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William Perkins versus William Bishop on the Role of Mary as Mediator

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

W.B. Patterson
W.B. Patterson*
Affiliation:
University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
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Extract

William Perkins and William Bishop, two of the leading spokesmen for their respective religious traditions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, clashed in print over the status of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as a number of other issues. They were formidable adversaries. Perkins, the most widely-read English Protestant theologian of the day, helped to make Cambridge University a centre of Reformed thought and practice. Bishop, an Oxford-trained theologian with extensive experience and associations on the continent, eventually became the first Roman Catholic bishop in England since the death of the last surviving bishop of Mary I’s reign. Though discussions of the Virgin Mary were not major themes in the books of either writer, their views on this subject are significant in showing how the two traditions developed, in competition with each other, during this phase of the long English Reformation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 39: The Church and Mary , 2004 , pp. 249 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 Breward, Ian, ‘The significance of William Perkins’, Journal of Religious History, 4 (1966), 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Breward, Ian, ed., The Work of William Perkins (Appleford, 1970), xiGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of his career and writings, see the Introduction, 3-131.

3 Ibid., 130. Perkins, , Catholico Reformando (1599; Amsterdam, 1624).Google Scholar

4 For editions of his works, see Breward, Work, 613-32. For other treatments of Perkins’s thought, see Paul R. Schaefer, ‘Protestant “scholasticism” at Elizabethan Cambridge: William Perkins and a Reformed theology of the heart’, in Carl R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark, eds., Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle, 1999), 147-64; Bryan D. Spinks, Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, MD, 1999); Richard A. Muller, ‘Perkins’ A Golden Chaine: predestinarian system or schematized Ordo salutis?, Sixteenth Century Journal, 9 (1978), 69-81; Thomas F. Merrill, ed., William Perkins, 1558-1602, English Puritanist: His Pioneer Works on Casuistry (Nieuwkoop, 1966), Introduction, ix-xx; Louis B. Wright, ‘William Perkins: Elizabethan apostle of “practical divinity”’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 3 (1939-40), 171-96.

5 There are two contemporary lives: Thomas Fuller, ‘The Life of Mr Perkins’, in The Holy State (Cambridge, 1642), 88-93; Samuel Clark, ‘The Life of William Perkins’, in The Marrow of Ecclesiastical History (1650), 414-18 (an account heavily dependent on Fuller). See also J. Bass Mullinger’s life of Perkins in DNB, 15:6-9.

6 Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), 125, 127, 401, 426, 434-5. For the question of Perkins’s relation to Puritanism, see Breward, ‘Significance’, 117-20, and Work of William Perkins, Introduction, 4-5, 10-13.

7 Among Perkins’s important works published during his lifetime were Armilla aurea (Cambridge, 1590) - English, A Golden Chaine (1591); The Foundation of Christian Religion (1591); A Case of Conscience (1592); Prophetica (Cambridge, 1592); An Exposition of the Symbole (Cambridge, 1595); A Reformed Catholike (Cambridge, 1597); A Graine of Musterd-seede (1597); and De praedestinatione, modo et ordine (Cambridge, 1598).

8 For Bishop’s career see Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 3rd edn, ed. Philip Bliss, 5 vols (1815-20), 2, cols 356-8, 862; Thompson Cooper in DNB, 2:558-9; Godfrey Anstruther, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales, 1558-1850, 4 vols (Durham, 1969-77), 1:36-9; A.F. Allison, ‘Richard Smith, Richelieu and the French Marriage: the political context of Smith’s appointment as Bishop for England in 1624’, Recusant History, 7 (1964), 148-211, esp. 148-52; and Francis Edwards, Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit, 1546-1610 (St Louis, MO, 1995), 230-8, 248, 254, 256, 262, 265, 276, 354.

9 Patterson, W.B., King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), 314–37.Google Scholar

10 Bishop was succeeded by Richard Smith, appointed by Pope Urban VIII in 1624. He crossed to England in 1625 but retired to France in 1631. It was not until 1685 that another bishop was appointed. See Allison, ‘Richard Smith’, 148, 164, 167-8, 188-9, 193.

11 D.B.P. [William Bishop], A Reformation of a Catholike Deformed (n.p., 1604); The Second Part of the Reformation of a Catholike Deformed (n.p., 1607).

12 Robert Abbot, A Defence of the Reformed Catholicke (1606); The Second Part of the Defence of the Reformed Catholkke (1607). Bishop answered with A Reproofe of M. D. Abbot’s Defence of the Catholike Deformed (n.p., 1608). Abbot’s The True Ancient Roman Catholike: Being an Apology or Covnterproofe against Doctor Bishops Reproofe of the Defence of the Reformed Catholike, The First Part (1611) was answered by Bishop’s A Disproofe of D. Abbot’s Counterproofe against D. Bishops Reproofe of the Defence cfM. Perkins Reformed Catholike (Paris, 1614).

13 Perkins, A Reformed Catholike, Dedication.

14 For reunion proposals in France in the late sixteenth century, see W.B. Patterson, ‘Henry IV and the Huguenot appeal for a return to Poissy’, SCH, 9 (1972), 247-57; idem, ‘Jean de Serres and the politics of religious pacification, 1594-8’, SCH, 12 (1975), 223-44.

15 Perkins, A Reformed Catholike, Dedication.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., title-page.

18 Ibid., 16.

19 Ibid., 23-4.

20 Ibid., 24. For other citations from the fathers, see 89-90 (Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil, and Origen, on justification by faith), 190 (Augustine, on the nature of Christ’s presence in the eucharist), 204 (Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, on sacrifice in the Lord’s Supper), 326 (Augustine and Chrysostom, on confession).

21 Ibid., 243-4.

22 Ibid., 244.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 245. The latter was offered in the bending of the knee, in invocations to them, in the dedication of churches to them, and ‘in pilgrimages vnto their reliques & images’ (245-6).

25 Ibid., 246.

26 Ibid., 248.

27 Ibid., 250.

28 Ibid., 253.

29 Ibid., 256.

30 Ibid., 256-7.

31 Ibid., 258.

32 Ibid., 260-1.

33 Ibid., 328.

34 Ibid., 340.

35 Bishop, A Reformation of a Catholike Deformed, sig. *ivr.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., sig. **ivv.

38 Ibid., sig. ***iir.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid., sig. ***iiv.

41 Bishop, The Second Part, 20.

42 Ibid., 21.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid, 12.

46 Ibid, no.

47 Ibid., 111.

48 Ibid., 122.

49 Ibid., 123.

50 Ibid., 129, 132.

51 Ibid., 139.

52 Ibid., 209.

53 Pelikan, Jaroslav, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT, 1996), 153–63.Google Scholar

54 Wright, A.D., The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (1982), 74, 183, 213, 235, 237, 243, 277.Google Scholar

55 Perkins, William, Problema de Romanae fidei ementito Catholicismo, ed. Ward, Samuel (Cambridge, 1604)Google Scholar. The section on Mary is at 229-31.

56 Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 149.

57 Cf. Questier, M.C., ‘What happened to English Catholicism after the Reformation?’, History, 85 (2000), 28–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alexandra Walsham, The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and “Parish Anglicans” in Early Stuart England’, JEH, 49 (1998), 620-51; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds, Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), Introduction, ix-xx.