image of repressive, ungenerous individual-
ism. 184 Puritan concern for discipline, prudence and discrimination
must not be construed to imply a negative attitude toward either
charity or its recipients. As Paul Slack has observed of the godly
magistrates of Salisbury, puritans were 'reasonable' rather than
'harsh' in their attitudes toward the poor; if they are to be criticized,
it must be for their 'liberality and forwardness in well doing.'185 Their
view of the impotent poor was that expressed by Thomas Gataker
when he urged his auditors at Sergeants' Inn to be especially diligent
in meting out justice to the poor and oppressed, since God 'hath a
special interest in them. God created, redeemed, and protects the
poor and rich alike. But special protection is given to the poor, the
widow, the orphan. . . He will glorify the poor as well as the rich, and
make them Kings and Judges.'186
But as always, there was no single-minded approach to social facts.
Poverty was not regarded as intrinsically good. It hardly needs saying
that protestants were as ruthlessly critical as Erasmus had been of
that 'popish conceit,' voluntary poverty, and of the poverty which
resulted from idleness. Christ may have lived by alms, Perkins said,
but not by begging, 'as the Papists affirm, but by the voluntary
ministration and contribution of some, to whom he preached.'
When Whitgift charged Cartwright with living like a lazy mendicant
friar, 'going up and down idly, doing no good, but living at other
men's tables,' Cartwright responded similarly that his support was
given him in exchange for his labor in teaching the children of his
hosts, partly in the principles of religion, partly in other learning.187
Neither Anglican nor puritan attached any sanctity to poverty per se
184
Lucy Hutchinson, Memoires of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. Julius Hutchinson
(1822), vol. 1, p. 122. It should be noted that she lists this quality before that of
being 'zealous for god's glory or worship'; cf. Sears McGee on the supposed
priority of First Table duties, in The Godly Man in Stuart England 1620-1640 (New
Haven, 1976), ch. 4. Further discussion of this issue occurs in chapter 6, below, cf
Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, ch. 7; Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy during
the Puritan Revolution (1930), p. 301.
185
Slack, pp. 185-6 et passim; Pearl, pp. 206-32; E. M. Hampson, The Treatment of
Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1597-1834 (Cambridge, 1934), p. 44; W. K. Jordan,
Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 (1959), passim; Beier, p. 99, notes 'occasional
egalitarian undertones' in the language used toward the poor by puritan JPs in
Warwickshire.
186
Gataker, Certaine Sermons (1637), pp. 110-11, 112.
187
Perkins, Cases of Conscience, pp. 195, 224; John Strype, Life and Acts of John Whitgift
(Oxford, 1882), vol. 1, p. 130.
 Work, wealth and welfare 163
or to religious mendicity. Rather, like Erasmus, they held mediocritas
as the ideal in regard to possessions. They recognized that poverty,
like riches, carried its own set of snares to sin. Richard Rogers found
his poverty sufficiently oppressive that his thoughts were drawn by it
from the worship of God to idolatry of the money he lacked. 'I have
been set on such untemperate thoughts about becoming rich,' he
confessed, 'that for that time nothing heavenly might be looked
after.'188 Furthermore, while the rich are more susceptible to the sin
of pride than are the poor, the latter are by no means immune to
it:
for we see a world of poor and proud. A man as he goes along in the street,
shall hear a company of poor that are the greatest rebels in the world against
God, that blaspheme, and swear, that rail against magistrates and gover-
nours, they are the most unbroken people in the world: the poorest and
beggarliest, the refuse of mankind; as they are in condition, so they are in
disposition. . . [these are] the devil's poor, such as are poor every way, out-
wardly and inwardly, and have their poverty as a just punishment of their
wicked lives, and continue in that wicked life, having it not sanctified to
them to make them desire better riches. Doth God esteem such poor?
No...189
Because of the obvious distinction between 'the devil's poor' and
those to whom God has sanctified poverty, protestants saw the need
to follow the Vivesian pattern of categorizing the poor. Like the
Christian humanists, they saw themselves in the venerable tradition
of Seneca and Cicero in their drive for discriminate almsgiving.
Robert Allen even found it necessary to apologize for his extra-
ordinarily heavy reliance on the Stoics and other ancients for advice
on this subject, by pointing to the 'special light of nature' which they
had obviously been given.190 The puritan fear was that the alms, of
which men were, after all, only stewards, would fall into unworthy
hands.191 They argued, as had the humanist Forma Subventions
Pauperum a century earlier, that such carelessness would not only
offend God, it would also deprive the true poor of that which was
rightfully theirs and encourage all manner of vice in the unworthy
poor. It was, for instance, Anthony Parker's concern for those who

188 189
Rogers, Diary, pp. 66, 86; cf p. 94. Sibbes, pp. 98-9.
190
Robert Allen, A Treatise of Christian beneficence (1600), p. 240 (mispaginated 342) et
passim. The final section of the treatise (pp. 199-240) consists entirely of'sentences
chosen out of sundry writers, Christian and pagan,' but mostly pagan, cf Bucer, p.
306, quoting Cicero' sDeOfficiis (I, 14; II, 18) to argue that'kindness. . . should be
rendered according to the worthiness of each individual.'
191
Greenham, Workes, p. 408; Milton, Commonplace Book, p. 417; Rogers, Spiritual/
flowers, sig. Avi.
164 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

'stand in need and are not able to work' that incensed him against
those who 'give to the jesters and scoffers, the stageplayers and idle
persons, though it had been better bestowed on them that lack meat
and drink and other necessaries.'192 Careless benevolence deprives
the truly impotent of the limited resources which are their due.
Perkins analyzed it in precisely the same terms as had the authors of
the Forma and the 1531 humanist reform proposal, when he de-
scribed it as a 'great disorder in commonwealths. For the boldest and
most clamorous beggar carries away all the alms from the rest, and so
relief is distributed both unwisely and unequally.'193 To give alms
without discretion was to support those 'better instructed at beg-
ging, indeed, extorting, the alms which should be dispensed to the
poor alone.'194 In the eyes of the reform-minded, misplaced
benevolence was in effect evil-doing. Instead, as Bucer had told King
Edward, deacons should be assigned to 'investigate how many really
indigent persons live in each church for whom it is equitable for the
church to provide the necessities of life.'195
Indiscriminate almsgiving was also evil in its maintenance of'lusty
beggars' and vagrants in their idleness, loose living and wickedness.
Those who gave themselves over to beggary when they might work
were 'men prone to every crime . . . harmful pests of society,' and it
'certainly is not the duty of the church to foster such people in their
godless idleness.'196 Robert Allen saw vagrants as 'a most dangerous
and harmful sort of people,' prone to fornication, bastardy,
drunkenness, infanticide, kidnapping and robbery, and certainly
unworthy of alms.197 The customs of begging and of private, per-
sonal almsgiving served to perpetuate the corruption of the idle
poor: Perkins saw mendicity itself as 'the very seminary of vaga-
bonds, rogues, and straggling persons, who have no calling. . .'198 He
was expressing an opinion not peculiar to puritanism, but one which
had become a commonplace in sixteenth-century England. It is
revealed, for instance, in the regulations for the relief of poverty
which were instituted by the city of Norwich in 1570. The city

192
Parker, Collectanea Theologica [1581], BL, Harl. MS 4048, p. 90.
193
Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 226; Bucer, p. 306. 194 Parker, p. 90.
195
Bucer, pp. 257-258, 307; cf. Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 225.
196
Bucer, pp. 258, 307. Bucer insisted that they should be excluded from com-
munion, as well as from relief (pp. 307 and 334: 'Just as the churches, therefore,
ought to exclude from their communion whoever lead idle lives, neither should a
Christian state [Respublica Christiana] tolerate anyone who does not dedicate him-
self to some honest work or labor which is useful to the commonwealth').
197
Allen, Epistle Dedicatory.
198
Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 226, and Works, vol. 1, p. 755.
 Work, wealth and welfare 165
fathers there, in an action precisely parallel to that of their Catholic
counterparts in Ypres and Lyon, officially condemned the 'foolish
pity' which moves 'many to make provision at their doors' so that 'it
hath made the greatest number [of poor] to leave their works to
attend such alms as thereby they have achieved to such idleness and
have found it (as they think) more profitable to them than to do any
work at all.' Personal, direct almsgiving does not allow for proper
investigation of the recipient and his need, and as long as this
medieval practice is allowed to continue, the unworthy will be main-
tained in their wickedness. It was to lack of discretion on the part of
benefactors that the Norwich legislators attributed 'the victualling
houses . . . stuffed with players and drunkards that so tended their
drink all day that they could not incline to work.' m Accordingly, the
city adopted a highly rationalized, discriminate system of relief
which prohibited begging and personal almsgiving altogether. They
appointed overseers of the poor, levied a poor rate on all
householders, and distinguished among several categories of poor.
Among the deserving poor were listed not only the physically dis-
abled, but also untrained youth, the unemployed, and the under-
employed who were willing to work if given the opportunity. The
undeserving- loiterers, vagabonds and strong beggars- were not to
be given doles, but were to be trained and set on work, or (if unwill-
ing to labor) punished and expelled from the city.200
This legislation was a continuation of the earlier sixteenth-
century trend among municipalities to implement Vives' dis-
criminate poor relief scheme. Similar regulations dot the records of
both local and central government for the next century.201 Enforced
discrimination between the truly impotent and able-bodied idlers
was the intent of the 1597 Poor Law, which Perkins praised as 'an
excellent statute and being in substance the very law of God, is never
to be repealed.'202 Allen agreed, calling it a 'gratulatory monument'
which has served to 'shut the door against idleness and all unthrifty
and wasteful misplacing of alms.' Writing in 1600, he was convinced
that the law already 'hath so prosperously, and with so speedy suc-
cess prevailed, that God hath, to the great comfort of all that love
true judgment and mercy, showed evidently, that his good hand

199 TED, vol. 2, pp. 317, 318; cf. Bucer against begging, p. 257.
200
TED, vol. 2, pp. 313-19.
201
Note, for example, acts passed in London in 1647 and 1649 to relieve the impotent
poor and punish rogues and vagrants (F&R, vol. 1, pp. 1042-5; vol. 2, pp. 104-10).
They were a response to the economic dislocations of the war years, but a response
202
which was humanist in inspiration. Perkins, Works, vol. 1, p. 755.
166 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

went with the execution of it' 203 The poor law was reaffirmed and
strengthened in 1601. But it is worth noting that, while puritans
praised both laws, they could not claim sole authorship of them, for
the Parliaments which passed them were by no means exclusively
puritan gatherings. The presbyterians of the Dedham classis, who
had in the 1580s agreed that their town should not support idlers,
had been suppressed,204 but as Conciliar directives of the 1590s
show, their principles of selective poor relief were held in common
with non-puritan authorities. Puritans and Anglicans were both pro-
ponents of the discriminate, rationalized poor relief system which
Catholic humanists had implemented decades earlier.

The lusty beggars against whom protestants discriminated in their

giving were the objects of a concerted effort to inculcate discipline.
The effort was, at least in intent, reformist rather than punitive, and
as such is another protestant continuation of a Christian humanist
innovation.
Work itself was, of course, considered a form of discipline and a
means of self-improvement, so that by forcing the able to work,
magistrates hoped to reform their attitudes, habits and lifestyle.
Forced work was described by the puritan magistrates of Warwick-
shire as a positive, preventive measure; in Salisbury a Bridewell was
established in 1602 'for the correction of the idle and the setting to
work of the able poor'; and Bacon commended 'houses of relief and
correction which are mixed hospitals, where the impotent person is
relieved, and the sturdy beggar buckled to work, and the unable per-
son also not maintained to be idle, which is not ever joined with
drunkenness and impurity, but is sorted with such work as he can
manage and perform . . ,'205 Work was clearly perceived to be
therapeutic, tending to the moral reform of the worker. As Edward
Hext wrote to Burghley in 1596, if'every prisoner committed for
any cause and not able to relieve him self [were] compelled to work
. . . I dare presume to say the tenth felony will not be committed that
now is.'206 On this assumption, the Salisbury workhouse was
enlarged in 1623 to include rooms where the 'lewder and baser sort'
might be corrected, and where poor children could be lodged and
203
Allen, Epistle Dedicatory.
204
Minute Book of the Dedham Presbyterian Classis, 1582-1389, ed. FL G. Usher
(1905), p. 100.
205
Beier, p. 99; Slack, p. 180 (emphasis mine); Francis Bacon, Letters and Life, ed.
James Spedding (1868), vol. 4, p. 252 (emphasis mine). The use of the term
'correction' is surely indicative of the initially reformist intent of these
206
establishments. TED, Vol. II, p. 342.
 Work, wealth and welfare 167
taught a trade before being bound out as apprentices. The puritan
magistrates of that city also sought outside employment for the 'res-
pectable' poor of the town during the 1625 depression by asking
clothiers, spinners and knitters to certify how many poor they could
employ. The ever-present aim of their focus on work was to set and
keep the poor on a proper course of life by forcing the idle to dis-
cipline themselves and providing the willing with regular employ-
ment. Such official attempts to locate jobs for the poor are
reminiscent of Bucer's suggestion that the law should encourage
gardening, spinning and mining to employ the idle, as they are of
More's and Starkey's proposals. Bucer had explicitly advocated mining
as a deterrent from and correction of idleness and its attendant
crimes.207
The language of punishment is not absent from the work orders of
the period, however. While the Elizabethan poor law of which the
puritans approved so heartily required the poor to be set on work, it
also allowed the flogging of those who refused to work. But the
assumption in this and other legislation was that punishment was
reserved for extreme cases of refusal to accept proffered employ-
ment. The 1571 Norwich Orders for the Poor provided for both the
'setting on work of loiterers' and'the punishment of vagabonds,' and
the 1576 and 1597 Poor Laws ordered those refusing to work to be
incarcerated in a house of correction, 'there to be straightly kept, as
well in diet as in work, and also punished from time to time,' or
gaoled until the next Quarter Sessions, when they might be
banished from the realm.208 The pious hope was that this extreme
measure would not be needed, but that the sturdy rogue would be
'corrected' through work and punishment. It is noteworthy that the
1597 Poor Law abolished the branding of vagrants - a clear indi-
cation of the shift away from medieval consignment of an individual
to an unchangeable social status in favor of the Renaissance drive to
reform the offender. The ferocity of pre-sixteenth-century vagrancy
laws should be kept in mind when charges of capitalistic oppression

207
Slack, p. 181; Bucer, pp. 339-40; Utopia, p. 69; Starkey, p. 173; cf. also the Discourse
of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, pp. 92, 126ff. Note, too, Karlstadt's tract
on the encouragement of vocational skills in the poor as a preventive poor relief
policy: Carter Lindberg, ' "There Should Be No Beggars Among Christians":
Karlstadt, Luther, and the Origins of Protestant Poor Relief,' CH, 46 (1977), 313-
34, p. 323.
208 TED9 voL 1, pp. 316, 333-4; cf. Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 226; F&R, vol. 1, p.
1044 and vol. 2, pp. 107-9, on the 1647 and 1649 London orders which decreed
both punishment of rogues, vagrants and beggars, and provision of work for the
willing poor. On the penal nature of the London Bridewell, see Pearl, p. 212.
168 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

of the poor are leveled at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

protestants.
Puritans seem to have been among the most ardent protestant
supporters of work schemes for the poor. Valerie Pearl has
remarked that, while plans to provide stocks of material for work
were put forward in London from the Common Council's 1579
Orders for the Poor to the Proclamation of 1629, none were as
ambitious as the schemes proposed in the 1640 s.209 Among these
were the Corporation of the Poor, which had the power to
apprehend vagrants and offer them a choice between work and whip-
ping, and Samuel Hartlib's Office of Address, which was intended to
be as much an employment agency as the center of technological
information into which it actually developed. Both had counterparts
on the continent, for both were implementations of those Christian
humanist ideals which had made such an impact on sixteenth-
century municipal poor relief.210 In Salisbury, innovative employ-
ment schemes for the poor were the work of the puritan mayor John
Ivie, and of zealous puritan councillors known also for their opposition
to morris dances on the sabbath, church courts, episcopacy and
stained glass. The city's Recorder, Henry Sherfield, fined in Star
Chamber in 1633 for breaking the stained glass window at St
Edmund's, might have been more severely dealt with had it not been
reported that 'he hath done good in that city . . . so that there is
neither beggar nor drunkard to be seen there.'211
Work was not the only method by which puritans wished to dis-
cipline the poor. Like the Catholic humanists, they also relied on the
withholding of alms from the undisciplined, on diligent oversight
and regulation of behavior by special officials, and most importantly
on the redemptive value of education. The withholding of alms, like
the threat of whipping, need not be interpreted as primarily puni-
tive 212 - as we have seen, it was in part an attempt to protect the rights
of the deserving poor and a guarantee of good stewardship for the
benefactor. However it was also a strong incentive to good behavior;
and it was one which characterized every early modern poor relief
scheme, both public and private, from Vives' through the Inter-
regnum. The Dedham classis provided in the 1580 s, for instance,
that two of their number, along with two or three aldermen and a

209
Pearl, p. 210; (/".Jordan, Charities of London, pp. 177-9.
210
Pearl, p. 211; Webster, pp. 67-75; cf. Solomon on Theophraste Renaudot's
Bureau d'Addresse in Paris. The London Office of Address was headed by Henry
Robinson from its foundation in 1647; it was abolished in 1659-
211 212
Slack, p. 184. cf Hill, Society and Puritanism, pp. 293ff.
 Work, wealth and welfare 169
constable, visit the poor monthly, 'and chiefly the suspected places,
that understanding the miserable estate of those that went and the
naughty disposition of disordered persons, they may provide for
them accordingly,' withholding aid until the disorderly should
reform.213 And when the Essex puritan Henry Smith established a
charity in 1626 for the relief of the able-bodied poor, he disqualified
those 'guilty of excessive drinking, profane swearing, pilfering or
other scandalous crimes,' along with vagrants and 'incorrigible ser-
vants', from received aid.214 Presumably the truly destitute would
conform to puritan discipline rather than forego assistance, so that
such criteria for relief would tend to the moral improvement of
individual and community.
Careful oversight by those officers labeled by Vives overseers of
the poor aided in maintaining circumspect behavior by recipients of
alms, as would the strict control of such temptations to undis-
ciplined activity as alehouses and communal festivities.215 The
magistrates of Salisbury, intent on eliminating the disorderly
behavior which created and perpetuated poverty, carefully con-
trolled alehouses, required recipients of alms to attend church,
regulated the diet of the poor, and provided a weekly examination of
paupers by the churchwarden and overseers of the poor to verify
that they had reformed their conduct.216
One of the duties of overseers in most relief schemes was to super-
vise the education and vocational training of the poor and their
children.217 Because puritans saw lack of proper education as a cause
of poverty no less than Starkey and Morison had done, so they
viewed the proper training of young people in moral behavior and
practical skills as the most effective single means of correcting the
problem. The influence of Christian humanism here is obvious.
'Ignorance' was defined by Arthur Hildersham, as by Erasmus, as
'darkness, which is breach of the law, or sin.'218 To eliminate

Dedham Minutes, p. 100. 214 Wrightson and Levine, p. 179.

215
Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1982), pp.
206-21, and Reformation of Manners, pp. 35-42 (on dancing) and chs. 4—5 (on
drunkenness). Note that the legislation being administered by puritan magistrates
was not the work of predominantly puritan Parliaments (e.g., 4 Jac. I, c.5; 7 Jac. I,
c.9 and 10; 21 Jac. I, c.7; I Car. I, c.4), although the zeal with which it was enforced
by puritans is certainly noteworthy, cf Dent, pp. 165-6.
Slack, pp. 182, 185.
For example, in the Norwich Orders, TED, vol. 2, p. 316, the authors declared
their intent that youth 'be trained in work, in learning, and in the fear of God, so as
no person should have need to go abegging'; cf. p. 324; on the apprenticing of poor
children by the 1597 Poor Law, TED, vol. 2, p. 347.
BL, Harl. MS 3230, fol. 102v; Allen, Epistle Dedicatory.
170 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

ignorance was to attack sin and eliminate its manifestations - idle-

ness, drunkenness, frivolity, and the poverty they produced.
Puritans were, therefore, in the forefront of the sixteenth-century
drive to endow schools and scholarships as a means of refor-
mation.219 Elizabethan presbyterians allocated half of all com-
munion offerings for 'the teaching of. . . poor men's children'; early
Stuart puritans praised humanist educational foundations for the
poor; and London in the 1640s was the scene of charitable
educational experiments which would have delighted Erasmus.220
Included among puritan suggestions for poor relief in London was
William Petty's proposal of'literary workhouses' for all children
over seven years old, a clear connection between the exaltation of
work and the hope for reformation through education which united
humanist and puritan.221
The incorporation of education and vocational training into poor
relief was one of several imaginative approaches to solving the prob-
lem of poverty. In seeking to address the causes of the problem,
puritans frequently reflected the Christian humanists' willingness to

219
Wrightson and Levine, p. 15; cf. p. 17 on the influence of Erasmus' works on
puritan yeomen. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, p. 154, attributes this drive to
broaden'the ambit of opportunity. . . in the conviction that poverty bred and per-
petuated itself in the slough of ignorance' to the protestant Reformation;
however, the common impulse for both puritan and non-puritan educational
reformers was Erasmian humanism, cf. Joan Simon, Education and Society
(Cambridge, 1966), and Lindberg, pp. 320-1, on the influence of late medieval
protest on Karlstadt. The Wittenberg Church Order (1522) prescribed subsidized
education for the children of the poor (Lindberg, p. 322).
220
Dedham Minutes, p. 100; Gataker, Certainesermons, p. 10; Pearl, pp. 211-19. Pearl dis-
cusses the link between London's Corporation of the Poor and Hartlib's
educational and vocational training schemes. She puts the penal nature of
Bridewell into the context of these more positive attempts to eliminate poverty
and sees the overall plan to train and employ the poor as a continuation of the
policies of Henry VIII and Edward VI by puritans intent on godly service to the
commonwealth. Puritan sponsors of the London ordinances included aldermen
Thomas Andrews and George Witham, Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Lee, Hartlib,
Dr Edward Odling and the radical Lord Mayor John Warner (Pearl, p. 217). cf.
Webster, pp. 114, 207 (tracing the influence of Bucer on seventeenth-century
educational reformers); and Quentin Skinner's interpretation of these plans as
Utopian (TLS, 2 July 1976).
221
William Petty, Advice . . . to Samuel Hartlib for Advancement of. . . Learning (1648).
Petty was aware of the social detriment caused by limiting educational oppor-
tunity to the well-born: not only did poverty and crime abound, but the common-
wealth was deprived of leaders, since 'many are now holding the plough, which
might have been made fit to steer the state.' By the same token, universal education
was potentially disruptive of the hierarchical status quo; therefore its strongest
supporters, both humanist and puritan, were those who least feared social change
in their drive for reformation. See chapter 6, below, on the humanist/puritan
challenge to the Great Chain of Being.
 Work, wealth and welfare 171
try non-traditional methods. No- or low-interest loans to im-
poverished artisans exemplify one such technique developed by
Catholic humanists and used to good effect by their protestant
progeny.222 Another is the concept of outdoor relief (the adminis-
tration of a dole to disabled or under-employed poor living in their
own homes), which offered a more humane mode of existence to the
poor at the same time as it prevented mendicity and reduced the cost
of maintaining a large workhouse.223 Support for these measures was
not limited to puritans; however, puritans are especially visible in
the more imaginative municipal plans to develop new employment
opportunities for the poor and new methods of financing and
administering relief. In London it was the puritan Sir Thomas
Middleton who in 1623 tried to persuade parishes jointly to finance
and build hemp and flax houses to provide local employment for the
poor. This plan won the favor of non-puritans, too: Sir Francis
Bacon, among others, pointed out the 'abatement of the tax' which
would result from such an attempt to give the poor a means of self-
support.224 In Salisbury, puritans got the Corporation itself to invest
in the brewing trade and use the profits to employ the poor; in 1628,
they founded a municipal storehouse and developed a truly original
token system whereby the poor could purchase food at cost and be
spared the temptation to spend a money dole on drink.225 The
puritan magistrates of Warwickshire were both efficient and
forward-looking in administering poor relief: they adjusted the size
of the dole in accord with price fluctuations, appealed for 'general
collections' on a county-wide basis to aid disaster-stricken families
or towns, and reformed taxation by ordering more equitable direct
assessments and extending the tax base in order to pay for poor
relief.226 And the Norfolk assize of 1620 encouraged the growing of

^ v o l 2 , p. 297; cf Bucer, p. 315, and William Hunt, The Puritan MomentXCam-

bridge, Mass., 1983).
223
Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 226, supported this concept, as did Sandys in the
1572 Commons debate. Sandys noted both the humanity of the system and its
practicability as evidenced by the success which had attended the adoption of such
measures in Worcester (D'Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments during the Reign of
Queen Elizabeth (1682), Parti, p. 165 (13 April 1572); TED, voL 2, p. 333 (18 EL, c.3,
1576). Indoor relief was a feature of English poor relief until prohibited by the
notorious 1834 Poor Law.
224
Pearl, pp. 214-15. Middleton, president of Bridewell, was unfortunately not per-
suasive enough to get his plan implemented; however, both national and local
relief measures frequently included orders to provide at public expense a stock of
raw material upon which the poor could work: e.g., D'Ewes, Journals, Parti, p. 254;
TED, vol. 2, pp. 332, 347. For Bacon's argument, see Letters and Life, p. 252.
225 226
Slack, pp. 182-3. Beier, pp. 82, 96-7.
172 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

root crops by the poor by paying them twopence a day for their gar-
dening work.227
Developments like these were possible in the seventeenth century
because puritans had absorbed from the sixteenth-century Christian
humanists the principle that employment of the poor would do
more than either doles or punishment to correct the problem of
poverty. Like Vives, they saw more potential reformation in a poor
man laboring in his own garden than in a beggar whipped and
expelled from the city, and like the magistrates of Ypres and Lyon,
they were willing to try new methods of providing work in order to
achieve that reformation. The real innovators were the Catholic
humanists who established the patterns elaborated upon by
seventeenth-century protestants.
Puritan schemes were made possible, too, by the fact that both
puritans and non-puritans agreed with the Renaissance laicization of
charity. Secular administration was part of the rationalized, insti-
tutionalized, less personal approach to social problems which had
been advocated by the Christian humanists out of concern for the
welfare of the poor. Lay overseers and constables were more strictly
accountable for administering relief than medieval clergy had been-
an advantage recognized by the magistrates of Norwich, Salisbury
and London, and by Elizabethan JPs, as it had been by Vives and the
author of the Ypres scheme.228 A secularized administration also
possessed the requisite authority to enforce a rate, obviously an
advantage for regular and consistent relief in times of economic fluc-
tuation.229 Oversight by JPs provided a means by which geographic
variations in wealth could be equalized, too: the 1597 Poor Law de-
creed that JPs were to rate wealthy parishes more heavily to pay for
relief in impoverished ones.230 Puritans were in sufficient agreement
with their contemporaries on the merits of secular relief for
Elizabethan presbyterians to rule against calling for reform of poor
relief as members of a classis; such action could only be appro-

227
Norfolk and Norwich Record Office, Walsingham MS XVII/2, De Grey Letter
Book, no. 5, Norfolk Assize Orders of Montague and Doderidge, n.f. I am grateful
to Derek Hirst for this reference.
228
F&R, vol. 1, p. 1045, vol. 2, p. 109; TED, vol. 2, pp. 322, 346-9, 354; Beier, p. 97;
Slack, p. 180.
229
The rate, for which Bucer had given an apology (Marburg Disputation, p. 156), was
established on a national level by the 1572, 1576 and 1597 Acts (TED, vol. 2, pp.
330-2, 347), although the county rates were in actuality only rarely used.
230 TED, vol. 2, p. 348; cf. the similar arrangement for the three parishes of Salisbury
in 1599 (Slack, p. 180).
 Work, wealth and welfare 173
priately taken as 'private men/ since the oversight of charity was the
responsibility of the magistrate, rather than of the church.231
Puritans, then, carried on both in theory and in practice the Chris-
tian humanist tradition of discriminate, disciplined, rationalized and
secularized poor relief. They were, moreover, part of an early modern
English consensus on the proper nature of charity - a consensus of
Catholic and protestant, of Anglican and puritan. Protestants
acknowledged, albeit with chagrin, that
the right care of the poor has already been restored [to the presumed ideal of
the primitive Christian church] in very many regions which still serve
Antichrist, whereas the very ones who glory in the reception of the gospel of
the Kingdom of Christ, although they are not unaware how necessary this
practice [of discriminate relief] is, and how much it is a part of the salutary
religion of Christ, still fail to re-establish it 232
Puritans supported and praised the legislation which was finally
passed by not necessarily puritan Parliaments to correct this situ-
ation. They agreed with Anglicans like Henry Hammond that the
poor should not be despised, with George Herbert that social ills are
due to lack of education and idleness, and with Robert Sanderson
that the idle should be set on work. Their agreement is to be expected,
since the authority cited by Sanderson - Erasmus - was no less an
authority for puritans.233 Anglicans and puritans were in substantial
agreement on the theory of poor relief because they relied on a com-
mon tradition, that of Erasmian humanism. Both were motivated by
a Renaissance sense of civic responsibility as well as by private piety.

231
Dedham Minutes, p. 32 (1583); Bucer (pp. 182, 310) agreed; cf R. W. Henderson,
'Sixteenth Century Community Benevolence: An Attempt to Resacralize the
Secular,' CH, 38 (1969), pp. 421-8, arguing that the late medieval trend toward
laicization of poor relief was reversed in Calvin's Geneva by the Ecclesiastical
Ordinances of 1541, establishing diaconal oversight of charity. Aside from the
absence of a parallel definition of the office of deacon in England, the distinctions
between sacred and secular spheres were somewhat blurred in both Christian
humanist and protestant social thought; it is not clear that there was any signifi-
cant difference between the procureurs and hopitaliers of fifteenth-century Geneva
232
and the deacons of the Reformed city. Bucer, p. 258.
233
Henry Hammond, Sermons (1695), p. 121. Hammond also condemned the pride of
the rich (p. 258, citing Aristotle) and urged generous almsgiving (pp. 140,251). The
Poems of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1961), pp. 7, 14; cf. p. 26 on
thriftiness and p. 28 on wealth as 'the conjurer's devil'; Robert Sanderson, XXXIV
Sermons (1661), pp. 107 (citing Cicero and Seneca, among others), 246, 249 (quot-
ing Erasmus' opinions of idle rogues), 251. Note also the essentially Christian
humanist positions of Thomas Fuller, Works, ed. M. G. Walter (New York, 1938),
voL 2, p. 154, and Lancelot Andrewes, Works (Oxford, 1854), vol. 5, p. 43, on this
issue. On puritan and Anglican agreement, see Breen, passim; Jordan, Philanthropy
in England, p. 155.
174 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Both were animated by the desire which John Ivie expressed 'to
advance God's glory and to settle a livelihood for the comfortable
living of poor souls.'234
The attitudes of both protestants and humanists to poor relief,
like their theories of work, wealth and poverty, occupy an inter-
mediate position between the medieval and the modern. Theirs was
a partial sanctification of the market-place- encouraging discipline,
productivity and thrift, but suspicious of prof it-making and accumu-
lation. Poverty was no longer praiseworthy, but neither was financial
success. Both prudence and generosity were enjoined, and social
responsibility rather than personal gain was to determine the direc-
tion of economic activity. Progressive methods were to be employed
in reforming the social order, but that reformation was aimed at the
greater glory of God and the establishment of Christ's Kingdom on
earth. The economic theory held by early modern Englishmen was,
in short, a transitional one; but what is apparent in all its aspects is
that its transitional nature was not determined by the protestant
Reformation. Its direction had been set before the Reformation, by
Christian humanists intent on applying ancient wisdom to contem-
porary problems.
Undeniably, the theories which emerged were responses to actual
socio-economic circumstances: a basic tenet of Christian humanism
was the need to devise practicable solutions for mundane problems.
It was the combination of demographic and urban expansion, com-
mercial changes, rising prices, periodic dearth and unemployment
which stimulated the development of new social and economic
attitudes in the sixteenth century. It was this combination which
gave rise to the vagrancy problem and to the polarization of wealth
and poverty with which contemporary theorists were confronted.
Social change conditions social ideology, and if Catholics and
protestants in early modern England shared a social outlook, it was
at least in part because they were responding to common cir-
cumstances. They were not so much theologically casuistic as simply
troubled. Both legislated against idleness because both were faced
with the problem of vagrancy and mendicity; both criticized
drunkenness because both witnessed its increase during periods of
dearth and understood it as a secondary cause of poverty.235

234
Quoted by Slack, p. 184.
235
John Walter and Keith Wrightson, 'Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern
England,' P&P, 71 (1976), pp. 22-42; Wrightson, 'Reformation of Manners,' pp.
179-90 (on the interaction of dearth and piety in spurring puritan enforcement
activities); Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation ofa City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis
 Work, wealth and welfare 175
The nature of their response, however, was conditioned no less by
ideas than by circumstances, and as the century progressed, ideas
gradually came to the forefront as the determinants of action. While
puritans and their opponents agreed on the need to enforce social
discipline, by the seventeenth century it was becoming clear that
puritans were in fact more diligent in doing so. Wrightson has found,
for instance, that while dearth stimulated magisterial repression of
alehouses, this phenomenon was much more pronounced in puritan
Essex than in Lancashire.236 Puritan reformers in Salisbury were
eventually opposed by the dean and chapter of the cathedral in their
attempts to implement innovative and non- punitive solutions to the
problem of unemployment.237 It will be shown that by the 1630s,
many Anglicans were beginning to opt for a more 'hard-hearted'
policy toward the idle, for the doctrine of poverty as a punishment
for wickedness, and for a penal approach to poor relief, and that they
were herein following a pattern which had been set by European
Catholics at the end of the sixteenth century.238 Catholics in the six-
teenth century and Laudian Anglicans in the seventeenth were
obviously addressing the same problems as their ecclesiological
opponents were. The differences which had developed in their social
and economic theory must be traced, then, to an ideological shift- a
shift away from the Christian humanist consensus, in favor of a more
conservative, conformist approach to social problems. Tridentine
Catholics and Laudian Anglicans espoused a new ideology of
authority and control which gave rise to new interpretations of
social order. Before the changes which occurred in their attitudes
toward poverty and wealth and toward marriage and the religious
functions of the household can be analyzed, then, it is necessary to
investigate that fundamental aspect of social theory on which
protestants and Catholics, puritans and Anglicans, first diverged -
the nature of social hierarchy and the locus of authority in the Chris-
tian commonwealth.

of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 20, has also noted the correlation of
drunkenness laws with periods of unemployment and compensatory drinking.
236
Wrightson, Reformation of Manners•, pp. 188-90.
237
Slack, pp. 186-8.
238
Slack, p. 185; Hill, Society and Puritanism, p. 267; Breen, p. 281; Beier, pp. 83-4, 99,
Table 3; chapter 7, below.
< = >

Conscience and the Great Chain of Being

Inferior authority cannot bind the superior: now the

courts of men and their authority are under
conscience. For God in the heart of every man hath
erected a tribunal seat, and in his stead he hath placed
neither saint nor angel, nor any other creature what-
soever, but conscience itself, who therefore is the
highest judge that is or can be under God.
William Perkins, 15961

Thou must not rest upon the testimony and sugges-

tions of thine own conscience . . . Why should you
think yourselves born, or grown so good divines, that
you need no counsel; in doubtful cases, from other
men? . . . For our Judge, which is the conscience, let
that be directed before hand, by their advice whom
God hath set over us.
John Donne, 16222

The conflict between Anglicans and puritans over so basic a

Reformation assumption as the authority of conscience represents
more than a theological disagreement. When Donne cast
conscience down from the lofty height where it had been enthroned
in the previous century and substituted for it the authority of the
hierarchy, he was articulating not so much an ecclesiological pos-
ition as an approach to the problem of social order - one which

1
A Discourse of Conscience, ed. T. F. Merrill, in William Perkins: His Pioneer Works on
Casuistry (The Hague, 1966), p. 32.
2
Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1957), vol. 4, pp. 221,
223.

