Recantation

The formal withdrawal or renunciation of a statement or article of faith, being therefore similar to abjuration, renunciation, or disavowal. Historically the term was used most frequently to mean a public confession of error in religious matters, a sense recorded from the sixteenth century. Although not technically an oath, the publicity surrounding recantation gave it personal endorsement. At the time of the constitutional and religious crisis during the reign of Henry VIII, recantation of Catholicism became a requirement endorsing his authority. Alternatively, in terms of the legislation, “Such offendour … shall be for the firste time admitted to recant and renounce his said errours” (1542–1543, Act 34 and 35 Henry VIII, c. 1 ). The term became particularly associated in the public mind with Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the third and last of the Oxford martyrs, who was burned at the stake on March 21, 1555. There he recanted his previous oaths of conformity to the Catholic Church issued under duress, stretching out his right hand into the fire, saying “forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall be punished therefore” (MacCulloch 1996, 603). As Isaac Disraeli shrewdly observed in 1814: “Recantations usually prove the force of authority rather than the force of conviction” ( Quarrels of Authors 1867, 453). The term has become used generally in many contexts, not all of them serious.