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‘Dowting of ye Cupp’: Disbelief about the Eucharist and a Catholic Miracle in Reformation England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2016

Alexandra Walsham
Alexandra Walsham*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
*
*Trinity College, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

This essay is inspired by an intriguing late sixteenth-century Catholic liturgical object, the Bosworth Hall burse. It commemorates a vision of the crucified Christ seen by the missionary priest (and later martyr) John Payne in Douai in 1575, which apparently dispelled a moment of doubt about the real presence in the consecrated eucharist. The incident is situated in the context of the heated Catholic and Protestant controversies about the doctrine of transubstantiation in post-Reformation England and against the backdrop of similar medieval miracles designed to counter disbelief, including the Mass of St Gregory and the miracle of Bolsena of 1263. The essay illuminates the persistence and transformation of anxieties about the sacred in the sixteenth century, considers the part they played in private and public crises of faith, and explores the mechanisms by which they were resolved. It also investigates how the memory of Payne's miraculous vision was crystallized in a material object.

Keywords

miraclesmasseucharistdoubtCatholicism
Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016 , pp. 232 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016 

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References

1 Horne, Ethelbert, ‘The Bosworth Hall Burse’, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 43 (1923), 80Google Scholar–1, 85.

2 On Payne and Gwyn, see Anstruther, Godfrey, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, 1: Elizabethan 1558–1603 (Ware and Durham, 1968), 266Google Scholar–7, 140–1 respectively; Foley, B. C., ‘Bl. John Payne, Seminary Priest and Martyr – 1582’, Essex Recusant 2 (1960), 48–75Google Scholar; Kelly, James E., ‘Conformity, Loyalty and the Jesuit Mission to England of 1580’, in Glaser, Eliane, ed., Religious Tolerance in the Atlantic World: Early Modern and Contemporary Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2014), 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar–70, at 152–6. See also n. 7 below.

3 For Payne's activities after his arrival in England and arrest, see J. H. Pollen, ed., ‘Father Persons’ Memoirs (concluded)’, Miscellanea IV, Catholic Record Society 4 (London, 1907), 1–161, at 39, 47–9.

4 The burse came to Bosworth Hall through the Petre family and was in the possession of Mrs David T. Constable Maxwell in the 1970s, who loaned it to the Leicester Museum between 1949 and 1957. In 1977 it was once again at Bosworth Hall: see Durham, Ushaw College, Bernard Payne Papers, UC/P14/1/24–29. I am grateful to James Kelly for his assistance in facilitating access to this material.

5 See McCue, James F., ‘The Doctrine of Transubstantiation from Berengar through Trent: The Point at Issue’, HThR 61 (1968), 385–430Google Scholar; Macy, Gary, Treasures from the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist (Collegeville, MN, 1999)Google Scholar, especially chs 5, 8; Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, ch. 1.

6 Febvre, Lucien, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, transl. Beatrice Gottleib (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1982)Google Scholar. For recent revisionist work, see Arnold, John H., Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London, 2005), 216Google Scholar–30; Alec Ryrie, ‘Atheism and Faith in Early Modern Britain’ (forthcoming). See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973 edn), 198–206; Wootton, David, ‘Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Modern History 60 (1988), 695–730CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Unbelief in Early Modern Europe’, History Workshop 20 (Autumn 1985), 82–100; Edwards, John, ‘Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450–1500’, P&P 120 (1988), 3–25Google Scholar; Reynolds, Susan, ‘Social Mentalities and the Case of Medieval Scepticism’, TRHS 6th ser. 1 (1991), 21–41Google Scholar.

7 At his trial Payne described his brother as having been ‘a very earnest Protestant’: Allen, William, A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of Twelve Reverend Priests: Father Edmund Campion and his Companions (London, 1908Google Scholar; first publ. 1582), 95.

