Reformation, the

The Reformation involved, not simply the reforming of the Church, more especially the Church of Rome, but a radical redefinition of its authority as a spiritual, political, and economic force. The challenges to existing ecclesiastical authority, which ended the supremacy of the Pope in most of Western Europe, and the subsequent controversies were carried on in a highly public fashion, and the tone and register used became increasingly emotive. Initially, the principal participants were Martin Luther, John Calvin, Henry VIII, and John Knox on the one hand, and various Popes on the other, but as the decades passed, affiliations changed and great numbers of polemicists became involved. What had previ- ously been a vocabulary of solidarity split into labels of vilification. Thus terms like abuse, superstition, heresy, idolatry , and abomination , previously the prerogative of the Church, were used indiscriminately by various sects of each other. The entry for Catholics shows how that term itself, the title Pope , and even the name of Rome came to be used in a hostile and abusive fashion. By contrast Protestant , originally used (from 1539) in a limited sense of the German princes and free cities that supported the Reformation, was rapidly espoused by the English campaigners against the Papacy and used in a generally favorable fashion. Initially the language was fairly neutral, but within a few years as the sectarian strife intensified it became so intemperate as to be virtually insane.

Luther’s publication of his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517 provoked a bitter controversy over indulgences. The Pope’s response referred to Luther as “a certain son of iniquity,” “a son of perdition” and—after declaring him a heretic—"a roaring sow of the woods [which] has undertaken to destroy this vineyard, a wild beast [which] wants to devour it" (Hillerbrand 1964, 56, 60, and 80). The powerful imagery is effective in presenting Luther as a destructive lunatic or wild animal. Luther had referred to Henry VIII as “a pig, an ass, a dunghill, the spawn of an adder, a lying buffoon, and fool with a frothing mouth” (Rawson 1991, 298). Another potent metaphor is that of the Plague. When Henry VIII entered the fray in 1521 (prior to his break with Rome) with his treatise Assertio Septem Sacramentum , he denounced “the pest of Martin Luther’s heresy [which] had appeared in Germany and was raging everywhere” (Hillerbrand 1964, 47).

When the Pope would not accede to Henry’s request to divorce Catherine of Aragon, Henry proclaimed the Church of England in 1542 with himself as its head, and demoted the Pope to the status of mere “Bishop of Rome,” an ironic and demeaning title still used in some quarters. The perennial, centuries-old complaint about the Church exporting the money from tithes to Rome led to hostile terms like Rome-runner, Rome-raiker , and Henry Brinklow’s ironic gloss (in 1542) on the Latin form of the Pope’s name: “Papa means pay pay” (1874, 39). The famous Calvinist John Knox was not alone in referring to the Church of Rome as “the Roman harlot” in his History of the Reformation , 1586–1587. In time the vocabulary of prostitution became widely exploited in terms like harlotry, carnality , and fornication . “The Presbyterians called the Independent churches whore,” observed William Erbury, “and the Independents called them whore again; and I say they are all whores together” (Chandos 1971, xxiv). George Buchanan even-handedly condemned “Godles papists, harlat protestantis” in his polemic Chamæleon (1570, 24). More remarkably, in the first recorded use of sodomite two centuries earlier, John Wycliffe applied the term to spiritual corruption: “?at prelatys … ben [are] gostly [spiritual] sodomytis wors þan bodily sodomytis of sodom and gomor” ( Works 1880, 55).

A tone of hysterical detestation becomes increasingly obvious in some of the belligerents. Thomas Harding in his Confutation of Jewel (1565) condemned Luther for bringing to Germany “the poisoned cuppe of his heresies, blasphemies and sathanismes” (II ii 42), using the last word for the first time, to mean “diabolical doctrine.” The extreme controversialist John Bale, Bishop of Ossory in Ireland, went so far in his pamphlet Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe (1543) as to refer to his Catholic opponents as “fylthye whoremongers, murtherers, thieves, raveners, idolatours, lyars, dogges, swyne … and very devyls incar- nate” (Bennett 1952, 73). As the schism increased, so new sects multiplied, invariably given demeaning names. In his polemic The Pulpit Guarded (1651) Thomas Hall listed the more important: “We have many sects now abroad [around]: Ranters, Seekers, Shakers, Quakers and now Creepers” (15).

However, the Reformation also inspired a new rigor in the use of language, especially in relation to the taking of oaths. When Luther was summoned before the Diet of Worms in 1521 and asked to recant, he refused on the grounds of conscience and scriptural authority. Sir Thomas More likewise refused to take the oath recognizing Henry VIII as the Head of the Church of England, for which defiance he was imprisoned and beheaded. At the same time, reformist programs showed an incipient puritanism. In Geneva, Calvin enforced discipline and morals by forbidding dancing, games of cards and dice, as well as severely punishing blasphemy and ribaldry.