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Miracles in Post-Reformation England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Alexandra Walsham
Alexandra Walsham*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

To speak of miracles in post-Reformation England may seem like something of an oxymoron. The sense of internal contradiction in my title springs from the fact that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ministers consistently maintained that this category of extraordinary events had long since ceased. They did not deny that supernatural acts of this kind had taken place in biblical times. As set down in the books of the Old Testament, God had vouchsafed many wonders to His chosen people, the Hebrews, including the parting of the Red Sea, the raining of manna from heaven, and the metamorphosis of Aaron’s rod into a serpent. Equally, the New Testament recorded the prodigious feats performed by Christ and his apostles to convince the disbelieving Gentiles and Jews: from the raising of Lazarus and the transformation of water into wine at the marriage at Cana to curing lepers of their sores and restoring sight to the blind, not to mention the great mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection. But dozens of sermons and tracts reiterated the precept that God no longer worked wonders above, beyond, or against the settled order and instinct of nature – the standard definition of miracle inherited from the scholastic writings of St Thomas Aquinas. Such special dispensations were the ‘seales and testimonials’ of the Gospel. They had been necessary to sow the first seeds of the faith, to plant the new religion centring on the redemption of mankind by Jesus of Nazareth. But this gift, stressed John Calvin and his disciples, was only of ‘temporary duration’. Miracles were the swaddling bands of the primitive Church, the mother’s milk on which it had been initially weaned. Once the Lord had begun to feed His people on the meat of the Word, he expected them to believe the truth as preached and revealed in Scripture rather than wait for astonishing visible spectacles to be sent down from heaven. Although there was some uncertainty about exactly when such wonders had come to an end, Protestant divines were in general agreement that, as a species, miracles were now extinct. Christians could and should not expect to see such occurrences in the course of their lifetimes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 41: Signs, Wonders, Miracles Representations of Divine Power in the Life of the Church , 2005 , pp. 273 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005

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References

1 Ex. 14, 26–29; Num. 11, 9; Ex. 7, 8–12.

2 See John 11,43–44 and 2, 1–11; Mark 1, 40–42; Matt. 8, 2–4; John 9, 1–7.

3 Aquinas’s views are enshrined in his Summa Theologiae, 1a, q. 110, a. 4. See also 1a, q. 105, a. 6–8. Key passages from his Summa Contra Gentiles are extracted in Richard Swinburne, ed., Miracles (New York and London, 1989), 19–22.

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17 Such arguments are expounded with particular clarity in Sheldon’s Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome (see n. 6 above). For a close study of how the miracles associated with St Dunstan were redefined as diabolical magic and fabricated legends, see Parish, Helen L., ‘“Impudent and Abominable Fictions”: Rewriting Saints’ Lives in the English Reformation’, Sixteenth Century Journal 32 (2001), 45–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the devil as a natural magician, see Clark, Stuart, Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), 161–78 Google Scholar. On the theme of ‘lying wonders’, see also Iliffe, Rob, ‘Lying Wonders and Juggling Tricks: Religion, Nature, and Imposture in Early Modern England’, in Force, James E. and Katz, David S., eds, Everything Connects: in Conference with Richard H. Popkin (Leiden, 1999), 185–209.Google Scholar

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52 Golding, Arthur, A Discourse upon the Earthquake that Hapned throughe this Realme of Englande (London, 1580)Google Scholar, sig. B3V. This tract was incorporated into the official order of prayer issued to appease divine wrath: ‘A godly Admonition for the time present’, in William Keatinge Clay, ed., Liturgical Services: Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, PS 30 (Cambridge, 1847), 572.

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63 Ibid.: Bramford was a mistake for Brentwood.

64 [Nicholas Harpsfield] Alan Cope (pseud.), Dialogi sex (Antwerp, 1573; first publ. 1566), esp. 540–1, 666–8, 680–1, 688. Harpsfield’s comments also referred to miracles mentioned by Luther and other Protestant writers.

65 Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563 edn), 95, 433, 444, 520, 881, 1040, 1355, 1669. A number of these ‘miracles’ were left out of the second and later editions. See also Collinson, Patrick, ‘Truth, Lies and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography’, in Kelley, Donald R. and Sacks, David Harris, eds, The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1997), 37–68, 55–7 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is a complex topic, to which it is impossible to do justice in a single paragraph. I am grateful to Tom Freeman for comments that saved me from a serious lapse of judgement.

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71 Mercurius Politicus, 28 (12–19 December, 1650) and 32 (9–16 January 1650[1]), pr. in Joad Raymond, ed., Making the News: an Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England 1641–1660 (Moreton-in-Marsh and New York, 1993), 182–4, and see Raymond’s commentary on 170–3.

