Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation

Abstract

Responsio ... ad Martinum Lutherum haeresearcham. This was immediately translated into English and German, with editions printed in London, Dresden, Cologne, Cracow, Ingolstadt, Hagenau, Rome, Leipzig and so on. Obviously Luther was embarrassed and angry, and of course he responded to Henry’s Responsio, making matters worse: a lame explanation of his actions was accompanied by a renewal of his initial furious attack from 1521. These are the central documents of the “Second Controversy,” contextualized, edited, translated, and analyzed by Rex. From my point of view, the most interesting one is Henry’s Responsio to Luther’s letter. It is much shorter than Henry’s Assertio septem sacramentorum of 1521, but I daresay more substantive. Here Henry, perhaps with the help of Thomas More, engaged a wide range of Luther’s “heresies,” with extraordinary attention to free will, justification by faith, and so on. Could it be that Henry had read De servo arbitrio? Rex, for his part, seems impressed with Henry’s grasp of the deeper issues. Rex supplements these key texts with some twenty, mostly shorter, ancillary documents. These include prefaces to various editions, prologues, epigraphs, letters of congratulation, commendatory verses, and so on. These are not entirely without interest. For instance, the Archbishop of Mainz’s 1527 letter to Henry just may be the most overwrought, bombastic, grandiloquent Thank You Note ever written! Or, what is one to say about Pope Clement VII’s Preface to the Roman edition, promising Henry “everlasting Glory with God” for writing this? There are, theologically speaking, more substantive attacks on Luther’s “Response” (e.g. Cochlaeus’ “Brief Discussion”), but Rex concedes that at least some of these amount to “tiresome nitpicking” (245). And so the question must be raised: where does one draw the line? For instance, do all three versions of Ortwin Gratius’s “Preface” to the Cologne edition really need to be included in this collection? And more generally, does every Early Modern printed text deserve a critical edition? Finally, I return to my initial puzzlement: has Rex uncovered something new – a “Second Controversy” between Henry VIII and Luther? Or is this at best an angry footnote to the First Controversy, a concluding furious round in a match with nothing much at stake, a final collision between two titans both with huge egos and short attention spans? Call it what you will, we can be grateful to Rex for bringing it to our attention in an elegant and intelligent way, to repeat, by offering us a lucid narrative based on meticulous documentation.