8 ‘Memoriam fecit mirabilium suorum misericors et miserator Dominus. Quorsum haec? Ecce enim, ut haesitantem multorum parvulorum fidem corroboraret, non reliquit eos sine miraculo. Quod te nullo modo celare debeo, quia sacramentum regis abscondere bonum est, opera autem Dei revelare et confiteri honorificum est. In basilica Sancti Nicolai quae adhaeret templo D. Jacobi, dum quidam ex nostris prima sacra faceret, aderat inter caeteros Anglicanae nostrae societatis oeconomus, vir prudens, gravis, maturus, religiosus; cujus in mentem post primae speciei adorationem cum illa venisset cogitatio, ut si totus Christus in secunda quoque vini speciei contineretur iisdem quoque verbis quibus prima compellari et salutari posse videretur, jamque haeretet potius quam vacillaret, certissime vidit oculis penetrantibus elevatum calicem venerabilem formam quasi nudi hominis. Attonitus novitiate rei valdeque anxius, postquam confessario suo, Societatis vestrae gravissimo viro, id ita esse sanctissime affirmasset homo minime levis aut superstitosus, jamque ipse Alanus tantum habere momenti ad honorem Dei et nostrorum aedificationem existimasset ut palam pro concione declaraverit, tandem ita coeptum est celebrari hoc miraculum ut illius causa in ea ecclesia publice supplicatio fieret et ad populum sermo exhortatorius. Rident ist qui sancta omnia rident, et nisi quod palpari queat nihil volunt credere . . . denique cum Apostolus dicat, Charitas omnia credit; nos quid tentamus Deum ut audiamus, Modicae fidei quare dubitastis?’: Knox, T. F., ed., The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay: And an Appendix of the Unpublished Documents (London, 1878), 311Google Scholar.

9 Ibid.

10 See Wooding, Lucy E. C., Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000), 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar–76. For the Thirty-Nine Articles and their predecessors, the Forty-Two Articles of 1553, see Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1994), 301–2. The black rubric explained that although the eucharist was to be received by communicants kneeling, this did not signify ‘any reall and essencial presence’; the bread and wine remained in ‘styll in theyr verye naturall substaunces, and therefore may not be adored, for that were Idolatrye to be abhorred of all faythfull christians’.

11 Jewel, John, An Apology of the Church of England, ed. Booty, J. E. (Ithaca, NY, 1968)Google Scholar, especially 31–4.

12 Dorman, Thomas, A Proufe of Certeyne Articles in Religion, Denied by M. Juell, Sett Furth in Defence of the Catholyke Beleef therein (Antwerp, 1564)Google Scholar; Rastell, John, A Replie against an Answer (Falselie Intitled) in Defence of the Truth (Antwerp, 1565)Google Scholar; Harding, Thomas, An Answere to Maister Juelles Challenge . . . Augmented with Certaine Quotations and Additions (Antwerp, 1565)Google Scholar, especially fols 50r–71r, 126r–130v, 135v–141v, 161r–162v; A Confutation of a Book Intituled an Apologie of the Church of England (Antwerp, 1565), especially fols 91a–106a; A Rejoinder to M. Jewels Replie against the Sacrifice of the Masse ([Louvain], 1567). For a helpful bibliographical guide to these debates, see Milward, Peter, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (Aldershot, 1977)Google Scholar, ch. 1. For these controversies in their European context, see Wandel, Lee Palmer, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge, 2006)Google Scholar, ch. 5.

13 Sander, Nicholas, The Supper of our Lord Set Foorth according to the Truth of the Gospell and Catholike Faith (Louvain, 1566)Google Scholar; Heskyns, Thomas, The Parliament of Chryste Avouching and Declaring the Enacted and Received Trueth of the Presence of his Bodie and Bloode in the Blessed Sacrament, and of other Articles Concerning the Same (Antwerp, 1566)Google Scholar; Pointz, Robert, Testimonies for the Real Presence of Christes Body and Blood in the Blessed Sacrament of the Aultar Set Foorth at Large (Louvain, 1566)Google Scholar.

14 Nowell, Alexander, A Confutation as wel of M. Dormans Last Boke entituled A Disproufe. &c. as also of D. Sander his Causes of Transubstantiation (London, 1567)Google Scholar, fols 151r–243r; Fulke, William, Heskins, D., Sanders, D., and Rastel, M., Accounted (among their Faction) Three Pillers, and Archpatriarches of the Popish Synagogue (London, 1579Google Scholar).

15 Harding, Confutation, sig. !2r; Pointz, Testimonies, sig. A3v.

16 Possevino, Antonio, A Treatise of the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar, Called the Masse, transl. Thomas Butler (Louvain, 1570)Google Scholar, sig. A5v.

17 Bristow, Richard, A Briefe Treatise of diverse Plaine and Sure Ways to Finde out the Truthe in this Doubtful and Dangerous Time of Heresie in Conteyning Sundry Worthy Motives unto the Catholike Faith, or Considerations to Move a Man to Believe the Catholikes, and not the Heretikes (Antwerp, 1574)Google Scholar, sig.*3r and title page.