176
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 177
seems to have had very little to do with his theology. It was in fact a
Catholic approach, and Donne adopted it not because of any
identification with the doctrine of his popish foes, but because it
happened that Catholics had recognized before protestants the anti-
authoritarian possibilities inherent in the exaltation of conscience.
It was the similar concern of the Anglican and Catholic hierarchies
with social order which prompted them to re-emphasize the primacy
of constituted authorities.
However, in affirming the sovereignty of conscience over the
guidance of social and ecclesiastical superiors, Perkins was no less
concerned with the maintenance of social harmony than was Donne.
His statements concerning conscience occur within the context of
the first significant English protestant work of casuistry, a treatise
whose purpose was to exhort Englishmen so to regulate their
behavior that a godly, well-ordered commonwealth would be pro-
duced. If Catholics, Anglicans and puritans found themselves agreed
on anything, it was on the need for social regulation and on the re-
sponsibility of preachers to provide an ideological guarantee for
order in the commonwealth. Political rebellion, democratic ideas,
and social levelling were anathema to all; they were equally con-
cerned with questions of authority and obedience. The differences
among them which emerged by the end of the sixteenth century on
the issue of social order arose not so much from their aims, then, as
from their means, for there was more than one approach to the
problem of social order available to Elizabethan and Stuart
theoreticians.
The issue expressed by Perkins and Donne in terms of the role of
conscience may be broadly conceived as a conflict between two
methodologies of social control - the one humanist-inspired and
progressive, the other medieval, static and ultimately repressive.
The question for the preachers, convinced (as were most of their
contemporaries) of the danger of imminent social breakdown, was
whether to insure the maintenance of order and stability in the realm
by demanding a reformation of behavior dictated at the level of the
individual conscience, as Perkins (following the humanist model)
did, or by asserting that the road to salvation lay in unquestioning
obedience to constituted authority, the solution for which
Donne opted.
Neither Perkins' approach nor Donne's was distinctively prot-
estant. Part of the reason that the controversy over authority in
seventeenth-century England presents such a complex problem for
historians is the fact that the length of its pedigree has never been
178 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

clearly recognized. The intellectual roots of the conflict must be

sought before the Reformation, in late medieval anticlericalism and
particularly in the social criticism of the Christian humanists, where
an alternative to the hierarchical conservatism of medieval society
first appeared in a reformist ethic. The protestant emphasis on
conscience was actually one aspect of Erasmian social ideology, a
'grass roots' approach to the problem of order in the common-
wealth. Reasoning along classical lines that the common weal was to
be achieved not by authoritarian means, but by inculcating virtuous
behavior in the individual citizen, the Christian humanists had
demanded a continuous, dynamic confrontation of the informed
individual conscience with moral issues in a civic environment. The
commonwealth was to be reformed from below by an emphasis on
behavior, rather than repressed from above by an insistence on
obedience to prescribed outward forms. The humanist goal was a
godly society, not just without disorder, but even without tension- a
state in which order was guaranteed by the government of rightly-
informed individual conscience.
The humanist vision was readily taken over by protestant re-
formers, who had necessarily abandoned the rule of metaphysical
hierarchies in favor of direct individual access to God. The social
concomitant of their theological position was precisely the com-
monwealth ideal of the Christian humanists. The civic responsibility
of the humanist citizen corresponded to the religious accountability
of the protestant saint; just as the well-ordered commonwealth was
to be achieved by individual reform, so the peace and harmony of the
elect nation was to be insured by a reformation of manners. Nor was
this an assumption disputed by most Anglicans, at least until the
1620s. The common humanist heritage of English protestants
guaranteed a relatively high degree of cooperation in urging
moral reformation.
This is not to say that protestants and Catholic humanists were not
in substantial disagreement on theological questions, even as they
pertained to moral reform. The Erasmians defined the good man as
one who led an exemplary life in light of the vita Christi and the moral
advice of the ancients; protestants defined the good man as one
redeemed by Christ. In humanist eyes education could achieve a
great deal nearly unaided; protestant theology required spiritual
intervention for education to make a genuinely effective contri-
bution to the sanctifying process. Ultimately, of course, the quarrel
over free will divided humanist from protestant. But despite the dif-
ferences, both acknowledged the power of sin and the need to over-
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 179
come its effects individually and socially. And despite the protestant
focus on redemptive history in the Scriptures, their stress on Christ
as moral exemplar and on the usefulness of classical ethics was no
less than Erasmus*. While the protestant saint did not win salvation
by good works, those works were none the less required as a
response to election. Whatever their theological differences, prot-
estants were able to use humanist moral guides and social advice to
good effect. And because their Reformed theology rejected me-
diation between man and God by priests and saints, the Christian
humanist emphasis on individual responsibility to the guidance of
rightly informed conscience was all the more palatable.
It was a common, humanist approach to social order, then, which
established the consensus of Catholics and protestants for most of
the sixteenth century on the nature and aims of family life, edu-
cation, economic conduct and poor relief. Only as the century pro-
gressed did it gradually become apparent, first to Catholics, then to
Anglicans, that the humanist and Reformed approach was fraught
with danger for upholders of hereditary status and social stasis. It was
the reformation of individual behavior through godly self-discipline
which humanists regarded as the means to social order, and under-
pinning this assumption was an explicit critique of the opposing
approach to social harmony, the Great Chain of Being.

The concept of the cosmos as a hierarchy of essence and degree

derived originally from Neo-platonic theory, and it seems never to
have been absent from medieval thought. It combines the Platonic
principle of plenitude, the notion that no genuine potentiality of
being in the multi-leveled universe can remain unfilled, with its
logical (although not strictly Platonic) implication, an absolute cos-
mological determinism. A vaguely Aristotelian notion of onto-
logical scale is also incorporated.3 What is posited, then, is a
harmonious, hierarchical order of things which is by its very nature
unalterable. The Chain of Being divides aetherial from aerial beings,
and aerial from terrestrial, placing each in its proper sphere. In
parallel fashion, it separates reason from appetite, soul from body,
king from commons, and fills the space in between with a hier-
archical arrangement of intermediaries. What is important is that
3
Macrobius, St Augustine and the PseudoDionysius are the most important fifth-
century Neoplatonic shapers of medieval cosmology; they used elements drawn
from both Plato and Aristotle, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original con-
texts of their ideas. Arthur O. Love joy's The Great Chain ofBeing (Cambridge, Mass.,
1936) is the classic study of the genesis of this idea; see pp. 52-66 for a summary of
its sources.
180 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

not only the arrangement itself, but the precise position of each
element within it is part of the nature of the cosmos; that is, it is
determined not by any action or behavioral merit of the element,
but by the natural essence with which it had been endowed. What
this means at the level of human society is that the essential in-
equality of persons is ensconced in a theoretically rigid hierarchy of
birth in which movement of an individual out of his allotted social
space is necessarily regarded as his attempt to flout the authority of
the Forger of the Great Chain - a challenge to the natural order of
the universe.4 Virtue is regarded as inbred, not inculcated; hence
hereditary aristocracy is a precise reflection of the cosmic order
within the sphere of human relations. Similarly, vice in a member of
the lower social orders is treated as an essential characteristic, rather
than as a behavioral lapse; thus reform is not to be considered an
alternative to or an end of punishment.
Against these presuppositions of their late medieval environment,
the Christian humanists stand out as staunch opponents of the most
basic elements of the social order. In the contrast between their
reformist ethic and the more complacent social theory of the Middle
Ages can be seen the unintended revolutionary implications of the
humanist approach, those aspects of Erasmian theory which were
ultimately to be perceived as a threat to social order, rather than a
guarantee of it, first by Catholics, then by those conservative seg-
ments of English protestantism which would be distinguished as
'Anglican.'
These supporters of hierarchical authority in church and state
were not deceived in their apprehension of the humanist challenge
to the established order. Humanists, while not actually the levelers
that some apparently feared them to be, none the less posed a threat
to the bases upon which the sixteenth-century social hierarchy- lay
as well as clerical- was established. They were, after all, part of that
late medieval anticlericalism which not only exposed the ignorance
and immorality of the clergy, but also labeled 'superstitious' the
whole medieval apparatus by which God's favor was mediated to
humanity by a multi-leveled celestial hierarchy of saints and angels.5
4
In the words of a later adherent of the theory of the Great Chain of Being, 'Take
but degree away, untune that string/ And hark! What discord follows!' (Shake-
speare, Troilus and Cressida, Liii).
5
For example, Coll., p. 38; Praise of Folly, tr. Betty Radice (New York, 1971), pp.
128-30, 139; cf. pp. 177-83; Liber de Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia, in The Essential
Erasmus, tr. John P. Dolan (New York, 1964), pp. 369, 380. In the Institutioprincipis
Christian/', tr. L. K. Born (New York, 1936), p. 196, Erasmus argued against a
mediating position for the stars.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 181
Proposing instead the possibility of direct access to God through
Scripture, they reduced the semi-magical role of the cleric to the
level of spiritual guide. Ridiculing the cults of saints and relics,
pilgrimages and indulgences, they posed a serious threat to the
authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Demanding an end to the
double standard of behavior for laity and clergy, and declaring the
market-place rather than the cloister the proper place to live out the
precepts of Scripture, they denied the inherent superiority of the
clerical estate and so shattered an important hierarchical assump-
tion. But it was their emphasis on behavior and their demand for
change which brought them into conflict with the foundations not
only of clerical, but also of lay hierarchy.
The argument that change within the social order is possible and
even good is perhaps one of the most significant innovations of
Christian humanist social theory. Change has been called the 'peren-
nial bugbear of the Great Chain'; it ultimately spelled the defeat of a
model in which the social order, like the cosmological, is a given, a
matter of being.6 The humanist understanding of change springs
both from the theory of behavior rather than birth as the determi-
nant of degree, and from humanists' observations of the changes
which were taking place within their own world. Such circumstances
as the augmenting numbers and influence of the mercantile ele-
ments of society, rising popular disillusionment with old authorities
(especially religious authorities), the apparent rise in the numbers of
poor and vagabonds- all were duly noted by humanists and set forth
as evidence that the cosmos is not, in fact, a static entity. In Richard
Taverner's 1539 translation of the Adages, this sense of flux is
expressed clearly: 'There is an alteration of all things . . . in men's
things nothing is perpetual, nothing stable, but all pass and repass
even like to the ebbing and flowing of the ocean sea.'7 New problems
arise; new solutions are required. And it was the humanists' sincere
hope that with the spread of the New Learning, humankind would
be enabled to construct a new, rational, humane social order in the
changing world.
6
Lovejoy, pp. 329-31. Hence Langland's conviction that evil will result from any
change in the social order (Piers Plowman, G vi, 65-81). cf Arthur Ferguson, The
Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1965), pp. 42—69, on
Langland and Gower.
7
Proverbes oradagies with new e addicions gathered out ofthe Chiliades, fol. xxiv; cf. Formulae,
Coll., pp. 581-2. Ferguson has argued that it is this 'new historical consciousness,
marked in varying degrees by a new sensitivity to the implications of social change'
which distinguished humanist thought in sixteenth-century England: Clio
Unbound: Perceptions of the Social and Culturalpast in Renaissance England (Durham, NC,
1979), pp. x, 179.
182 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

For Erasmus, war, ignorance, crime and poverty are among the
social evils which result not merely from individual moral failure,
but from a static rather than a progressive view of human society.8 In
his reckoning, these evils both can and must be changed. Change
may be in and of itself good; stagnation always spells defeat. The
enemy on whom he declared his own war, therefore, was custom, the
ultimate barrier to social change, the guardian of all that is archaic. It
is custom, he said, which allows the proliferation of holy days which
results in idleness and its attendant evils, gluttony, drunkenness and
lechery: 'and why should it be an offence against religion to change
the custom, for the very same reason for which our ancestors
established it?'9 It is custom, moreover, which prevents bad laws
from being amended.10 Custom, the real ruler of early modern society,
is 'the fiercest tyrant of them all,' n a tyrant who must be overthrown
for a truly rational and godly society to be constructed.
In the Christian humanist scheme, then, a godly social order, far
from eschewing change, requires it. At the individual level, one is
born no more to poverty and ignorance than to virtuous leadership.
The individual is expected to rise above the circumstances of low
birth and not to take for granted the advantages of high birth; he is to
exercise self-discipline, to pursue wisdom, to know the Scriptures,
and to behave uprightly. At the social level, high regard is to be re-
served not for the well-born, but for the virtuous. It was this doc-
trine, combined with the positive conception of change, which
developed in Christian humanist literature into a frontal assault on
the medieval theory of a natural hierarchy of being.
Erasmus may again be taken as a representative figure. The notion
of an aristocracy of birth was repugnant to him, and he bestowed
some of his most caustic social commentary on what he regarded as
8
Robert P. Adams, 'Designs by More and Erasmus for a New Social Order,' Studies in
Philology', 62 (1945), 131-46. On Erasmus' pacifism, see the adages Duke helium in-
expertis, Spartam nactus es, hanc orna, and Sileni Alcibiadis, in The 'Adages' of Erasmus, tr.
Margaret Mann Phillips (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 269-353; the colloquy Charon,
(Coll., pp. 388-94); and the Querelapads (1517). A facsimile of the 1559 English
translation of the latter, The Complaint of Peace, by Thomas Paynell, is available with
an introduction by William James Hirten (New York, 1946).
9
Ignavis semperferiae sunt, Adages (1964), p. 268; cf. Liberde Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia,
Dolan, p. 385. (It was precisely this line of reasoning which puritans would follow
when, during the Interregnum, they abolished holy days, including Christmas.)
10
Institutio, p. 229. Thomas Starkey similarly argued against the acceptance of tra-
dition per se; his emphasis on the 'process of time' is discussed by Ferguson, Clio
Unbound, pp. 174-8.
11
Conviviumprofanum, Coll., p. 600; cf Franciscani, Coll., p. 214: 'There is nothing too
ridiculous for custom to sanction'; Abbatiset eruditae, Coll., p. 221: 'Why tell me of
custom, the mistress of every vice?' Puerpera and Synodus grammaticorum (Coll., pp.
270, 272, 398) express very similar sentiments.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 183
one of the most unfortunate outcomes of i t - hereditary monarchy.
Just as he denied the necessity for intermediaries between man and
God, so he rejected the links of the Great Chain of Being which
correspond to the celestial hierarchy in human society. And his
rejection incorporated a very basic critique of the medieval/
Neo-platonic model of the cosmos: it insisted that degree is not
properly a matter of being, or natural essence. Degree in society
should correspond rather to virtue, and virtue, in Erasmus'
experience, seemed all too often to bear an inverse relationship to
exalted birth. In early modern Europe as Erasmus perceived it, the
aristocracy was seldom composed of the aristos.
This thesis is perhaps most forcefully argued in Erasmus' lengthy
commentary on the adage Scarabeus aquilam quaerit, which first
appeared in the 1515 edition of the Adages.12 Here the natural
hierarchy of the animal kingdom, presided over by the eagle and the
lion, is presented as the precise counterpart to the domination of the
human social and political order by king and nobles. Erasmus' con-
clusions are devastating to the honor and prestige accorded to
royalty and nobility as such. According to the traditional concep-
tion, the inherent nobility of the eagle won it its royal title, and the
status of the beetle (popularly thought to dwell and feed on dung)
was likewise determined by its natural position in the Chain of
Being, its inherent lowliness. But Erasmus saw the irony of this
order:
The eagle alone has seemed suitable in the eyes of the wise men to represent
the symbol of a king- the eagle, neither beautiful, nor songful, nor good to
eat, but carnivorous, greedy, predatory, ravaging, warring, solitary, hated of
all, a universal pest, the creature who can do the most harm and would like
to do even more than it can. It is exactly on the same grounds that the lion is
appointed king of the animals- when there is no other great beast which is
fiercer or more noisome. . . Obviously it must be a royal creature, just like
the eagle.13
Other animals, even the lowliest, are by contrast positive con-
tributors to the common weal: dogs watch over men's possessions,
oxen till the soil, mules carry heavy loads. And it is the occupant of
the humblest position of all in the animal realm, the beetle, which
receives the highest praise from Erasmus for its diligence, reliability,
and ingenuity: 'What valour of spirit the beetle has! What mental
power, worthy of heroes!'14
A more complete inversion of the traditional hierarchy can hardly
12 13 14
Adages (1964), pp. 244-63. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 249.
184 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

be imagined. If kings are universal pests, and the least of commoners

heroes, what must Erasmus' readers have concluded about their own
social order? Obviously, the Erasmian approach is antipathetical to
the enforcement of social order on the basis of the inherent
authority of the well-born. Elsewhere, Erasmus was even more
blatant in his castigation of those born to prominence. In the
Institutio principis Chrtstiani, Erasmus compared the hereditary suc-
cession of his own time with barbarian practices of old and argued
that'kings who have the inclination of brigands and pirates should
be put in the same class with them. For it is the character, not the
title, that marks the king.'15 It is absurd to place the slightest value
on birth in determining who should rule, given the evidence of his-
tory and observation that even if kings in the present system are not
found to be downright evil, they create mischief in their realms by
their lack of understanding: 'You merely have to turn over the
chronicles of the ancients and the moderns, and you will find that in
several centuries there have been barely one or two princes who did
not by sheer stupidity bring disaster to human affairs.' Folly
obviously maintains her empire even over emperors.16
It is hardly surprising to find Erasmus' socially conservative con-
temporaries describing his 'wanton pen.' 'Whatsoever might be
spoken to defame princes' government is not left unspoken,'
15
Institutio, p. 169; cf. p. 248. In the adage Civitasnon civitas Erasmus' republican senti-
ments emerge; acknowledging, however, that monarchy was an unavoidable evil
in his own day, he argued for elective rather than hereditary kings. See Utficioculis
incumbunt, Adages, p. 359- Contrast, as an example of the medieval view, the opinion
of Aegidius Romanus, a pupil of St Thomas, that hereditary monarchy is the best
form of government, in On the Governance of Princes (1287) (noted by L. K. Born,
Institutio, p. 118). Erasmus was willing to compromise his ideals by writing tactful
advice to monarchs of both types in hopes that a bad system could thereby be
ameliorated. In a letter of 1504 to Jean Desmarez, he gave an apology for his 1503
Panegyricus for Prince Philip: such a composition
consists in presenting princes with a pattern of goodness, in such a way as to reform bad rulers,
improve the good, educate the boorish, reprove the erring, arouse the indolent, and cause
even the hopelessly vicious to feel some inward stirrings of shame . . . How much better to
improve matters by compliments rather than abuse. And what method of exhortation is more
effective . . . than to credit people with possessing already in large measure the attractive
qualities they urge them to cultivate? CWE 2, no. 180, p. 81.
cf. More's reluctance to follow suit in Utopia, pp. 87,103. Quentin Skinner offers a
useful discussion of'mirror-for-princes' writers in Foundations of Modern Political
Thought (Cambridge, 1978), voL 1, pp. 213ff. On Erasmus' political thought, see
James D. Tracey, The Politics of Erasmus (Toronto, 1978), esp. pp. 23^*8.
16
Autfatuum aut regem nancisci oportere (1515), Adages, p. 216. Note that the beetle in
Scarabeusaquilam quaerit is credited with 'no common brains' (p. 249). Folly, pp. 113,
117, 173-5; cf Meliores naucisci aves, Adages, p. 23, in which Erasmus argued that
kings are as susceptible as 'the vulgar' to superstition. Erasmus, always desperate
for patronage, none the less refused an offer from Francis I to join the court at
Paris: Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation (New York, 1957), p. 94.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 185
charged Stephen Gardiner. But Bishop Gardiner also correctly
located the basis of Erasmus' radical social theory in his insistence
that 'every man must come to the high prick of virtue, or . . . be
extremely nought.' 17 In his insistence on individual virtue and the
rule of conscience as the foundations of order in the commonwealth,
Erasmus implicitly destroyed the basis for the medieval method-
ology of control, the inherent authority of the well-born.
Nor did Erasmus restrict his criticism to the summit of the no-
bility, the king. Having noted in another adage the obscure social
origins of Jesus and the Apostles, 'lowest of the low, the objects of
everyone's scorn,' he contrasted those who receive honor as nobly-
born:
You would find in no one less real nobility than in those Thrasos with their
long pedigrees and collars of gold and grand titles, who brag of their noble
blood; and no one is further from true courage than those who pass for
valiant and invincible just because they are rash and quarrelsome. There is
no one more abject and enslaved than those who think themselves next to
the gods, as they say, and masters of all.
'Noble birth,' he concluded, 'is simply laughable, an empty name.'18
If society were scaled according to true virtue, the present nobility
would surely occupy the lowest position, since they are in practice
the deliberate destroyers of the common good. In his commentary
on Utfici oculis incumbunt, he portrayed the great lords and grandees
as 'insatiable in their greed, most corrupt in their appetites, most
malignant in their cruelty, inhuman in their despotism - real
enemies of the public weal, and highway robbers . . . who fatten on
public misfortune.'19 The Chain of Being is thus regarded as inimical
to the common weal, rather than the guarantee of it.
Nobles were seen as no less despicable in their personal conduct.
In the colloquy De rebus ac vocabulis, Erasmus defined a knight as one
who has possessed himself by inheritance or by purchase of a title,
and who 'never does a good deed. . . dresses like a dandy, wears rings
on his fingers, whores bravely, dices constantly, plays cards, spends
his life in drinking and having a good time . . .20 How absurd it is to
bestow honor and power on such an unworthy class; none the less,
17
The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed J. A. Muller (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 386-7.
18 19
Sileni Alcibiadis, Adages, pp. 273-4, 278. Adages, pp. 258-9.
20
Coll., p. 388. See also Folly, pp. 105, 123, 176, and the colloquiesEmentita nobilitas
and Coniugium impar, pp. 424-32 and 401-12 in Thompson's edition. In the latter
colloquy, the parents of a young, beautiful woman are denounced for marrying her
to a notorious gambler, whoremonger and drunkard, a thief and a bankrupt, a pox-
ridden corpse whose 'breath is sheer poison, his speech a plague, his touch death,'
all for the sake of'his glorious title of knight'
186 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Erasmus observed such absurdity in daily practice. Title is normally

placed in high regard in the choice of marriage partners, a practice
which Erasmus deplored. On a less serious level, part of his highly
entertaining critique of German inns was pointed at the preferential
treatment given to nobles over commoners. 21 Yet if preference is to
be given, it should go to the latter, since one who glories in his ances-
try is in reality 'low and base-born because he is so far from virtue,
the only true fount of nobility.'22 Neither should wealth or position
be regarded as proper determinants of social status, since heaven
grants wealth, palaces and kingdoms to the slothful and the worth-
less, and wealth, honor and descent make one neither better nor
happier.23
The strongest second to Erasmus' disdain for hereditary nobility
came from Sir Thomas More. Erasmus remarked with obvious
approval in a biographical sketch of More that the latter was dis-
inclined to life at court and to intimacy with princes, so great was his
liking for equality.24 More's egalitarian tendencies are most apparent,
of course, in the social structure of Utopia, which provides a vehicle
for the most pervasive attack on chivalric aristocracy of the period.
More attacked both lords and their retainers as idlers, condemned
princes as war-mongers, and denounced virtually every aspect of
aristocratic living as destructive of the common weal. His denunci-
ation of chivalric values was complete.25
Thomas Starkey followed in the same tradition: 'Princes and
lords,' he accused, 'seldom look to the good order and wealth of
their subjects; only they look to the receiving of their rents and
revenues of their lands.' Nobles and prelates maintain in their
houses 'an idle rout. . . which do nothing else but carry dishes to the
table and eat them when they have done; and after, giving them-
selves to . . . idle pastimes and vain, as though they were born to
nothing else at all.'26 As for monarchy, while it is the rule 'most con-
venient' for England, 'princes commonly are ruled by affects rather
than by reason and order of justice,' so that 'seldom it is that they
which by succession come to kingdoms and realms are worthy of

21
Coniugium impar, Procietpuellae, and Diversoria, Coll., pp. 401-12,86-98, and 147-52;
22
cf. Institutio, p. 241; Folly, p. 131. Folly, p. 38; cf. p. 59.
23
Ars notoria and Abbatis et eruditae, in Coll., pp. 220, 460.
24
Erasmus to Ulrich von Hutten (23 July 1519) in Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi
Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1922), vol. 4, no. 999, p. 15.
25
Utopia, pp. 57, 62-3, 66, 128, 131, 138, 146, 150-2, 166-70, 204. See Hexter's
introduction, pp. 1-liv, his 'The Loom of Language and the Fabric of Imperatives:
The Case ofII Principe and Utopia, 'American Historical Review, 69 (1964), 945-68, pp.
960-2; and Skinner, voL 1, pp. 257-60, for more complete discussions of More's
26
radical stance on the nature of aristocracy. Starkey, pp. 79, 86; cf. 123-5.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 187
such high authority.' Hereditary succession is judged to be 'contrary
to nature and all right reason.'27
Birth, then, was not deemed a proper determinant of status by
humanist theorists. While those born to nobility are too often the
most ignoble of men, people of lowly birth who apply themselves to
virtuous behavior and education may well be worthy to rule. The dis-
dain which humanists evinced for the 'common sort* rested on an
Erasmian re-definition of the term. For Erasmus, the appellation
'common' or 'vulgar' was related not to social class, but to level of
understanding and moral uprightness. The 'stupid generality of
men' are those who 'blunder into wrong judgments because they
judge everything from the evidence of the bodily senses.'28 The
'common people' include all those who are fooled by the false
opinions of astrologers and other superstition-mongers, but these
include kings and emperors.29 In his paraphrases on the Sermon on
the Mount, Erasmus identified the 'common sort' as those whose
concern is with material possessions, rather than with learning
righteousness; again, however, this is not a criterion which corre-
sponds exclusively to low social estate.30 To value gems, gold, royal
purple, the pomp of heralds and an exalted genealogy is one charac-
teristic of the 'base, vile, and unbecoming' thought of the vulgar.
But Erasmus found this trait typical of the opinions of the princely
estate. 'How ridiculous it is,' he exclaimed, for one possessed of
these superficial benefits to regard himself as 'so far superior to all
because of them, and yet in light of real goodness of spirit to be
found inferior to many born from the very dregs of society.'31
Erasmus would have concurred heartily with Archbishop Cranmer's
judgment that the children of the poor are often more gifted than
gentlemen's sons.32 When he did use the term 'common' in its more
usual sense of low social estate, he was as often as not alluding to the
wisdom of simple folk.33
27
Ibid., pp. 99, 104, 165.
28
Silent Alcibiadis, Adages, p. 276; cf That chyldren oughte to be taught. . ., a treatise by
Erasmus included in Richard Sherry's A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (London,
1550), foL Giii; Apophthegmes, tr. Nicolas Udall (London, 1542), fol. 21.
29
Institution p. 196; cf Adages, p. 23; Folly, pp. 113, 117.
30
The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente (London,
1548, Scholars' Facsimiles, 1975), fol. xix; cf Apophthegmes, fol. 51, where the
wealthy classes are obviously in Erasmus' mind as he labels 'common' those who
spend money on their horses and stables, rather than on their children's
education.
31
Institutio, pp. 145-50; in Apophthegmes, fol. 47, he deems a beggar superior to an
ignorant or unwise man.
32
Thomas Cranmer, Works (Cambridge, 1844-6), vol. 2: Miscellaneous Writings and
Letters, p. 398, from BL, MS Harl. 419.
33
For example, Festina lente, Adages, p. 188, notes that 'the common people' are in
agreement with Quintilian in regard to certain child-rearing practices.
188 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Birth, therefore, has nothing to do with the virtue of the

individual, which is for the humanists the proper determinant of
status. John Colet articulated their aspiration that 'all the old diver-
sity might be abolished. . . and one new and simple and like form of
Christ be put on by all.' The aim of Christian behavior on the part of
men of all social levels Colet regarded as 'the closer of the grovelling
eye which regards only the inequalities of earth.'34 Erasmus was
clearly an accurate spokesman for Christian humanism when he
boldly asserted in the Institutio that 'Nature hath created all men
equal, and slavery was imposed on nature.'35
This should not be construed to imply, however, that the
humanists were completely anti-hierarchical or in any sense of the
word democratic in their social outlook. They were, after all, early
modern men, and they shared the concern of their contemporaries
with the ever-present threat of social chaos should degree be
abolished. Erasmus was particularly affected by the German Pea-
sants' Revolt, which inspired in him a horror of anarchy: 'The pea-
sants raise dangerous riots and are not swayed from their purpose by
so many massacres. The commons are bent on anarchy. . . the whole
earth is pregnant with I know not what calamity'; in the adage Utfici
oculis incumbunt he commented that princes are to be endured 'lest
anarchy- on the whole a worse evil- take the place of tyranny. The
experience of public events has often proved - and the recent
peasants' revolts in Germany show u s - that the harshness of princes
is to some degree more tolerable than the confusion of anarchy.'36 As
a result, the ideal social order which they would oppose to the
'slavery' of the Chain of Being does incorporate hierarchy, but it is a
hierarchy determined by behavior - active evidence of virtue.37
Equality at birth simply allows for the potential of wisdom, moral
uprightness and ruling ability in a given individual, irrespective of
class or condition of birth. It is an allowance not particularly surpris-
34
loannis Coleti Enarratio in Primam Epistolam S. Fault ad Corinthios, tr. J. H . L u p t o n
(London, 1874), p. 97.
35
Institutio, p. 177; the adage Festina lente urges masters to treat their servants like
men, not beasts of burden, on this basis. Adages, p. 184.
36
Puerpera, Coll., pp. 269-70; Adages, p. 359; cf. Adages, p. 378 and Proverbes, foL liii.
Luther's response to the Peasants' Revolt was similar, if more strongly expressed
37
Clarence Miller, 'Some Medieval Elements and Structural Unity in Erasmus' The
Praise of Folly/ Renaissance Quarterly, 27 (1974), 499-511, finds in Erasmus' hier-
archical concepts evidence of'medievalism'; however, whereas medieval social
critics sought restoration of a diseased social organism to health, Erasmus wished
to see it replaced with an ideal entity in which different criteria for status are
employed, republicanism is held to be preferable to monarchy, etc. Complete
social reform for Erasmus would require reversion not to a medieval Golden Age,
but to a classical schema worked out in a Christian context
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 189
ing to discover in the theory of a man ever-conscious of his own base
birth, but one which none the less pervaded the thought of other
humanists as well. Their admiration for classical Stoicism is perhaps
nowhere more evident.
Given, then, that the combination of birth, wealth and honor
corresponds neither to understanding nor to virtue, it is not a proper
criterion for the designation of a ruler or ruling class. Rather,
wisdom, learning and moral excellence - possibilities at any social
level - should be the sole considerations:
In navigation the wheel is not given to him who surpasses his fellows in birth,
wealth, or appearance, but rather to him who excels in his skill as a
navigator, in his alertness, and in his dependability. Just so the rule of a state:
most naturally the power should be entrusted to him who excels all in the
requisite of kingly qualities of wisdom, justice, moderation, foresight, and
zeal for the public welfare.38
It is implied that those who do the choosing are also to be qualified
for their important position in the hierarchy by their virtue and
learning; they are to rule with the prince and receive honor from the
ruled. But in the humanist order, * there is no real honor except that
which springs from virtue and good deeds/ 39
Erasmus's system is thus not without a nobility. But'noble', like
'common', is redefined:
There are three kinds of nobility: the first is derived from virtue and good
actions; the second comes from acquaintance with the best of training; and
the third from an array of family portraits and genealogy or wealth. It by no
means becomes a prince to swell with pride over this lowest degree of no-
bility, for it is so low that it is nothing at all, unless it has itself sprung from
virtue. Neither must he neglect the first, which is so far the first that it alone
can be considered in the strictest judgment.40
38
Institution p. 140; cf. pp. 203-4; an abstract of this passage was translated and pre-
sented to Edward VI in 1550 by John Lumley (BL, Royal MS 17.A.XLIV, fols.
2-2v). cf. Apophthegmes, fol. 6; Enchiridion militis christiani, tr. and ed. Raymond
Himelick (Bloomington, Indiana, 1963), p. 65. It is noteworthy that when dis-
cussing the problem of who should rule, Erasmus consistently rejected the
traditional literary image of society as an organism in favor of the more flexible
image of the ship. This allows choice of a captain on the basis of merit, not birth, or
essential headship, as in the organic metaphor, cf. Michael Walzer, Revolution of the
5tfM(NewYork, 1972), pp. 171-83.
39
Institution pp. 20 3—4:' During a great tempest even the most experienced navigators
will listen to advice from a layman. But the ship of state is never without a storm.'
cf pp. 198, 224; Enchiridion, pp. 198-90.
40
Institution p. 151; De rebus ac vocabulis and Ementita nobilitas, in Coll., pp. 382-8,
424—32. The educational element is further stressed by Erasmus in De Civilitate
Morum Puerilium, translated by Robert Whittington as A lytell booke of good manners for
chyldren(1552). See Foster Watson, TheEnglish Grammar Schools to 1660 (Cambridge,
1908), p. 106, for the widespread influence of this work.
190 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Elsewhere, Erasmus added a spiritual dimension to the definition of

'nobility'. The Enchiridion counts as true nobility a sort of spiritual
elite composed of those who imitate Christ most nearly, and the
Liber de Sarcienda Ecclesiae Concordia (1533) describes society as a
spiritual hierarchy in which status is determined by conquest of sins:
'To be born from a father who is a servant is not base, while to be a
slave to lust, avarice, and other vices is most base; to beg one's bread
when necessity requires is not shameful, but to refuse the necessities
to the poor or to live on what has been stolen from them is a con-
temptible crime.'41 Clearly, the reformist concerns of Christian
humanism are uppermost in this denial of one of the central tenets
of medieval social theory, that status is a matter of being, not
behavior.
The Erasmian position is visible in its most idealized form in
Utopia, where there are no distinctions of birth. Here it is the most
virtuous and learned men who are elected rulers. More's epigrams
reveal his disapproval of monarchy: Epigram 182, on the best form
of government, promotes the rule of an elected senate rather than
that of a monarch chosen by the 'blind chance' of birth.42 Likewise,
Starkey raised the possibility of elective rather than hereditary rule
as a means of insuring that the best men, rather than the highest-
born, are placed in positions of authority: 'that country cannot be
long well governed nor maintained with good policy', observes Pole
in the Dialogue, 'where all are ruled by the will of one not chosen by
election but come to it by natural succession.'43
For Starkey, as for Erasmus and More, such a proposition was
purely theoretical; however, the underlying assumptions about the
proper nature of social hierarchy were there in their published
writings for subsequent generations of readers to consider in light of
their own political situations. And in the meantime, both Catholic
and early protestant humanists would maintain those assumptions
even when called upon to defend the established political order.
While the event of rebellion would seem the logical context for a
demand for unquestioning obedience to constituted authority,
Richard Morison found himself justifying the obedience due to
41
In Dolan, pp. 338, 365; Enchiridion, pp. 189-91 etpassim. The parallels between
those considered reprobate in puritan theology and the vulgar in the humanist
scheme are obvious. But puritans and humanists would admit that some people
seem to be beyond reformation; both saw repression as the only means to insure
social order in such extreme cases.
42
More, Utopia, p. 122; James McConica, 'The Patrimony of Thomas More,' History
and Imagination, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (New York,
43
1981), 56-71, p. 67. Starkey, pp. 99, 104-5, 154.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 191
Henry VIII in the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace on the basis not of
the king's birth and position, but of his virtue and courage in the
defense of truth and the common weal. Disobedience would be an
act of ingratitude for the king's virtuous behavior. Depicting the
present struggle as a conflict between an anti-Christian foreign
power and the representatives of the true faith, Morison issued an
appeal to conscience to come to the defense of right. In his officially
sanctioned treatise, he presented the humanist formulation that the
authority of the ruler is not absolute, but is conditioned by his vir-
tuous actions: 'God standeth with kings that stand with him.'44
Even more striking was the use of a similar argument in the next
decade against rebellion not by the aristocracy, but by a 'rabble of
Norfolk rebels' claiming a political voice. Those who would contem-
plate such a rebellion were exhorted to obedience by the humanist
Sir John Cheke not with an appeal to the Great Chain of Being, but
with an Erasmian theory of rightly determined rule. Cheke did not
deny hierarchy, but replaced hierarchy of birth with that of merit:
'they that have seen most, and [are] best able to bear it, and of just
dealing besides, be most fit to rule.'45 Obedience is owed the king
not because of his exalted birth, his position next to God in the cos-
mological order, but rather because of his virtue. The present king is
ruled by informed conscience; therefore, conscience dictates that
obedience is due him.
Thus, in expanding their doctrine that reform is the key to social
control and that virtuous behavior is the foundation upon which the
godly commonwealth must be built, the Christian humanists
developed an approach to social order diametrically opposed to the
medieval conception. The Erasmian focus was on the informing of
conscience; the Great Chain of Being subjected conscience to essen-
tial hierarchical authority embodied in king, lords and bishops. Both
aimed at social order, but one approached it from below, while the
other imposed it from above. The lines were drawn, the conflict
apparent, by the time protestantism appeared on the scene. In their
reformist zeal to achieve a godly commonwealth, the early Re-

44
Richard Morison, An Exhortation to styire all Englishmen to the defence oftheyr countreye
(1539), sig. Bviii; cf. Biiii ff, Diii-Diiii; An Invective agenste the great anddetestable vice,
treason (1539), sig. Ai-Biii et passim.
45
[Sir John Cheke], The Hurt of Sedicion howe Greveous it is to a Commune Welth (1549),
sig. Avii. On Ket's Rebellion, see S. T. Bindoff, Kefs Rebellion, 1549 (Historical
Association, G.I2, 1949); Stephen K. Land, Kett's Rebellion: The Norfolk Rising of
1549 (Ipswich, 1977); Diarmaid Macculloch, 'Kett's Rebellion in Context,' P&P,
84 (1979), 36-59; and Barrett L. Beer, Rebellion and Riot: Popular Disorder in England
during the Reign of Edward VI (Kent, Ohio, 1982).
192 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

formers naturally seized upon their humanist heritage. One must

agree in principle with the historian who has observed that
'Commonwealth, Protestantism and Christian humanism' were
indeed 'jumbled together in a splendid porridge of reformist yearn-
ings/ and that this 'cross-play of beliefs, weighing differently in dif-
ferent men, strikes much more convincingly than a distinction of
categories.'46 That porridge would nourish Anglicans and puritans
alike in Elizabethan England.