72 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogue on Miracles, 1: 53–5; 2: 60–1, 74; Herolt, Miracles, 22–3; Acta SS Octobris I, 682. See the article by Michael Goodich in this volume, 135–56.

73 A True Relation, sigs A3v-4r. Distinctively Tridentine variations on this theme also survive from seventeenth-century France. See Roger Chartier, ‘The Hanged Woman Miraculously Saved: An Occasionnel’, in idem, ed., The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1989), 59–91. A similar broadsheet about an innocent maiden who survived her hanging near Rheims in 1589 was published in Augsburg: Walter L. Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut 1550–1600: a Pictorial Catalogue, 3 vols (New York, 1975), 3: 1194.

74 Finucane calculates that nine tenths of the late medieval miracles reported were medical: Miracles and Pilgrims, 59.

75 Bailey, Walter, A Briefe Discours of certain Bathes or Medicinall Waters in the Countie of Warwicke neere unto a Village called Newnam Regis ([London?], 1587)Google Scholar, sig. A3V.

76 G. W., Newes out of Cheshire of the New Found Well (London, 1600), sig. Dzv. See also sig. A3V and passim.

77 St[anhope], M[ichael], Newes out of York-shire … (London, 1627), 20 Google Scholar. On the language used to describe cures, see my ‘Reforming the Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England’, in Wood, Diana, ed„ Life and Thought in the Northern Church c.1100- c.1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, SCH.S 12 (Woodbridge, 1999), 227–55, 252.Google Scholar

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88 Cadbury, ed., George Fox’s ‘Book of Miracles’, 5–6 and see plate II. It should be noted that the allegation that such events were ‘miracles’ often came from the early Quakers’ opponents, who sought thereby to discredit them for their presumption. Only retrospectively did Fox and other Friends embrace this categorization. By the end of the century the Quakers were seeking to distance themselves from this aspect of sectarian enthusiasm. See Rosemary Moore’s essay in this volume, 336–45.

89 Welwood, James, A True Relation of the Wonderful Cure of Mary Maillard (London, 1694)Google Scholar. Quotation from the summary in Turner, William, A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences, both of Judgment and Mercy… (London, 1697), 109–10.Google Scholar

90 See A Relation of the Miraculous Cure of Susannah Arch, of a Leprosy and Ptysick (London, 1695)Google Scholar; A Relation of the Miraculous Cure of Mrs Lydia Hills, of A Lameness of Seventeen or Eighteen Years Continuance (2nd edn, London, 1696)Google Scholar. See also the case of a shepherd cured while listening to a sermon at a nonconformist meeting: A True Copy of a Letter of the Miraculous Cure of David Wright (London, 1693[4])Google Scholar.

91 Stubbe, , Miraculous Conformist, 26.Google Scholar

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94 See Westfall, Richard S., Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 1958), 70–105, esp. 85–91, and 203–4.Google Scholar

95 Westfall is convincingly criticized by Burns, R. M., The Great Debate on Miracles: from Joseph Glanville to David Hume (Lewisburg, PA, 1981), esp. 52–7 and 247–51 Google Scholar. The argument is further developed in Harrison, Peter, ‘Newtonian Science, Miracles, and the Laws of Nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995), 531–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and MacIntosh, J.J., ‘Locke and Boyle on Miracles and God’s Existence’, in Hunter, Michael, ed., Robert Boyle Reconsidered (Cambridge, 1994), 193–214 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Turner, , Compleat History, dedicatory epistle. Joseph Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus (London, 1681)Google Scholar is the leading example of the attempt to use witchcraft and other manifestions of the supernatural in support of the existence of God. For the ways in which providentialism developed in the context of advances in natural philosophy, see Winship, Michael P., Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD, 1996), esp. 93–110 Google Scholar; Burns, William E., An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727 (Manchester, 2002), esp. 57–96.Google Scholar

97 Nor was it as original as has often been alleged. R. M. Burns sees it as ‘a tail-end contribution to a flagging debate’ about the miraculous that was initiated by advocates of belief in their perpetuity. He argues that the attack on miracles was ‘a defensive reaction to this development’: Great Debate, quotations at 10 and 12 and see esp. chs 6–8, 131–246. See the essay in this volume by Françoise Deconinck-Brossard, 356–75.

98 Shaw, Jane, Miracles in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, and London, forthcoming)Google Scholar. For a foretaste of her arguments, see eadem, ‘The Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Harries, Richard and Mayr-Harting, Henry, eds, Christianity: Two Thousand Years (Oxford, 2001), 162–91.Google Scholar