18 Pointz, Testimonies, fol. 5v. See also Harding, Answere, fols 126r–130v; Sander, Supper, fols 2r–v, 5v–6v, and bk 4; Heskyns, Parliament, bk 2, ch. 14; bk 3, ch. 8; Nowell, Confutation, especially fols 151r, 155r, 198r; Fulke, D. Heskins, 291.

19 Pointz, Testimonies, fol. 48v; Harding, Answere, fols 130v, 158v–162v.

20 See Sander, Supper, fols 86v–87r; Pointz, Testimonies, fols 10r, 14v; Heskyns, Parliament, sig. Aa1v. For a Protestant response to this point, see Fulke, D. Heskins, 217–22.

21 Pointz, Testimonies, fol. 92r, and see also fols 14v, 15r–16r. For Protestant emphasis on the evidence of the senses in refuting the real presence, see Nowell, Confutation, fol. 183v; Fulke, D. Heskins, 282.

22 Heskyns, Parliament, sigs Rr4r, T4v, M5r.

23 Persons, Robert, A Review of Ten Publike Disputations (St Omer, 1604), 20Google Scholar; see also Questier, Michael C., Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar, ch. 2.

24 On concomitance, see Bynum, Caroline Walker, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011), 208Google Scholar–9, 212–13. For contemporary discussions, see Harding, Answere, fols 50r–71r; Heskyns, Parliament, bk 3, chs 67–8; Fulke, D. Heskins, 302–17, especially 309.

25 For medieval speculations on this point, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, 54–8. Eamon Duffy comments that the custom of elevating the host emerged to counteract the view that the consecration of both elements was incomplete until the words of institution had also been said over the chalice: The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), 95–6. See also Bede Camm's comments on the case: Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Downside Abbey, Bede Camm Papers (Files on the English Martyrs: Payne). The rite used was presumably that prescribed by the Tridentine missal, which had been issued in 1572: see Wandel, Eucharist, 237–9. I am grateful to Catherine Pickstock, Aidan Bellenger and Charlotte Methuen for their advice on this complex issue.

26 I owe this suggestion to Dermot Fenlon; Constable, Giles, ‘Nudus nudum Christum Sequi and Parallel Formulas in the Twelfth Century’, in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Essays Presented to George Huntston Williams on the Occasion of his 68th Birthday, ed. Forrester Church, F. and George, Timothy (Leiden, 1979), 83–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Rubin, Corpus Christi, 108–29. On medieval eucharistic miracles, see Corblet, Jules, Histoire dogmatique, liturgique et archéologique du sacrement de l'eucharistie, 2 vols (Paris, 1885), 1: 447–515Google Scholar; Browe, Peter, Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters (Breslau, 1938)Google Scholar; Snoek, G. J. C., Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist (Leiden, 1995), 310Google Scholar–19. For the story of ‘a priest who felt a doubt in saying the canon and beheld raw flesh’ in Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogue on Miracles (c.1220–35), see Shinners, John, ed., Medieval Popular Religion: A Reader (Peterborough, ON, 1999)Google Scholar, 90. See also Charles Zika, ‘Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in Fifteenth-Century Germany’, P&P 118 (1988), 25–64.

28 Bynum, Caroline Walker, ‘The Blood of Christ in the Later Middle Ages’, ChH 71 (2002), 685–714Google Scholar; eadem, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, PA, 2007), esp. 3–5, 86–90, 138–41; eadem, Christian Materiality, especially 139–45, 157–9, 224. On miracles as a mechanism for dispelling doubt, see also Goodich, Michael E., Miracles and Wonders: The Development of the Concept of Miracle, 1150–1350 (Aldershot, 2007)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

29 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 102–7, at 102.

30 Arnold, John H., ‘The Materiality of Unbelief in Late Medieval England’, in Page, Sophie, ed., The Unorthodox Imagination in Late Medieval Britain (Manchester, 2010), 65–95Google Scholar, at 73.

31 On this miracle, see Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 119, 135, 149, 304 n. 87; eadem, Christian Materiality, 143, 144, 259, 278, 340 n. 62.

32 For an eighth-century image of the ‘doubting matron’, see Heinlen, Michael, ‘An Early Image of a Mass of St Gregory and Devotion to the Holy Blood at Weingarten Abbey’, Gesta 37 (1998), 55–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. de Voragine, Jacobus, The Golden Legend, transl. W. G. Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 1: 179Google Scholar–80.