Protestant adoption of the humanist approach to social control

followed logically from the reformist orientation which they shared.
Both reform movements were founded on an optimistic vision of a
true stability to be achieved through change, a conviction that a
godly society is to be achieved not by enforcing obedience to
hierarchy, but by a concerted attack on the reasons for disorder in
the commonwealth - individual sin, moral ignorance and civic ir-
responsibility. If the protestant believer was a'citizen by calling,'47 he
was indebted to his Christian humanist forebears; his duty to the
commonwealth involved him in the same confrontation between
conscience and sin which Erasmus' Christian knight had faced.
Protestant preachers addressed congregations trained in the humanist
assumption of the importance of individual virtue to the common
weal. That order in the realm was to be achieved by individual refor-
mation of behavior was beyond debate in the mid-sixteenth century.
It was this presupposition which conditioned the preaching of
Bishops Latimer and Bale as it would that of puritans for the next
century and more. It helped to define the Elizabethan mainstream in
which puritans and conformists labored to realize the godly
commonwealth.
Protestant acceptance of humanist social theory was also con-
ditioned by their consensus on the authority of Scripture and the
need to apply its precepts to the practical problems of daily living. In
combination with their common rejection of the need for clerical,
saintly and angelic mediation between man and God, this biblicism

G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge,
1973), p. 1; cf. Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, Mass.,
1948); James McConica, English Humanism and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965);
Arthur B. Ferguson, Articulate Citizen. J. G. A. Pocock has suggested that the dif-
ficulties encountered by Ferguson's' commonwealth' humanists in achieving their
ends after the Reformation can be attributed to the 'sheer fear of disorder [which]
compelled an obstinate adherence to the vision of England as a hierarchy of
degree.' The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), pp. 348-9.
C H. and K. George, p. 18.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 19 3
naturally resulted for both humanists and protestants in an elevation
of the role of individual conscience in interpreting and acting on
scriptural injunctions. Reform was to be channeled to society
through conscience.
Zealous protestants, like Catholic humanists, wrote handbooks
for self-improvement, domestic conduct manuals, treatises on
education and diatribes against idleness, drunkenness, dancing and
other deadly sins not because of any intrinsic value in such
endeavors, but because of their larger social vision. Their remark-
able literary output was rather aimed at the goal of social order and
the common weal. The demands on conscience which they made of
gentlemen and servants alike comprised their method of achieving
social control. Reasoning along humanist lines, for example, that
crime is the result not of disobedience to superiors, but of idleness in
the lower orders and greed at the top, non-conformists, moderate
puritans and reforming bishops alike preached against idleness and
avarice, and supported workhouse legislation and the regulation of
enclosures, rents and prices. Their goal was the common weal, the
abolition of social disorder as it is manifest in crime. Likewise, their
shared Sabbatarianism was not an end per se, nor an obsession with
Old Testament legalism, but a conviction that want of regular
church attendance 4s the cause of so many wicked and rebellious
children, untrusty and disobedient servants, nay, unfaithful and
unkind wives everywhere.'48 Social harmony would result only from
a reformation of manners, and this reformation would be achieved
through the vehicle of preaching. The drive to move the ungodly
multitude from alehouse to church on Sunday was fuelled by a con-
viction that the instruction and exhortation received there would
awaken lax consciences and guide behavioral reformation. When
the godly laity of Elizabethan Essex protested against the suspension
of their puritan ministers, they noted the preachers' promotion of
social discipline by means of sermons.49 The publication of sermons
on practical social reform had the same goal: the puritan William
Jones' essay on household government was explicitly written as a
means of amending disorders in the commonwealth.50
Protestants emulated the humanist preference for moderation

48
Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Government (London, 1598), p. 31; cf
the Sabbatarianism of the Catholic humanist Richard Whitforde, The Werke for
housholders (n.p., 1537), sigs. Dviii-Eii.
49
William Hunt, The Puritan Moment (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), p. 98.
50
William Jones, A Briefe Exhortation to all men to set their houses in order (1612),
p. 3.
194 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

and self-control in all things out of a concern for the common weal.51
Puritan opposition to tippling rested similarly on their charge that it
resulted in social disorder. Nor do drunkards make any positive con-
tribution to the commonwealth: William Perkins, in his Treatise ofthe
Vocations (1597), condemned drinking, feasting and idle sports and
pastimes because they prevented men from 'employing themselves
in service for Church or commonwealth,' not because they were
inherently eviL Perkins is in this treatise representative of puritanism's
inheritance of the humanist commonwealth ideal: every action of a
Christian, including his choice of vocation, should be determined by
a desire to contribute to the common good, the edification of a godly
and well-ordered society.52 Puritan casuistry from Perkins and
William Ames to Richard Baxter should thus be interpreted as
evidence of the consensus among humanists and protestant refor-
mers that since individual sin is the root of England's troubles,
individual reform will assuage the turmoil. And the protestant, like
the Erasmian, requirement for spiritual self-examination may
therefore be understood as a technique of social control.53 Elizabethan
51
Following the advice, for instance, of Ulrich Zwingli's Of the Upbringing and Edu-
cation of Youth in Good Manners and Christian Discipline (1523) in Library of Christian
Classics, vol. 24, tr. G. W. Bromiley (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 114. Zwingli here
shows a humanist-inspired respect for Seneca, citing him in connection with the
contributions of individual self-control to the common weal.
52
William Perkins, A Treatise ofthe Vocations, or Callings ofMen in Workes(l6l6), vol. 1,
pp. 758, 773, et passim. Keith Wrightson, in'The Puritan Reformation of Manners
with special reference to the Counties of Lancashire and Essex, 1640-1660'
(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1973) has effectively
challenged puritan exaggeration of the extent of the problem of drunkenness, as
well as their charges that it led to more serious crimes. But while he admits that
puritan bombast against drink was heavily, if not correctly, fortified by appeals for
order and social responsibility, he sees this as a popular ideological disguise for
their real concern with drink as a barrier between the individual and his awareness
of his sins (pp. 78-82). I would argue rather that puritan concerns were both
individual and social. If drink numbs conscience, it does so to the detriment both
of the drunkard and of his community in puritan eyes. The godly commonwealth is
the one in which order is achieved at all levels through the control of sinful
behavior by individual conscience.
53
Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, in Merrill, pp. 79-240; William
Ames, Conscience With the Power and Cases Thereof (1639), passim; Richard Baxter,
Practical Works (1838), voL 1, pp. 902—4 et passim. Self-examination was preached,
for example, by William Perkins and George Webbe in A Garden ofspirituall Flowers
(1610), sigs. Biiii-Bv, Fiii-Fiiii, and by Luke Rochfort in An antidot for laziness
(Dublin, 1624), p. 20, in the latter case with more classical than biblical citations. It
was recommended by James Duport to his students at Trinity, Cambridge,
complete with the Pythagorean questions so highly thought of by Erasmus and
Cranmer (Trin. MS O.10A.33). It was practiced by Richard Rogers and Samuel
Ward (Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. M. NM. Knappen (Gloucester, Mass.,
1966)), Lady Margaret Hoby (Diary, ed. D. M. Meads (1930)), and Sir Simonds
D'Ewes (Autobiography, ed. J. O. Halliwell (1845)), vol. 1, pp. 353-63, to name a
few. The correspondence of Thomas Gataker, moreover, reveals the concern of
puritan divines with guidance of their parishioners in the process of self-
examination (CUL, MS Dd. 3.83,19, dated 1631).
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 195
protestants and puritans in the next century were in full agreement
with humanists that the problem of order in the commonwealth was
to be approached at the level of individual conscience.
The implications of this approach for the authority of the social
and ecclesiastical hierarchy is as apparent in protestant as in
humanist social theory, and here the first divergence of puritan from
conformist social understanding begins to emerge. Just as Erasmian
critics had subjected the behavior of kings, nobles, and clerics to the
scrutiny of morally informed conscience, so the hotter sort of prot-
estants would demand the imposition of a disciplined life style on
their social superiors. Andrew Melville, who identified uneducated
nobles as enemies of godliness, threatened James VI in 1597 'with
fearful judgments if he repented not'; he was denounced by Richard
Bancroft for charging 'the greatest men of the land with God's heavy
punishments' should they fail to conform to standards of godly
living. Thomas Cartwright called magistrates to govern according to
God's rules, and 'to submit their sceptres, to throw down their
crowns before the church,' a church in his vision directed by godly
laymen no less than by ministers.54 Laurence Humphrey wrote to the
queen and bishops criticizing the royal policy whereby 'the learned
man without his cap is afflicted, the capped man without learning is
not touched' merely because the latter conforms to the demands of
tradition. He charged bishops and priests in Erasmian style with
neglecting their true duties of caring for the poor, preaching, seeing
vagabonds disciplined and pulling down 'monuments of super-
stition', and boldly announced to Elizabeth that while he believed in
obedience to the prince, 'it is most right and convenient that the
mind and conscience of any, be not forced or compelled.'55 The
Cambridge puritan, Samuel Ward, numbered the sins of princes and
primates (including bull-baitings on the Sabbath and indulging
papists) among reasons for the ills of the nation.56 And puritans such
as Laurence Chaderton and Henry Smith would wholeheartedly
agree with Colet that' God has no respect of persons' in his demands
on conscience: the commandments of Scripture are directed to
pauper and lord alike.57 In the next century, the puritan Thomas
Gataker warned nobles not to rely on their birth to give them status
54
Andrew Melville, Diary (1556-1601), ed James Melville (Edinburgh, 1844), pp.
130, 274; Richard Bancroft, Dangerous Positions(1593), n.p.; Cartwright is quoted in
H. C Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958),
p. 142.
55
BL, Harl. MS 7033; cf. Humphrey's debate with Sanderson, recorded by a puritan
student at St John's, Cambridge (MS S.20), pp. 107-30.
56
Sidney Sussex College, MS Ward B, fol. 31.
57
Colet, p. 96; Laurence Chaderton, An Excellent and Godly Sermon. .. preached at Paules
Crosse (1578), sig. Biiii; Henry Smith, Sermons (London, 1593), sig. Yy5.
196 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

in God's kingdom, but to look to their actions, since 'It is with men
as with counters: howsoever while the account lasteth one standeth
for a penny and another for a pound, yet are they all counters alike
before and after the account, when they are together in the bag/
Rulers who neglect the common good in their pride of birth 'are
more dangerous to Crown and State, I say not than idle vagrants, or
than whoremasters and adulterers, or than thieves and murderers. . .
but even than popish traitors and conspirators.'58 Preachers such as
Thomas Hooker and William Gouge thundered warnings against
magistrates and the king himself, threatening them and the nation
with divine retribution for their sins.59 Even John Preston, as
chaplain to Prince Charles, managed tactfully to criticize the king's
foreign and religious policies in court sermons, calling for the prince
to submit his politics to the direction of instructed conscience. In
one such sermon, Preston went so far as to comment that God 'doth
not need princes' to care for his people, and that the believer would
do well to distinguish between God's cause and the king's.60 Prot-
estant disregard of hierarchy of birth in relation to virtuous action,
like that of the humanists, is evidence of their'grass roots' approach
to the problem of order in the commonwealth, their conviction that
order is to be exhorted on the level of the individual conscience,
whether noble or common, not imposed by force from above.
That Calvinist theology contributed to the implicit opposition of
English puritanism to hierarchy of birth is undeniable. But at least
part of the appeal of Calvinist social theory to English protestants
even before the rise of puritanism must be located in their predilec-
tion for Christian humanist social criticism.61 The Erasmian Re-
former Martin Bucer had told English divinity students that virtue is
a more vital quality than exalted genealogy in a ruler, that the
Kingdom of Christ ought to be governed by a 'person who excels the
others in wisdom and every virtue'; the responsibility of rule should
58
Thomas Gataker, Certaine Sermons (1637), p. 103; cf. pp. 73, 87-90, and 110,
frequently citing Seneca.
59
Hunt, pp. 199-208, provides numerous examples and notes that geographically,
resistance to the Forced Loan in Essex is found precisely in those areas where
puritan preachers were most active (p. 202).
60
Irvonwy Morgan, Prince Charles's Puritan Chaplain (1957), passim; Preston, Life
Eternall, p. 126.
61
Walzer, pp. 148-83, attributes puritan anti-hierarchical tendencies exclusively to
Calvinist theology, rather than acknowledging the Christian humanist precedent.
Furthermore, in his focus on revolution and radical politics, he fails to see that a
desire to achieve social order and harmony lay at the heart of the puritan reformist
program and that their critique of the behavior of nobles and prelates was
necessitated by their thesis that conscience is the proper agent of social control, cf
Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), pp. 150-88.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 19 7
not be assigned to 'any particular class of men, much less to hyp-
ocrites with empty titles.' He used nautical imagery just as Erasmus,
his predecessor at Cambridge, had used it: 'No one willingly entrusts
himself to a ship whose master has only the name and income of a
navigator, but who does not know how to navigate; but everyone
prefers to sail with a man who, although his name is unknown and his
talents modest, nevertheless has all the knowledge and experience
necessary for sailing a ship.'62 While extreme protestants pragmatically
convinced themselves that these behavioral requirements were met
by the then King Edward VI, their doubts about nobles and prelates
remained, and were embodied in an Erasmian critique of these
estates as detractors from the common weal and ultimately breeders
of disorder through vice. Nobles in Bucer's view were far from being
4
a shining example to the common people, as they should be';
rather, 'the effort they make for the advantage of the common-
wealth' is paltry compared to that of citizens of less birth but more
virtue.63 The critique of aristocracy embodied in Thomas Becon's
tracts likewise parallels Erasmus' at every turn, and evinces the same
attitude toward hierarchy even before the full impact of Calvinism
had been felt in England. In a 1560 sermon, Becon asked Seneca's
question, 'Seeing, then, that as touching our corporal creation there
is no difference, no prerogative, what nobility or worthiness of
blood can there be more in the noble personage than in the base
slave?' Virtue, he argued, is the sign of true nobility, a sign too often
absent from the titled.64 In the next century, Bulstrode Whitelocke
told his children that 'no birth will make one noble' without
righteous behavior.65
This principle was firmly established in the minds of Elizabethan
and early Stuart puritans. They learned it, either directly from
Seneca or through the mediation of Christian humanists, in the
course of their university studies,66 and they applied it to increasingly
virulent attacks on a frivolous and ungodly aristocracy, on the reign
of custom, and on the insistence of the conformist hierarchy that
conscience must be subject to temporal authority. William Bright,
having copied large portions of More's Utopia into his commonplace
book, called for rule based on virtue and ability, and Simonds
D'Ewes could only wish'that it might be truly said. . . Omnus magnus est

62 63
Bucer, pp. 176-7, 267-8. Bucer, pp. 341, 360.
64
Thomas Becon, The Jewel ofJoy (1560), sig. CCc6.
65
Memoirs of Bulstrode Whitelocke, ed. R H. Whitelocke (London, I860), p. 36.
66
For example, Trin. MSS R.16.6 (pp. 529-30), R.16.12 (fol. 87v), R.16.17 (foL 34),
R.16.18 (fols. 105, 115); Pembroke, Cambridge, MS LCII.16 (n.£).
198 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

bonus, the greatest are the best' Enamoured as he was of his own
genealogy, D'Ewes admitted that 'Every beggar comes from a king,'
and that we all trace our lineage to Noah; he saw pride in birth, as in
riches, as a hindrance to his progress toward heaven.67 By the 1640s,
the tendency to locate responsibility for social disorder in an idle,
vice-ridden courtly class, reliant on its birth rather than laboring to
attain true wisdom and virtue, had become part of the definition
of a puritan:
if any were grieved at the dishonours of the kingdom, or the gripping of the
poor, or the unjust oppression of the subject, by a thousand ways, invented
to maintain the riots of the courtiers... he was a Puritan... in short, all that
crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the proud encroaching priests, the
thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry, whoever could endure. . .
modest habit or conversation or anything good, all these were Puritans; and
if Puritans, then enemies to the king and his government.
Lucy Hutchinson, who thus defined puritanism, praised her hus-
band because 'he was above the ambition of vain titles . . . he loved
substantial and not airy honor. . . [and] pitied those that took a glory
in that which had no foundation of virtue.'68 Other puritan women
would go much further: Lady Brilliana Harley proclaimed in 1641
her 'belief that hierarchy must down, and I hope now.'69
Until the Civil War, most puritans were sufficiently fearful of dis-
order to go no further than expressing criticism of the blatantly
irreligious among the aristocracy and fear of divine retribution on
the nation, and urging individual moral reform to create the godly
commonwealth. Far from wanting to level society, they readily
adopted the alternative hierarchy of merit proposed by the
humanists. They were no more egalitarian than Erasmus had been;
they saw a need for society to be structured along hierarchical lines.
But they re-formed those lines as Erasmus had. They recommended
that Englishmen 'honour all men in their places, but no man so much
for his greatness as for his goodness, and thus shall you imitate the
Lord himself, who accepteth not persons, but in every nation ac-
cepteth him that feareth him.'70 Richard Sibbes' description of
67
CUL, Add. MS 6160, pp. 21, 33, 48; BL, Harl. MS 182, fol. 38v; Harl. 186, fols.
54v-58v; cf D'Ewes, Autobiography, passim.
68
Lucy Hutchinson, Memoires of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. Julius Hutchinson
(1822), pp. 122-3; cf. pp. 175-6.
69
Letters ofLady Brilliana Harley, ed. T. T. Lewis (Camden Society, 1884), p. 111. Lady
Brilliana was admittedly given to overstatement- she is the same Brilliana who had
earlier elevated parents to divinity; however, it should be recalled that she lost her
life beseiged by the forces of her king, against whom she and her family waged
determined war.
70
A Garden of spirituall Flowers Planted by Ri. Ro[gers], Will. Per[kins], Ri. Gree[nham], M
M., andGeo. Web/be] (1610), Part II, sig. Av.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 199
degree ignores birth altogether in favor of behavior as the sole deter-
minant of status; other puritans recognized various kinds of no-
bility, but reckoned that of birth inferior to that 'which a man doth
purchase by virtue and good living.'71 That 'distinction which God
maketh between man and man in every society' was paralleled to the
angelic hierarchy by Perkins in a sense diametrically opposed to the
essential hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being: distinctions for
angels and for men are based not on being but on behavior, on
obedience to God's commands under the guidance of conscience.
The dictates of conscience could even release the godly from
ordinary social obligations: rather than violate the dictates of con-
science, a servant could legitimately leave his master, according to
Perkins.72 Others expressed the logical implications of the notion of
an alternative hierarchy of virtue in politically reformist terms: the
godly vestry of Braintree issued in 1619 a new set of regulations for
the town's government, requiring that its governing body be chosen
not only on the traditional basis of social status, but also on grounds
of virtuous behavior - they must be 'unreprovable in their lives'
rather than merely wealthy or of the highest status.73
In Cambridge, a notorious case tried in the Vice-Chancellor's
court in 1628 reveals that the implications of the alternative
hierarchy could be more alarming to constituted authorities. When
the puritan Thomas Edwards of Queens' preached at St Andrew's on
obedience to the dictates of conscience, he told his auditors that
when they had difficulty understanding the word of God,
When there arise any doubts about the way, and thou knoweth not well
which way to take, if thou beest a servant, thou must not go to thy carnal
master to enquire of him; if thou beest a wife, thou must not go to thy carnal
husband to ask him; if thou beest a son, thou must not go to they carnal
father; if thou beest a pupil, thou must not go to thy carnal tutor to ask him,
but thou must find out a man in whom the Spirit of God dwells, one that is
renewed by grace, that he shall direct thee.74
71
Richard Sibbes, Beames ofdivine light(1639), Part I, p. 156. Francis Rogers, A sermon
preached. . . at the Funerall of William Proud (1633), sig. Bii-Biiii; Perkins, Cases of
Conscience, pp. 236-7.
72
Perkins, Vocations, p. 755, and Works (Cambridge, 1608), vol. 1, p. 734; cf Walzer,
pp. 161-6. That Perkins passed such opinions on to his students at Christ's College
is evident from the moderate William Bedell's counsel to Samuel Ward in 1607
that 'so often as a man doth not follow the dictamen of his conscience (yea though
erring) inciting him to do that which may be most for God's glory, all things con-
sidered, he sins; that being the highest reason of doing that may be and to be
crossed or hindered by nothing under it' (Bodl., MS Tanner 75, fol. 354, 23 July
73
[1607]). Hunt, p. 82.
74
CUL, MS CUR 6.1, it. 39, fols. 21-21 v; cf. fols. 21-25; and CUL, MS VC Ct. 1.49,
fols. 25-26. Edwards was later suspended by Archbishop Laud, but he was an active
preacher under Parliamentary rule. He is known primarily as the author of
Gangraena (1646).
200 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

The Edwards case illustrates both the radical potential of the alterna-
tive hierarchy and the fear of both the conformists and the moderate
puritans on the court about the possible outcome of such a doctrine.
If virtue is to determine status, then patriarchy is as endangered as
monarchy and aristocracy. Edwards was required to clarify to the
parishioners of St Andrew's that he had not intended to justify 'dis-
obedience to superiors.' That he was ordered to do so even by those
puritan heads who had themselves denounced princely and clerical
sins75 is an indication of the fear of disorder and conflict that bound
the early Stuart church together. At this date even the later
politically radical Stephen Marshall was behaving circumspectly,
and Jeremiah Burroughs was keeping his theories of popular
sovereignty to private conversations.76 When the sins of the well-
born became intolerable, the alternative hierarchy would become a
revolutionary possibility. That the destruction of royal patriarchy
was held off until 1649 owes more to puritan fear of social chaos and
their humanist hope for reformation (particularly in view of that
already achieved by godly magistrates and bishops in the preceding
generation) than to any theoretical conservatism. Bastions of order
they were, but of a reformed and reforming order.
In their concern for order in the commonwealth, puritans
followed closely the humanist tradition of calling for individual
moral reform at all levels, rather than unquestioning obedience to
constituted authority. In so doing, they repudiated the Chain of
Being to the extent that theoretically the guidance of individual con-
science was elevated above the demands of human authority and
laws, which 'bind not simply of themselves, but so far forth as they
are agreeable to God's word, serve for the common good, stand with
good order, and hinder not the liberty of conscience.' It is con-
science which judges human authority in particular cases, the stan-
dards being provided by Scripture, order and the common weal.
Even the authority of princes, fathers, priests, tutors, saints and
angels is subject to review by conscience.77 What is important is that
in the puritans' stress on conscience their objectives, like those of the
Christian humanists, were not primarily spiritual or other-worldly,
75
Samuel Ward was a member of the consistory and supported the judgment of the
court; Laurence Chaderton was one of the members assigned to follow up on
Edwards' subsequent performance at St Andrew's. Sidney Sussex, MS Ward B, fol.
76
31; CUL, MS CUR 6.1, it. 39, fol. 22v. Hunt, pp. 276, 278.
77
Perkins, Discourse ofconscience, pp. 34, 26-35; on the relative authority of the clergy,
p. 23; cf. Arthur Hildersham, BL, Harl. 3230, p. 44. Brilliana Conway quoted
Perkins' opinion in her commonplace book (Nottingham University MSS, Box
166), fol. 85.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 201
nor were they aimed at destroying social order. Puritans were in fact
carrying on the reformist tradition of humanist commonwealthmen.
While William Fulke was charged with having 'diminished the laws
of the realm, referring all things to conscience,' his aim was to
strengthen social order from the bottom, and to attack authority at
the top only insofar as he perceived it to diminish the common
weal.78 Laurence Humphrey concluded his debate with Bishop
Sanderson over the relationship between conscience and obedience
to authority with the humanist principle that' It is a matter of con-
science to seek or procure the good of the commonwealth . . . 'tis a
matter of conscience to obey good or profitable laws so far as we are
persuaded our obedience is profitable'™ Puritan concern was for the
establishment of social order on the basis of rightly informed
individual conscience.
A Paul's Cross sermon preached in 1616 by Samuel Ward of
Ipswich may illustrate the connection most graphically. In A Balme
from Gilead to Recover Conscience, Ward defined conscience as
in man the principal part of God's image, and that by which he resembleth
most the autarchy and self-sufficiency of God, which I grant is proper to his
infiniteness, to be content and complete within itself; but under him, and
with his leave and love, this faculty makes man self-sufficient and indepen-
dent of other creatures, like unto those self-moving engines, which have
their principle of motion within themselves . . . [Conscience is] God's
lieutenant, and under him the principal commander and chief controller of
man's life, yea every man's god in that sense that Moses was Aaron's.
Conscience is 'wonderful in the greatness and sovereignty of it,' and
Ward exhorted his readers to remember 'Paul's rule, to follow the
dictate of conscience, rather than of angel, potentate, or prelate, yea
of apostle.'80 What is significant is that, having given sovereignty to
conscience, Ward continued his sermon by informing the con-
sciences of his readers as to the social behavior which they should
require of the individual. He warned that obsession with business
and accumulation may 'choke the conscience':
Mark, then, you that have mills of business in your heads, whole
Westminster-Halls, bourses, exchanges, and East Indies (as I fear many of
you have whilst I am speaking to your conscience), that making haste to be
rich, overlay your brains with affairs, are so busy in your counting house and
books, and that upon this very day [the sabbath], that you never have once in
a week, or year, an hour's space to confer with your poor consciences; yea,
when did you?81
78
Porter, p. 125.
79
St John's, Cambridge, MS S.20, p. 130; the debate is recounted on pp. 107-30.
80 81
Samuel Ward, A Balme from Gilead, pp. 17-18, 21, 47. Ibid., pp. 27-8.
202 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

He continued with instructions in family religious duties, proper use

of recreation time, honest business practices, and charity as well as
fighting against popery and Arminianism and encouraging a preach-
ing ministry.82 Whatever the radical potential of the doctrine of
sovereign conscience, Ward's concern was to edify, rather than
undermine, social order, by demanding reformation based on the
guidance of informed conscience.
Puritans were convinced that social order required social change.
The process of informing and guiding conscience involved practical
reform endeavors. While it has been suggested that puritans were
concerned with * the inward peace of a good conscience' even at the
expense of social harmony and so concentrated on 'First Table
duties,' their endless tracts, treatises and sermons on family govern-
ment, education, recreation, vocation, economic behavior, poverty,
drunkenness, idleness, etc., were aimed precisely at the goal of a
well-ordered commonwealth.83 As Simonds D'Ewes argued, we
know our holiness toward God is genuine 'if we make conscience of
our duties towards our neighbors, by the careful performance of
family duties, relative duties, and calling duties.' He noted that only
four of the Ten Commandments relate to our obligations to God;
the rest relate to our social callings.84
So that they might perform those callings effectively, the godly
were obliged to reform the social order. The rule of custom con-
demned by Erasmus as an upholder of evil, was no less an enemy of
his seventeenth-century followers. They charged that the ungodly
justify themselves by an appeal to tradition: 'if all other things fail,
they say, "these things pleased our ancestors" . . . as if they had wit-
tily concluded the matter [and] with this answer stopped every man's
mouth.'85 William Hull quoted from Erasmus' Adages and cited them
frequently in the marginal notes to his sermon criticizing custom as a
guide.86 The preachers argued from the mutability of all nature that
'custom is an idiot, and whosoever dependeth wholly upon him,
82
Ibid., pp. 49-54, 78-9, 81-2.
83
J. Sears McGee, The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two
Tables, 1620-1640 (New Haven, 1976), p. 135, and chapter 4, passim. It should
hardly be necessary to count the number of pages devoted by puritans not men-
tioned by McGee to practical Christian behavior in a social context to
demonstrate the primacy of their devotion to Second Table duties. One wonders
whether McGee began his investigation after 1620 in order to avoid such represen-
tative figures of puritan social theory as Perkins, Dod, Cleaver, Ames and Rogers-
whose works were in any case reprinted throughout the seventeenth century.
84 85
BL, Harl. MS 227, fol. 16. CUL, Add. MS 6160, p. 21.
86
Repentance not to be Repented Of, fols. I6v, 63v-64.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 20 3
87
without the discourse of reason, will. . . become a slave.' This was
one of their bases for accusing rulers of using 'ceremonies and false
opinions to keep the people in awe.'88 Godly magistrates like Henry
Sherfield accordingly participated in iconoclasm as easily as in con-
structing innovative schemes for poor relief: both had the same end,
the reformation of society by the casting down of 'ungodliness,'
defined in the humanist tradition to include both 'superstition' and
poverty. Sherfield was certainly a supporter of established order; but
it should not be overlooked that the established order in his Salis-
bury was a reformist one. When, under the pressure of Laudian
clericalism, it ceased to be so, Sherfield, like other godly magis-
trates, found himself in opposition to authority- and prosecuted by
the new establishment for his reformist pains.89 But this is looking
ahead. While the Erasmian consensus prevailed, social reform spon-
sored by godly magistrates was the order of the day.
This is the context in which the reformation of manners belongs.
The puritan magistrates of towns like Salisbury and Exeter and
Ipswich took precisely the Christian humanist tack on social reform:
it was to be accomplished by appeal to reason through education and
to conscience through sermons, and by eliminating problems like
poverty that led to disorder. The puritan impetus for educational
expansion illumined by John Morgan was directed toward the goal of
a biblically literate laity capable of educating their own households
in godly behavior and of a preaching clergy able to direct the build-
ing of the New Jerusalem. 90 Only when these means fail should force
be applied, and then in hopes that an enforced discipline will provide
an atmosphere conducive to moral improvement (hence, for
example, the incorporation of education and religion into work-
87
CUL, MS Add 6160, p. 21; cf fol. 135, deriding 'grey-headed errours.'
88
Trin. MS R.16.7, fol. 123v. There is inadequate evidence in the MS to identify this
author as puritan or non-puritan; 'ceremonies' in this context are not limited to
the liturgical. But the commonplace book is heavily Erasmian, and is an indication
that Christian humanism was one source for such seventeenth-century critiques of
tradition by university-trained divines.
89
See chapter 5, above, for the Salisbury scheme to support the welfare program
with a municipal brewhouse; also Paul Slack, 'Poverty and Politics in Salisbury
1597-1666,' in Crisis and Order in English Towns, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack
(London, 1972), pp. 164-203. cf Collinson, Religion of Protestants, pp. 147-50, with
Paul Seaver's view of Sherfield as a radical in The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of
Religious Dissent 1560-1662 (Stanford, 1970), p. 90.
90
J o h n Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education,
1540-1640 (Cambridge, 1986); cf Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and
Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York, 1979), pp. 142-54; and
Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1982), pp.
206-21.
204 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

houses). The reformation of manners in practice looks very much

like the vision of Thomas More for the ideal society.91
It was not the intent of most puritans, any more than of Christian
humanists, that the resultant social progress should involve revo-
lution or regicide. They were not, as their Anglican opponents
charged, enemies of social order. If their emphasis on conscience
carried with it the seeds of rebellion, it should not be concluded that
they lacked devotion to the good order of the commonwealth. Their
hope was for order through reform. On the other hand, it cannot be
denied that in their journals, sermons and treatises is found the
transmission of a theoretical basis for opposition to king, lords and
bishops. It was a theory derived, sometimes unconsciously, from
humanists no more revolutionary than most protestants, but it
would be taken up in the 1640s by radicals like Christopher Feake,
who located 'an enmity against Christ' in aristocracy and mon-
archy.92 It would be used by the more moderate puritan settlers of
Massachusetts to discourage the establishment of a hereditary aris-
tocracy in their colony of saints.93 It would inspire Stephen Marshall,
in a sermon of 1642, to observe that all too often it is the mighty
who
engage all against the Lord, his church and cause. The Lamb's followers and
servants are often the poor and off-scouring of the world, when kings and
captains, merchants and wise men, being drunk with the wine of the whore's
fornications, proceed to make war with the Lamb. . . When the might of the
world do oppose the Lord, God's meanest servants must not be afraid to
oppose the mighty?*
Shades of Erasmus' eagle and beetle can be discerned in this passage.
Nor were puritans always unaware of either the origins or the
implications of their reformism. D'Ewes opined that while Erasmus
doubtless left some of his more dangerous principles out of his

More, Utopia, passim',]. C. Davis, Utopia andthe IdealSociety(Cambridge, 1981), notes

that the Utopians depended not only on education and good will to form a rational
society; they also depended on total discipline and enforcement, cf. Wrightson,
English Society, pp. 168-70, 181-2, 210-19; and Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and
Piety, pp. 156-63. 92 Quoted by Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646), pp. 147-8.
When Lords Saye and Sele and Brooke were considering emigration to New
England, the official response from the puritan magistracy there was a warning
that exalted birth would be no guarantee of political status in their godly common-
wealth: should their lordships' progeny not be endowed with virtue and ability to
rule, the colonists warned, 'We should expose them rather to reproach and
prejudice and the commonwealth with them, than exalt them to honour, if we
should call them forth, when God doth not, to public authority.' Quoted by
Lawrence Stone in The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford, 1965), p. 745.
Meroz Cursed (1642), p. 8, quoted by Hunt, p. 296.
 Conscience and the Great Chain of Being 205
published works, a few remained that could be construed to call for
'dethroning kings and princes.' Still, he purchased Erasmus' Adages
for his children and maintained an obvious respect for the
humanists' neo-Stoicism. And while he insisted that 'I have ever
maintained obedience to the magistrate in all lawful things,' he
added the standard humanist/puritan qualification, 'that the con-
science ought not to be enforced.'95 He was fearful of disorder, but
convinced that a truly godly order would be achieved not by
demanding absolute obedience to traditional authority, but by
informing and exhorting individual conscience to take responsi-
bility for godly behavior. Ultimately, when the lines were drawn be-
tween conscience and authority by the requirements of king and
bishops, the critique of established authority implicit in the
humanist reformism of puritanism would force the hotter sort into a
choice which many would have preferred to avoid. However reluc-
tant they had been earlier to admit the implications of their oppo-
sition to the Great Chain of Being, those who opted to fight for
Parliament found that they had readily available a theoretical basis
for their action in the Erasmian challenge to existing authority
structures.
The opponents of puritanism had recognized long before the Civil
War the radical implications of the Erasmian approach to social
order. Anglicans, especially the new Laudian strain, were by the
seventeenth century realizing as Catholics had in the sixteenth that
Christian humanist social theory was ultimately inimical to the
traditional, hierarchical authority structure to which they were com-
mitted. Accordingly, they required that conscience 'be directed
before hand, by their advice whom God hath set over us.'96 In so
doing, they repudiated what had become by the mid-sixteenth
century a reformist consensus among social theorists, in favor of a
different approach to social order - a demand for obedience and
conformity.
95
EX'Ewes, Autobiography, Part II, pp. 64-5, 113; cf. Watson, The Library of Sir Simonds
D'Ewes (1966), pp. 101, 139.
96
Donne, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 223.
 The conservative reaction:
Trent, Lambeth and the demise of
the humanist consensus

Erasmus encountered opposition from conservative Catholic

theologians as soon as the core documents of his social criticism had
become available. The University of Paris waged unremitting war-
fare on the Colloquies and the Moriae Encomium in particular; the
theologians of Louvain attacked among other works the Encomium
Matrimonii in 1519; 1527 saw a conference of theologians at
Valladolid condemning Erasmian 'heresies'; and in 1533 a vigilant
group of theologians raided a Paris bookshop and confiscated
Erasmus' Colloquies, the Moriae Encomium, the Encomium Matrimonii,
the annotated translation of the New Testament, and even (surely by
mistake) the De Copia verborum.l The heaviest fire was consistently
drawn by those works most critical of ecclesiastical authority and
most insistent on the availability of the Scriptures to the laity. And
the attacks increased dramatically in frequency and virulence after
the appearance of Luther on the scene. The hierarchy clearly per-
ceived Erasmus' works as a threat to clerical privilege and authority,
to the church's monopoly on learning and interpretation, and
ultimately to the unity and order of Christendom.
With the earliest opposition to Erasmus, the Catholic Refor-
mation can be seen transforming itself into the Counter-Reformation.

1
The Correspondence of Erasmus, tr. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (Toronto,
1977—), CWE, 6 (1982), no. 948 (Erasmus to Petrus Mosellanus, 22 April 1519),
pp. 310-18; Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen and
H. W. Garrod (Oxford, 1906-58), no. 1784, vol. 6, pp. 459-61 and no. 2868, vol.
10, pp. 301-3; G. VanCalster, 'La Censure louvaniste du Nouveau Testament et la
redaction de 1'index erasmien expurgatoire de 1571,' in Scrinium Erasmianum, ed. J.
J. Coppens (Leiden, 1969), voL II, pp. 379^36; Marcel Bataillon, Erasme etl'Espagne
(Paris, 1937), pp. 264-6. On the Valladolid conference, see Bataillon, pp.
309-35.
206
 The conservative reaction 207
The fear of a critical and potentially disobedient laity drew from the
threatened hierarchy a reaction against innovation, against lay
initiative, against any new developments which could detract from
the authority vested in the clerical estate. Christian humanists had
gone too far in their criticism; church control of Christian society
was perceptibly weakening, and the response of the hierarchy was to
repress those humanist ideas thought to be potentially subversive,
to demand new conformity and obedience to constituted authority,
and to give official sanction to the revival of both Thomistic the-
ology and its counterpart in social theory, the Great Chain of
Being.

The Thomists of the sixteenth century, led by Francisco de Vitoria,

Fernando Vasquez, Domingo de Soto and (in the next generation)
the Jesuits Robert Bellarmine, Luis de Molina and Francisco Suarez,
aimed their attack at the two aspects of Erasmian humanism which
most threatened the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: its
demand for accurate, vernacular translations of the Greek and
Hebrew Scriptures, and its ideal of a religiously educated laity. The
first gave rise to the Lutheran doctrine of sola scriptura, the second to
the protestant views of the church as congregatio fidelium and of the
priesthood of all believers.2 Both were obvious affronts to Roman
clericalism and tradition; both pointed logically to a social order
dominated by the godly laity, and to a political order in which, as
Suarez warned, 'the power to make laws depends on the faith or
morals of the prince.' 3 In such an order, the ecclesiastical establish-
ment would be constantly subject to the reforming enthusiasm of lay
householders, and monarchy would be in perpetual dread of the sort
of revolutionary ideology developed by French Huguenots in the
sixteenth century and English Parliamentarians in the seventeenth.
Recognizing this potential in Christian humanism, the defenders
of orthodoxy returned to the via antiqua in defense of tradition. St
Thomas' incorporation of Aristotelian natural hierarchy into
Roman Christianity was reaffirmed, providing a philosophical basis
for the restoration of nobility to 'their ancient honours, dignities
and privileges' (including special preferment to the church) and of
the commons to the 'old simplicity' from which heresy had lured

QuentinSkinner, TheFoundationsof'ModernPolitical'Thought(Cambridge, 1978), vol.

