How to Hold Your Tongue: John Christopherson’s Plutarch and the Mid-Tudor Politics of Catholic Humanism

If Renaissance humanists pursued eloquence, those who wished to offer their learning and gift of tongues to the powerful did well to convince them of discretion’s part in speaking appositely. Keeping one’s mouth shut, or the disastrous consequences of failing to do so, is richly explored in Euripides’s Bacchae and other plays. The Greek tragedian’s sententious utterances on the subject were drawn upon by Plutarch when he composed his essay ‘On Talkativeness’ (Peri adoleschias / De garrulitate). Erasmus, who translated Euripides before moving on to Plutarch, drew heavily on De garrulitate, as well as the Book of Sirach and the Pauline Epistles, in developing his Lingua (1525). This owed its length, and possibly its popularity, to Erasmus’s disproportionate treatment of the malicious tongue, a reflection of his recent troubles. His prefatory epistle identifies this diseased ‘affliction of the unbridled tongue’ as threatening ‘the total ruin and destruction of the liberal arts, good morals, civic harmony, and the authority of the leaders of the church and the princes of the realm alike’ (Collected Works of Erasmus [CWE] 29: 259-60). Plutarch, in De garrulitate as elsewhere in the Moralia, offered an appeallingly rich and urbane encounter with the works of classical antiquity, especially Greek. Moreover, the length of his moral essays, as with the individual lives in the Vitae Parallelae, made both the more attractive as works to package and present in translation to those of influence who might reflect on the counsel they offered, as well as on the interests of the learned donor. This essay explores the terms in which the English Catholic humanist John Christopherson (d. 1558) offered Plutarch’s De garrulitate to the Catholic princess Mary during the reign of Edward VI.

Christopherson was one of England’s leading Hellenists. In 1546 he migrated from St John’s College, Cambridge to become a founding Fellow of Trinity College. St John’s, home of John Cheke, provided several further leading Hellenists from Cambridge’s ‘Athenian Tribe’, including Trinity’s first master, John Redman, and Robert Pember, Roger Ascham’s teacher of Greek.¹ McConica long ago noted how humanist learning at St John’s—the college of John Fisher—was far from the preserve of the ‘Protestant interest in the English Reformation’, and that although Roger Ascham (like Richard Brandisby, another friend of Christopherson’s from Johnian days) would later gravitate with Cheke towards Protestantism under Edward, he sought sponsorship under Henry primarily from the ‘learned, conservative clergy’ (208). Peter Marshall has noted that even revisionist accounts of Henrician exile focus almost entirely on evangelicals, failing to register the number of Catholics who left the country, and treatments of the Edwardian period tend to continue the trend. Yet the writings in manuscript and print of Catholic humanists produced at home and abroad sustained learned networks around or connecting to Mary, the Catholic magnate, her wider household, and leading religious conservatives. At Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for example, the Reader of Greek and religious conservative John Morwen (Morrenus) offered to his patron William Roper, the husband of Thomas More’s most erudite daughter, Margaret, Latin translations of works of St Basil and St Cyril (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 439). Roper’s daughter Mary was tutored by Morwen and, as will be discussed later, dedicated her Greek learning to the defence of the old faith, as her celebrated grandfather had done (see Hosington). Morwen also translated a collection of Greek saints’ lives and martyrdoms (‘Martyrologii et Menologii ex graece pars quaedam, in qua horum, qui sequuntur Martyrum, vita et mors, continetur’ (London, British Library MS Royal 13.B.x, f. 2^r)). ² In his long and rich letter of dedication to Princess Mary, probably written towards the end of Edward’s reign, he celebrates the translation of the Greek ecclesiastical historian Eusebius by Mary Clarke (f. 4^v), as Mary Roper then was, and her inspiration for his own work. Clarke was seen by Morwen as an influential connection through which to approach Princess Mary, whose household, in which the Mass was...