33 On the Mass of St Gregory, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 238–9; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 308–10. A database relating to the subject can be found at: <http://gregorsmesse.uni-muenster.de>. See also Shestack, Alan, Fifteenth-Century Engravings of Northern Europe from the National Gallery of Art Washington DC (Washington DC, 1968)Google Scholar, nos 213–15. For indulgenced prints of the Mass of St Gregory, see Kamerick, Kathleen, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 (New York, 2002), 169Google Scholar–72; Göttler, Christine, ‘Indulgenced Prints of Saint Gregory's Miraculous Mass’, in eadem, Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (Turnhout, 2010), 31–69Google Scholar. For a late medieval stone relief of the Mass of St Gregory, see Rushforth, G. McN., The Kirham Monument in Paignton Church, Devon: A Study in Mediaeval Iconography and in Particular of the Mass of St Gregory (Exeter, 1927)Google Scholar, especially 21–9 and fig. 1. Caroline Walker Bynum argues that later versions of the image were not designed to explicate the doctrine of transubstantiation or dispel doubt: ‘Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St Gregory in the Fifteenth Century’, in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché, eds, The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 208–40.

34 Göttler, ‘Indulgenced Prints’, 69. I am grateful to Olive Millward and Ellie Jones for their assistance in obtaining a photograph of the Bishop Oldham reredos.

35 See Clark, Stuart, Vanities of the Eyes: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe’, JRH 27 (2003), 143–60.

36 Peter Marshall, ‘Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII’, P&P 178 (2003), 39–73, at 66; The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 6/1: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc’ Hadour and Richard C. Marius (New Haven, CT, and London, 1981), bk 1, chs 9–10, 14–15, at pp. 87–8.

37 Heskyns, Parliament, bk 3, ch. 42, at sig. Ooo6r; Fulke, D. Heskins, 462–7.

38 Bristow, Briefe Treatise, fols 15r–39v, at 16r, 38r–39v; Demaundes to be Proponed of Catholiques to the Heretikes (Antwerp [Douai], 1576), fols 29–32, 35–6.

39 Knox, ed., First and Second Diaries, 311.

40 See my ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England', HistJ 46 (2003), 779–815, especially 805–8. For Protestant mockery of a seventeenth-century miracle involving Robert Persons, in which the host received by an English gentlewoman in Rome turned into a piece of ‘red flesh’, see Gee, John, The Foot out of the Snare (London, 1624)Google Scholar, sigs E4v–F1v.

41 On vestments, see Janet Mayo, A History of Ecclesiastical Dress (London, 1984), ch. 5 and p. 75; Johnstone, Pauline, High Fashion in the Church: The Place of Vestments in the History of Art from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Leeds, 2002)Google Scholar, especially chs 4–5. For evidence of the survival, adaptation and destruction of Catholic vestments, see Pecock, Edward, English Church Furniture, Ornaments and Decorations, at the Period of the Reformation: As Exhibited in a List of the Goods Destroyed in Certain Lincolnshire Churches, AD 1566 (London, 1866)Google Scholar, especially 30, 33, 36, 39, 40–1, 43, 48, 49, 56–7, 66–7, 71, 77, 80–1, 86, 94, 107–8, 119, 131–2, 144, 147, 159, 165.

42 See Virginia C. Raguin, ‘Liturgical Vestments’, in eadem, ed., Catholic Collecting: Catholic Reflection 1538–1850 (Worcester, MA, 2006), 61–8. For Arrowsmith's chest, now preserved at Stonyhurst College, see Whitehead, Maurice, ed., Held in Trust: 2008 Years of Sacred Culture (Cirencester, 2008)Google Scholar, 70–1, also ibid. 80–3; Sophie Holroyd, ‘“Rich Embrodered Churchstuffe”: The Vestments of Helena Wintour’, in Ronald Corthell et al., eds, Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), 73–116; eadem, ‘Embroidered Rhetoric: The Social, Religious and Political Functions of Elite Women's Needlework, c.1560–1630’, 2 vols (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2002), 148–252.

43 Whitehead, ed., Held in Trust, 84–5.

44 Parker, Rosina, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

45 See Kelly, ‘Conformity, Loyalty and the Jesuit Mission’, 152–6.

46 de Molina, Antonio, A Treatise of the Holy Sacrifice of the Masse, and Excellencies Therof, transl. I. R. [John Floyd] ([Saint-Omer], 1623)Google Scholar.

47 Virginia C. Raguin, ‘Liturgical Vessels’, in eadem, ed., Catholic Collecting, 49–59, at 53–4.

48 Allen, Briefe Historie, 89–97; Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests (London, 1924 edn), 39–44. Challoner or the manuscript from which he derived this account appears to have mistranslated ‘burse’ as ‘purse’.