3
2, pp. 135-73. Ibid., p. 140.
208 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

them.4 Even more important, the natural mediatory position of the

clerical hierarchy in the Thomistic scheme allowed the Jesuits to
demand absolute, unquestioning obedience to the papal establish-
ment. 'To be right in everything/ Ignatius Loyola told his followers,
'we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the
Hierarchical Church so decides it/ 5 Catholic universities in the six-
teenth century, especially those dominated by Dominicans and
Jesuits, became centers of militant scholasticism in which the
humanist language of persuasion and analysis was replaced by
Thomistic definitions and a systematic conceptual exactitude
altogether absent from the writings of Catholic humanists.6 These
universities produced such conservative crusaders as Robert Bellar-
mine, who defended the Vulgate against Erasmus' 'manifest lying',
and later in the century the English Jesuit Robert Parsons, who
charged that 'wheresoever Erasmus did but point with his finger,
Luther rushed upon it; where Erasmus did but doubt, Luther
affirmed.'7
At the Council of Trent (1545-63) the Neo-scholastic campaign
against Erasmus reached its culmination. Assembled in direct re-
sponse to the spread of protestant heresy, the cardinals at Trent
were immediately confronted with the opposition of Thomistic
orthodoxy to humanist reformism and forced to decide between the
two. Compromise was impossible, as the advocates of a humanist
Catholic, rather than Counter-, Reformation soon discovered. Led
by Pole, Contarini, Valdes and Morone, their call for reformation
through interior regeneration and the spread of biblical understand-
ing to the laity was decried by their Jesuit and Dominican adversaries
as Lutheran. The lines were clearly drawn between these spirituali
and the zelantz (led by Carafa), and the fact of the Reformation erased
4
Robert Parsons, Memorial for the Reformation ofEngland(n.p., 1690), p. 220; cf pp.
220^4. Parsons' treatise was written in Seville in 1596 and is analyzed by T. H.
Clancy,'Notes on Parsons's "Memorial",' Recusant History, 5 (1959), 17-34, and by
J. J. Scarisbrick, 'Robert Parsons's Plans for the "true" Reformation of England,'
in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J. H Plumb,
ed. Neil McKendrick (London 1974), pp. 19-42. See also Clancy's Papist
Pamphleteers (Chicago, 1964).
5
The Spiritual Exercises, tr. Elder Mullan (St Louis, 1978), Part II, Rule 13,
p. 234.
6
In all fairness, the protestant scholasticism which blossomed in the seventeenth
century was also committed to rigid definition and philosophical systematization,
but in protestant universities the new scholastics, protestant and Catholic, were
injected into the old humanist curriculum rather than used to replace humanist
and expurgated classical authors. See chapter 3, above.
\ Bellarmine, De Verbo Dei, in Opera Omnia, ed. Justin Fevre, 12 vols (Paris, 1870-4),
vol. 1, pp. 109-10, cf pp. 138-9; Parsons' A Treatise of Three Conversions of England
([St Omer], 1604), Part III, pp. 307-8.
 The conservative reaction 209
8
any middle ground between the two. The question before the car-
dinals was whether to continue to allow the sort of internal criticism
which in the zelanti's view had given rise to the Reformation, or
whether to opt for the new, militant approach of Carafa and the
Roman Inquisition and repress all dissension. In view of the
apparent failure of the moderate approach recommended by Pole
and Contarini to bring protestants back into the fold, the decision
reached by the majority at Trent was to enforce orthodoxy by
actively repressing heresy, to demand conformity to narrowly
defined dogma, and in the process to repudiate Erasmian humanism
in no uncertain terms.
Accordingly, the Council of Trent located truth both in the 'writ-
ten books and in the unwritten traditions' of the Church, and in
order to 'check unbridled spirits' directed Christians to rely not on
their own judgments of the Scriptures, but on the understanding
mediated by the 'holy mother church, to whom it belongs to judge of
their true sense and interpretation.'9 Sir Edwin Sandys, for all his
virulent anti-popery, was thus by no means wide of the mark when
he observed to the 1599 Parliament that the Roman church required
each individual to 'submit his own reason to the Church's authority.'10
As for the role of the Scriptures in social reformation, the Council
decreed the Vulgate to be the only admissible translation, and only
clerical instruction in its meaning was to be allowed. At the fourth
session of the Council (1546), de Soto condemned the individual lay
Bible-reading enjoined by Christian humanists as 'a heretical
individualism.' n The instruction which was to replace it would com-
bat that heresy with precisely defined Thomistic orthodoxy and
replace its incipient individualism with strict hierarchical control.
The most explicit Tridentine repudiation of Erasmus came when
the Index of Prohibited Books was compiled by Pope Paul IV in
1559. Erasmus was here included in the highest category of
heterodoxy, the entire corpus of his writings being wholly con-
demned. And although the 1564 Tridentine Index exempted some
of his educational works from this blanket censure, Pope Sextus V's
1590 Index reverted to the 1559 ruling and again banned all of his
works. Such was the Counter-Reformation concern for conformity
8
Dermot Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter
Reformation (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 100-60 et passim.
9
Canons and Decrees ofthe Council of Trent, ed. H.J. Schroeder(St Louis, 1941), pp. 17,
18-19.
10
Quoted by Marc Schwarz, 'Lay Anglicanism and the Crisis of the English Church in
the Early Seventeenth Century,' Albion, 14 (1982), 1-19, p. 6.
11
Canons and Decrees, p. 18; Skinner, p. 147.
210 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

to orthodox doctrinal definitions that even such innocuous

educational treatises as De copia and the orthodox production of
Erasmus' youth, De contemptu mundi, were included.12 The apparent
fear was that by admitting some of the humanist's works to be
legitimate fare, the church might inadvertently mislead the literate
layman into reading works critical of authority and tradition.
The Tridentine decrees and Indices communicate to modern
readers a distinct impression of the desperation felt by the cardinals
in the face of first the Lutheran and then the Calvinist threats. The
Counter-Reformation was dogmatic, repressive, and uncompro-
mising in its demands for strict formulations and absolute obedience
to authority because it saw both religious and political disunity and
social chaos as the inevitable results of diversity and tolerance of
criticism. At the level of popular culture, this conviction is apparent
in the methods used to carry out the intentions of the Council: all
were aimed at increasing ecclesiastical control over all aspects of life,
occasionally in the face of lay resistance, but generally without
significant compromise. Late medieval confessional summas were
resurrected and used as instruments of social control, and the
religious confraternities which drew the most zealous lay people
were established under clerical auspices to enforce Counter-
Reformation orthodoxy. 13 When the confraternities got out of line,
as happened occasionally in Spain and in Venice, particularly in the
context of welfare administration, clerical authorities responded
immediately by re-affirming the official line promulgated at Trent
One historian has described Spanish confraternities as 'a thorn in the
side of ecclesiastical authorities,' whose drive to 'control their
growth and eliminate some of their secular activities' was largely suc-
cessful. 14 On another front, the educational institutions which had

12
F. H. Reusch, Der Index der verboten Biicher (Bonn, 1883-5), vol. 1, pp. 347-55; Die
Indices librorumprohibitorum der sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Tubingen, 1886), pp. 183,
259, 477.
13
Thomas N. Tentler, 'The Summa for Confessors as an Instrument of Social
Control,' iwThe Pursuit ofHoliness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles
Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden, 1974), pp. 103-26. Tentler has de-
fended his use of the term 'social control' against the objections of Leonard Boyle
(Pursuit ofHoliness, pp. 126-30,134-7). John Bossy's review, 'Holiness and Society,'
P&P, 75 (1977), 119-37, pp. 127-8, argues that the primary social function of con-
fession was rather 'to restore damaged relations between the sinner and others,'
and that social control was of secondary importance. Tentler's argument may be
somewhat overstated, but it is a substantial and thought-provoking elaboration of
the thesis briefly argued by Christopher Hill in 'Protestantism and the Rise of
Capitalism,' in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England in
honour of R. H. Tawney, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge, 1961), 15-39, p. 27.
14
Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain (Cambridge, 1983), p. 48.
 The conservative reaction 211
burgeoned in Catholic as in protestant countries during the
Renaissance were increasingly either brought under church control
or abolished, and in eithex case humanist elements in the curriculum
were suppressed as threats to tradition and authority. And, as we
shall see, Erasmian ideas about the family and humanist plans for
poor relief were either suppressed or significantly modified to meet
the regulative aims of Trent.
It is, of course, possible to overdraw the distinction between
humanist and later sixteenth-century Catholic social thought It will
be suggested below that post-Tridentine Catholics - lay people in
particular- were by no means unaffected by their humanist heritage
as they tackled the social problems which faced early modern Euro-
peans of all persuasions. The official line of the victorious cardinals
and the actual practice of post-Tridentine Catholics were not always
identical, and particularly in the area of welfare reform, the prac-
ticality of humanist proposals was not overlooked even by the op-
ponents of Erasmus and Vives. But the official line is clear enough.
However wary we ought to be of arbitrary periodization, the fact
remains that the Church at Trent deliberately and formally rejected
the Christian humanist heritage in its blanket condemnation of the
prince of humanists, and that this institutional move reflected a pro-
found intellectual shift which would necessarily effect modifications
of Catholic social reform programs from the later sixteenth century
onwards. In its banning of Erasmus' works, the Church recognized
fully that the humanist approach to reform by appeal to individual
conscience was a risky business at best for an institution whose claim
to authority had been severely undermined by Luther's revolution.
The Council of Trent thus presents an unavoidable watershed in the
history of Catholic social thought in the early modern period. The
Council in itself was not an innovator: Domingo de Soto was occupy-
ing himself in opposing Vivesian welfare reforms in Spain decades
before the Council offered him a forum for his criticism of
humanism. But it was during the course of the Council that the
Roman hierarchy adopted and consolidated the conservatism rep-
resented earlier by the theologians of Paris and Louvain, Valladolid
and Salamanca, and defined it as orthodox. The fathers at Trent
firmly and explicitly departed from the humanist consensus which
had earlier united protestants and Catholics on a myriad of social
issues, and demanded that the orthodox follow suit. Whatever the
pitfalls of periodization, where anomalies congregate an attempt at
description and explanation is in order.
212 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

One illustration of the highly selective survival of humanism in the

hostile environment of Catholic Europe after Trent is provided by
shifts in pedagogy and curricula in Counter-Reformation colleges.
Numerous and detailed studies of French urban colleges, established
by townsmen from 1500 on humanist lines and taken over by
bishops or Jesuits in the early seventeenth century, suggest that the
clergy's interest in humanistic education was not so great as their
commitment to the propagation of Tridentine orthodoxy and
ecclesiastical authority, and that this commitment in fact shaped an
approach to education to which Erasmus would have taken great
exception. While many elements of the humanist curricula of the
early sixteenth century remained, modifications in the objectives
and the methods of the colleges reflect the authoritarianism of Trent
and may serve as an introductory glimpse into the effects of Tri-
dentine conservatism on the humanist vision of social order.
The Tridentine clergy apparently waged constant and ultimately
successful battles with French aldermen in the second half of the six-
teenth century, over whether the aim of education was the prolifer-
ation of clergy or the provision of opportunity for children of the
poor to attain the status oigensde biens and for children of substance
to learn to serve the commonwealth in secular callings as good
citizens. A recent study of the 'geography of humanism' shows that
Latin schools flourished in sixteenth-century parlementary and
commercial towns like Amiens, where they had been founded for the
sons of magistrates and merchants to be trained as good governors in
the classical tradition and for gifted sons of the poor to learn the
values of productive citizenship. It was in these same towns that
bourgeois opposition to the Jesuits in the seventeenth century was
virulent, as the followers of Loyola seized control of the often
financially troubled institutions and attempted to replace much of
the literary portion of the curricula with scholastic theology and
philosophy.15 By the 1620s, when either bishops or Jesuits had been
largely successful in seizing control of the colleges, parents were com-
plaining that graduates of the institutions looked down on the mer-
cantile life and had learned nothing useful to the community.16
15
George Huppert, 'The Social Function of Classical Education in Renaissance
France,' (unpublished paper read at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, 25
October 1980) has discussed the intervention of both the secular clergy andjesuits
in the colleges, and especially in the Amiens College de la Ville. On methods of
Jesuit takeover, see Pierre Delattre, Les Etablissements des jesuites en France depuis
quatre siecles (Enghien, 1949), voL 1, ix, and entries for (e.g.) Amiens, Bordeaux.
16
Francois de Dainville, L'education des jesuites (XVIe-XVIIIe siecles) (Paris, 1978), pp.
25, 36.
 The conservative reaction 213
Education for virtuous participation in forum and market-place had
given way to education for the cloister, leading English commen-
tators like Sandys to conclude that the Roman church had returned
to her historic practice of enclosing 'all learning within the walls of
their clergy, setting forth Lady Ignorance for a great saint to the
laity.'17 His conclusion is exaggerated, perhaps, but not groundless.
Despite their reputation for having a primary commitment to
education, moreover, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
Jesuits seem in fact not to have been terribly interested in teaching.
Even Jesuit historians admit that the educational process in the
colleges was subordinated by most of the resident clergy to other
activities, particularly preaching and missionary efforts in the
countryside.18 Of the twenty-five Jesuits in residence in the College
Sainte-Marie at Aire-sur-la-Lys in 1636, only six were occupied with
teaching.19 Delattre remarks that it was not unusual for the entire
teaching enterprise in a college of 1400 to 1600 students to depend on
only one prefect of studies and six regents. This was the case at
Amiens in 1629, and Dijon provides a similar case; the Bordeaux
College de la Madeleine was fortunate to have thirteen professors for
1,200 students in 1610.20 Dainville found grammar classes of 200 stu-
dents per master typical in the sixteenth century.21 Clearly there was
ample manpower in the Society sufficiently unencumbered by
teaching duties to pursue the political and propagandist^ efforts on
behalf of papal authority to which Loyola had been primarily
committed.
Finally, the curricula of Jesuit and episcopal colleges reveal both the
survival of a humanist corpus and the ravages inflicted by Trent in
the name of orthodoxy and order. Much of the classical literature
prescribed by the humanists remained in the grammar and rhetoric
courses, but approved versions of Cicero, Quintilian, Virgil and
Horace were read only alongside Christian 'explanations' of them;
Ovid was read only in expurgated versions; Terence was officially
expelled from the colleges by an absolute decree in 1575; and masters
found it difficult to restrain students tantalized by the blank spaces
in their texts of Lucretius from seeking uncensored editions.22
Again, even Jesuit historians of education bear witness to the exten-
sive censorship of classical as well as contemporary texts which in
some cases all but eliminated poetry from the study of humane let-
ters altogether in the sixteenth century.23 The late sixteenth-century
17 18 19
Quoted by Schwarz, p. 6. Delattre, vol. I, p. viii. Ibid., voL 1, p. 33.
20
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. viii, 734-51 (Bordeaux).
21 n 23
Dainville, p. 175. Ibid., pp. 169, 180-83. Ibid., p. 170.
214 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Toulousan library inventories which have been examined by Dain-

ville tell much the same story: they include approved texts of Cicero,
Quintilian, Virgil, Ovid and Horace, but never Terence or Plautus.
The only Christian humanist works are Erasmus' De copia and De con-
scribendis epistolis; Aristotle is much in evidence but Plato is obviously
suspect; and only Latin Bibles are found.24
Clearly the Jesuits were not so dogmatically philistine as those
Louvain theologians who in 1519 had condemned' classical languages
and the humanities, repeating that these are the springs from which
heresies flow.'25 But they were sufficiently devoted to orthodoxy and
ecclesiastical authority to exercise the sort of heavy-handed cen-
sorship and approval of corrupt texts which Erasmus would have
found reprehensible and which seems not to have happened in
English education. The issue here, of course, was the old debate
about Athens and Jerusalem, and it was a debate of which Erasmus
had been as aware as his detractors were. But whereas Erasmus had
acknowledged the problem but opted for Athens uncensored as an
appropriate foundation for the teaching of Christian truth, the
Jesuits found the implications of such free inquiry ominous. Pre-
serving what they felt was safe in the pagan corpus edited by Erasmus
and his colleagues, they none the less irretrievably compromised
their humanism by sacrificing the principle of exegesis based on
complete, unexpurgated, and critically edited texts in favor of cleri-
cal censorship. Not only in the case of the Bible, where retention of
the Vulgate was an obvious rejection of humanist textual advance in
favor of the authority of tradition, but also in the case of classical
authors who might too easily corrupt the young conscience not ad-
equately submissive to constituted authority, the Jesuits adopted
the role of selectors and mediators of truth. Tridentine Catholics
seem to have had less trust of the individual student's informed
moral judgment than even those protestants who held total
depravity to be an article of faith. Ironically, it was the latter who
carried on the humanist tradition of presenting entire texts- pagan
and Christian - with all of their problems, to the judgment of the
individual As for Erasmus' own works, even if they had not been
included in the Index, the Jesuits' commitment to Tridentine posi-
tions on the merits of celibacy, of pilgrimages, of the veneration of
images, of indulgences, etc. would have resulted in their purging
most of his works from the curricula of the colleges.
It is surely not to be expected that Catholics trained in such a tra-
24 25
Ibid., pp. 270-4. CWE, 6, p. 313 (Erasmus to Petrus Mosellanus).
 The conservative reaction 215
dition would adopt a Christian humanist approach to the social
order without significant modification. We must expect, then, that
Trent as watershed must substantially qualify, if not entirely negate,
our stress on the continuity of Erasmian humanism as a shaper of
social thought in early modern Europe.

In England, the response of humanists to such Counter-Reformation

tendencies was varied. The greatest of English humanists, Sir
Thomas More, had of course been faced with his decision long
before the Council of Trent, and his choice was a reluctant but clear
repudiation of his humanism. It has been suggested that as early as
1516 More had begun to question the possibility of joining the
philosophia Christi with public life; certainly between the publication
in that year of Utopia and the 1523 Responsio ad Lutherum, More
retreated from his humanist criticism of church and society into a
reactionary stance rooted in fear of the social and political anarchy
which could result from over-zealous reformism.26 The Lutheran
Reformation was for More, as for the majority of Tridentine car-
dinals, sufficient reason to repudiate humanism, with its 'ideal of an
enlightened society of earnest saints on earth' in favor of'the safety
of a society so regulated by earnest saints as to include nobody but
themselves.'27 It was in the light of growing heresy that More said he
would burn Utopia rather than see it translated into English. Mem-
bers of the More circle, however, did not necessarily follow in the
martyr's footsteps, and the diversity of their responses was mirrored
by that of the spirituali at Trent Some were sufficiently committed to
the biblical reformation of church and society to ally themselves
with protestantism rather than remain loyal to an increasingly Neo-
scholastic, conformist Catholicism. More's daughter Margaret may
be an early example of this group, along with those of the common-
wealth men who did not take the Oath of Supremacy simply for con-
26
D. B. Fenlon, 'England and Europe: Utopia and its Aftermath,' TRHS, 5 th ser., 25
(1975), 115-35, and especially pp. 124-8,133;'The Counter Reformation and the
Realisation of Utopia,' Historical Studies: Papers Read at the Ninth Conference of Irish
Historians, ed. J. Barry (Dublin, 1973); Heresy and Obedience, p. 41. On More's con-
servatism, see Alastair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence(Oxford, 1982) and
G. R. Elton, 'The real Thomas More?', Studies (Cambridge, 1983), but cf Brendan
Bradshaw, 'The Controversial Sir Thomas Moie\ JEH, 36 (1985), 535-69-
27
William A. Clebsch, England's Earliest Protestants (New Haven, 1964), p. 301, com-
menting on More's Apology (against St Germain); cf Bradshaw, pp. 566ff, who
believes that More repudiated protestantism in order to maintain Erasmus' stand
on free will. Bradshaw may be right as far as he goes, but there is no evidence that
More maintained other Erasmian positions after the Reformation, and in the area
of social criticism, the evidence— e.g., his statement about burning Utopia— tends
to the opposite conclusion.
216 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

venience.28 Others did, like More, give their lives for the authority of
the Roman church, although the implications of Counter-Reformation
for Christian humanism may not have been as apparent to them as it
was to More.29 Still others took the Oath but lived as recusants or
fled to the continent Of these, many were confronted with the
choice between maintaining their humanism and risking the wrath
of Tridentine conservatives or conforming to the anti-Erasmian
stance of the church in order to restore the unity of Christendom.
Pole is an example of those who maintained a compromise between
loyalty to Rome and Christian humanism as long as possible but
finally succumbed to pressure and abandoned their reformist middle
ground to align themselves with Tridentine orthodoxy.30 Richard
Smith, who became a professor of theology at Douai, similarly
reneged on his humanism in favor of conformity. Other members of
the More circle seem to have arrived more gradually at the realiz-
ation that the social and religious reforms of Christian humanism
would have to be set aside if loyalty to Rome were to be
maintained.31
But after the generation of John Harpsfield, George Etherige,
John Seton and Thomas Watson, English Catholics no longer had a
choice to make. After Trent, full-blown Christian humanism was
simply no longer an option; Erasmus had virtually disappeared from
the orthodox Catholic scene.32 Elizabethan recusant scholarship
presents us with a completely different set of concerns from
Erasmus' or Whitforde's or Pole's. The themes being argued by
Nicholas Sander, Thomas Stapleton, Edmund Campion and Robert
Parsons are reformation for the clergy, conformity for the laity, and
restoration to Rome for England.33 No longer is there an insistence
28
James Kelsey McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965),
p. 264, points out that Margaret More Roper not only took the oath, but also
attempted to get the protestant Roger Ascham to tutor her children. Among con-
tinental humanists who opted for protestantism and maintained their humanism
were Ochino and Vermigli, who embarrassed their patron, Pole, and incidentally
fed the anti-humanist fires of Trent by their choice (Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience,
pp. 45, 50-1).
29
By 1543, John More, William Roper, William Daunce and other members of the
More household had formed the 'Plot of the Prebendaries' against Cranmer.
30
Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, pp. 174-95, discusses Pole's reluctant acquiescence
in the face of a widening theological gulf between protestantism and Catholicism
during the course of the Council. His acceptance of the decrees Fenlon describes
as an act of obedience rather than conviction (p. 208).
31
McConica, pp. 266-78, 285-92.
32
Thomas Stapleton's account of More's life makes no mention of More's Eras-
mianism, in line with the orthodox condemnation of Erasmus.
33
The reforming decrees of the twenty-second session of the Council of Trent (1562)
proscribed luxury, feasting, dancing, gambling, sports and other 'crimes and
secular pursuits' for the clergy only {Canons and Decrees, p. 153).
 The conservative reaction 217
on a lay reformation of manners for the advancement of the com-
monwealth; the humanist exaltation of the vita activa has given way
to a new stress on contemplative virtues; the ideal of the godly living
out the gospel in the market-place under the guidance of informed
conscience has been replaced with an insistence on lay obedience to
clerical instruction. The works of devotion most popular among
Elizabethan English Catholics- Parsons' Christian Directory, Southwell's
Short Rule of a Good Life, Loarte's Exercise of a Christian Life, and
Lascelle's Little Way How to Heare Masse - all enjoin a regularity of
sacramental practice which necessitated a resident chaplain. They
foster a notion of the godly life as one of intense, directed, contem-
plative spirituality for the educated, and one of correct, rather
mechanical performance of rituals and rote prayers for the less
sophisticated, but all under the strict oversight of a clergyman.34 The
remedy prescribed at Trent for the ills of Christendom was not the
reformism of Christian humanists, but the conformism of the zelanti.
Clerical abuses were to be purged, under strict episcopal super-
vision; the laity were enjoined not to analyze and criticize, but to
obey. In the humanist scheme, the godly layman was responsible for
social diagnosis as well as critical self-examination. The objective of
the Counter-Reformation was to restore the clerical estate to a
position of moral superiority and absolute authority, and society
properly regulated was portrayed as society clerically dominated.
Decades of theological controversy had taken their toll on the
social vision of Roman Catholicism. While social theory was hardly
the main focus of the Council of Trent, the social implications of
Christian humanism were no more immune from censure than were
its religious and theological proposals. To the extent that elements
of the humanist social critique were adaptable to the objectives of
the Counter-Reformation, they would be retained- the clearest case
being that of welfare reform. This was a highly selective retention,
however. Rejection of the underpinning of Erasmian reformism is
much more noticeable, both in the Tridentine decrees and in the
social ideology of Counter-Reformation Catholics. In a religious
society, religious conservatism does not easily co-exist with social
reformism; in the interests of self-preservation, sixteenth-century
Catholicism necessarily rejected the preponderance of Erasmian
social theory as part and parcel of humanist anticlericalism.
That Erasmian social theory was more than an incidental casualty
34
Christopher Haigh, 'From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern
England,' TRHS, 5th ser., 31 (1981), 129^8, p. 138; J. C. H. Aveling, 'Catholic
Households in Yorkshire, 1580-1603,' Northern History, 16 (1980), 85-101,
esp. p. 96.
218 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

of the Counter-Reformation is perhaps nowhere more apparent

than in the anti-humanist social vision of the Elizabethan Jesuit
Robert Parsons. Parsons' Memorial for the Reformation of England
(1596) is a proposal for the re-structuring of English society after its
projected return to the true faith (presumably by Spanish arms). It is
in a sense a vision of a Utopia, but a very different one from that
envisaged by More and approved by Erasmus, for its overriding fea-
ture is clerical domination. The monastic ideal is there re-affirmed,
and monastic lands are restored in Parsons' Utopia; a clerical Coun-
cil of Reform is to oversee legal reform (including the re-institution
of canon law) and social welfare; and the Roman office of censor is to
be revived and assigned not to the reforming lay magistrate, as in
Vives' scheme, but to the clergy.35 The censors, moreover, are to
concern themselves less with the behavior of the commons (the
main responsibility of Vives' censors) than with their doctrinal con-
formity. Collegiate instruction is to be abolished, since it is less sus-
ceptible to centralized oversight than are university lectures, and
grammar schools, universities and the Inns of Court are all to be sub-
ject to frequent visitations by bishops and clerical commissioners to
insure their orthodoxy.36 A national Synod is to enforce the decrees
of Trent, and the council of Reform is to be succeeded by an English
Inquisition. As his critics aptly charged, Parsons' desire was to
establish 'an ecclesiastical Utopia'.37 His social ideal was blatantly
clericalist and theocratic. Social order was to be insured by
deference to a divinely ordained hierarchy rather than by individual
moral reformation guided by personal confrontations with the
demands of Scripture. The ultimate aim of Parsons' social order
was a conformity to dogmatic orthodoxy; accordingly, the primary
emphasis in his instructions to householders, teachers and magis-
trates is on obedience to constituted authority. Parsons is typical of
the post-Tridentine Catholic clergy in that when he addressed social
issues at all, his overriding concern was with ecclesiastical control.

The Counter-Reformation's repudiation of Christian humanist

social theory left protestants to carry on the Erasmian vision of
35 36
Parsons, Memorial, pp. 89—90; Scarisbrick, passim. Scarisbrick, pp. 25—6.
37
Parsons, Memorial, pp. 220—4, 256-7; A. Copley, An answere to a letter of a Jesuited
gentleman (1601), cited in Scarisbrick, p. 34 (emphasis mine); Scarisbrick, p. 39.
Scarisbrick notes the similarity of Parsons' to Genevan government by elders;
however, the puritan/humanist regard for individual conscience and their
demands for social reformation through lay education, religious instruction and
discipline in families, and the restructuring of secular institutions are noticeably
absent
 The conservative reaction 219
social change, and in England, protestants of all liturgical per-
suasions took up the cause with zeal during the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. Accordingly, in the foregoing three chapters
the opinions of Elizabethan and Jacobean conformists have fre-
quently been cited along with those of puritans in support of the
thesis of a protestant consensus on the nature of the social order
which was drawn from Christian humanism. But the English
hierarchy was no less aware than the Tridentine of the potential
dangers of the reformist position, and when those dangers began to
be actualized in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, the
conformist clergy began to retreat from humanist social theory in
the same direction as their Catholic counterparts had taken at Trent
Elizabethan and early Stuart puritanism posed for the English
hierarchy a similar threat to that of Lutheranism for Catholics. It was
a threat which had social and political overtones not to be ignored by
supporters of the established order- the danger posed by autonomous
individual conscience to the authority vested in clerical hierarchy.
The elevation of biblically informed conscience and the critique of
the Great Chain of Being which puritans had adopted from Christian
humanism presented the same threat to the protestant as to the
Catholic hierarchy, and called forth from them a similar revival of
Aristotelian doctrines of natural hierarchy and a parallel demand for
obedience and conformity. It is not altogether surprising that when
the Jesuit Martin Becanus sought English support for his opposition
to the popular availability of the vernacular Scriptures, he found it in
Richard Hooker's argument for clerical authority over personal
conviction:
Yea, as a Protestant of great name, well acquainted with the proceedings of
their churches, complains, 'This conceit hath made thousands so headstrong,
even in gross and palpable errors, that a man whose capacity will scarce serve
him to utter five words in a sensible manner blusheth not in any doubt con-
cerning matter of Scripture to think his own bare Yea as good as the Nay of
all the wise, grave, and learned judgments that are in the whole world, which
indolency must be repressed, or it will be the bane of the Christian religion.'
Thus he.38
In fact, the demise of the Great Chain of Being had all along
implied a decrease in clerical authority. While humanists and
puritans saw the role of the clergy in guiding men to a knowledge of
God and right behavior as important, they agreed that the priest

38
Martinus Becanus, A Treatise oftheJudge of Controversies, tr. W. W[ right] ([StOmer],
1619), Preface, et passim.
220 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

does not have 'a sovereign power of making laws, but a power of
giving judgment of controversies' according to Scripture. Clerical
judgment, Perkins said, does not 'constrain conscience . . . [since]
the sovereign power of binding and loosing is not belonging to any
creature, but is proper to Christ... As for the power of the Church,
it is nothing but a ministry of service.'39 Perkins was here defining
the difference between protestant and Catholic casuistry, but he had
witnessed the parallel controversy between presbyterians and
bishops within the English church, and the implications of his argu-
ments were not lost on his puritan readers in the 1590 s.
In the reformist tradition of individual moral involvement, the
cleric was a guide, not a spiritual magistrate, a functionary, not an
intermediary. The common weal was assured when each person
became his own casuist It was when they realized that this theoreti-
cal limitation of the authority of the clerical hierarchy was combined
with searching scrutiny and criticism of the behavior of bishops as
well as princes, that elements of the English protestant hierarchy
finally began to turn away from reformist social ideology. The lines
were drawn when the puritan William Tay compared bishops whose
orders failed to meet the requirements of Scripture and conscience
with the apostates of Jude's epistle who preferred 'their political,
carnal, human jurisdiction and hierarchy before the spiritual and
heavenly ordinance of the Lord.'40 Convinced that their ecclesiasti-
cal'jurisdiction and hierarchy' were in fact the only possible guaran-
tee of social order, and seeing the reformist disdain for that
hierarchy as evidence of the imminent onset of social chaos,
Anglican conformists opted as their Tridentine counterparts had to
seek order through conformity and obedience, if necessary even at
the expense of lay moral reformation.
It is true that the lines were not as clearly drawn in Elizabethan
England as they had been at Trent. Royal headship of the church
complicated the hierarchical arrangement of cleric over prince to
which the Counter-Reformation was dedicated; and the shared
theology of Anglicans and puritans prevented many of the more
extreme lengths to which Catholics had been willing to go to restore
clericalism. The comparison is a relative one. There were Anglican
attempts to strengthen clericalism, most notably in the 1604
canons, but even earlier in Whitgift's efforts to strengthen the ju-
39
William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience, e d T. F. Merrill in William Perkins: His
Pioneer Works on Casuistry (The Hague, 1966), p. 23.
40
Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1582-1589, in The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign
of Queen Elizabeth, ed. & G. Usher (1905), pp. 86-7.
 The conservative reaction 221
dicial arm of the church by a resort to High Commission and his
purging of the Canterbury diocesan commission of its lay mem-
bers.41 But these lacked the ferocity of the Counter-Reformation
orders and methods of enforcement, partly due to the theological
unity of puritans and conformists at that point on the issues of pre-
destination and free will.42 Consensus if possible, compromise if
necessary, were the order of the day in the Jacobean church, and
departures from the order were relatively few.
Still, the discrepancies which did develop between Anglican and
puritan approaches to and involvement with social reform in the
seventeenth century must not be ignored in our acceptance of rela-
tive Jacobean stability and our pursuit of the theme of intellectual
continuity. Such data as striking differences in the subject matter of
seventeenth-century Anglican and puritan publications demand an
explanation: if the humanist consensus continued in full force at the
turn of the century, why do the published works of conformists
evince relatively little concern with such issues as family govern-
ment and the use of wealth43 - issues which had occupied Erasmus
and continued to obsess puritans? By the 1630s, moreover,
divergence of Anglican and puritan views of the social order had
become more than a matter of Anglican omission. Jacobean
Anglicans for the most part seem not to have disagreed with reigning
protestant opinion about the need to train and discipline the poor,
for instance, or about the household as a spiritual unit; they simply
devoted less attention to these subjects in their published sermons
than puritans did, and perhaps progressively less attention to them
as their concern with clerical authority and the problem of non-
conformity increased. But in the era of Laud's ascendancy, substan-
tial conformist departures from the time-honored humanist
understanding of social order are impossible for the historian to
avoid.

41
Peter Clark, English Provincial Society (Hassocks, Sussex, 1977), pp. 182-183.
42
Nicholas Tyacke has argued that Calvinism 'helped to reconcile the differences'
between Anglicans and puritans until the 1620s; only then did many (although by
no means all) Anglicans embrace Arminianism and thereby add a basic theological
issue to the puritans' grievances against them: 'puritanism, Arminianism and
Counter-Revolution,' in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell
(London, 1973), pp. 121, 119-43; Tyacke, 'Arminianism in England, in Religion
and Politics, 1604-1640' (unpublished D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1968).
For a recent critique of Tyacke's view, see Peter White, 'The Rise of Arminianism
Reconsidered,' P&P, 101 (1983), 34-54.
43
Joseph Hall seems to have been the only bishop of this period to have dealt at
length with these subjects and other ethical issues, in, for example, his Salomons
Divine Arts (1609).
222 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

The explanation must lie in the fact that despite the restraint
offered by theological cohesion, episcopal reaction to puritanism
first opened and then widened the gap between conformist and
puritan social ideology. If Anglican rejection of Erasmianism was
more selective than that of the cardinals at Trent, with Anglicans
retaining, for instance, humanist scholarly and exegetical inno-
vations, some departure from the social thought of Christian
humanism was mandated by episcopal fear of disorder arising from
dissent and the growing conviction of the established hierarchy that
order must be imposed from above. In other words, the shifts away
from humanist reformism which begin to emerge in Anglican
approaches to social problems in the early Stuart period can best be
explained by acknowledging those common elements in Tridentine
Catholicism and clericalist Anglicanism which most actively militated
against the earlier understanding of social order. In light of this sug-
gestion, it is not so surprising that the English bishops' drive for
order and control drew many in the 1630s perilously close to arguing
the necessity of priestly mediation between the individual and God,
the validity of a life of religious retirement from the world, and the
social and political danger of widespread lay Bible reading. Hooker's
earlier warnings about the effects of religious education on the
common sort presaged the opinions of many seventeenth-century
Anglican clerics whose concern for conformity overcame their com-
mitment to reform.44 As for the contemplative life, George Meriton
told King James in 1606 that the highest form of nobility is * neglect-
ing mortal things' to 'aspire unto the heavenly.' The active public life
of a mayor or a JP, he said, 'cannot sort so well with noble estate, as
Priesthood may.'45 And from the presumed superiority of the clerical
estate followed such positions as Bancroft's and Donne's that
priests, bishops and archbishops stand between the laity and God.46
Such sentiments sound popish indeed, suggesting that to the extent
that Anglican departures from humanist social thought parallel, if
not equal, those of Tridentine Catholics, surely the explanation for
the divergence is to be found in their common inclination to
44
Richard Bancroft, Tracts, ed. A. Peel (Cambridge, 1953), p. 118; e.g., John Donne,
Sermons, 10 vols, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1957), vol. 1,
p. 255.
45
Meriton, A Sermon of Nobilitie (1607), sigs. Civ, Eii verso-Eiil A priestly life is
described as one of retirement from the cares of this world to the haven of study
(sigs. Eiii-Eiii, verso). While this strong conviction was not altogether characteristic
of Anglicanism, it is visible in a significant strand of the conformist contingency
and was tolerated by the more activist clergy; moreover, it is all but impossible to
find, even stated less vehemently, in puritan sermons.
46
Bancroft, p. 118; Donne, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 312.
 The conservative reaction 223
respond to dissent with an insistence on conformity and obedience
to an authoritarian clericalist hierarchy.
The culmination of this conservative movement occurred during
the archbishopric of William Laud, with results that lend credibility
to the judgment that what we now call Laudianism, if not Laud him-
self, was 'the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English
Church.'47 Puritanism had become enough of a force for reform,
both social and religious, by the 1630s, that the repression of
theological dissent and the enforcement of outward assent to
ceremonies, vestments, and episcopal government became very
nearly the sole concerns of the Laudian hierarchy.48 In the climate of
compromise and consensus which had for the most part charac-
terized the Jacobean church, a climate in which puritan and
conformist alike had held to Erasmian ideals of family religion and
labor discipline and moral education, the ascendancy of William
Laud came like a destroying wind, shattering the social vision along
with the theological cohesion of the religion of protestants. If of-
ficial endorsement of Arminian doctrine and the inauguration of the
first serious repression of puritan preachers since the Elizabethan
anti-presbyterian campaigns were not enough, Laud showed himself
'nearly as hostile to social puritanism as he was to the clerical non-
conformity with which it was often associated.'49 In social as well as
theological and ecclesiological terms, 'it is almost impossible to
overestimate the damage caused by the Laudians.'50
The reforged Chain of Being which had appeared with increasing
frequency in Anglican thought with the rising threat of puritan pro-
test in the 1620s became the basis in Laudian England of a conserva-
47
Collinson, Religion of Protestants, p. 90. Christopher Haigh's criticism of Collinson's
statement, EHR, 50 (1985), 840-3, 'Where, in the integrated and stable Jacobean
Church, can Laud have come from? - and Andrewes, Buckeridge, Harsnet,
Howson, Neile and Overall?', gives rise to my substitution of'Laudianism' for
Laud. The roots of the '-ism' are to be found in conformist fear of puritans from
Whitgift, Bancroft and Hooker on; in light of Laud's renewed and fierce enforce-
ment of ceremonialism and his patronage of anti-predestinarian theology, it seems
appropriate to give the -ism his name.
48
Local studies have shown that relatively little repression of puritanism was carried
out by an Elizabethan hierarchy concerned more with Catholic recusancy than
with protestant non-conformity. The concern to establish a preaching ministry
drove such Anglican bishops as Cox of Ely to appoint to livings men like Richard
Greenham who would later refuse to conform to Whitgift's Articles: Margaret
Spufford, Contrasting Communities (Cambridge, 1974), p. 259, cf 256-265; Ronald A.
Mar chant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560-1642
(London, I960); William Hunt, The Puritan Moment (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
49
Hunt, p. 253.
50
John S. Morrill, 'The Religious Context of the English Civil War,' TRHS, 5 th ser.,
34 (1984), 155-78.
224 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

tive social theory very close to that of Trent The English church
under Laud, like the Catholic church at Trent, was split by a 'fun-
damental political difference between those to whom a priest was an
official invested with authority from above, without regard to merit
or capacity, and those to whom he was a minister appointed by the
community to assist them in the realisation of their own powers.'51
The Laudian hierarchy appropriated the Tridentine solution for
internal dissension by affirming, in John Cosin's words, that 'we are
to honour, reverence, and obey, in the very next degree unto God,
the voice of the Church of God wherein we live.'52 The jus divinum of
bishops (and tithes) and the 'sacredness of the clergy' were staples of
Laudian dialogue.53 The position of the clergy in the Chain of Being
provided the apologetic for unquestioning obedience by the
laity.
For Laud, as for the Tridentine fathers, the clergy were to be the
sole arbiters of matters of faith. The layman was by nature ill-
equipped for theological discussion; lest he usurp clerical authority,
therefore, he was told to leave religious controversies to the judg-
ment of a superior estate. Donne had argued in 1617 that subtleties
of biblical interpretation, 'every artificer's wearing now,' should not
be 'served in every popular pulpit to curious and itching ears, [and]
least of all made table-talk, and household discourse.' Ten years
later, when Cosin compiled his visitation articles for the archdeaconry
of the East Riding in Yorkshire, he excluded Erasmus' Paraphrases on
the New Testament and his Paradesis from the volumes to be made
available in parish churches, presumably because they encouraged
just the sort of lay discussion which fed puritan discontent with the
established religious order.54 One historian has concluded that most
Anglican divines thought that 'private judgment. . . was of no value,
whereas the verdict of the Church fell only just short of inerrancy.'55
What was required of the godly layman was not theological
understanding and religious self-analysis based on personal Bible-
reading, but conformity to dogmatic and liturgical orthodoxy en-
forced from above. Laud's notorious dislike of the vestry, with its

51
H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Z,#W (Hamden, Conn., 1962), pp. 45-6.
52
John Cosin, Works (Oxford, 1845), vol. 1, p. 172.
53
Schwarz, p. 2; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants(Oxford, 1982), discusses
earlier seventeenth-century versions of divine right episcopacy, but the culmi-
nation of this development was clearly Laudian, and in combination with Laudian
enforcement of ceremonies and Arminianism, it was bound to prove intolerable.
54
Donne, Sermons, vol. 1, p. 255; Cosin, Works, vol. 2, pp. 3-4.
55
James T. Addison, 'Early Anglican Thought, 1559-1667,' Historical Magazine of the
Protestant Episcopal Church, 22 (1953), 248-369, p. 260.
 The conservative reaction 225
mutually dependent ministry and laity, is a logical corollary, and one
which helped to mobilize and radicalize puritan opposition to
Lambeth. The radical potential inherent in the humanist view of
social order had lain as dormant in puritans as in Erasmus himself
until the Laudian era, but systematic repression of individual con-
science and of lay participation in church government was too great
a departure from both traditional English anticlericalism and
humanist exaltation of individual judgment to go unopposed. And
within the Erasmian scheme of social order were the seeds of a truly
radical opposition. There is good reason to agree with William Hunt
that 'the credit for transforming social puritanism into a revolutionary
force belongs very largely to William Laud,'56 but it is essential to
recognize that English protestants had a theoretical underpinning
for their radicalism in their humanism.
It should be noted that puritans were not the only critics of the
new clericalism. There were among Anglican laity such opponents of
Laudianism as Falkland, who told the Long Parliament that Laud and
his cohorts wanted 'a blind dependence of the people upon the
clergy, and of the clergy upon themselves.' But it is surely no acci-
dent that Falkland's editor identified Erasmus as 'a person much
esteemed by Falkland,' and that the viscount's writings are replete
with references to the humanist.57
Whether Falkland can in any case be considered representative of
Anglican lay opinion is debatable, but his conclusions about the
nature of Laudian clericalism stand.58 To the extent that Laud's
views were espoused in the Stuart church, autonomous individual
conscience was dethroned. 'No school can teach conscience but the
Church of Christ,' according to Laud, so that despite one inter-
preter's insistence that Anglicans, in contrast to puritans, 'urged all
men to evaluate the results of their actions in terms of the public
peace,' in fact this characterization more nearly describes the
puritan plea.59 Anglicans preferred that men should not evaluate

56
Hunt, p. 253.
57
Schwarz, pp. 3, 15, quoting first Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, A Speech Made to
the House of Commons concerning episcopacy (1641), and then the Dedicatory Epistle to
Falkland's Discourse and Reply (1651).
58
Much more work needs to be done on lay Anglican opinion before full credence
can be given to Schwarz's thesis that 'the new model Anglicanism erected by
archbishop Laud and his supporters w a s . . . a jerry built facade, a cadre of generals
without battalions, a clerical elite without a lay following' (p. 1). Falkland, on
whom Schwarz depends heavily, is an exception to many rules.
59
William Laud, Works (Oxford, 1842), vol. 1, p. 112; cf. J. Sears McGree, The Godly
Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620-1640 (New Haven,
1976), p. 169.
226 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

their own social ethics at alL Evaluation was not the responsibility of
the individual, but of the hierarchy. The pious conforming layman
would do well to limit both his ethical and his theological specu-
lation and concentrate instead on the rather ethereal, pietistic
devotional activities recommended in orthodox manuals. Puritans,
of course, were by no means free of pietism- witness the popularity
of Edmund Bunny's edition of Parsons' intensely devotional
Resolutions', but when taking their spiritual temperatures, they
measured not only their emotional fervor during spiritual contem-
plation, but also, and perhaps to an even greater extent, the degree
to which their behavior in market-place and household conformed
to the detailed instructions meted out by the preachers.60 The image
to which they most closely conformed was that of Erasmus' godly
youth.61
Puritan obsession with 'cases of conscience,' practical theology
and regular self-examination by the godly layman thus contrasts
markedly to Laudian preoccupation with authority and obedience.
Both puritans and Anglicans were striving for an ideology of social
control, but by Laud's time they were approaching the problem
from precisely opposite directions. Laudian bishops were no longer
calling for the achievement of social order through a reformation of
lay manners; their desire was simply for conformity to rules handed
down from above. Their instructions were addressed to subjects, not
citizens, and the concerns were conformist, not reformist Their ser-
mons and treatises are preoccupied not with domestic conduct,
acquisition and proper use of material goods, control of frivolity and
drunkenness, and the inculcation of self-discipline, but rather with
explicating 'the beauty of holiness' and demanding obedience to
episcopal authority.62 The visitation articles of Bishops Wren and
Neile emphasize lay opinion and liturgical conformity, not lay social
behavior; they require presentation of those who criticize epis-
copacy, refuse to conform to liturgical requirements, and attend
60
Among countless examples are the diaries of Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward, in
Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries, ed. M. M. Knappen (Gloucester, Mass., 1966); The
Diary of Lady Margaret Hobyr, ed. D. M. Meads (1930); and the commonplace book
of Nehemiah Wallington (BL, Add MS 40883), discussed by Paul Seaver,
Wallington's World (Stanford, 1985). cf Edmund Bunny, A book of Christian exercise
appertaining to Resolution By R. P[arsons] (n.p., 1585), and Bunny, A briefe answer unto
those idle quarrels of R. P. against the late edition of the Resolution (n.p., 1589).
61
Confabulatiopia (1522), Coll., pp. 30—41, discussed in chapter 2 above.
62
Hunt notes that opposition to Laud in Essex can also be traced to the expense of the
'beauty of holiness' in the midst of the economic hardships of the 1630s. John
Bastwick was arrested in Colchester in 1634 for charging the bishops with, among
other things, 'wasteful extravagance and neglect of the duties of charity'
(p. 261).
 The conservative reaction 227
63
unlawful sermons. Laud's attempts to control the Merchant
Adventurers were aimed at censorship of reading material, the struc-
ture and services of chapels, and the opinions of their deputies, not
at the ethics of their mercantile endeavors or their familial and
public responsibilities.64 While Laud and his cohorts required an
ascetic behavioral standard for clerics (including university stu-
dents), their overriding policy of parochial conformity meant that
their attempts to deal with popular profanity failed to go beyond
mere formality.65 A double standard of behavior for clergy and laity,
not inconsistent with the hierarchical social theory of the Laudians,
effectively undermined puritan efforts at reforming manners by
making the easy prelates preferable to the exacting preachers in the
lukewarm popular mind.66 The re-issue and enforced reading of the
Book of Sports in 1633, which puritans saw as undercutting the
authority of householders as well as encouraging profanation of the
sabbath, is a good indicator of Laudian priorities. The reformation
of manners had clearly gone by the board in favor of the campaign
for conformity.
For Laudian Anglicans, as for other upholders of the Chain of
Being, an important device for social control was the use of
ceremony to reinforce hierarchical distinctions. It was in the context
of an argument that 'Christ shall make master and servant equal, but
not yet, not here' that Donne insisted on the setting apart of holy
places and the use there of signs of reverence. The puritans' failure
to 'distinguish places,' he said, was concomitant to their denial of
'distinctions of persons.'67 Bishop Cosin redefined'godly discipline'
in purely ceremonial terms, and the social ideology underlying his

63
Spufford, pp. 266-7; R. C Richardson, Puritanism in North-West England (Man-
64
chester, 1972), p. 22. Trevor-Roper, pp. 253-4.
65
Trevor-Roper has noted that 'the asceticism . . . which the Anglican and the
Catholic confined to the clergy, was, by the puritan, demanded of all the godly,
whatever their profession' (p. 155). Among Laud's complaints of the extravagant
and frivolous activities of Oxford students are a 1634 letter to the Warden of All
Souls (Works, vol. 6, pp. 387-8); however, he agreed with Charles' reissue of the
Book of Sports, with its rejection of strict Sabbatarianism and its allowance of
maypoles, church ales, etc. (Trevor-Roper, p. 158). The 1617 Declaration of
Sports, it should be noted, was written by Bishop Morton, the first Bishop of
Chester (1616-19) to perceive the preachers as a bigger threat to order in that
diocese than the Catholic recusants (Richardson, p. 21). Cosin's practice followed
Laud's principle: while he demanded only avoidance of disobedience and criticism
by the laity, he required ministers in the East Riding to renounce the use of'dice,
cards, tables, or other idle and unlawful games,' hunting, hawking, dancing and
swearing (Works, vol. 2, p. 15).
66
Keith Wrightson's observation in 'The Puritan Reformation of Manners with
special reference to the Counties of Lancashire and Essex, 1640-1660,' p. 128.
67
Donne, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 377-8.
228 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

position is abundantly clear in his 1633 warning that those who

oppose formal distinctions of times and places 'will not only shake
the universal fabric of all government and authority, but instantly
open a gap, nay set open the flood gates to all confusion and
anarchy/68 He was not far wrong: the Essex radicals who destroyed
the chancel window in the Chelmsford church after the church-
wardens had removed its religious pictures but left the escutcheons
of its gentle benefactors were indeed challenging a 'monument to
social subordination.'69 Their social iconoclasm was a logical exten-
sion of their vision of a godly commonwealth ordered on virtuous
behavior. When another Essex puritan, John Gibson, had been pros-
ecuted a few years earlier for 'teaching scholars in church,' it was
likewise his humanistic combination of stressing popular education
and scoffing at 'popish' ceremonial distinctions which drew the
wrath of his Laudian opponents; he was supported by the puritan
villagers who were concerned more with the reformation of
behavior through godly instruction than with conformity to epis-
copal 'superstition'.70
Laudians, puritans and humanists agreed that education was
important; however, their varying approaches to establishing social
order are reflected in their disagreements not only about the prop-
riety of using churches as classrooms, but also about the educational
process itself and the manner in which it was to benefit church and
society. For Christian humanists and puritans, popular education
was a means to individual moral reformation, a process by which one
could attain virtue and be prepared for service to and reformation of
the commonwealth. For the Laudians, on the other hand, the pur-
pose of education was to reinforce the existing order, to instill into
the individual the importance of obedience. When educational
institutions failed to perform this function, they were uncom-
promisingly suppressed. While Christian humanists had responded
to the ills of grammar school and university instruction in their day
by introducing gradual but significant reforms in methods and
curricula, archbishop Laud responded to Strafford's difficulties in
controlling Irish schools by assenting to 'the prohibiting of the
teaching of arts abroad in the country. . . and the sooner it be done

68
C o s i n , Works, v o l . 1 , p p . 5 1 , 1 7 0 .
69
Recounted by Hunt, p. 292.
70
Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling,
1523-1700 (New York, 1979), pp. 146-7.
 The conservative reaction 229
71
the better.' In Salisbury, the Laudian Recorder, Robert Hyde, took
the extreme position of'being against the breeding of poor men's
children to learning.'72
On the university scene, Laud's drive for central control and the
suppression of dissent is visible as early as 1616, when, as Neile's
chaplain, he accompanied the king to Scotland and returned with
royal instructions for the regulation of studies at Oxford. Later, as
Chancellor of that university (from 1629), he was responsible for a
code of statutes which 'show Laud's primary concern with externals
- with the details of conduct and discipline,' with reverence and
ceremony over preaching, with the imposition of'uniformity and
order in externals' from above by central authority as the solution to
the problem of ill discipline in the university.73 It is true that the
Laudian statutes did go beyond mandating ceremonial conformity
and attendance at newly-ordered Latin prayers in St Mary's in their
quest for order: they were concerned, too, with a reformatio morum for
students, the details of which were not objectionable to puritans.74
The similarity of Laud's and puritans' demands for moral discipline
in the university simply show that they were on some issues still
thinking within the same conceptual space, one defined in part by
Christian humanism, whether that debt was acknowledged or n o t
But there were significant differences between puritan humanism
and these unacknowledged survivals of Renaissance moralism in
Laud: the Chancellor's reformation of manners was not extended
beyond the university and the clergy, and its mode of implemen-
tation rested on the assumption that reform is best achieved not so
much by exhortations to pious self-examination and education for
virtue as by requiring obedience of a code imposed and enforced by
central authority at the expense of collegiate autonomy. While we
must grant a recent commentator's affirmation that the Oxford of

71
Laud, Works, vol. 6, p. 356; cf Wentworth to Laud (1633) in The Earl of Strafforde's
Letters and Dispatches, ed. William Knowler (Dublin, 1740), vol. 1, p. 188. It was an
extreme reaction to the problem of popish influence in grammar schools: it is dif-
ficult to imagine humanists or puritans closing the schools altogether rather than
launching into a reform program. Presumably some of the protestant school-
masters who might have filled the gap were disqualified by non-conformity - a
greater concern for Laud and Strafford than the teaching of grammar.
72
Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? (Cambridge, 1975) p. 206. Hyde was
also known for his opposition to preaching and for his punitive approach to
poor relief.
73
Kevin Sharpe, 'Archbishop Laud and the University of Oxford,' in History and
Imagination, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (New York, 1981), 146-
74
64, pp. 156, 161. Sharpe, p. 153 etpassim.
230 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Laud was not the Salamanca of Philip II (the encouragement of new

scientific speculation in Laudian Oxford is evidence enough75),
Laud's high-handed dealing with the heads of colleges- eventually at
both universities- his insistence on recognition of his authority, and
above all his apparent approval of Neo-scholastic studies suggest
that the difference is one of degree.76
In regard to curriculum, Laud's forward-looking foundation of
lectureships in Arabic and Hebrew and his fostering of the new
science were offset by his reinstituting the study of unabridged texts
of the Schoolmen and of continental Neo-scholastics.77 It was under
Laud's oversight that Wren upheld scholastic theology in the 1631
dispute with Ganning.78 The statutes of 1636 included adminis-
trative changes designed to increase control over collegiate instruc-
tion to enforce this conservative curriculum, and Laud attempted to
visit both universities metrapolitically to impose his statutes and
these texts on the institutions which had by then produced
Hampden and Pym, Oliver StJohn, Lord Saye and Sele, John Selden,
and Sir Henry Vane the Younger.79 Scholastic curricula in Oxford
and Cambridge were doubtless intended to serve the same functions
for Laudians in the 1630s that they had in continental Catholic
universities since it had first been realized that humanist reformism
threatened constituted authority. In fact, so similar were Laud's con-
cerns and activities to those of Tridentine Catholics that the Earl of
Arundel thought the Archbishop 'a fitting instrument for the
advancement of the Roman faith'; in 1633 Laud was twice offered a
cardinal's hat.80

Anglican support for the Great Chain of Being was not limited to
arguments for lay obedience to the clerical estate. The social order
which they wished to uphold included kings as well as clerics, and
Thomas Cartwright's judgment that monarchy is as superfluous as

75
Nicholas Tyacke,' Science and Religion at Oxford before the Civil War,' in Puritans
and Revolutionaries, ed. D. Pennington and K. Thomas (Oxford, 1978), pp.
73-93.
76
Sharpe, pp. 150, 155-6; BL, Add. MS 32,093, fol. 140 (Cambridge heads to Laud,
19 December 1635); CUL, Add. MS40(C),2 (Samuel Ward to Archbishop Ussher,
24 May 1637).
77
Trevor-Roper, pp. 45, 49; Hugh Kearney, Scholars and Gentlemen (London, 1970),
pp. 94-6; cf. Tyacke, 'Science and Religion,' and Sharpe, p. 162.
78
SP 16/193/91, described in chapter 3 above.
79
Mark Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition (Oxford, 1959), p. 277. On the pro-
posed visitation of Cambridge, see CUL, MSS Add. 22, fols. 115ff, CUR 6.1, items
41-6, CUR78, items 28-58; BL, MS Add. 32,093, fol. 140; andmy' "An Act of Dis-
cretion": Evangelical Conformity and the Puritan Dons,' Albion, 18 (1986),
80
581-99. Trevor-Roper, p. 307.
 The conservative reaction 231
archbishops had forewarned them (and James I) of what would result
should they fail to revive popular adherence to the medieval
hierarchy of essence and degree.81 The warning was apparently
heeded by Matthew Wren when, as Master of Peterhouse, he led the
opposition in 1627-8 to the puritan Lord Brooke's first history lec-
turer at Cambridge: Dr Dorislaus had, it seems, spoken much too
positively about ancient Roman consular government for Wren's
taste, and Wren complained to Bishop Laud that 'he seemed to ac-
knowledge no right of kingdoms.' According to another auditor,
Dorislaus 'was conceived of by some to speak too much for the
defense of the liberties of the people'; clearly he was putting classical
learning to a use unforeseen by clericalist supporters of monarchy.
The support given Dorislaus by the puritan heads on the Cambridge
consistory must have made the whole situation even more alarm-
ing.82 In buttressing the authority of the church in society, the
Laudians were compelled to invoke the Chain of Being in all its
facets, from its immutable rankings of angels to its foundation of the
commonwealth not so much on responsible citizenship as on
hereditary monarchy and aristocracy.83
While the followers of Erasmus had urged obedience to the king
on the basis of his own merit and virtuous activity in defense of the
realm, the Anglican Roger Mainwaring sought to instill obedience
by pointing out the king's position in the cosmological hierarchy:
'Relations and respects [not behavior] challenge duties correspon-
dent' It should not be surprising that he quoted Aristotle in
medieval exegetical fashion by way of St Thomas, and drew support
for social degree from the works of Suarez.84 An Anglican student at
Balliol drew on the same sources in his contemporary comparison of
the hereditary monarch to 'the sun in the firmament, from whom the
other stars receive their light' Because 'from him it is that the others
move . . . one must out of duty and for conscience' sake, be subject
and obey.'85 However faulty his astronomy, this student was well
81
Quoted in Trevor-Roper, p. 4.
82
Wren's letter to Laud is transcribed in J. B. Mullinger, The University of Cambridge
(Cambridge, 1911), vol. 3, pp. 84ff. Wren was supported by Eden, a fellow-
Laudian, and opposed by the puritan master of Sidney Sussex, Samuel Ward.
Ward's account of Dorislaus' lecture is included in a letter to Archbishop Ussher
of Armagh complaining about the trouble caused in Cambridge by the Laudian
heads: The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher (Dublin, 1843), vol. 15, pp.
402-3 (16 May 1628).
83
Jeremy Taylor, Works, ed. R Heber (London, 1828), vol. 4, p. 151; Laud, Works,
voL 1, pp. 85-6 (a Parliament sermon of 1625); Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiasti-
cal Polity, ed R. A. Houk (New York, 1931), Book VIII, p. 168.
84
Roger Mainwaring, Religion and Allegiance (London, 1627), pp. 2, 8.
85
Balliol, MS 337 (n.f.).
232 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

aware that the royal prerogative which he saw as the source of social
harmony was best defended by affirming the Chain of Being. At the
episcopal level, Thomas Morton's Causa regia, sive, de authoritate, et
dignitateprincipum christianorum, directed against Bellarmine's theories
of resistance in 1620, was easily adapted later to address English
puritan opposition to monarchy as The necessity of Christian subjection.
Demonstrated, and proved. . . that thepower ofthe King is not ofhumane, but of
divine right.™
Seventeenth-century conformists saw birth as the proper determi-
nant of the status and authority of the aristocracy as well as of the
monarchy: George Meriton told James I that true nobility may be
possessed by one whose behavior is immoral, simply by virtue of his
birth. Arguing against the intellectual heroes of both Christian
humanists and earlier protestants, the Stoics, 'the old brokers of
parity,' Meriton asserted that nobility of birth is the 'image and
splendor of God's divinity' in this world.87 Nobility of birth is
superior to that nobility of virtue which humanists and puritans had
regarded as the only true nobility. In fact, however, nobles seldom
beget immoral children, since 'it may not be denied, but that the
pure naturals in some are better than in others, for the procreation
of moral or civil virtues.' A more anti-humanist attitude than
Meriton's denial that Nobilitas sola est animum quae moribus ornat is dif-
ficult to imagine.88 And he, like Mainwaring, quoted Aristotle in
defense of a natural hierarchy of being.89 John Donne similarly
returned to the principles of the Chain of Being when he argued in a
1622 sermon that nobles are 'types' of God, as the king's court is a
type of the court assembled around God's throne. While Erasmus
and his protestant progeny in the sixteenth century had noticed the
poverty and ignoble birth of Jesus, the saints, and the Apostles,
Donne went to the extreme of asserting John the Baptist's fitness to
be a witness of Christ on the basis of his noble birth. The Baptist's

86
The necessity of subjection was published in 1643, probably in London.
87
George Meriton, A Sermon of Nobilitie (1607), sigs. Cii, Biii, Div. That opposition to
Stoic notions of equality is not related to theological position, as Walzer would
have it, is demonstrated by the Calvinist Bishop Joseph Hall's belief that equality
will have no more place in heaven than on earth: Works (Oxford, 1837), vol. 8, pp.
366-7. While few puritans actively opposed hereditary aristocracy, none offered
such an extreme theoretical defense of it as Meriton. Until the 1640 s, the concern
for social order which they shared with Anglicans (and with their humanist for-
bears) prevented puritans from acknowledging the logical implications of the doc-
trines of spiritual equality and the superiority of virtue to pedigree as a
determinant of status.
88
Meriton, sigs. Ciiii, Cii verso-dii. cf Sig. Eiiii, on the superiority of inherited to
89
elective kingship. Meriton, sigs. Biiii, Ci verso.
 The conservative reaction 233
nobility he extrapolated inventively from the fact that his father was
a priest, and 'in all well policed states . . . they have ever thought it
fittest to employ [as priests] persons of good families, and of noble
extraction.' 90 Later in the same year he preached against those
[puritans] who dared subject even the king to their 'censures and
corrections.'91 Respect must be given to each man in his place, he
insisted, 'for in the chain of order, every link depends upon one
another.'92 Archbishop Laud's patronage of the Calvinist Joseph Hall
may be less mysterious if we consider Hall's commitment not only to
jure divino episcopacy and the suppression of religious dissent, but
also to the notion that that land is blessed whose rulers are 'not of
any servile condition,' but sons of nobles. 'It is a monster in a state,'
Hall goes on, 'to see servants ride on horses and princes (of blood) to
walk as servants on the ground; neither more monstrous, than
intolerable,' since 'as his blood is heroical, so his disposition.'93
Richard Hooker had laid the theoretical foundations for this posi-
tion when he had opposed the presbyterian discipline's disregard of
social estate with the principle that it is 'repugnant to the majesty
and greatness of English nobility' to bring' equally high and low unto
parish churches.'94 In the century which followed Utopia and the
Adages, in the six or seven decades since Dering had castigated the
sins of princes and magistrates, a reversal had taken place: order was
to be sought not so much in reform, as in a recognition of the
inherent superiority and authority of the well-born.95
It was on the basis of this inherent authority of the upper echelons
of the medieval hierarchy- lay and clerical- that Anglicans focused
their demand for obedience regardless of the leanings of the con-
science. For Mainwaring, religion was 'the stay of the polity' not as
the agent of individual moral reform, but as the teacher of
obedience. Thus narrowly did Anglicans conceive of religion as 'the
90
Donne, Sermons, vol. 4, pp. 146, 177.
91
Ibid., vol. 4, p. 250; cf vol. 1, p. 183, vol. 2, p. 303, Vol. 4, pp. 240-1, and Laud,
Works, vol. 1, pp. I6ff, arguing that the puritan William Gouge's criticism of the
sins of the prince reveal him as anti-monarchical and therefore heretical. Gouge's
self-defense is in the preface to his commentary on Hebrews (1655).
92
Donne, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 316. He also used the Chain of Being image in a 1617
sermon at Paul's Cross (vol. 1, p. 208).
93
Joseph Hall, Salomons Divine Arts (1609), pp. 109-10; T. F. Kinloch, The Life and
94
Works ofJoseph Hall, 1574-1656 (1951), pp. 32-5. Hooker, vol. 2, p. 475.
95
There are, of course, exceptions. Arthur Lake was still even-handed in his de-
nunciation of the sins of rulers, railing in a sermon on Psalm 82, for example,
against magistrates who 'understand not, consider not, walk on in darkness' to the
danger of state (Ten Sermons (London, 1640), p. 110, cf pp. 119-20). The develop-
ment being described here was gradual, and it did not culminate until Laud rose to
power. What we are attempting to trace is a process of change.
234 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

foundation of the well-ordered commonwealth,' since it was

obedience to a code of externals, rather than reformation of internal
attitudes and inclinations, which would produce social order.96 John
Carpenter actually traced the roots of social restlessness to the
reforming spirit; accusing his opponents of desiring social and politi-
cal, as well as religious reformation, he pictured them as perfec-
tionists, * dreaming of Plato's commonwealth. . . In the pride of their
hearts, [they] imagine themselves to be rather kings reigning with
God in heaven, than men living among men on earth.'97 Puritans, in
the humanist tradition, are here justly portrayed as enemies of the
Chain of Being, if inaccurately as proponents of social disorder;
order was in the last analysis the aim of their appeals to conscience.
Anglicans did not deny a role to conscience, but they changed its
functions drastically: for Archbishop Laud, concerned above all else
with the enforcement of conformity, the function of conscience was
not to determine right, but under the direction of the Church to
accord obedience.98
Perceiving the threat posed to the existing system by the
humanist/puritan program of control through reform, Anglicans
had deliberately repudiated much of the sixteenth-century consen-
sus for the protection offered by a traditional social ideology. They
in effect fled in the face of the reformist assault to the haven of a rigid
hierarchical structure, a divinely-ordered system of social degree
reflective of the cosmic hierarchy of planets and spheres, angels and
heavenly principalities, before whose innate authority disobedience
was out of the question. Being, not action, was to determine status;
estate of birth rather than devotion to the common weal evinced
right to rule. The institutions of monarchy and episcopacy were
givens; princes and bishops were not subject to review. The extent
to which social reform was perceived as no threat to ecclesiastical
conformity would determine the point to which the bishops would
accept Christian humanist social ideology. It was at the point where
reform challenged conformity that they would repudiate humanist
presuppositions. When reformist predilections came into conflict
with hierarchical interests, the choice had to be made between re-
pression and reform.
The outcome of the conflict in England did not become apparent

96
Mainwaring, pp. 4-5; McGee (pp. 142-70) has amply documented this insistence
on unquestioning obedience, although his interpretation of it is debatable.
97
John Carpenter, A Preparative to Contentation (1597), sig. Kiiii.
98
Laud, Works, vol. 1, p. 112. Jeremy Taylor followed suit in seeing no sin more
heinous than disobedience (Works, vol. 4, p. 150).
 The conservative reaction 235
until the Civil War, when conscience enthroned finally succeeded in
casting down the actuality, as well as the theory, of the traditional
hierarchy. The war can thus be interpreted as in part an ideological
dispute over the relative authority of individual lay conscience and
established hierarchy." Behind this dispute, however, lay the
struggle between two groups equally concerned with the imposition
of order on society, but in disagreement as to whether that order was
best achieved from the top, by demanding unquestioning obedience
or by means of a grass roots approach, a reformation of manners
directed toward the realization of a well-ordered commonwealth.
The same choice had confronted the delegates at Trent; the same
conflict is represented in Contarini's opposition to Carafa. The same
resolution was made at Trent as at Lambeth, with many of the same
effects on social theory.

It was the decision first of the Tridentine cardinals and later of the
Anglican hierarchy to realize social order through enforced con-
formity rather than humanist reform that explains the divergence of
Catholic from protestant, puritan from Anglican household theory.
William Perkins dated the shift in Catholic thinking about the family
quite accurately when he associated the popish belief 'that this
secret coming together of man and wife [is] filthiness' with the judg-
ment of the Council of Trent.100 It was at Trent, he charged, 'after
that marriage was condemned by them, [that] some began to detest
and hate women/ 101 The puritan John Dod was similarly perceptive
when he criticized the Jesuits, who 'so straightly tie the women to
wheel and spindle, as they do cut them off and bar them from all
conference touching the word of God, as absurd and far unbe-
seeming their sex/102 By the time Perkins and Dod were writing,
there was indeed a sharp contrast between protestant and papist
household theory, a contrast which goes far toward explaining the
emphasis of historians on the unique character of protestant domes-
tic conduct theory.
99
Seeing t h e Civil W a r in terms of conflicting social ideology helps t o explain why
English 'Catholic c o m m i t m e n t t o armed support of t h e King was all o u t of pro-
portion t o t h e size of the c o m m u n i t y as such, and was, furthermore, most marked
in t h e upper echelons of t h e army in terms of rank, and in t h e elite arm, t h e
cavalry.' P. R. Newman, 'Catholic Royalists of N o r t h e r n England, 1642-1645,'
Northern History, 15 (1979), 8 8 - 9 5 , p. 8 8 .
100
Perkins, Works (Cambridge, 1618), vol. 3, p. 689. Joseph Hall concurred in The
Honor of the Married Clergie Mayntayned (1620), Dedicatory Epistle.
101
Perkins, vol. 3, pp. 669ff, 689.
102
John Dod, Bathshebaes Instructions to her Sonne Lemuel (1614), pp. 61-2; cf. pp.
1-3, 64.
236 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

It has been argued above that the pre-eminent concern of the

Council of Trent was with doctrinal uniformity. The practice of
religious education and discipline in the household was seen by the
Council as liable to threaten the spiritual authority of the official
hierarchy by replacing it with the quasi-priestly position of parents.
Participation in household religion was viewed as incompatible with
conformity to strictly orthodox doctrine and practice: 'in the
Counter-Reformation hierarchy the notion of the nuclear family as
an autonomous entity inspired indifference or distaste . . . The
Counter-Reformation hierarchy seems to have taken it for granted
that a household religion was a seed-bed of subversion.'103 The sol-
ution of the fathers at Trent was to enforce parochial conformity at
the expense of familial autonomy. The Tridentine canons and
decrees accordingly gave bishops, and not fathers and mothers, the
responsibility to provide catechism for children; unauthorized
teaching was prohibited, and parental religious responsibilities are
conspicuous by their absence.104 In England, where the families that
sheltered outlawed priests had to be considered coterminous with
parochial units, the Jesuits campaigned to transform households
into clerically-dominated seminaries. Richard Smith's biography of
Lady Montague gives no indication that lay members of her
household had anything but a passive role in household religion, and
Parsons' Booke ofthe Christian Exercise (1582), a very popular guide for
Christian living, contains no reference to the religious responsi-
bilities of lay heads of households.105 In fact, the publications most
encouraged by Jesuits and seminarists to guide the spiritual lives of
English families- works like Parsons', Southwell's and Lascelles',
noted earlier, and Peter Canisius' Little Catechism, Gaspar de Loarte's
Exercise of a Christian Life and his Spiritual Combat, Luis de Granada's
Spiritual Doctrine Containing a Rule to Live Well and his Excellent Treatise
of Consideration and Prayer - stress 'the worldliness and manifold dis-
tractions of ordinary family life and the absolute need for devout
individuals . . . to go aside from family commitments, to make their
souls under clerical direction.'106 Aveling notes that 'Catholic cleri-
103
John Bossy, 'The Counter-Reformation and the People,' P&P, 47 (1970),
51-70, p. 68.
104
Canons and Decrees, pp. 26, 196; cf Bossy, 'The Character of Elizabethan
Catholicism,' in Crisis in Europe, 1360-1660, ed. Trevor Aston (1965), pp. 229-35,
and The English Catholic Community 1570-1830 (Oxford, 1976), chs. 1-3.
105
Smith, The Life of the Most Honourable and Vertuous Lady, the La. Magdalen Viscountesse
Montague, tr. J. C. Fursdon (1627), passim; Robert Parsons, The First Booke of the
Christian Exercise, appertayning to resolution (1582), passim.
106 Aveling, p. 101; cf Haigh, p. 138, commenting that the 'intense family religiosity'
enjoined by these works centered around a resident chaplain and regular
sacramental practice.
 The conservative reaction 237
cal writers, for their part, did their best to suppress Erasmus' writings
and forget More's liberalism.'107 Accordingly, when the Yorkshire
gentlewoman Mary Ward attempted in 1610 to launch her own
female missionary endeavor to guide married women in the religious
instruction of their households, she found her efforts engulfed in 'a
wave of hysterical agitation . . . [by the clergy, and] suppressed by
the papacy before the close of the 1620s.'108 The Jesuits' ' "mon-
astic" tradition of spirituality [had] prevailed over tendencies
toward "devout humanism".'109
Not only did Tridentine Catholicism deprive householders of a
religious role, it also affirmed the inferiority of the married state to
that of virginity. A canon adopted by the twenty-fourth session of
the council declared that' if anyone says that the married state excels
the state of virginity or celibacy and that it is better and happier to be
united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy, let him
be anathema.'110 Ignatius Loyola told readers of his Spiritual Exercises
* to praise much religious orders, virginity and continence, and not so
much marriage as any of these.'111 Parsons regarded virginity as a
superior state and vigorously criticized Edmund Bunny's prot-
estantized edition of his Christian Exercise for its omission of all
references to virginity: 'he maketh me to speak like a good minister
of England.'112 Smith recorded of Lady Montague, 'Albeit she chose
not the highest degree of chastity, which is virginity, that perhaps
may rather be ascribed to want of advice and counsel, whereof she
often lamented to have been destitute in her youth, than of desire to
follow the best' 113 This devaluation of marriage clearly contributed
to the Counter-Reformation goal of returning religious authority to
the priesthood: if husbands and wives are spiritually inferior beings,
then their potentially subversive religious teaching is likely to be dis-
regarded in favor of the orthodox doctrine of the celibate priest.
Thus, the Tridentine concern for parochial conformity led to the
demise of the family as a primary religious institution in Catholic
teaching.
The same conviction can be seen at work in the Laudian Church of
England, although in a less extreme version and ultimately with less

107
Aveling, p. 100.
108
Bossy, English Catholic Community, pp. 160, 282. The general misogyny of the Coun-
cil of Trent has been illuminated by Joan Morris, Against Nature andGod'(197'4), pp.
150-8. Abbesses were for the first time subjected to episcopal or general chapter
supervision by the twenty-fifth session (1563) of the Council (Canons and Decrees,
109 uo
pp. 223-4). Aveling, p. 101. Canons and Decrees, p. 182.
111
Spiritual Exercises, sec. 356, 4th rule, p. 230.
112
Parsons, Christian Exercise, fols. 13, 9- Bunny was chaplain to the Archbishop of
113
York and later minister at Bolton. R. Smith, p. 31.
238 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

success, when doctrinal and liturgical uniformity came to be seen as

a primary goal of the ecclesiastical institution. Laud's visitation
articles are reminiscent of the Tridentine decrees in that the only
religious responsibility assigned to parents is that of sending their
children to church for catechism by the priest. In 1636, Bishop
Wren of Norwich actually instructed churchwardens to present
laymen who presumed to discuss religion in their families.114 The
dearth of domestic conduct manuals among Anglican treatises and
the absence of practical advice to parents in their sermons are
evidence of an attempt to replace the spiritual autonomy of families
with a clerically dominated, conformist religion. Even John Cosin,
who sometimes condoned household religion, showed signs of
ambivalence toward the spiritualized household in his notion that
'single life be a thing more angelical and divine' than marriage; had
Christ not attended the wedding at Cana, he said, men might have
ceased marrying at all, since 'married life itself seems to be but an
imperfect state; the state of perfection is virginity, so much com-
mended by our Saviour, so highly esteemed by St. Paul.'115 Donne's
view of the family was similarly equivocal. He actually rearranged
the three ends of marriage, placing companionship last, and in a
1619 sermon he interpreted the death of children as God's way of
showing us 'the sinful voluptuousness in which they were begotten
and conceived.' As for women, puritan patriarchy was tame by com-
parison with Donne's assertion, 'We are sure women have souls as
well as men, but yet it is not so expressed, that God breathed a soul
into woman as he did into man.' The political parallel which he
immediately drew - that while all governments have 'soul,' God
'breathed it more manifestly into monarchy' - clarifies the extent of
his patriarchalism, the conservatism of his political theory, and the
dependence of both on the Great Chain of Being.116 It is this
divergence of both Catholic and conformist Anglican doctrine from
the humanist/puritan consensus in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century which has resulted in the misleading emphasis
of historians on the innovative character of puritan house-
hold theory.

Much the same phenomenon can be seen in the area of economic

doctrines and poor relief schemes, although here the utility of many
114
Laud, Works, vol. 5, p. 446; Wren's position is noted by Hill, Society and Puritanism,
p. 468.
115
Cosin, Works, vol. 1, pp. 48, 56. These statements were made in a wedding sermon!
It should be noted that the household religion which he commended was
preferably to follow the authorized catechism and the Prayer Book (voL 2, pp.
8-10). 116 Ibid., vol. 4, p. 241.
 The conservative reaction 239
aspects of Christian humanist thought for proponents of a strictly
controlled society qualified both Tridentine and (to a greater
extent) Laudian rejection of humanist innovations. Tridentine
Catholics upheld medieval views of religious poverty and of the
intrinsic merit of almsgiving, however indiscriminate. But they
accepted the humanist innovation of workhouses, although modify-
ing them in a penal direction into mechanisms for the enforcement
of conformity. The adaptability of the workhouse to their drive for
control made it the one exception to the Tridentine/Laudian ten-
dency to oppose innovation and uphold tradition as the foundation
of social order.
The importance attached by orthodox Catholics to the spiritual
character of poverty and almsgiving had always presented a problem
for humanist opponents of mendicity, religious or otherwise.
According to traditional Catholic doctrine, the poor are representa-
tive of Christ on earth, and every Christian ought to dispense charity
both out of regard for this religious significance inherent in poverty
and as a necessary means of attaining eternal salvation. Humanist
schemes to eliminate begging and ultimately poverty itself were
seen as a barrier to the realization of this soteriological imperative,
but in a more immediate sense, they were interpreted as an obvious
criticism of religious mendicity. Accordingly, Vives' plan for Ypres
was labeled heretical and Lutheran by the vicar of the Bishop of
Tournai in 1527 and by the mendicant orders of Ypres in the 1530s,
and in 15 31 the Sorbonne responded to it by ruling against any pro-
hibition of public begging and almsgiving.117 The Lyon Aumone-
Generale likewise drew the wrath of Dominicans and of the
Inquisition in the 1530s, as did Francis Fs Bureau General des
Pauvres in the 1540s.118 With the solidification of the Counter-
Reformation at the Council of Trent, opposition to humanist
117
Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), p. 17;
Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Haps burg Spain (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 7, 13. It
should be noted, however, that the mendicant orders did not always oppose the
humanist drive to eliminate begging. Franciscan reformers, particularly in the
New World, frequently patronized Vivesian schemes. See John Leddy Phelan, The
Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World (Berkeley, 1956), o n G e r o n i m o
deMendieta; Bataillon, vol. 2, pp. 435-54; Lewis Hanke, The First Social Experiments
in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1935). Opposition to these New World reforms
from Dominican inquisitors was in part an aspect of traditional inter-order
rivalry.
118
Davis, p. 17; Howard M. Solomon, Public Welfare, Science and Propaganda in Seven-
teenth Century France: The Innovations of Theophraste Renaudot (Princeton, 1972), p. 27.
The Bureau did not prohibit begging, but did attempt to separate deserving poor
from rogues and establish ateliers. Its primary offenses in clerical eyes were lay
administration and discriminate, indirect distribution: 'by policing the poor, it
removed from circulation the vessel through which the Christian became Christ-
like' (p. 32).
240 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

attitudes toward poverty and its relief intensified, despite the

apparent successes of the humanist reforms in Ypres and Lyon. By
the 1540s it was apparent to the Catholic hierarchy that the Vivesian
scheme threatened not only the theological foundations of the men-
dicant orders and the doctrine of the necessity of works for sal-
vation, but also clerical control over a traditionally ecclesiastical
function, the relief of poverty. It was clearly perceived as a facet of
Erasmian anticlericalism, and its opponents were henceforth led by
the same Dominican and Jesuit #?/##// who were responsible for the
revival of Thomism, the establishment of the Roman Inquisition,
the inclusion of Erasmus on the Index and the dogmatism of the
Tridentine decrees.
Thus, among Cardinal Pole's quarrels with the hard-liners at Trent
were his objections to Seripando's draft decree on justification
(1546), which stressed the need for expiatory almsgiving.119 He was
overruled by a Council intent on re-affirming traditional doctrine,
with the end result that the 'motive of self-sanetification' remained
an important and openly-avowed precept of Catholic charity in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.120 By 1568, Nicholas Sander's
assertion that 'our daily sins and inward uncleanness are made clean
by almsdeeds' was an articulation of typically Catholic opinion.121
The only other English Catholic to write in any detail about poor
relief after Trent, Robert Parsons, likewise focused his work on the
salutary functions of charity for the penitent benefactor. While he
accepted several aspects of the humanist welfare program (including
no- or low-interest loans to poor artisans and job training for poor
children), it was always with the assumption that all such programs
would be under strict episcopal control and that they would thereby
enable benefactors to contribute to their own salvation and
simultaneously augment the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.122
In the seventeenth century, English Jesuits would be less qualified in
their condemnation of humanist poor relief: Edward Knott
described the discriminating, indirect almsgiving of protestant
England as 'Charity Mistaken.'123

119
Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience, p. 163. This document was repudiated by Pole
(p. 164).
120
Brian Pullan, 'Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe,' TRHS 5 th Ser., 26
(1976), 15-34, p. 27, noting the opinion of the Bavarian Jesuit Jerome Drexel that
alms do not lose their merit in unworthy hands.
121
Nicholas Sander, A briefe Treatise of Usurie (Louvain, 1568), sig. Bii, verso.
122
Parsons, Memorial, pp. 86-7, 256-61.
123
Edward Knott [alias Matthew Wilson], Charity Mistaken (1630); Mercy and Truth
maintained by Catholics (1634), passim.
 The conservative reaction 241
In Spain, it was the Neo- scholastic theologian of Salamanca,
Domingo de Soto, who quashed the humanist poor relief plan of
Juan de Robles (1545) because its * removal of the indigent from the
streets would result in grave spiritual harm by denying the faithful
the opportunity of practicing charity/ and because its involvement
of secular magistrates would reduce clerical control over social
order.124 Juan de Robles had insisted that alms given indiscriminately
were not meritorious (denying de Soto's distinction between mercy
and justice), but that involuntary charity could be (allowing the
possibility of a rate). He went along with his enemy in departing
from Vives on only one point, that relief should be administered by
ecclesiastics. Beyond this, he was a thoroughgoing humanist: it is
not without significance that when he died in 15 72, he left a Spanish
translation of the New Testament unpublished, * possibly because he
feared the adverse judgement of the Inquisition.' De Soto, by con-
trast, was sent to the Council of Trent in 1545 and contributed there
to the legislation on justification.125
De Soto's opposition to Vives, like Knott's, was unqualified;
moreover, in Spain it was relatively effective.126 A 1557 edict of
Philip II reversed the magisterial reforms of Bruges by allowing the
poor to beg; in 1559 Philip sponsored a propaganda campaign
headed by the Augustinian preacher Lorenzo de Villevicencio
against any secular authority attempting to forbid begging or
administer charity; and the 1565 poor law for the Spanish Empire
decreed a licensed begging system, outlawed a rate, and made no
provision for educating the poor.127 When a humanist-inspired
movement to rationalize relief emerged from the followers of Juan
de Avila at the University of Baeza, it was suppressed by' the unfavor-
able judgment of the Inquisition,' including Avila's imprisonment

124
Martz, pp. 2, 22-9, discussing de Soto's Deliberation en la causa de lospobres (1545);
William J. Callahan, 'The Problem of Confinement: An Aspect of Poor Relief in
Eighteenth Century Spain,' Hispanic American Historical Review, 51 (1971), p. 4. See
also Robert Jutte, 'Poor Relief and Social Discipline in I6th-Century Europe,'
European Studies Review, 11 (1981), 25-52. So important was direct, personal
almsgiving to de Soto that he even opposed the use of a servant as an intermediary
(Callahan, p. 5, n. 18). It should be noted, however, that most Spanish welfare
reformers supported some limitation on public mendicity; even Loyola had per-
suaded the council of his home town of Azpeitia in 15 35 to eliminate public beg-
ging and encourage the moral reformation of the poor (Martz, pp. 2, 14-15).
125
Martz, pp. 25-9.
126
The only point that de Soto lost in the 1565 Poor Law of Philip II related to the
law's requirement that the poor confess and communicate before receiving relief
(Martz, pp. 33-4).
127
Martz, pp. 31-3. Lorenzo de Villevicencio's explicit criticism of Vives is embodied
in his De oeconomia sacra circa pauperum curam a Christo institutam (Paris, 1564).
242 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

for 'suspicious practices and preaching.'128 Later in the century,

when municipalities attempted to confine the poor in beggars' hos-
pitals, their attempts were generally short-lived, partly because of
opposition from conservative theologians to enclosure and limits on
begging.129 Moreover, the relative absence of regular employment
and educational schemes in Spanish poor relief even in the era of
reform so ably described by Linda Martz is striking in comparison
with the welfare systems of countries and municipalities not affected
by the Roman Index and the Tridentine decree. In the New World,
the end of the humanist Zumarraga's Utopian educational schemes
for poor Indians came in the 1550s when the Montufar Inquisition,
in good Dominican fashion, condemned his works 'with the firm
conviction that Zumarraga's Erasmianism was heretical.'130 Not
until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment revived the works of
Vives were any further attempts made by secular Spanish authorities
to limit begging, define the deserving poor, and establish reforming
institutions for the indigent. It is interesting to note that it was a
staunch opponent of the Jesuits, Fabian y Fuero, who in 1781
financed the first Spanish edition of Vives' De Subventione Pauperum
since the sixteenth century, and the pattern subsequently followed
by the Spanish government was that of sixteenth-century Ypres and
Lyon.131
Post-Tridentine Catholic poor relief was thus a return to the
medieval tradition of direct distribution of alms to groups of beggars
in the streets, with the inadvertent result that when Pierre de
l'Estoile visited Rome in 1596 he found that 'the crowds of poor in
the street were so great that one could not pass through,' and in 1607
a traveler reported that 'in Rome one sees only beggars.'132 The
128
Martz, p. 39. Many of the Baeza publications were put on the Index of 1559 by
Inquisitor Fernando Valdes, who called them 'books of contemplation for car-
penters' wives,' underlining the clericalism and the misogyny of the Counter-
Reformation.
129
The great institutional reform of sixteenth-century Spanish relief was hospital
consolidation, which was accompanied by administrative changes allowing stricter
episcopal supervision of charitable institutions (Martz, pp. 34-59, 64, 71-6,
119-58).
130
Richard E. Greenleaf, Zumdrraga and the Mexican Inquisition (Washington, DC,
131
1961), p. 39. Callahan, pp. 3, 8-9.
132
Henry Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe, 1350-1660 (New York,
1971), p. 387. On the decay of sixteenth-century municipal charity in France, see
Emmanuel Chill, 'Religion and Mendicity in Seventeenth Century France,' Inter-
national Review of Social History, VII(1960), 400-25, pp. 403-4. An exception to this
rule is found in Venice, where humanist innovations survived the Tridentine
period, no doubt in part because of traditional Venetian anti-papalism. Even here,
however, begging was not entirely eliminated: see Brian Pullan, 'Catholics and the
Poor,' p. 24, and Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp.
363, 369-71.
 The conservative reaction 243
severity of the problem finally demanded of Catholics some attempt
at a new solution, and lest secular princes and magistrates return in
desperation to the lay-administered Vivesian scheme, the church
finally recognized the need to adopt those humanist institutions
which could both control the proliferation of the poor and be easily
modified and overseen by the clerical hierarchy.133 The campaign to
eliminate begging thus found sponsors like Carlo Borromeo, Arch-
bishop of Milan, and many Jesuits returned to their founder's
opposition to begging.134 The solution which was appropriated,
moreover, was the workhouse. However the Counter-Reformation
version of this institution was not the reform-oriented combination
of school and manufactory described by Vives, but a quasi-penal
structure in which the poor could be confined and controlled, and
from which in some cases they could beg, although only under
strict supervision.
An anonymous Memoire concernant les pauvres qu'on appelle enfermes
(1617), together with the writings produced by the Company of the
Holy Sacrament to establish the pattern for the hopitaux generaux of
seventeenth-century France, are representative of what became
Counter-Reformation poor relief theory.135 The members of the
Company of the Holy Sacrament, a powerful, secret group of devout
laymen and priests founded in the 1620s by St Frangois de Sales and
Pierre Berulle, were responsible for most of what are in fact the
relatively few works of Tridentine social thought providing any
detail at all on the structure, intent, and administration of relief
institutions.136 The distinctive features of the ideal hopital general or
133
The response of secular magistrates in Catholic Europe seems in fact to have been
brutally repressive, with the exception of the humanist-inspired municipal relief
programs which had managed to survive Tridentine oppression. See I. A. A.
Thompson, 'A Map of Crime in Sixteenth Century Spain,' Economic History Review,
2ndSer., 21 (1969), 244-67, p. 245; Maria Jimenez Salas, Historia dela asistencia social
inEspana (Madrid, 1958), pp. 127,139; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, tr.
Richard Howard (New York, 1965), pp. 38-64 (on the royal Hopital General of
Paris, pp. 46-7); Solomon, p. 33.
134
Pullan, 'Catholics and the Poor,' p. 24.
135
The Memoire is included in Archives Curieuses de I'histoire de France, ed. M. L. Climber
andF. Danjou (Paris, 1837) I erSerie, 15, pp. 248-69. The Annalesde la Compagniedu
St-Sacrement, collected in the seventeenth century by Comte Rene de Voyer
d'Argenson, have been edited by H. Beauchet-Filleau (Marseille, 1900); the
Company's plan for Toulouse, L'Aumone Generale, is reproduced in A. August, La
Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement a Toulouse (Paris, 1913), pp. 47-59.
136
While St Francois de Sales was heavily involved in the administration of ecclesias-
tical charity,his views on the subject must be deduced from the documents of the
company of the Holy Sacrament, since his major treatises, the Treatise on the Love of
God, tr. Henry Benedict Mackey (Westminster, Md, 1949), and the Introduction a la
Vie devote (1608), ed. Robert Morel (Haute Provence, 1963), have little to say about
poverty (beyond a commendation of voluntary poverty and of contentment with
involuntary poverty in the Introduction, pp. 186-95), and less to say about charity
244 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

hbtel-dieu described in their schemes and the Memoire, in comparison

with the system proposed by Christian humanists, are strict epis-
copal oversight, the enforcement of religious asceticism on inmates,
and the application of a punitive discipline to all the poor, whatever
the nature and causes of their poverty. The seventeenth-century de-
vots emphasized the effects, not the sources, of destitution, and
addressed themselves not to changing social institutions which con-
tributed to poverty, but to isolating the poor from society. The
theory of the hopitaux generaux, as of the contemporary hospicios of
Spain, saw internment and repression as the only way to address the
poverty problem, and order was linked with asceticism imposed
from above.137 Accordingly, while the humanist scheme for Rouen
had encouraged relief of the poor at home in 15 34, by the early
seventeenth century the assumption of clerics and laymen alike was
that forcible incarceration of the poor was the only way to impose
order.138 The Memoire demanded incarceration of the poor in ateliers,
where they were to be subjected to 'harsh, vexatious, and difficult
employments' designed to chasten them.139 As a result, the general
hospitals established under post-Tridentine ecclesiastical auspices
have been described as 'prisonsdespauvres,''institutions repressives? 'fun-
damentally disciplinarian and penal in spirit,' differing from
medieval institutions in their harsh demands upon the poor and in
their 'bureaucratic rationality.'140
The Annales specified that charity was to be provided not by the
secular government, but by ecclesiastical agencies, and only when

(other than the approval of direct, personal benevolence given in the Introduction,
p. 191). St Vincent de Paul, another member of the company, wrote voluminous
letters of advice to the missionaries and charitable societies administering
poorhouses and foundling homes in mid-seventeenth-century France; however, it
is significant that these letters focus to a much greater extent on the missionaries'
spiritual status and attitudes toward the poor they served, and on their religious re-
sponsibilities toward inmates, than on plans to reform and rehabilitate the poor
and idle: e.g., Correspondance, Entretiens, Documents, ed. Pierre Coste, 14 vols (Paris,
1925), vol. 9, pp. 5, 249, 253, 593; vol. 10, pp. 679-80; vol. 11, pp. 32, 381-4, 392;
voL 12, pp. 74,87,470,473; voL 13, pp. 761-820 (instructions to the Dames de la
Charite of the Paris Hotel-Dieu).
137
Memoire, passim; Annales, passim; Chill, pp. 400-25; cf. Solomon, p. 12, and Foucault,
p. 62. The hospicios of Tridentine Spain were ecclesiastically dominated and were
openly admitted, even by advocates of confinement of the poor, to be penal in
nature, toward both able-bodied idlers and the truly impotent poor (Callahan,
p. 15).
138
Jean-Pierre Gutton, La Societe et lespauvres: L'exemple de la generalite de Lyon, 1534-
1789 (Paris, 1971), pp. 295-6, 298-9, 305-6, 314. Internment of the poor began at
Rouen in 1613 and in Lyon in 1614, based on a plan of 1591.
139
Memoire, p. 248. The ultimate objective of the Company for the poor, according to
Gutton, was the 'desolation des ames,' and their methods became steadily more
punitive after the 1640 s: Lyon, pp. 324-5.
 The conservative reaction 245
141
* the interest of religion' would thereby be served. That the interest
of religion was not necessarily that of the poor themselves was all too
evident in the Spanish hospicios where the clerical staff were so busy
saying masses for the dead that the inmates were deprived of all
priestly services; in France, even in the theory of Vincent de Paul the
same priorities are reflected- 'The Daughters of the Hotel-Dieu,' he
said, 'have as their endfirst their own perfection &n&then the relief of
the sick.'142 The nature of that'interest of religion' is further clarified
in the plans developed by the devots for the treatment of the
recipients of charity. Brian Pullan has argued that while protestants
changed the monastery into a hospital or a school, Tridentine
Catholics extended monasticism and imposed it on the poor under
the oversight of those lay brother- and sisterhoods, 'clerically
inspired and bent on self-sanctification.'143 According to the Annales,
the poor were to be forcibly incarcerated in order to subject them to
strict church oversight and control. Inmates of an hopital, whether
rogues or bonspauvres, were to be subjected to a rigorous time and
work regimen, frequent prayers and masses- ceremonial reinforcers
of ecclesiastical authority - and the regular exercise of harsh dis-
cipline.144 In France as in Spain, the work which went on in the
workhouse was seen as punishment, and in both countries this

140
Chill, pp. 418-19, 421; Gutton, Lyon, pp. 295, 301. In practice, protestant
workhouses doubtless occasionally degenerated into quasi-penal institutions as
well; however, they had to depart from their theoretical foundations in order to do
so. That this was not the case for Catholic hopitaux implies a resultant difference in
the degree, and perhaps in the nature, of actual repression of the poor in prot-
estant and Catholic institutions. Even in an article intended to demonstrate the
continuity between protestant and Catholic welfare reform in the early modern
period, Brian Pullan admits that 'when it came to the correction of the homeless
poor by means of internment, hard labour, corporal punishment, and compulsory
piety, there can have been few English bridewells to compare in scope or scale with
the motley complex of barrack-like hospitals and dungeons controlled by the
governors of Hopital General in seventeenth-century Paris' (Catholics and the
Poor,' p. 19).
141
Annales, pp. 120, 127; cf Robert M. Kingdon, 'Social Welfare in Calvin's Geneva,'
American Historical Review\ 16 (1971), 50-69, p. 66.
142
Conferences of St. Vincent de Paul to the Sisters of Charity, tr. J. Leonard(1938), vol. 3, p.
98 (1655), emphasis mine; Martz, p. 84.
143
Pullan, 'Catholics and the Poor,' pp. 32, 34. He compares the hopital-general of
seventeenth-century France to a 'penal monastery' (p. 32); Gutton, Lyon, p. 296,
compares the children's Hopital de la Trinite in Paris to a convent and notes that
the enfermes had no contact with the outside world; their day was a round of
religious exercises and work.
144
Memoire, pp. 260, 269; L'Aumone Generale, pp. 54, 56; St Vincent de Paul, vol. 11, pp.
381-4 and vol. 12, p. 87; Pullan, 'Catholics and the Poor,' pp. 29-33; Pullan, Rich
and Poor, pp. 362-70; Gutton, Lyon, pp. 295 ff; cf Foucault, pp. 38-64. Foucault
emphasizes that Counter-Reformation theory perceived work as punishment,
askesis (pp. 59-60).
246 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

attitude became more pronounced, the treatment of beggars grew

harsher and punishments were more severe as the seventeenth cen-
tury progressed - 'an expression of the nouvelle vague of Counter-
Reformation charity that permeated much of Catholic Europe/
according to a recent interpreter.145 As for reformation through
education, while instruction in literacy and religious catechism was
recommended by the Company's plan for Toulouse, the reformist
intent of Vives' education schemes for the poor is not visible: the
plan makes no provisions for vocational training, apprenticeship or
other devices to move the poor out of the institution and establish
them as productive members of the community.146 In any case, by
the end of the century, the workshops themselves had disappeared
from the general hospitals, and schools for the poor in France were
few and far between.147 The most negative aspects of the static social
theory of the Middle Ages are evident in the Company's conviction
that, in the words of the Toulouse scheme, 'the poor, who by birth
should serve the rich,' are not susceptible to improvement, whether
by education or by labor discipline, but only to control.148
That control, finally, must be strictly clerical: Vincent de Paul's
preoccupation with priestly oversight of the hopitaux and the women
who frequently ran them is a strikingly recurrent theme of his let-
ters; his goal, like that of the Council of Trent and of other members
of the Company, was ecclesiastical control of the social order in the
145
cf with the Annales and the Memoire Cristobal Perez de Herrera's Amparo despobres
(n.p., 1598), disussed by Martz, pp. 86-7; the quote is from Martz, p. 158.
146
L'Aumbne Generate, pp. 56 etpassim; cf St Vincent de Paul, vol. 10, pp. 381-2, voL 12,
pp. 74, 470, 473.
147
Gutton makes this last observation for France and Venice and points out that
those that did exist frequently admitted paying students to the exclusion of the
poor; neither masters nor parents showed excessive zeal for the admission of poor
children free. He also notes the frequency with which elementary schools
degenerated into Sunday catechism classes (La Societe et les pauvres en Europe,
p. 155).
148
L'Aumone Generate, pp. 48-9 (emphasis mine); cf. Richard C. Trexler, 'Charity and
the Defense of Urban Elites in the Italian Communes,' in The Rich, the Well Born, and
the Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History, e d Frederic Cople Jaher (Urbana,
Illinois, 1973), pp. 64-109, arguing the thesis that sixteenth-century Italian
charity administered by religious confraternities 'aimed at preserving corporate
identification, not at fostering interclass mobility' (p. 69). The innovations pro-
posed by Renaudot to improve the situation of the poor, including the establish-
ment of a job bureau for the unemployed of Paris (the Bureau d'Adresse, founded
with royal approval in 1628), was an exception to the seventeenth-century
Catholic rule. It should be noted, however, that Renaudot was of Huguenot
extraction- he converted to Catholicism in 1625 to facilitate royal acceptance of
his schemes for social improvement- and that the Bureau was a secular institution.
In any case, by 1639 even this progressive plan was transformed into a repressive
institution when registration by the jobless was made mandatory (Solomon, pp.
14-21, 35-52).
 The conservative reaction 247
name of Catholic orthodoxy. It was partly in protest against the con-
finement of the poor by secular authorities that Vincent de Paul
refused the spiritual services of his priests to the Hopital General de
Paris.149 And the confraternities which ran the hospitals of seventeenth-
century France were more closely tied to the administrative struc-
ture and oversight of the church than their early sixteenth-century
counterparts had been.150 But the primacy of the Company's con-
cern with conformity, even at the expense of the poor, is nowhere
more apparent than in their campaign to destroy Huguenot hopitaux,
however desperate the plight of their inmates, in order to combat
heresy.151 In the final analysis, then, the social welfare projects of the
Counter-Reformation for the most part 'obeyed the limits marked
out by the pessimistic spirituality of the . . . Counter Reformation,'
and the Company of the Holy Sacrament was entirely typical in that
its 'bureaucratic, disciplinarian tendency, its passion for religious
decorum, its flair for systematic and rational means derived, not
from new needs or from a rational program or conception of society,
but rather from ascetic impulses turned in a socially repressive direc-
tion and colored by a profound conformism to the existing
order.'152
English protestant conformists did not face the theological di-
lemmas which Christian humanist ideas about poverty and charity
posed for Catholics; therefore, they are frequently found in substan-
tial agreement with puritans on much of their poor relief theory. But
the areas of disagreement reveal the extent to which conformism
had replaced humanist reformism in their social theory; and these
areas of disagreement expanded in direct proportion to Laudian
opposition of individual nonconformity.
Anglicans tended to agree with humanist/puritan ambivalence
toward wealth, but also with the Erasmian denial of sanctity in
poverty. Exceptions can, of course, be found. Laud's close friend
Henry Hammond saw poverty as a clear punishment for sin, and he
viewed ambition and covetousness as less serious sins than did
puritans or humanists.153 But at the same time John Normanton of
149
Gutton, La Societe et les pauvres en Europe, p. 144.
iso p u ll a n > 'Catholics and the Poor,' p. 20; Bossy, 'Counter-Reformation and the
People,' pp. 59-60.
151
Vincent de Paul, voL 2, p. 92; vol. 9, pp. 50, 661; vol. 10, pp. 205, 304, 313; vol. 12,
pp. 377, 387, 393-7. Annales, p. 154. 152 Chill, p. 423.
153
Henry Hammond, Works (Oxford, 1853), voL 1, p. 268; Timothy H. Breen, 'The
Non-Existent Controversy: Puritan and Anglican Attitudes on Work and Wealth,
1600-1640,' CH, 35 (1966), 273-87 (on Hammond, pp. 281, 286-7). Breen notes
that Hammond was 'the only pre-Civil War divine who developed these ideas so
completely' (p. 281).
248 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Caius articulated a view of poverty of which any Counter-Reformation

Catholic would have approved:
Happy. . . were those ancient heroes. . . those ancient fathers of the church
that have been hermits, anchorites, and monastic men that have refused,
scorned, condemned, and trampled on the world, and have given away all to
follow Christ and his disciples . . . Happy were those kings and princes that
have left their glittering palaces for a gloomy and melancholic cell. Amongst
hundreds of examples, that of Charles the fifth is the most eminent.154
Neither Hammond nor Normanton, however, can be described as
typically Anglican on these points. Rather, agreement of Anglicans
and puritans is much more noticeable than their divergence on the
nature of wealth and poverty.155
Anglicans likewise found the humanist distinction between
deserving poor and idle rogues perfectly admissible, and, as has been
argued at length earlier, they sponsored along with their puritan
opponents the poor relief legislation for which puritans have
received so much credit. In this area, however, exceptions to the rule
are more numerous and are perhaps significant demonstrations of
the Anglican tendency to affirm traditional values in defense of
established social order. While many Anglicans shared Robert
Sanderson's harsh attitude toward the undeserving poor, both
Donne and Cosin spoke approvingly of public acts of personal, indis-
criminate charity.156 The ultra-royalist cleric Clement Paman found
merit in almsgiving 'even to the loose and impious,' and Neile was
known to stop his carriage in poor towns to distribute alms to all and
sundry.157 Such acts by clerics and by the well-born naturally tended
to reinforce the essential hierarchy which Anglicans supported, and
clerical approval of them should probably be interpreted in this
light. But the Laudian hierarchy never went so far as to condone
begging itself or to denounce discriminate relief programs; on the

154
Sidney Sussex, Ward MS F, fol. 103v. Normanton also told the Vice-Chancellor's
court that the increase of poverty in the realm was due to the pulling down of mon-
asteries by the Tudor forerunners of the puritans (fol. 194v).
155
Bieen, pass/m; Donne, Sermons, vol. 2, p. 214, vol. 3, pp. 5 3-5 (on the temptations of
riches), 58, 65 (on using wealth for commonwealth), vol. 4, pp. 172 (recommend-
ing mediocrity in material possessions), 189 (on celestial usury), 318 (on causes of
poverty), vol. 5, p. 203 (on luxury); Humphrey Sydenham, The Rich Mans Warning-
peece (1630), pp. 11-18 (citing Seneca and Vives on moderation).
156
Robert Sanderson, XXXIV Sermons (London, 1661), p. 108, 251; cf. Fuller, Works,
ed. G. M. Walter (New York, 1938), vol. 2, p. 154; Lancelot Andrewes, Works
(Oxford, 1854), vol. 5, p. 43. On the other side, Cosin, Works, vol. 1, p. 27; Donne,
Sermons, vol. 5, p. 154.
157
H. Jenkins, Edward Ben/owes (1952), quoting Paman (p. 159); Trevor-Roper,
p. 143.
 The conservative reaction 249
contrary, the weight of their arguments lies on the side of dis-
criminate charity.
Work, too, had value for Anglicans as for humanists and puritans,
although it must be admitted that Laudians expressed less approval
of the equal sanctity of secular and clerical callings than did Eras-
mians. Here, obviously, their tendency to exalt clerical authority as
a means of establishing social order provides the explanation for
their divergence.158 But the difference is one of degree, rather than
kind, and as a means of dealing with the poor, work was advised no
less by Anglicans than by puritans.159
There is perhaps no better illustration of the selective but substan-
tial survival of humanist social ideology in seventeenth-century
Anglicanism than in the joint sponsorship of the Books of Orders of
1630-1 by the most staunchly conformist of the hierarchy and the
most zealous of puritans. The conciliar orders mandated setting on
work for the masterless poor, forced labor for able vagrants, the
apprenticeship of young children and stricter control of alehouses-
all measures which Vives or More or Starkey would approve.160 And
at the county level they were 'generally well enforced. . . and oppo-
sition was fairly small scale' and based on localist resentment of cen-
tralized political authority rather than on rejection of the content of
the Orders.161 While traditionally the Books of Orders have been
seen as part of the Laudian policies of'Thorough,' recent research
reveals that the primary influences on their formulation were the
king's Huguenot physician Sir Theodore de Mayerne and the

158
cf. Sidney Sussex, Ward MS F, fol. 103 v (quoted above) and Sanderson's defense of
ancient monastic retirement from the world (p. 247) with Donne, Sermons, vol. 1, p.
207, vol. 3, pp. 68, 196, 232-4, vol. 4, pp. 160, 272, 304, 318-19. In all fairness to
Sanderson, it should be pointed out that he denounced 'present day monks' with
their 'lean skulls and . . . fat paunches' (p. 247) and strongly upheld the intrinsic
value of productive labor (pp. 239^46).
159
Sanderson, pp. 107, 246, 249, 251; Breen, passim; Sir John Oglander, A Royalist's
Notebook, ed. Francis Bamford (London, 1936), p. 204. C. John Sommerville, 'The
Anti-Puritan Work Ethic,' JBS, 20 (1981), 70-81, has found stronger Anglican
than dissenter support for a Weberian work ethic after 1660; by this time, of
course, puritans had largely given up their vision of social reform in the face of
political defeat, whereas, as Sommerville remarks, Anglicans had developed
theologically in a more semi-pelagian direction and socially into a more self-
conscious, 'denominational' group (pp. 77—8). Sommerville also sees Anglican
development of a work ethic as in part a response to their own perceived failure to
govern society effectively (pp. 80-1).
160
In fact, an official handbook for the magistrates who were to enforce the orders
reprinted much of the Elizabethan legislation on vagrancy and poor relief, part of
which was of course Vivesian in inspiration: Certaine Statutes. . . to be carefully put in
execution by all justices (1630).
161
Clark, English Provincial Society, p. 352.
250 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

zealously puritan Earl of Manchester, Henry Montagu.162 Moreover,

it has been suggested that part of the reason the orders were
relatively well-enforced is that they had already been substantially
implemented in counties like Somerset and Kent and Essex long
before the 1630s.163 In Essex, the orders were most vigorously en-
forced by the Earl of Warwick, Sir Thomas Barrington and Sir
William Masham - all puritans, and all militant Parliamentarians
when the war came. In the Book of Orders, as William Hunt com-
ments, the 'Privy Council merely generalized the techniques that
had been implemented over the previous half-century by parochial,
municipal, and county elites, especially by those of a godly per-
suasion.'164 But if primary credit cannot, after all, be given to Laud
and Wentworth, still their agreement with the tenor of the conciliar
orders at the beginning of the Personal Rule attests to the continued
influence of humanist-inspired reforms even after those in authority
had launched their campaign against many of the most potentially
subversive aspects of Erasmian humanism, such as its criticism of
hereditary nobility and its advocacy of household religion.
Perhaps the most significant Anglican departure from the
sixteenth-century consensus on poor relief is not so much a dis-
agreement with the substance of the consensus as a matter of omis-
sion: the small degree to which the conformist clergy concerned
themselves with the issue at all is a stark contrast to the volumes of
practical advice on wealth and charity preached and published by
puritans. In this area of social theory, as in that of domestic conduct,
most Stuart Anglicans simply had little or nothing to say. Their con-
cerns lay elsewhere - with doctrinal, liturgical and ecclesiological
questions. To preach conformity to orthodox instructions in these
areas would in the Laudian framework do more for social order than
would sermons on social issues. As a result, Laudian theories of poor
relief (with the notable exceptions of Hammond's and Sanderson's)
must be deduced from passing statements in sermons on less practi-
cal topics, and little detail is ever provided of specific proposals for

162
Paul Slack, 'Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577-1631,'
TRHS, 5 th ser., 30 (1980), 1-22, pp. 1, 8, 14.
163
T. G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625-1640 (Oxford, 1961); Clark, p. 351; Hunt,
pp. 248-9.
164
Hunt, pp. 248-50, quote from 250. Hunt goes on to say that the program
envisioned by the Book of Orders 'could never be implemented under the regime
of William Laud. Laud's ecclesiastical policies alienated those very social groups
whose cooperation was essential to the success of Stuart paternalism: ministers,
vestrymen, and noble professors.'
 The conservative reaction 251
165
the relief of poverty or the disciplining of the idle. Frequently,
Anglican sermons which initially appear to concern themselves with
poverty and benevolence turn out to be spiritualizations of the con-
cept of charity. Donne, for example, defined charity in spiritual
terms, and identified the 'best charity' as prayer.166 And when
economic issues arise in private correspondence, advice on the
proper use of wealth is similarly lacking.167 In comparison with Eras-
mian and puritan theory, Anglican poor relief ideas are infrequent
and sparse.
The same generalization applies to a comparison of Anglican with
puritan charitable activities. In actuality, as in theory, the nature and
extent of Anglican participation in poor relief reflects the conform-
ists' pre-eminent concern with ecclesiastical control and doctrinal
uniformity rather than with individual and social reformation.
However generous Archbishop Laud himself was to the poor of his
home town, Laudians generally come off badly in comparison with
non-Laudian benefactors in terms of amounts given to reformist
institutions. Laud's support of apprenticeship programs for poor
children, provisions of work for the able poor, and municipal edu-
cation, might better be explained in terms of his own social origins
and mobility than as an example of Anglican generosity to insti-
tutions designed along humanist lines to improve the prospects of
the poor and unemployed.168 In any case, in analyzing Laud's
attitudes toward poor relief, these personal bequests must be
weighed against his overriding preoccupation with church control of
charitable institutions and against the sort of advice which he gave to
165
Sanderson is in many ways an intermediate figure, difficult to place theologically
as well as ideologically: G. R. Cragg, From Puritanism to the Age ofReason (Cambridge,
1966), pp. 22-9. Examples of Anglican failure to provide any details of briefly men-
tioned welfare plans include Donne, Sermons, vol. 4, p. 272 (on the Virginia plan-
tations as bridewells); Cosin, Works, vol. 2, p. 118; Sydenham, passim.
166
Donne, Sermons, vol. 5, pp. 278-9. McGee's thesis that puritans were more con-
cerned with First Table duties, Anglicans with practical works of piety is difficult
to see in a comparison of Donne and Perkins on poor relief.
167
Laud, writing to Wentworth 24 October 1637 concerning a charge made against
his remarkable economic good fortune in Ireland, reported the king's approval of
his increasing wealth, 'with a profession of much joy, that any of his good servants
should in honourable ways grow and increase in his service.' (Laud, Works, Vol. VI,
p. 509). The opportunity which would have been eagerly seized by More or
Perkins or Greenham to warn against the potential dangers of wealth and exhort
to righteous acquisition and use of riches is pointedly ignored by Laud.
168
The Benefactions of William Laud to the County of Berkshire, ed. John Bruce (1841),
passim, and especially pp. 21-8, 55-66; Laud, Works, vol. 3, p. 220, vol. 4, p. 445, vol.
5, p. 108, vol. 6, pp. 318, 420, 470-1, 578, 586; Trevor-Roper, pp. 340,
341-84.
252 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

Bishop Williams in 1635 permitting a drastic reduction in the pro-

portion of clerical income traditionally regarded as owed to the
poor.169 Certainly other conformists were not as generous as was the
archbishop or as able as were Christian humanists and puritans at
encouraging charitable endeavors by their parishioners: charitable
giving in England fell during the Laudian decade from its early Stuart
peak, and it was not to rise significantly again until the puritan ascent
to power in the Interregnum.170 During that pre-Laudian peak
period, moreover, the majority of charitable donations went to
education and other charities aimed at individual reformation; it was
educational giving which underwent the most marked decline dur-
ing the 1630s, reflecting both the reluctance of puritans to give to
institutions coming increasingly under Laudian control and the de-
emphasis of the Anglican hierarchy on reformist charity.171
The obvious charitable option for benefactors concerned with
religious uniformity consisted in those institutions which sym-
bolized the authority of the hierarchy. A 1619 sermon on charity by
Donne accordingly exhorted the godly to donate to the building of
houses of worship as a means of easing their way to heaven. And in a
list of Cosin's benefactions totalling£3,151, only£366 is designated
for the poor; the majority of the remaining £2,785 was for the
beautification of cathedrals, the construction of other church
buildings and the purchase of altar ornaments.172
Finally, conformist Anglicans diverged from the humanist/
puritan conviction that the poor were to be reformed and equipped
169
Bruce, Benefactions, pp. 22, 26-7; W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660:
A Study ofthe Changing Patterns ofEnglish SocialAspirations(New York, 1959), pp. 1 3 3 -
5 (on attempts by Laudians to centralize control over local relief); Laud, Works, vol.
6, pp. 427-31. Laud concluded his advice to Williams,
as the chargeableness of the times now are, and the many contributions by subsidies to ship-
ping, and otherwise, which the Clergy in those [patristic] ages and places felt not, and the great
difference in housekeeping, between the diet and manner of living in those hotter countries
and these of ours, that it will be best, till it shall please God better to furnish this Church with
means, to leave the Clergy free masters of their own charity, (p. 431)
170
Jordan, pp. 245, 183; H. R. Trevor-Roper, Historical Essays, pp. 127-8; A. L. Beier,
'Poor Relief in Warwickshire 1630-1660,' P&P, 35 (1966), 78-99, p. 83, Table III.
Jordan's failure to take inflation into account weakens the impact of his figures,
but does not invalidate his observation of decline in the 1630s. For criticism of
Jordan's figures, see W. Bittle and R. Lane, 'Inflation and Philanthropy in
England,' EcHR, 29 (1976), 203-10, andD. C Coleman, 'Philanthropy Deflated: A
Comment', EcHR, 31 (1978), 105-28.
171
Jordan, pp. 283—96. Jordan comments that early Stuart donors' 'educational
interests were in large part derived from the humanistic' influence of the
Renaissance (p. 287). Nearly all of the grammar schools established during this
period gave free tuition to poor boys (p. 290).
172
Donne, Sermons, vol. 2, pp. 213, 215-22, 234; Cosin, Works, vol. 1, pp. xxxi-xxxii.
Again, note Anglican stress on First Table duties.
 The conservative reaction 25 3

to be self-supporting, rather than isolated, confined and subjected

to punitive discipline.173 Like the Tridentine hierarchy, they
transformed the theoretical aim of the workhouse from the refor-
mation of the individual to the enforcement of obedience. Henry
Hammond demanded a tough, quasi-penal labor discipline in
workhouses, a position logically required by his view of poverty as
punishment for sin.174 Robert Sanderson exhorted his auditors, 'Let
us harden our hearts against' the idle poor 'and not spare them . .
These ulcers and drones of the Common-wealth are ill worthy of any
honest man's alms, of any good magistrate's protection.' 175 The sen-
timent may not be much of a departure from Vives' or Perkins', but
the language is, and the optimistic humanist assumption that the
idle can be trained in self-discipline and job skills and so reformed is
missing altogether. Rather, 'he that helpeth one of these sturdy
beggars to the stocks and the whip and the house of correction not
only deserveth better of the commonwealth, but doth a work of
greater charity in the sight of God than he that helpeth him with
meat and money and lodging.'176 More significant is the extension of
this attitude to the impotent poor by those in authority during the
Laudian years and after the Restoration. It has been observed that
'rarely was there a hint of sympathy for the poor' in the Caroline
orders, and that during the 1630s, examples can be found of the
poor being persecuted merely because of their indigence, regardless
of its causes.177 Post-Restoration institutions for the poor reflect the
triumph of the conformist position in their de-emphasis on edu-
cation and in the increasingly punitive approach to the poor which
gave late seventeenth-century workhouses the reputation which
survives in popular literature. 178
The conformists' suppression of some of the more innovative
attempts to train and reform the poor can be interpreted as con-
comitant with their assumption that a change in behavior and mode
173
cf. Sydenham's thesis that poverty is to be accepted unquestioningly (p. 19) with
the humanist assumption that it is to be eliminated.
174 175
Hammond, Works, vol. 1, pp. 200, 207, 299. Sanderson, p. 108.
176
Ibid., p. 251; cf p. 107; Barnes, Somerset, pp. 189-90, remarks on the harshness with
which vagrants were repressed during the Personal Rule in that county.
177
Beier, p. 99.
178
Valerie Pearl, 'Puritans and Poor Relief: The London Workhouse, 1649-1660,'
Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford,
1978), p. 230, comments that the workhouses of Middlesex and Westminster,
established in 1664 and 1666 respectively, 'did not operate with the earlier
[puritan] emphasis on education and both were markedly unsuccessful.' The re-
established Corporation of the Poor (1698) added in 1700 a vagrants' wing which
was 'run like a house of correction,' a phenomenon which Pearl comments that she
does not find in the London of the Interregnum.
254 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

of life is neither possible nor the proper concern of the authorities.

In Salisbury, it was the dean and chapter who opposed aldermanic
financing of work for the poor and training for poor children with a
municipal brewhouse; the ecclesiastical authorities held that
poverty is properly controlled by a penal workhouse, and that the
innovations of the lay magistrates were evidence of 'inconformity to
the state government and of puritanism and the like.'179 Under their
increasing influence in the 1630s, the municipal workhouse was
enlarged, the inmates were more strictly segregated from the com-
munity and more harshly disciplined, employment opportunities for
poor children were eliminated, outside relief for those able to con-
tribute toward their own maintenance at home was abolished, and
the idle were routinely whipped when sent to the workhouse, there
4
to be kept as prisoners.' In Laudian Salisbury, as in Tridentine
France and Spain, 'the ambition that outdoor employment and relief
might lead to the gradual abolition of all but minimal poverty was
tacitly abandoned, to be replaced by this quasi-penal incarceration
of the poor.'180

When control and conformity became the order of the day, the
Christian humanist hope for social transformation through individual
reformation was repudiated. The Anglican social order, like the
Tridentine, was a system of enforced obedience to a set of behavioral
and ceremonial expectations imposed from above. Puritanism, con-
tinuing the Erasmian insistence on the rule of individual conscience,
lay self-examination and social analysis based on direct confron-
tation with Scripture, household religious teaching and discipline,
and rational, secular schemes to eliminate poverty through edu-
cation, could only be seen as a threat to the strictly hierarchical, de-
scending authority of the clerical and aristocratic estates. This is not
to deny that there was in early Stuart England a spectrum of opinion
- there were moderate Anglicans interested in social reform, and
there were moderate puritans willing to compromise more or less
with established authority. To have described here the polarities is
not to say that a middle ground did not exist; it is merely an attempt
to clarify the options open to early modern Englishmen concerned
with social order.
By 1640 the polarities were becoming more obvious than the
middle ground, and Englishmen were being confronted with
179
Paul Slack, 'Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597-1666,' in Crisis and Order in
English Towns 1300-1700: Essays in urban history, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack
(Toronto, 1972), 164-203, p. 188. 18° Ibid., p. 192; cf. pp. 186-91.
 The conservative reaction 25 5
demands to ally themselves with one system of social order or the
other. Puritans, who had been left to carry the banner of Erasmian
reformism alone, carried it at last into the Civil War. Having hung in
the balance during the course of that struggle, Erasmian social
theory at last emerged as the dominant approach to order in the
commonwealth. The victory of puritanism in the 1640 s meant the
victory, too, of Erasmian humanism in the area of social reform; the
execution of Laud symbolized the existence at long last of an oppor-
tunity for the Christian humanist social vision to be carried out by
the hotter sort unopposed by the upholders of tradition. Of course,
the rulers of the new commonwealth were faced with political,
religious, and diplomatic problems as well as social ones, so that
their implementation of humanist social theory during the
Interregnum was at best partial and seldom firmly enough established
to weather the storms of the Restoration. But credit must be given to
the enthusiastic endeavors of Parliamentarians and local magis-
trates, preachers and projectors, parents and educators, to realize
the Erasmian Golden Age, or in their terms, the New Jerusalem.
In the order established by victorious puritanism, the spiritualized
household was enjoined by law, not merely idealized by preachers
and presbyters. The 1645 Directory for Public Worship called
newlyweds to be diligent in family Bible-reading and prayer, and in
'watching over and provoking each other to love and good works.'181
Legislation passed under the Protectorate required free consent to
marriage by both parties and ended the sexual double standard, at
least in the eyes of the law.182 The conjugal family unit was to be
indeed the church and commonwealth writ small which Erasmus and
More had envisioned a century and a half earlier; and it was to be
hedged by the stricter legislation against adultery for which puritans
had been agitating for decades: the Adultery Act of 1650 followed
the advice of More and other humanists in making adultery a capital
offense.183
The sobriety of Utopian life and the pietism of Erasmus' Christian
knight were also in effect legislated by puritan Parliaments, in the
name of that same biblicism which had inspired the Christian
humanists. While the Interregnum prohibitions of drunkenness,
gambling, frivolity and extravagant living were not in most cases

181
F&R, voL 1, p. 600; cf. Minutes of the Manchester Presbyterian Classis, ed. W. A. Shaw
(Chetham Society, 1890), pp. 117, 400. 182 F&R, vol. 2, pp. 388, 717.
183
Keith Thomas, 'The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered,'
Puritans and Revolutionaries, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford,
1978), pp. 257-81.
256 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

acknowledged as Erasmian by their authors, the puritans' intellec-

tual debt to the Christian humanist social vision is reflected by the
striking similarities of these laws to those recommended by Erasmus
to Charles V, by Starkey to Henry VIII, and by Bucer to Edward
VI.184 Cromwellian laws against drunkenness and other forms of self-
indulgence were passed not only to eliminate the dishonor to God
which accompanied such activities, but also because they 'do often
produce the ruin of persons and their families' - they were
recognized as secondary causes of poverty.185 Sabbatarian legis-
lation, moreover, was designed not only to encourage worship of
God and regard for First Table duties, but also to subject the poor,
the idle and the frivolous to the moral instructions being meted out
from the pulpit.186 Preaching was encouraged by law as a means
whereby God would be glorified, and in the process, society would
be reformed by persuasion of individual conscience.187
Innovative educational schemes flourished during the Interregnum
as never before. Legal encouragement was given by Parliament to
the foundation of new schools wherein persons of'piety and learn-
ing . . . employ themselves in the education of children in piety and
good literature' and of new, puritan-sponsored universities (Dublin
and Durham) designed to produce both learned ministers and able
public servants.188 Reformers like William Petty, John Dury and
Samuel Hartlib, critical of scholasticism, traditional academic exer-
cises and metaphysics, projected new schools with more practical
curricula.189 Petty's suggestion of 'literary workhouses' for all
children over seven, including the poor, would have delighted Eras-
mus and Vives; he aimed to change a social order in which 'many are
now holding the plough, which might have been made fit to steer the
state.'190 Foundlings in London (girls as well as boys) were routinely
given Bibles and other books, and 8s per annum was spent on each
184
Cromwellian injunctions against drunkenness include F&R, vol. 2, pp. 940-2,
1050, 1132; against gambling, vol. 2, p. 1250; and against plays as encouragers of
vice, vol. 1, pp. 1027, 1070-1071. 'Pastimes' were no more legitimate in puritan
than in humanist eyes (vol. 2, p. 1249); however, recreation per se was not con-
demned: regular days of recreation were established in 1647 (vol. 1, p. 954).
185
F&R, vol. 2, pp. 345, 861.
186
F&R, vol. 1, pp. 420-2; cf vol. 1, pp. 23, 81, and vol. 2, pp. 384-5, 1167. The
ineffectiveness of this legislation is discussed by John Morrill, 'The Church in
England, 1642-9,' Reactions to the English Civil War (New York, 1983), pp.
187
89-109. F&R, vol. 1, p. 830.
188
F&R, vol. 2, p. 345; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and
Reform 1626-1660 (New York, 1975), pp. 224-42.
189
Webster, pp. 199-202, 207-20. Dury's The Reformed School advocated education for
girls as well as boys (Webster, p. 219).
190
William Petty, Advice. . . for Advancement of. . . Learning (London, 1648), p. 4.
 The conservative reaction 257
191
one's education in the 1640s and 1650s. Hartlib's apologetic for
the London Corporation of the Poor explained that the corporation
would take in hand the children of the poor 'to civilize and train
them up, in their books, and so by degrees to trades, that so they may
be fit servants for the Commonwealth'; his aim was thus a far cry
from that of the French devots who merely isolated poor children
from the larger society.192 Pullan's remark following his account of
the pre-occupation of early modern English philanthropy with the
foundation of grammar schools, that 'It is hard to find anything
exactly comparable in sixteenth century Venice,' is a telling com-
ment on the Counter-Reformation's approach to social reform.193
An iconoclastic attitude toward scholasticism prevailed in the
universities during the 1650s, and university reforms under Parlia-
ment and the army 'created conditions favorable to intellectual
experiment' there.194
At the Restoration, Durham University was suppressed, Dublin
and many other projects stillborn, and educational revenues re-
channeled to ecclesiastical uses. The educational workhouses of the
puritan commonwealth were replaced in 1660 by workhouses
'motivated by purely economic considerations, rather than by a
genuine humanitarian belief in the value of education,' and the con-
formist charity schools of the later seventeenth century, 'designed
to instil the basic literacy needed for moral and religious conformi-
ty,' have been described as 'a return to attitudes of the Laudian
period.'195 As noted earlier, those attitudes also diminished the
educational offerings of workhouses and turned them into semi-
penal institutions more akin to the hospicios of Hapsburg Spain than
the training grounds envisioned by Vives.
As for poor relief, puritan reinforcement during the Interregnum
of discrimination between the impotent poor and rogues, of strict
lay oversight of relief, and of ambitious work projects for the idle
and unemployed have been mentioned in an earlier chapter, as has
puritan generosity toward charities aimed at reforming the poor and
equipping them for self-support.196 Puritan workhouses were far

191
Pearl, 'Social Policy in Early Modern London,' in History and Imagination, ed. H.
Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (New York, 1981), 115-31, p. 126.
192
Pearl, 'Puritans and Poor Relief,' p. 219, quoting Londons Charitie (1649), et
passim. 193 Pullan, Rich and Poor, p. 401; cf pp. 401-5.
194 195
Webster, p. 144, cf pp. 129-44, 178-90. Ibid., pp. 244-5.
196
F&R, voL 1, pp. 1042-5, vol. 2, pp. 104-10, 252, 1019-25, 1098; Pearl, 'Puritans
and Poor Relief,'passim, focusing on the puritan-founded Corporation of the Poor;
E. M. Hampson, The Treatment of Poverty in Cambridgeshire, 1597-1834 (Cambridge,
1934), p. 44; Beier, pp. 95-7; see chapter 5 above.
258 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

from the prisons des pauvres of the Company of the Holy Sacrament
residence (or incarceration) was not a prerequisite for assistance,
either for adults or for children, and the objective of work was
vocational rehabilitation so that inmates could hope to become pro-
ductive citizens.197 Pearl has concluded that the London Corpor-
ation of the Poor, a representative puritan institution in the
Interregnum, was 'a pioneering education and workhouse foun-
dation rather than the prison for vagrants into which it was turned by
historians of our own day.'198 Such efforts as these reflect the
Vivesian assumptions which guided puritan legislators, perhaps
unconsciously, and which had been largely absent from or penally
interpreted by their Laudian predecessors, as they would be by their
Restoration successors.199 In addition, while Hill has charged that
'humanitarianism was irrelevant to those who believed in the fixed
decrees/ puritan legislators of the Commonwealth and Protectorate
were responsible for orders to supply the London poor with fuel
during the wartime crisis ('the poor sort of every parish to be first
served, and after the other degrees and ranks of people'), for the
release from prison of debtors unable to pay their creditors, and for
designating portions of the royal estates 'the poors' ground.'200 In
1649, the Council of State formed a committee to 'consider what is
fit to be done for abating the price of corn, and for setting the poor at
work,' and the decision in the same year to drain the Fens professed
as one of its objectives the creation of employment for the poor.201
On a local level, orders for the correction of vagrants and rogues in
Warwickshire aimed at 'positive, preventative measures, and puni-
tive ones took second place.'202 In London, publically-financed wage
supplements to the under-employed were substantial, and managers
made risky investments in public real estate to house the poor, suc-
cessfully raising capital loans from parishioners. It is clear that there
was in fact a 'growing sense of communal responsibility [which] . . .
increased, rather than diminished, in the century of Puritanism.'203

197
Pearl, pp. 221, 224—5. Provision was made for parish pensioners to walk poor
children to the workhouse each morning and home at the end of the day.
198
'Puritans and Poor Relief,' p. 230.
199
Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism (New York, 1964), p. 295, observes that
'serious attempts to set the poor on work were abandoned' after the Restoration,
when state policy 'concentrated on restricting the mobility of labour' instead.
200
Ibid., p. 287. On fuel provisions, F&R, voL 1, p. 303, cf. pp. 304-5, 481-2; on poor
debtors, vol. 2, pp. 240-1, 321-4, 378-9, 582; on common land for the poor, vol. 2,
p. 785.
201
CSPD, 22 November 1649, ed. M. A. E. Green (1875), p. 402; F&R, voL 2, pp.
13O_9. 202 Beier, p. 99. 2O3 Pearl/Social Policy,' pp. 115-31,quote from p.131.
 The conservative reaction 259

In this reforming legislation, in the republican experiment itself,204

in the content of puritan sermons and treatises and in the activities
of puritan householders, can be seen the survival of Christian
humanist social theory in the Interregnum. Undeniably the puritan
Erasmianism of the seventeenth century had undergone significant
sea changes - shifts in emphasis and context sufficient to obscure
considerably its true identity (particularly to historians intent on
saddling puritans with Victorian morality and profiteering). Except
in the area of social thought and textual exegesis, the humanism of
the puritans was indeed altered almost beyond recognition. It was
cluttered with dogmatic quarreling with which Erasmus would have
had little sympathy. It was, in the Interregnum, re-shaped by
millenarianism, which, while not altogether dissimilar to utopianism,
did shift the emphasis in a more exclusive, spiritually elitist direction
than the humanists had had in mind. Carried into battle with the
black and gold of Parliament, the humanist banner wound up waving
over acts of political radicalism and violence which would have
appalled Erasmus and More, and, indeed, most of their Elizabethan
and Jacobean followers. The humanism of seventeenth-century
puritans had also lost Erasmus' elegance of language and urbanity of
wit- no small loss to modern students who find it hard to turn from
the Moriae Encomium to Perkins' sermons.
All this is surely to be expected, for the Erasmian tradition was no
more stagnant than any other intellectual development in history.
By its very nature Christian humanism would manifest itself dif-
ferently in 1650 from in 1520: it was, after all, a set of assumptions
about the nature of man and society which would itself pave the way
for changes scarcely foreseen by its first authors, even in their most
radical visions. Protestantism injected different nuances, and social
conditions and political change reshaped the details of its projected
reforms, but humanism was per se an ethic of change.
The fact remains that even in protestant dress and in the midst of
civil war, the social goal of the hotter sort remained that of Eramsus
and Vives, More and Whitforde, Starkey and Lupset- to transform
medieval social stasis into a progressive, sober, hard-working, dis-
ciplined order. The new order was to be imposed by godly, educated
204
Blair Worden, 'Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution,' in History and
Imagination, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (New York, 1981), pp.
182-200, finds the republicanism of the Interregnum rooted in the classical litera-
ture with which puritans were so familiar. But he sets this classicism in the tradi-
tion of Renaissance humanism (p. 193).
260 CHRISTIAN HUMANISM AND THE PURITAN SOCIAL ORDER

laymen, but imposed not through demands for outward conformity

to authorized ritual and dogma, but through the training of
individual conscience in pious self-control, in an industrious mode
of living for the common good, in the practical morality of the
philosophia Christi. The social order of Erasmus and Perkins was not
secular; it was a sanctification of the seculum. Household and market-
place, political forum and village school were the proper fields of
Christian activity, and it was the hope of Cromwellian magistrates no
less than of Christian humanist educators that biblically-inspired
activism on these fronts would realize Utopia.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

MS NOTEBOOKS OF MEMBERS OF OXFORD

AND CAMBRIDGE COLLEGES1
COLLEGE AUTHOR DATE DESCRIPTION MS LOCATION2/
REFERENCE NO.

Broadgates Hall [Carnsew brothers]3 1573-4 Fragmentary remains PRO/SP46/15

of academic diary
Corpus Christi, John Rainolds 1573-8 Lectures on Aristotle Queen's, Oxford/354
Oxford
Christ Church John Stone 1576-85 Notes on theology, Bodl/Rawl. D.273
sermons and orations,
Scripture, recent
historical events
Christ Church Anthony Parker 1581 Theological notebook BL/Harl. 4048
Brasenose, University Robert Batti 1581-4 Lecture notes; verses; Bodl/Rawl. D.985
College letter book
Christ's, Cambridge Arthur Hildersham 1582-1614 Theological notebook BL/Harl. 3230
[Emmanuel] Anon. 1583-1628 Notes on history and CUL/Gg.1.29
theology
Oriel John Day 1589 Notes on Aristotle Bodl/Rawl. D.274
[Cambridge] Anon. ca. 1590 Greek text of CUL/Add. 6314
Demosthenes with
Latin commentary
Pembroke, Cambridge Anon. Commonplaces; LC 11.164
lecture and
disputation notes
Christ's, Cambridge Samuel Ward 1590 Commonplace book Sidney MS 44
Trinity, Dublin Lucas Challoner 1595-^.1612 Commonplace book TCDMS357
Christ's, Cambridge Samuel Ward 1595-9 Diary (some later Sidney MS 45
entries dated 1601,
1621, 1625, 1629)
University College Alexander Cooke 1596 Theological notebook BL/Harl. 5247
Christ's, Cambridge Samuel Ward 1596-9 Primarily lists of book Sidney Sussex/Ward
loans; logic notes A4
King's, Cambridge Anon. 1597 Commonplace book Bodl/Rawl.
Queens', Cambridge Richard Morton ca. 1600 Notes on natural Home 43
philosophy
[Emmanuel] Anon. ca. 1600 Theology and sermon CUL/Dd.3.85.5
notes
Emmanuel Samuel Ward ca. 1600-10 Theological note- Sidney/Ward B, C, D,
books; notes on E, F, G, H, I
grammar, logic,

261
262 BIBLIOGRAPHY

COLLEGE AUTHOR DATE DESCRIPTION MS LOCATION2/

REFERENCE NO.

history; F and I have

some later entries
(1635-42)
St John's, Oxford [John English] 1601 Commonplace book Bodl/Rawl. D.1423
Trinity, Cambridge Robert Boothe ca. 1605 Aristotelian logic/ BL. Harl. 5 356
physics
Corpus, Oxford Daniel Featly 1606-22 Notes on theology, Bodl/Rawl. D.47
sermons; letter book
Sidney Sussex Samuel Ward ctf.1610-1630 Theological note- Sidney/Ward J, K, L,
books; notes on M, O5
Synod of Dort
Exeter Anon. 1615 Lecture, disputation BL/Harl. 977
and sermon notes;
Scripture commentary
Balliol Thomas Laurence 1615-17 Letter and common- Balliol/438
place book; notes on
ancient authors
[Queen's, Oxford] Edmund Sheapheard 1617 Notes on Aristotle Queen's, Oxford/437
St John's, Cambridge Simonds D'Ewes 1618 Collectanea philosophia BL/Harl. 190
— — 1618 Commonplace book BL/Harl. 182
— — 1619 Aristotelian logic BU Harl. 191
_ _ 1619 Notes on history BL/Harl. 192
Pembroke, Cambridge Alexander Bolde 1620 Commonplaces; St John's, Cambridge/
sermon notes; verses S.34
Oriel [Thomas Kearn] ca. 1620 Commonplace book Bodl/Rawl. D.947
Wadham [Richard Seymes] 1622 Commonplace book; Queen's, Oxford/438
notes on ancient
authors
St John's, Cambridge Simonds D'Ewes 1622-3, 1646 Commonplaces; notes BL/Harl. 186
on history, genealogy
Queen's, Oxford Anon. 1623 Crackenthorpe's Queen's, Oxford/196
Logic
Emmanuel William Sancroft 1620-40 Notes in philosophy; Bodl/Sancroft 25
logic disputation
notes (by both the
later Archbishop
Sancroft and his
uncle)
Trinity, Cambridge Anon. post-1629 Theological St John's, Cambridge/
commonplaces S.18
Emmanuel William Sancroft 1630^0 Commonplaces; Bodl/Sancroft 87
logic notes (the
latter certainly by the
archbishop)
Emmanuel William Sancroft l63O^iOs Letter book; notes on Bodl/Tanner 467
ancient authors
Oriel; Jesus, Oxford Henry Vaughan 1634-9 Commonplace book; St John's, Cambridge/
notes on ancient K.38
history, rhetoric
Pembroke, Cambridge Anon. post-1631 Commonplaces; LC 11.16
ancient authors
Oxford Anon. 1635-6 Commonplace book; St John's, Cambridge/
notes on theology S.44
and Scripture
[Christ Church] Anon. 1635-53 Notebook and letter Bodl/Add. B.I09
book
Balliol Francis Boughley 1637 Disputation notes BL/Harl. 1779
St John's, Cambridge Thomas Baker post 1637 Notes on university BL/Harl. 7033
history
Emmanuel William Bright 1644-61 Sermon and historical CUL/Add. 6160
notes; theological
commonplaces
 Bibliography 263

COLLEGE AUTHOR DATE DESCRIPTION MS LOCATION2/

REFERENCE NO.

Queen's, Oxford Thomas Brathwaite 1642 Theological notes; CUL/Dd.12.57

commonplaces
Trinity, Cambridge Daniel Foote 1646 Aristotelian ethics, BL/Sloane 586
physics
University College [William Johnson] 1650-7 Commonplaces, St John's, Cambridge/
poems, accounts; O.64
notes on ancient
history
Balliol Anon. 1656 Transcription of Balliol/399
Brierwood's Logic
Trinity, Cambridge James Duport 1660 'Rules for Students' O.10A.33
— Isaac Newton 1660 Book list; expenses R4.48d
Pembroke, Cambridge Anon. 1672-3 Sermon and LCIL14
theological notes
Queen's, Oxford Nehemiah Rogers 1675 Aristotelian logic BL/HarL 5043
notes; poems

UNDATED EARLY TO MIDDLE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

STUDENT NOTEBOOKS
COLLEGE AUTHOR DESCRIPTION MS LOCATION/
REFERENCE NO.

Trinity, Cambridge Edward Palmer Massive commonplace book; notes on R.16.6

ancient authors
Anon. Commonplace book, similar to above R16.7
Anon. Commonplace book with Hebrew R.16.8
glossary and pronunciation guide;
Greek grammar
Anon. Commonplace book, similar to R.16.6 R.16.9
Anon. Commonplace book, similar to R.16.6 R.16.10
Edward Palmer Commonplace book, Greek and Latin R.16.11
[Palmer] Commonplace book, frequently citing R.16.12
Ovid and Martial (less Greek than
above)
[Palmer] Commonplace book, heavily Greek R.16.13
Anon. Commonplace book, similar to R.16.13 R.16.14
but in different hand; heavily patristic,
Stoic, indebted to Vives
Anon. Commonplace book, smaller and less R.16.15
neatly kept than R. 16.6-14
Anon. Commonplace book, smaller and less R.16.16
neatly kept than R. 16.6-14
Anon. Commonplace book, similar to R.16.17
R.16.13
Anon. Commonplace book, similar to R.16.6, R.16.18
7, 9, 10
"W. Ga." Philosophical commonplace book, R.16.19
predominantly Aristotelian
Pembroke, Cambridge Nicholas Felton Notes on scholastic metaphysics LC IL56
Pembroke, Cambridge Anon. Verses; notes on the Iliad LC IL11
Pembroke, Cambridge Anon. Theology notebook LC IL12
Pembroke, Cambridge Anon. Transcript of Matthew Wren's LC ILl 33, 134
commentary on Scripture
St John's, Cambridge Anon. Commonplace book St John's,
Cambridge/I. 34
St John's, Cambridge Simonds D'Ewes Theological observations BL/HarL 227
264 BIBLIOGRAPHY

COLLEGE AUTHOR DESCRIPTION MS LOCATION/

REFERENCE NO.

Cambridge Anon. Logic notebook, 'Notae . . . BL/Sloane 600

Burgersdicii'
Cambridge Anon. Aristotelian logic notebook CUIVDd.5.47
(Unknown) Anon. Notes on Aristotle BL/Sloane 1981
(Unknown) Anon. Aristotelian logic notebook BIVLansdowne 797
Balliol [Joseph Buss;ard] Theological commonplace book Balliol/337
Queens', Cambridge [John Eames or Theological commonplace book; Home 41
Thomas sermon notes
Lover ing]

MS NOTEBOOKS FROM NON-ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES

COLLEGE DATE DESCRIPTION MS LOCATION/
REFERENCE NO.

Cagliari ca. 1575-1600 Transcript of Aristotle's Balliol/3227

Logic with Thomistic
commentary
Rome 1623 Notes on scholastic St John's,
philosophy Cambridge/I. 37
Salamanca 1652 Notes on Aristotelian logic CUL/Add. 4359

OTHER MANUSCRIPTS CONSULTED

Part I: Sixteenth Century
MS LOCATION/ AUTHOR DESCRIPTION DATE
REFERENCE NO.

Balliol/354 Richard Hill Commonplace book; family 1518-27

records
BL/Royall7.1.XLIX Thomas Lumley Abstract of Erasmus' Institutes of 1550
a christen prince
BL/RoyallS.CVI Anon. Treatise on poor relief 1531
BL/Royall2.A.I-IV Lady Mary Fitzalan Translations of various Greek
authors
BL/Arundel73 Nicholas Harpsfield Ecclesiastical History to 1522 post-1522
BL/Vespasian F.IIL Catherine Parr Correspondence to Princess
No. 35 Mary regarding Erasmus
BL/Lansdowne 95, [Thomas Smith] Treatise on poor relief 1580
3
Bodleian/Auct S.2.29 John Rainolds Aristotle's De arte dicendi libri 1572-78
tres (Paris, 1562), interleaved in
and bound with MS commen-
tary in Rainolds' hand; pre-
sumably his lectures at Corpus
CUL/Add 7197 Anon. Ridley's sermons, compiled for 1529
a Cambridge scholar
Cambridge U. Booklists from Wills and 1520-1660
 Bibliography 265
MS LOCATION/ AUTHOR DESCRIPTION DATE
REFERENCE NO.

Archives Inventories in Chancellor's

Court Registers
Oxford U. Archives Booklists from Wills and 1527-1653
Inventories in Chancellor's
Court Registers

Part 2: Seventeenth Century

MS LOCATION/ AUTHOR DESCRIPTION DATE
REFERENCE NO.

BL/HarL 118-21 Simonds D'Ewes School notebooks 1615-17

BL/Add 25, 285 Oliver St John Commonplace book
BL/Add 21, 935 Nehemiah Historical notes and 1630-49
Wallington meditations
BL/Add 40883 — Diary 1641-3
CUL/Dd 3.85, 18 Lancelot Andrewes Treatise against re-marriage 1601
after divorce
CUL/Dd 3.85, 10 Anon. Treatise dedicated to
Andrewes
CUL/Dd 3.83, 19 Thomas Gataker Letter of pastoral counsel 1631
CUL/Add 84 John Patrick Book catalogue 1630-50
CUL/Add 6867 John Walker Commonplace and letter book 1632-55
CUL/Add 3102 Anon Book catalogue; the names of ca. 1650
Sir John Hare and Anthony
Thomas appear on the flyleaf
CUL/Add 40(C), 2 Samuel Ward Letter to Ussher 1637
CUL/Add 22 Documents concerning 16th-17thC
university affairs
CUL/CUR6.1 Documents concerning 16th-17th C
religious conflict in Cambridge
CUL/CUR 78 Documents concerning I6th-17th C
religious conflict in Cambridge
CUL/VC Ct 1.49, L8 Vice-Chancellor's court early 17 th C
and Com.Ct 1.18 registers, Cambridge
Lambeth Palace/MS William Rawley Commonplace book 1626-44
2086
Nottingham U. MS, Brilliana Conway Commonplace book 1622
Box 166 (later Harley)
PRO/SP 16/193/91 E. Duncan Letter to Mr Queries concern- 1631
ing a controversy at Corpus
Christi College
St John's, Anon. Catalogue of books given to St
Cambridge/U.5 John's [by Bishop John
Williams?]
St John's, Matthew Robinson Strena Poetica (to his tutor,
Cambridge/0.65 Zachary Cawdrey)
Sidney Sussex/ Anon. Debate between William Ames 1626
WardR and Thomas Gataker on lots.
with letters from Ames to
Samuel Ward and [Matthew]
Stonam
Emmanuel/I.2.27 Richard Holdsworth Directions for students in the 1630s
universities
266 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Notes to Ms Bibliography
1 Order of arrangement is roughly chronological, 1570-1675; notebooks
from continental universities (kept by presumably Catholic English
students) and undated notebooks are listed separately. Notebooks of
fellows and masters of colleges, as well as of undergraduate students,
are included.
2 If other than college listed in first column.
3 Brackets indicate uncertain identification.
4 Classification of the Ward manuscripts is found in Margo Todd, 'The
Samuel Ward Papers at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,' Transactions of
the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1985), 582-92.
5 Listed by manuscript location.
6 This and the foregoing fourteen manuscripts are in early seventeenth-
century hands.
7 Described by R. A. B. Mynor's Catalogue of the MSS ofBalliol College, Oxford
(Oxford, 1963) as by 'A professor in the Jesuit College at Cagliari.'

SELECT P R I N T E D W O R K S
1 Primary sources
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Stationers of Cambridgefrom 1504 to 1699, ed. G. J. Gray and W. M. Palmer,
London, 1915.
Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait,
London, 1911.
The 'Adages' of Erasmus, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, Cambridge, 1964.
Allen, Robert, A Treatise of Christian beneficence, London, 1600.
Ames, William, Conscience with Power and the Cases Thereof, London, 1639.
The Marrow of Theology, trans, and ed. John Eusden, Boston, 1968.
Andrewes, Lancelot, Works, Oxford, 1854.
Annales de la Compagnie du St-Sacrement, ed. H. Beauchet-Filleau, Marseille,
1900.
Aquinas, St Thomas, Summa theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English
Dominican Province, London, 1913-42.
Archives Curieuses de I'histoire de France, ed. M. L. Cimber and F. Danjou,
Paris, 1837.
Arthington, Henry, Provision for the Poore, London, 1597.
Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus, London, 1545.
Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, ed. J. O. Halliwell,
London, 1845.
Bacon, Francis, Works, ed. James Spedding, London, 1868.
Bale, John, Select Works, ed. Henry Christmas, Cambridge, 1849.
Ball, John, The Power of Godliness, London, 1657.
Bancroft, Richard, Dangerous Positions, London, 1593.
 Bibliography 267

Tracts, ed. Albert Peel, Cambridge, 1953.

[Barlow, Thomas], 'A Library for Younger Schollers' Compiled by an English
Scholar-Priest about1655', ed. Alma Dejordy and H. F. Fletcher, Urbana,
Illinois, 1961.
Batty, Bartholomew, The Christian mans Closet, trans. William Lowth,
London, 1581.
Baxter, Richard, The Reformed Pastor, London, 1656.
Christian Directory, London, 1673.
The Catechising of Families, London, 1683.
Autobiography, ed. J. Lloyd Thomas, London, 1931.
Becanus, Martinus, A Treatise of the Judge of Controversies, trans. W. W[ right],
[St Omer], 1619.
Becon, Thomas, The Jewel ofJoy, London, 1560.
Catechism, ed. John Ayre, Cambridge, 1844.
Bedel, Henry, A sermon exhortyng to pitie the poore, London, 1572.
Bedell, William, The ABC. or, the institution of a Christian, Dublin, 1631.
Bellarmine, Robert, De ascensione mentis in Deumper scalas creaturarum. . . A most
learned andpious treatiseframing a ladder whereby our mindes may ascend to God,
Douai, 1616.
Opera Omnia, ed Justin Fevre, Paris, 1870-4.
The Benefactions of William Laud to the County of Berkshire, ed. John Bruce,
London, 1841.
Bolton, Robert, Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences,
London, 1631.
Brierwood, Edward, Elementa logicae, London, 1614.
Bucer, Martin, A Treatise How by the Worde of God, Christian mens Almose ought to
Be distributed, London [1557].
De Regno Christi, trans. Wilhelm Pauck and Paul Larkin in Library of Chris-
tian Classics, vol. 19, Melanchthon and Bucer, Philadelphia, 1969.
Bullinger, Heinrich, The Christen state of Matrimony e, trans. Miles Coverdale,
London, 1541.
Bunny, Edmund, A book of Christian exercise appertaining to Resolution By R.
Parsons, n.p., 1585.
A briefe answer unto those idle quarrels ofR. P. against the late edition of the Reso-
lution, London, 1589.
Calvin, John, Commentary on Seneca's De dementia, trans. Ford Lewis Battles
and Andre Malan Hugo, Leiden, 1969.
Cambridge Transactions during the Puritan Controversies, eds. J. Heywood and T.
Wright, Cambridge, 1854.
Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans, and e d H. J. Schroeder, St
Louis, 1941.
Carpenter, John, A Preparative to Contentation, London, 1597.
Cartwrightiana, ed Albert Peel and Leland H. Carson, London, 1951.
Chaderton, Laurence, An Excellent and godly Sermon. . . preached at Paules Crosse
the xxvi daye of October, An. 1578, London, 1578.
[Cheke, Sir John], The Hurt of Sedicion howe Greveous it is to a Commune Welth,
London, 1549.
268 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cleaver, Robert and J o h n Dod, A Godly Forme of Householde Government,

London, 1598.
Clinton, Elizabeth, The Countess of Lincolns Nurserie, London, 1622.
Colet, John, Enarratio in Primam Epistolam S. Pauli ad Corinthios, trans. J. H.
Lupton, London, 1874.
Collected Works of Erasmus; various editors, Toronto, 1974—
The Colloquies of Erasmus, trans. Craig R. Thompson, Chicago, 1965.
The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 4, Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz andj. H.
Hexter, New Haven, 1965.
The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. F. Rogers, Princeton, 1947.
Cosin, John, Works, ed. John Henry Parker, Oxford, 1843-5.
Crackenthorpe, Richard, Introductio in metaphysicam, Oxford, 1619.
Logicae libri quinque, London, 1622.
Dent, Arthur, Plaine mans Pathway to Heaven, London, 1601.
de Sales, Francois, Treatise on the Love of God, trans. Henry Benedict Mackey,
Westminster, Maryland, 1949.
Introduction a la Vie devote, ed. Robert Morel, Haute Provence, 1963.
Desiderius Erasmus: Christian Humanism and the Reformation, ed. J o h n C. Olin,
Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1973.
D' Ewes, Sir Simonds, TheJournals of all the Parliaments during the Reign of Queen
Elizabeth, London, 1682.
The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, ed. Dorothy M. Meads, London, 1930.
Dod, John, Bathshebaes Instructions to her Sonne Lemuel, London, 1614.
and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Government, London,
1598.
Donne, John, Sermons, ed. G. R Potter and E. M. Simpson, Berkeley,
1957.
The Earl of Strafforde's Letters and Dispatches, ed. William Knowler, Dublin,
1740.
Elyot, Sir Thomas, The Boke Named the Governour (1531), ed. S. E. Lehmberg,
London, 1962.
England in the Reign of King Henry the Eighth, ed. Sidney J. Herrtage,
London, 1878.
Erasmi opuscula, ed. Wallace K. Ferguson, The Hague, 1933.
Erasmus, Desiderius, Apophthegmes, trans. Nicholas Udall, London, 1542.
The Censure and judgement . . . Whyther dyvorsemente betwene man and wyfe
stondeth with the lawe of God, trans. Nycolas Lesse, London, [1550].
Comparation of a vyrgin and a martyr, trans. Thomas Paynell, London,
1537.
Complaint of Peace, trans. Thomas Paynell, London, 1559; Scholars' Fac-
similes, Delmar, New York, 1946.
De Civilitate Morum Puerilium . . . A lytell booke of good manners for chyldren,
trans. Robert Whittington, n.p., 1532.
De Contemptu mundi, trans. Thomas Paynell, London, 1533.
Dicta sapientu . . . Very necessary and profitable for children to lerne
London [1527].
The Education ofa Christian Prince (Institutio Principis Christiani), trans, and ed.
L. K. Born, New York, 1936.
 Bibliography 269
Enchiridion militis Christiani, trans, and ed. Paul Himelick, Bloomington,
Indiana, 1963.
An Exhortation to the diligent studye of scripture, n.p., 1529.
A playne and godly exposytion or declaratio of the comune Crede and of the X.
comaundementes, London, 1533.
The Praise of Folly, trans, and ed. Betty Radice, New York, 1971.
Proverbes or adagies with newe addicions gatheredout of the Chiliades of Erasmus by
Richard Taverner, London, 1539.
A ryght frutefull Epystle devysed by the moste excellent clerke Erasmus in laude and
prayse of matrymony, trans. Richard Taverner, n.p., n.d [1531].
A Sermon . . . in the seconde chaptyre of the Gospell of saynt Johan, n.p., n.d.
Erasmus and Cambridge: The Cambridge Letters of Erasmus, trans, and ed. D. F. S.
Thomson and H. C. Porter, Toronto, 1963.
The Essential Erasmus, trans. John P. Dolan, New York, 1964.
The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente,
London, 1548; Scholars' Facsimiles, Gainesville, Florida, 1975.
Fish, Simon, The Supplication of Beggars, London, 1524.
The Forme andManer of Subvetion or Helpingfor Pore People devysed andpractysed i
the Cytie ofHypres in Flanders (Forma Subventionis Pauperum), trans. William
Marshall, London, 1535.
Forrest, Sir William, Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise, London, 1548.
Fuller, Thomas, Church History, ed. J. S. Brewer, London, 1868.
Works, ed. M. G. Walter, New York, 1938.
A Garden of spirituall Flowers Planted by Ri. Rogers, Will Perkins, Ri. Greenham, M
M, & Geo. Webbe, London, 1610.
Gataker, Thomas, A Good Wife Gods Gift, London, 1623.
Certaine sermons, London, 1637.
Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties, London, 1622.
Greenham, Richard, Workes, London, 1601.
Griffith, Matthew, Pharisaisme and Christianity, London, 1608.
Bethel, London, 1633.
Hall, Joseph, The Honor of the Married Clergie Mayntayned, London, 1620.
Works, Oxford, 1837.
Hamilton, John, Catechism, Edinburgh, 1552.
Hammond, Henry, Sermons, London, 1695.
Works, Oxford, 1853.
Harpsfield, Nicholas, The life and death of Sir Thomas Moore. . . written in the tyme
of Queene Marie, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, London, 1932.
Hill, Robert, The Pathway to Prayer and Pietie, London, 1613.
Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. P. G. Stanwood,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981.
Hull, William, Repentance not to be Repented Of, London, 1612.
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Hutchinson, London, 1822.
Jones, William, A Briefe Exhortation to all men to set their houses in order,
London, 1612.
A pithie & short treatise whereby a godly Christian is directed how to make his last will,
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Keckerman, Bartholomew, Systema Systematum, ed. J. H. Alsted, Hanover,

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 INDEX

adiaphora, 19, 43 authority, hierarchical (see also Great

Adultery Act of 1650, 255 Chain of Being), 176, 178, 180,
Agricola, Rudolph, 63, 66, 67, 81 195, 205, 206, 231
Albertus Magnus, 24, 72 Avila, Juan de, 241-2
Allen, Edmund, 58
Allen, Robert, 159, 163, 164, 165
almsgiving, see charity, poor relief Bacon, Lady Anne, 106
Ames, William, 153, 194 Bacon, Sir Francis, 75, 171
Amiens, 212, 213 Bale, John, 114, 192
angels, 6, 150, 180, 199, 200, 201, Bancroft, Richard, 118, 195, 222
231, 234 Barlow, Thomas, 81, 82, 86
Anglicanism, definition of, 13-15, Barnes, Robert, 58
180 Barrington, Sir Thomas, 250
Anglicans, conformist, 175, 219, Batti, Robert, 63, 65, 66, 71, 261
220-1, 222, 254-5 Batty, Bartholomew, 97, 99, 100,
anticlericalism, 21, 123, 178, 225, 240 105, HO, 111, 112
Aquinas, St Thomas, 23, 66, 67, 122, Baxter, Richard, 12, 13, 100 nl9,
135, 207, 208, 209, 231 104, 105, 194
aristocracy, hereditary (see also Great Becanus, Martinus, 72, 79, 219
Chain of Being), 182-7, 189, 190, Becon, Thomas, 60, 103, 197
195-8, 204, 207,232-3 Beggars Act 1536, 145-6
Aristotle begging, see mendicity
and Great Chain of Being, 207, 232 behavior as determinant of status (see
and property, 132 also conscience), 178, 181, 187,
'purified', 29, 63, 66, 68, 69-71, 188, 190, 192, 195-7
78, 80-2 Bellarmine, Robert, 60, 72^£, 76,
in university curricula, 50, 64, 207, 208, 232
68-71, 80-2, 86, 214 Berulle, Pierre, 243
works: Ethics, 62; Metaphysics, 8 1 ; Beza, Theodore, 59
Oeconomica, 66, 98, 100; Organon, Bible (see also New Testament,
66; Politics, 29, 62, 66, 101; Vulgate)
Rhetoric, 47 n78, 69 and Counter-Reformation, 81, 209,
Arminianism, 10, 11, 15, 202, 221, 214
n42, 224 n53, 225 Geneva, 9 n22
Armstrong, Clement, 35-6 importance of, to protestants, 53,
Ascham, Roger, 42, 60, 86, 93, 216 102-3
n28 interpretation of, 17, 224
Askew, Anne, 114 and New Learning, 61
Augustine, St, 22, 26 n7, 37 n39, H I puritan emphasis on, 24-6, 53, 206,
authority, clerical, 208-9, 217, 218, 207
219-20, 222-5 as source of protestant social
283
284 Index
Bible (cont.) Queen's College, 63, 261
theory, 4, 6, 12, 14, 15 n42, 17, St John's College, 88, 90
94, 97-8, 192 Sidney Sussex College, 72, 262
in university curricula, 51, 81, 85 Trinity College, 72, 80, 81, 83-7,
vernacular translations of, 25, 43 262, 263
biblical languages, 23, 25, 49, 61, 62, Trinity Hall, 58
80, 207, 230 Campion, Edmund, 216
biblicism, 23-6, 29-31, 33, 34, 58, Canisius, Peter, 72
95, 97, 107 Capito, Wolfgang, 57
Bilney, Thomas, 58 Carafa, see Paul IV, Pope
birth as determinant of status {see also Carpenter, John, 234
aristocracy), 181, 187-9, 190, Cartwright, Thomas, 58, 62-3, 73,
196, 232-3 148, 158, 162, 195, 230-1
blasphemy, 13, 32, 89 nl29, 163, 169 Cary, Lucius, see Falkland, Viscount
Bolde, Alexander, 72, 87, 262 Case, John, 55, 69-71
book inventories, 56, 67, 71, 91, 214, Catherine of Aragon, 40
265 Cato, 77, 85, 87, 88, 89
Book of Common Prayer, 15, 99, 238 Cecil, Mildred, 106
nll5 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 57,
Book of Orders 1630-1, 161, 249-50 166
Book of Sports, 227 celibacy {see also marriage, exaltation
Boothe, Robert, 72, 81, 262 of), 96, 98, 214, 235-7, 238
Borromeo, Carlo, 243 ceremonies, 11, 14, 15 n42, 223,
Brahe, Tycho, 90 227-8
Braintree vestry, 199 Chaderton, Laurence, 3, 11, 61, 103
Brathwaite, Thomas, 72, 74, 89, 263 n29, 158, 195
Bridewell, 141, 158, 170 n220 Challoner, Lucas, 65, 261
Brierwood, 79, 81 change, humanist concept of, 181-2,
Bright, William, 75, 88, 149-50, 192
159-60, 161, 197 charity {see also poor relief)
Bruges, poor relief in, 138^£2, 421 benefits of, 159
Bucer, Martin, 43 n63, 57-8, 59, 66, discriminate, 137, 138, 158, 161,
148-9, 156, 159, 167, 196-7, 256 163-6, 168-9
Bullinger, Heinrich, 59, 97, 103 indiscriminate, 119, 121, 134-6,
Bunny, Edmund, 226, 237 144, 159, 164, 165, 239-41,
Bureau d'Adresse, 246 nl48 251-2
Burroughs, Jeremiah, 200 puritan view of, 6, 118-20, 158-60,
163
Cagliari, 264 rationale for, 159, 160-3, 240
Cajetan, 72, 73, 74, 79 secular administration of, 140-1,
calling, see vocation 142, 172-3
Calvin, John, 9 n22, 17, 32, 56, 59, Tridentine view of, 239—40
66 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor),
Calvinism, 4-7, 10, 17, 31, 56, 58, 144,256
157, 179, 196-7, 210, 221 Charles I (King of England), 20-1,
Cambridge, University of 196
Caius College, 76, 90, 118 Cheke, Sir John, 42, 191
Christ's College, 59, 65, 71, 86, 87, children
90, 153, 169, 261 classical literature on, 29 nl8, 87
Clare Hall, 58 education of, as subject of study in
Corpus Christi College, 58, 92 university, 60, 87, 88
Emmanuel College, 66, 72, 75-6, in humanist thought, 30-1, 44,
85, 88, 90, 93, 149-50, 197, 261, 108-10, 112
262 in puritan thought, 105-6, 110, 112
Jesus College, 58 Christian commonwealth, Erasmian
Pembroke College, 66, 67, 72, 76, ideal of, 30, 33, 51-2
87, 262, 264 Christian humanism {see also charity,
Peterhouse, 231 children, crime, family, poor
 Index 285
relief, poverty, women, and common weal, 29, 123-6, 148, 150,
individual humanists), Chapter 2 152, 156, 192
passim commonplace books (see also
attractiveness to protestant notebooks), 53, 63, 82-6, 87, 92, 94
Reformers, 56-9 community of property, 37, 130-2
biblicism of, 23-6, 37 community, puritan sense of, ^>-A,
and classical literature, 26-30, 61 11, 13, 258-9
definition of, 22-3, 30 nl9, 34 Compagnie du St Sacrement, 243,
and education, 38, 40, 43-51 246-7, 258
and exegisis, 23, 25, 60-1, 81 confraternities, 210
influence on government, 41-3 conscience
as intellectual force, 17-21 as final authority, 176-9, 185,
in lay puritan libraries, 93—4 191-2, 193, 194 n53, 195, 199,
opposition to (see also trent), 200, 201, 204-5, 234-5
206-11, 222 as subject to hierarchy, 191-2, 211,
and social structures, 37—41, 190, 219, 234
259-60 consensus (Erasmian)
in university curricula, 54, 58-67, as godly commonwealth, 3, 19-21,
78, 80-2, 84-91 54, 177-8, 179, 184, 192, 193,
and vita activa, 3 3—6 194-5, 203
Chrysostom, St John, 85, 159 on poor relief, 247—54
Church Fathers (see also individuals), demise of, 20-1, 221-3, 250-4
23, 25, 26 n7, 37 n39, 47-8, 49, Contarini, Cardinal, 208-9, 235
85 Conway, Brilliana, see Harley, Lady
Church of England, 10-11 Brilliana (Conway)
Cicero Cooke, Alexander, 59, 60, 67, 261
and humanists, 27-9, 33^4, 65, Cooke, Sir Anthony, 104
131, 150, 163 Copernicus, 90
in university curricula, 58, 60, 62, Cosin, John (Bishop), 107, 224,
63-6, 67, 69, 71, 81, 82, 84-90, 227-8, 238, 248, 252
93,213-14 Counter-Reformation, 206-7, 208-10,
works: De Amicitia, 47; Epistolae, 47; 239^2, 243-7
De Officiis, 17, 27-9, 47, 64, 88, Council of Trent, see Trent
90; De Oratore, 47; De Senectute, Coverdale, Miles, 42, 58, 97, 107
47; Republic, 65; Topics, 62 Crackenthorpe, Richard, 79
Civil War, 3, 4-5, 7, 9, 21, 235, 255, Cranmer, Thomas (Archbishop of
259 Canterbury), 58, 187, 216 n29
Clarke, Mrs Samuel, 106 crime
classics, and humanists (see also causes of, 38-9, 126, 142, 170
individual authors), 16, 22, 23, n221, 182, 193
26-30, 65-7, 98 remedies for, 38-9, 41, 47, 143,
classis 193
Dedham, 166, 168-9, 200 n40 Cromwell, Oliver, 10, 12, 256, 260
Manchester, 104 Cromwell, Thomas, 35-6, 42, 45, 51
Cleaver, Robert, 100, 103, 105, 106, curricula (see also Christian humanism,
108, 112, 115, 116 Erasmus, More, Vives, Neo-
Clement, John, 50 scholasticism, Schoolmen)
clerical authority, 220-2 classical literature in, 62, 63-7, 71,
Clinton, Elizabeth (Countess of 80, 8 1 ^
Lincoln), 110 Cromwellian reform of, 51
Cole, John, 81 grammar school, 88-9
Cole, Thomas, 91 historiography of, 54-6
Colet, John medieval, 62, 73
Grammar, 93 structure of, 62-3
as humanist, 18, 27, 41, 188, 195 tutorial, 63-4, 80, 82-8
and St Paul's School, 34-5, 48-9
colleges, see Cambridge, Oxford Danvers, Lady, 107
colleges de villes, 212-14 Day, John, 63, 66, 61, 261
286 Index

Democritis, 87, 94 humanist concept of, 18, 43-51,

Demosthenes, 47, 62, 77, 86, 88, 94 102-3, 178
Dent, Arthur, 150 Interregnum reform of, 91, 256-7
Denys, John, 71 Laudian view of, 228-9
Dering, Edward, 233 protestant regard for, 53
de Soto, Domingo, 71, 79, 207, 209, as remedy for social ills, 38, 40, 41,
211, 241 45
devotio moderna, 22-23 Edward VI (King of England), 43, 51,
D'Ewes, Sir Simonds 53, 104, 148, 197, 256
notebooks of, 86, 88-9, 159, 262 Edwards, Thomas, 199-200
later life, 92-3, 104-5, 106, 150, Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 99,
154,197-8 126, 195
dialectic (see also Ramus, Ramism), Elizabethan Settlement, 11-12, 13
46-7, 62-3, 70, 72-3, 77, 79, 81, Elyot, Sir Thomas, 36, 42, 48, 55,
86, 88, 89 100, 101, 108, 109, 112
Diogenes, 87, 88 employment schemes, 140-6, 149,
Directory for Public Worship 1645, 166-8, 171, 172
255 English, John, 65, 67, 262
discipline (see also reformation of Epictetus, 87
manners) Erasmus, Desiderius
as antidote for poverty, 126, 127, at Cambridge, 50, 58
137, 142-3, 147, 168 and classics, 26, 70-1
in household, 111-13 domestic theory of, 97-9, 101, 107,
humanist view of, 12-13, 14, 31-2, 109, 110, 116
118, 121, 123, 149 on education, 43-52, 88-9, 228
Discourse of the Common Weal, 35, 40 on idleness, \2?>-A, 130, 139,
divorce (see also Adultery Act), 42, 57 150-1, 173
n9, 58, 99-100 life of, 34 n30, 42
Dod, John, 74, 105, 150, 235 and Luther, 18, 31, n20, 208
domestic conduct theory (see also opposition to (see also Trent),
family), 96-7, 102-3, 193, 235-8, 206-8, 237
255-6 popularity of, 89, 92-4, 225-6
Donne, John and social structures, 38^40, 231
on charity, 248, 251, 252 in university curricula, 60, 61, 66,
on clerical authority, 222, 224, 227 67, 71, 74, 75, 78, 84-91
on conscience, 176-7 and vita activa, 27, 42
on family, 238 and wealth, 128-9, 130, 131-2
on nobility, 232-3 works placed on Index, 20, 206,
spirituality of, 15 n42 208-11, 214, 216-18, 242
Dorislaus, Isaac, 231 works: Adages, 18, 46, 48, 56, 83,
Dome, John, 50 85, 86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 131, 181,
Douai, 216 183, 202, 205, 233; Apophthegmata,
drunkenness, 32, 89 nl29, 123, 125, 56, 86, 93-4; Colloquies, 46, 48,
139, 164^6, 169, 170, 174, 182, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93-4, 110,
194 n52, 202, 226, 255-6 206; De conscribendis epistolis, 86,
Dublin University, 256-7 214; De contemptu mundi, 34 n30,
Duns Scotus, 66, 72, 76-7 210; De copia verborum ac rerum,
Duport, James, 80, 86, 263 44, 64, 206, 210, 214; Enchiridion
Durandus, 72 militis christiani, 17, 18, 24-5, 29,
Durham University, 256-7 30-1, 87, 93-4, 190; Encomium
Dury, John, 256 matrimonii, 206; Institutio principis
Christiani, 46, 86, 184-8; Liber de
education (see also Cambridge, Sarcienda Ecclesia Concordia, 190;
Oxford, curricula, dialectic, De lingua, 85, 86; Moriae Encomium
Jesuits, rhetoric) (In Praise of Folly), 18, 24, 41, 85,
as antidote to poverty, 129, 137-8, 86, 156, 206; Novum Instrumentum
140, 142-3, 149, 153, 169-70, (Greek New Testament), 25, 56,
203 58, 91, 206, 224; Panegyricus, 184
 Index 287

n l 5 ; Paraclesis, 224; Paraphrases, Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke, 203

43, 58, 59 nl8, 187, 224; De n93, 231
pueris, 44, 119; Querelapacts', 42. Grindal, Edmund (Archbishop of
Erastus, Thomas, 90 Canterbury), 57
Essex, 12, 228, 250
Etheridge, George, 216 Hall, Joseph, 221 n43, 233
Euripides, 62, 64, 81, 94 Hammond, Henry, 173, 247, 248,
Exeter, 203 250,253
Harley, Lady Brilliana (Conway), 94,
Falkland, Lettice, 107 106, 108, 111 n62, 154, 198, 265
Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount, 225 Harley, Sir Robert, 92, 93
family (see also domestic conduct Harpsfield, Nicholas 108, 113
theory, marriage, children) Hartlib, Samuel, 168, 256, 257
deference in, 111-12 Harvey, Gabriel, 66, 67
discipline in, 111-13 Henry VIII (King of England), 42, 53,
and education, 44, 96, 102-10 109, 140, 144, 190-1, 256
exaltation of, 5-6, 96, 211, 221, Herbert, George, 173
223 Hermogenes, 62
Laudian view of, 226, 237-8 Hext, Edward, 166
as spiritual entity, 5, 96-7, 100-2, hierarchy of merit, 183, 188-91,
255 198-200, 207
as subject of study in universities, High Commission, 221
84, 87-8 Hildersham, Arthur, 59, 65, 71,153,
Tridentine view of, 235-7 169,261
Felton, Nicholas, 72, 264 Hill, Christopher, 4-7, 10 n25, 26,
Ferrar, Nicholas, 107 88, 119, 152,258
First Table duties, 202, 256 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 106, 107
Fisher, John (Bishop), 58 Holdsworth, Richard, 82, 85-6
Fitzalan, Lady Mary, 94, 264 Holmes, Dorothy, 107
Forma subventione pauperum, 163, 164 holy days, opposition to, 124, 150,
Forrest, Sir William, 40-1, 143 151,182 n9
Francois de Sales, St (see also Homer, 62, 86
Compagnie du St Sacrement), Homilies, Book of (Elizabethan), 107
243 Hooker, Richard, 219, 222, 233
Fulke, William, 68 n48, 201 Hooker, Thomas, 196
Hopital General de Paris, 247
Ganning controversy, 77, 230 hopitaux generaux, lA'b—l
Gardiner, Stephen (Bishop), 185 Horace, 47, 62, 90, 213-14
Gataker, Thomas, 103, 112, 154, 162, hospicios, 244-6
195-6 household (see family)
Geneva, 32 Huguenots, 147, 207, 246 nl48, 247,
German Peasants' Revolt, 188 249
Gibson, John, 228 Hull, William, 202-3
Gouge, William human nature, humanist concept of,
Of Domestical Duties, 92 29-30
domestic theory of, 97, 100, 101, humanism, Erasmian (see Christian
102, 106, 108, 110, 113-15 humanism)
on true nobility, 196 humanism, Italian, 22, 23, 26-7, 30
Gough, John, 151 nl9, 34
Great Chain of Being humanism, Northern (see Christian
affirmation of, 207, 223^, 227, humanism)
230-5 Humphrey, Laurence, 9, 55, 60, 195,
definition of, 6, 179-80, 185 201
humanist repudiation of, 183, 199, Huntingdon, Countess of, 107
200, 219-20 Hutchinson, Lucy, 161-2, 198
Greek, study of, 26-7, 47, 49, 51, 62, Hutton, Matthew (Bishop), 3
68, 74, 80-1, 85, 89 Hyde, Robert, 229
Greenham, Richard, 154, 158 Hyrde, Richard, 94, 108, 110, 116
288 Index

ideas, in history, 19-21 opposition to puritans, 225

idleness (see also unemployment), 6, Laudianism
32-3, 118, 120-1, 122-7, 130, and charity, 251-2
142, 147, 148 n l l 7 , 150, 164-7, and clerical authority, 223-8
170 domestic theory of, 237-8
Independents as puritans, 12 economic policy, 247-54
Index of Prohibited Books, 20, education and, 228-31
209-10, 214, 240, 242 as means of social control, 249
individual access to God, 179, 181, Laurence, Thomas, 90, 262
192 lay literacy as humanist goal (see also
individual responsibility, humanist education), 24-5, 40, 51, 60, 207
view of, 179, 182, 185 lay piety as humanist ideal, 28, 35, 36
industry (see work) Leigh, Dorothy, 104
Inns of Court, 218 l'Estoile, Pierre de, 242
Inquisition, 209, 218, 239, 240, 241, Lily, William, 48, 93
242 Linacre, Thomas, 62
Interregnum, 9, 21, 252, 253 nl78, Livy, 47
257-9 loans, as poor relief (see also usury),
Ipswich, 203 157, 158, 159, 171, 240, 258
Isocrates, 47, 49, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71, Loarte, Gaspar de, 217, 236
76, 77, 81, 84, 88, 89, 94 logic (see dialectic)
Italian Renaissance, 26 Lombard, Peter, 72, 74, 77
Ivie, John, 168, 174 London Corporation of the Poor,
168, 257, 258
James VI and I (King of Scotland and Louvain, 58, 206, 211, 214
England), 195, 222, 229, 231, 232 Loyola, St Ignatius, 208, 212-13, 237,
Jesuits 241 nl24, 243
and clerical control, 214 Lucian, 47, 49, 60
and family, 236-7 Lucretius, 213
and poor relief, 240, 242-3 Lupset, Thomas, 32, 42, 49, 50
role in education, 208, 212-14 Luther, Martin
and women, 235 and Erasmus, 18, 31 n20, 208, 210
writings in university curricula, in university curricula, 66f 85
72-3, 76, 79 Lutton, Jane, 106
Jewel, John, 58, 59, 60 Lyon, 133, 239-40, 242
Jones, William, 103-4, 105, 158, 193
Josselin, Jane, 106 Mainwaring, Roger, 231, 232, 233
Josselin, Ralph, 104, 106 marriage
Juvenal, 60, 85, 90 as companionship, 98-100
exaltation of, 5, 96-8
Keckermann, Bartholomew, 76-7, 79 humanist concept of, 96-7, 98-101,
Ket's Rebellion, 191 156, 185 n20
KnotvEdward, 240, 241 puritan view of, 100, 115, 255
as subject of study in universities,
Lake, Arthur (Bishop), 233 n95 83
Lambeth, 225, 235 Tridentine view of, 237
Langland, William, 121, 122, 135 Marshall, Stephen, 200, 204
Latimer, Hugh (Bishop), 58, 103, Marshall, William, 42, 145
148, 192 Martyr, Peter (see Vermigli)
Laud, William (Archbishop of Mary, Princess, 93-4, 99
Canterbury), 20-1 Masham, Sir William, 250
ascendancy of, 221, 222 Matrimony, Homily on (1562), 99
and church control of charity, Mayerne, Theodore de, 249-50
251-2 Mead, Joseph, 86
and education, 228-31 medieval church, Renaissance view
enforcement of conformity, 20-1, of, 22, 24
223-5, 227, 233-5 medieval curriculum, 50-1, 62
execution of, 3, 244 Medina, Juan de, 72, 79
 Index 289

mediocritas, ideal of, 130, 147, 153, Norfolk, poor relief in, 171-2, 191
154, 157-8, 162 Normanton, John, 76, 118, 247-8
Malanchthon, Philip, 63, 66, 81, 88 Norwich, poor relief in, 164-5, 167
Melville, Andrew, 195 notebooks, student, 56, 59, 63^£, 71,
Memoire concernant les pauvres qu'on 73-4, 262-^i
appelle enfermes, 243, 244 Nowell, Alexander, 58
mendicity, 41, 121-2, 123, 134, 135, nursing, maternal, 87, 109-11
137, 144, 145, 164, 239-42
Mendoza, 72 Oath of Supremacy, 215-16
Mercers Company (St Paul's School), Ockham, William of, 24
35 Oecolampadius, 59, 60, 66
Merchant Adventurers, 227 Orders for the Poor 1579, 168
Meriton, George, 222, 232 Ovid, 47, 84, 85, 87, 89, 213-14
Mexico, 143*, 239 n l l 7 , 242 Oxford Trojans, 49
Middleton, Sir Thomas, 171 Oxford, University of
millenarianism, 259 Balliol College, 90, 231-2, 262
Milton, John, 12, 58, 75 n75, 86-7 Brasenose College, 63, 65, 66, 71,
ministers (see preachers) 261
Molina, Luis de, 72, 79, 207 Christ Church (Cardinal) College,
monarchy, 132, 183, 184 nl5, 186, 50, 60-1, 65, 66-7, 261
190, 200, 207 Corpus Christi College, 55, 58, 67,
monasticism, 24, 34-6, 190, 218, 77, 165, 261, 262
230-2, 234 Magdalen College, 91
Montagu, Henry (Earl of New College, 91
Manchester), 249-50 Oriel College, 63, 67, 77
Montagu, Lady Magdalen, 236, 237 Queen's College, 72, 74, 89, 263
Montaigne, Michel de, 85 St John's College, 65, 87, 88
More, Margaret, 108-9, 110, 215, 216 University College, 59, 60, 63, 65,
n28 66, 67, 71, 91, 261
More, Sir Thomas Wadham College, 81, 89, 262
as humanist, 18, 34, 39^*0, 42, 49,
124, 125, 130-1, 237, 255 Pace, Richard, 42, 88
personal life of, 41, 108, 111, 186 Palmer, Edward, 83, 263
Responsio ad Lutherum, 215-16 Paman, Clement, 248
repudiation of humanism, 215-16 Paris, poor relief in, 145
in university curricula, 60, 66, 75, Paris, University of, 50, 68, 206
78, 87 Parker, Anthony, 61-2, 163, 261
Utopia, 32, 37-8, 41, 71, 88, 93, 94, Parker, Henry, 121, 122, 134-5
99-100, 124, 186, 190, 197, 204, Parliamentarians, 207, 250, 255-6,
215, 233 259
Morrison, Richard, 40, 42-3, 149, Parr, Catherine (Queen of England),
190-1 42, 93^£, 109, 264
Morton, Richard, 63, 261 Parsons, Robert, 208, 216, 217, 218,
Morton, Thomas (Bishop), 232 226, 236, 237, 240
Mulcaster, Richard pastime (see also recreation), 125, 151
Musculus, Wolfgang, 59, 66 Patricke, John (Bishop), 91
Paul IV, Pope (Carafa), 20, 208-9,
Nazianus, Gregory, 85 235
Neile, Richard (Archbishop of York), Pellican, Conrad, 67
226, 229, 248 Perkins, William
Neo-platonism, 27 n9, 179, 183 on conscience, 89, 176-7, 199, 220
Neo-scholasticism, 54, 55, 66, 72-9, domestic theory of, 101, 103-4,
86, 88, 91, 208, 230 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 119, 235
New Learning, 25, 50, 58, 60 economic thought of, 152, 154,
New Testament, Greek (see also under 157, 160, 161, 162, 164-5, 251
Erasmus), 25, 47-8, 83, 91 nl 66
Newnan, Thomas, 76-7 as puritan, 3, 10, 259
nobility (see aristocracy) on vocation, 148, 150, 156, 194
290 Index

Perkins, William (cont.) preaching

in university curricula, 74, 81, 89, importance of humanism for, 64,
90 92
Peter of Spain, 47 as means of reformation, 192, 193,
Petrarch, 60, 66 195
Petty, William, 170, 256 puritan emphasis on, 11, 12, 14,
Philip II (King of Spain), 241 53, 193,256
philosophia Christi, 26, 29-30, 260 repression of, 223, 226-7
Philostratus, 49 as transmission of Christian
Pico della Mirandola, 75 n74 humanism, 53, 93
Pilgrimage of Grace, 190-1 predestinarian theology, 5, 10, 221
Piscator, 81 priesthood of all believers, doctrine
Plato of, 5, 73, 207
Republic29, 131, 133, 234 presbyterianism, 10-11, 12, 233
in university curricula, 47, 62, 64, Preston, John, 10, 74, 196
68, 80, 81, 85, 88, 94 profit, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129 n44,
Plautus, 214 149, 156
Pliny, 62, 65, 87, 89, 98 punishment (see crime)
Plutarch puritanism (see also Bible, charity,
as source for social theory, 27, 29, children, education, family, poor
110, 150 relief, poverty, preaching,
in university curricula, 47, 64-6, women, and individuals)
71, 81, 82, 84^6, 89, 90, 94 and consensus for godly common-
Pocklington, John, 76 wealth, 2-14, 19-21
Pole, Reginald (Cardinal), 208-9, 216, definition of, 9-14, 15 n42, 198
240 historiography of, 1-10, 19
poor laws (see also charity, poor relief, and idleness, 118
poverty) intellectual context of, 16-21
of 1536, 144, 146-7 moderate, 2, 7, 11, 14, 254
of 1547, 146 radical, 2, 3, 4-5, 7, 14, 16, 20, 223,
Caroline, 249 225, 226, 234, 254-5, 259-60
Elizabethan, 5, 145, 165-6, 167-8, and social structures, 54, 228, 234
172-3 in university curricula, 86, 231
medieval, 134 n65, 135 n66 and wealth, 118
poor relief (see also charity, poor laws, Pythagoras
poverty, Spain) as humanist source, 31, 131, 132
during Civil War and Interregnum, in university curricula, 64, 65, 81,
158-9, 257-8 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 194
during Counter-Reformation, 211, n53
242-7
humanist concept of, 58, 133-7, quadrivium, 62
14O^£, 147-8, 164, 173, 221, 223, Quintilian
257-8 Education of the Orator\ 47
secular administration of, 137, 138 theories of, 27, 110
n80, 139-41, 144, 145, 165, 168 in university curricula, 62-3, 65,
Porphyry, 62 66, 81, 82, 84-6, 88-90, 213-14
poverty, (see also charity, poor laws,
poor relief) Rainolds, John, 9, 55, 58, 60, 67, 69,
abolition of, 121, 130, 133 265
humanist theory of, 18, 65, 121, Ramism, 54-5, 56
123, 127, 130 Ramus, Peter
medieval concept of, 122, 133-5, Dialecticae institution es, 63
136 as humanist, 68-72
nature of, 160-3, 174, 239 in university curricula, 67, 81
puritan concept of, 16, 160—3 Randolph, Thomas, 77
as subject of study in universities, Ratcliffe, Jane (of Chester), 106
65, 84, 87-8 Rawley, William, 92
voluntary, 122, 162 reason, 30-1
 Index 291

recreation, 150, 151, 256 nl84 secular vocation, 123, 156

recusants, 216-18, 223 n48, 227 n65 self-improvement, humanist stress
reformation of manners, 3, 7, 16, 18, on, 30-1
33, 178, 193, 2O3^£, 217, 227, Seneca
229 as source for social thought, 27-9,
reformism, consensus on, 16—17, 18, 31 n20, 34, 56 n6, 77, 150, 154,
19 163, 194 n51, 197
regnum Christi, 30, 33, 51-2 in university curricula, 60, 64-5,
Renaissance, northern 17 71, 81-90, 93, 94
republicanism, 3, 132, 184 nl5, 259 works: De dementia, 65; Epistles to
Restoration, 253, 258 Lucilius, 65, 94; Tragedies, 90
Rhenanus, Beatus, 57, 67 separatists, 10 n25, 11
rhetoric, 46-7, 62 Seripando, 240
Robles, Juan de, 241 sermon (see preaching)
Rogers, Daniel, 100, 114 Seton, John, 63, 216
Rogers, John, 59 Seymes, Richard, 81, 89, 262
Rogers, Richard, 152, 158, 163 Sherfield, Henry, 168, 203
Rogerus, Servatius, 50 Sibbes, Richard, 74, 159, 160, 198-9
Rouen, 144, 244 sin, 18
Rudd, John, 64 humanist concept of, 24, 28, 30-1,
Rufinius, 135 33, 38, 43-4
institutional remedies for, 37-9,
Sabbatarianism (see also holy days), 3, 43-5
13, n37, 15 n42, 151 nnl29-31, problem for reformists, 23-4, 28,
193, 227, 256 30-1, 33, 192
St John, Oliver, 59, 154, 230 protestant view of, 18, 214
St Paul's School, 27, 34-5, 48, 92, Six Articles, 43
140 Sixtus V (Pope), 209
Salamanca, University of, 79, 211, Smith, Henry, 195
241 Smith, Richard, 216, 236, 237
Salisbury, social reform in, 166-7, Smith, Sir Thomas, 43, 90, 93, 129,
168, 169, 171, 175, 203, 229, 140
230, 254 social order, search for, 178, 233-5
Sallust, 29 social structure, as cause of individual
Sampson, Thomas, 57-8 failure, 33, 41, 130
Sancroft, William, 72, 88, 90, 262 social theory
Sander, Nicholas, 216, 240 consensus on, 17-18, 54, 94-5,
Sanderson, Robert (Bishop), 79, 81, 173^i, 179
150, 173, 201, 248, 249, 250, 253 humanist, 22-3, 178, 180, 188,
Sandys, Edwin (Bishop), 159 190-2, 197
Sandys, Sir Edwin, 209 puritan, 4r-7, 19, 20, 200, 204-5
Saye and Sele, Lord, 203 n93, 230 transitions in, 20, 175, 177
Scaliger, Joseph, 66, 81 Tridentine, 211
scholasticism (see also Schoolmen) Socrates, 29-30, 68, 81
humanist rejection of, 24, 25, 58, sola scriptura, doctrine of, 73, 207
60 Sophocles, 64, 89, 94
in university curricula, 54, 56, Sorbonne, 68-9, 79, 129, 144, 239
70-1, 72-9, 208, 230 Spain, poor relief in, 144, 210, 211,
Schoolmen 240-2, 244-6
economic ideas of, 132 spirituali, 208-9, 215
Renaissance view of, 22, 58, 60-1, Staple ton, Thomas, 216
66 Starkey, Thomas
in university curricula, 56, 58, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, 36,
60-1, 66, 72, 74, 75, 91, 230 40-1
Scientific Revolution, 5 life at court, 42-3, 256
Scotus, Duns, 24, 49, 51 social theory of, 32-3, 124-5, 126,
Scripta Anglicana, 5 7 129, 140, 186-7, 190, 259
Scripture (see Bible, biblicism) stewardship
292 Index

stewardship of time, 151-2 Vasquez, Fernando, 72, 79, 207

Stock, Richard, 161 Vaughn, Henry, 77, 262
Stoics (see also individuals) Venice, 133, 145, 210, 257
as source for social thought, 22, 23, Vermigli, Peter Martyr, 57, 59, 60,
27-30, 34, 37, 44 n64, 47, 65, 216 n28
98, 153 vernacular Bible, 43, 241
in university curricula, 65 Vice-chancellor's Court, Cambridge,
Stone, John, 50-1, 65, 66-7, 261 64, 76,199-200, 231
Stoughton, John, 93 Villevincencio, Lorenzo de, 241
Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl Vincent de Paul, St, 245, 246-7
of, 228, 229 n71, 250, 251 nl67 Virgil, 47, 62, 84, 85, 86, 87, 213-14
Sturm, Johannes, 67, 68, 81 virtue as sign of true nobility, 6, 180,
Suarez, Francisco, 72, 73, 79, 207, 183-5, 188, 191, 196, 197, 232
231 vita activa, 28, 33-6, 41, 217
Sydenham, John, 106 vita contemplativa, 34-5, 4 1 , 66, 214,
Synod, Provincial, 1648, 104 216-17, 222
Vitoria, Francesco de, 207
Taverner, Richard, 31, 42-3, 98, 131, Vives, Juan Luis
181 Ad sapientiam introduction 94
Tawney-Weber thesis, 4, 118, 249 on Aristotle, 68, 69, 71, 78
nl59 domestic theory of, 99, 101
taxation, 38 educational theory of, 40, 45, 47
Tay, William, 220 humanism of, 18, 25, 34, 36, 41-2
Taylor, Jeremy, 102 Instruction of a Christian Woman, 99,
Ten Articles, 43 108, 109, 110, 112, 116
Terence, 47, 58, 131, 213-14 in Interregnum, 211, 256-9
Thomism (see also Aquinas, Thomas), on poor relief, 41, 138-46, 159,
208-9 165, 169, 172, 239-40, 241, 242
Thucydides, 47 popularity of, 94
Tilney, Edmund, 101-2, 108 De Subventione Pauperum, 125, 242
time, stewardship of, 125, 127, 151, in university curricula, 61, 66, 67,
152 69, 71, 74, 84, 89, 90, 91
Tlatelolco, Mexico, 143 vocation, 33-4, 35, 121, 123-5, 148,
Tolleta, 79 150, 156, 194
Toulouse, 214, 246 Vulgate, 25, 61, 208-9, 214
Toxophilus, 45
Trent, Council of, 20, 77, 79, 175, Walker, John, 76
208-14, 216 nn30 and 33, Wallington, Grace, 106-7
217-20, 235-7, 239, 241 Wallington, Nehemiah, 92, 104-5,
Trinity College, Dublin, 65 149, 152, 154-5, 156-7, 159
trivium, 62 Ward, Mary, 237
Ward, Samuel, lecturer of Ipswich,
unemployment, 138, 139, 140, 161, 149, 153, 201-2
174, 175 Ward, Samuel, Master of Sidney
universities (see also Cambridge, Sussex College, 11, 72, 75-6, 88,
Oxford, curricula) 90, 100 nl9, 118 nl, 158, 195,
Catholic, 79-80, 264 200 n75, 231 n82, 261, 262
humanist thought in, 53-4, 61 Ward, Seth, 81
during Interregnum, 256-7 Warner, William, 58
under Laud, 229-30 Warwickshire, poor relief in, 171
Ussher, James, Archbishop of Watson, Thomas, 216
Armagh wealth
usury, 128, 129 n43, 156, 157 nl61, in humanist thought, 94, 127-32
158, 161, 171 medieval view of, 121
puritan view of, 6, nl6, 118, 152-5,
vagrancy, 124, 134, 145-6, 150, 164, 157-8
167, 168, 169, 249 stewardship of, 133, 137, 147, 151,
Valla, Lorenzo, 49, 71, 81 157-8
Valladolid, 206, 211 Webbe, George, 152-3
 Index 293
welfare reform, Tridentine, 217-18 workhouses, 166-7, 171, 239, 243,
Wentworth, Thomas (see Strafford) 253, 257-8
White, John, 149 Wren, Matthew (Bishop), 90, 226,
Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 104, 197 230, 231, 238
Whitforde, Richard
humanist thought of, 125, 259
Werkefor householders, 108-9, 111, Xenophon
112, 113 Oeconomica, 29
Whitgift, John (Archbishop of source for humanist social theory,
Canterbury), 58, 162, 220-1 16,45
Williams, John (Bishop), 252 in university curricula, 47, 64, 65,
Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal), 42 68, 82, 87, 88, 89, 94
women
conformist Anglican views of, 107, Yates, John
238 Ypres, 41, 126, 130, 137, 141, 142,
in humanist thought, 67, 96-8, 143, 144, 145, 172, 239-40
105-7, 108-10, 113-16
in puritan thought, 5, 96-7, 105-7,
108,113-15 Zabarella, 66, 72, 81
Tridentine view, 235 Zanchius, Jerome, 16
work zelanti, 208-9, 217, 240
humanist view of, 123-7, 143, 144, Zumarraga (Bishop of Mexico), 143,
147-8, 156, 166, 194, 249-50 242
medieval view of, 121, 124, 137, Zurich, 144
148 Zwingli, Ulrich, 56, 59, 66, 194 n51