Identifying Heresy in Sixteenth-Century England

"I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand." St. Anselm's famous dictum, enunciated in chapter 1 of the Proslogion, can be regarded as a structuring rule of orthodoxy in the centuries during which the principle and practice of doctrinal uniformity was embedding itself more securely across western Christendom. The period between the mid-tenth and mid-thirteenth centuries—almost exactly mid-pointed by the death of Anselm in 1109—has famously been characterized by the historian Robert Moore as witnessing "the formation of a persecuting society," an era when error was increasingly systematically diagnosed and criminalised as heresy.¹ A desire to reverse the order of priority laid out in Anselm's "faith seeking understanding" was almost the defining characteristic of the heretic. Deriving from the Greek hairesis (meaning choice), heretics were those who supposed they could arrive at the truth through an exercise of their own will, rather than through faithful submission to the teachings of scripture and ecclesiastical authority.²

As countless commentators on Anselm have observed, fides quaerens intellectum was scarcely a slogan of rigid and slavish ecclesiastical obscurantism, or one intended to stifle creative scholastic inquiry; he conceived of faith and learning, it has been suggested, as "harmonious spheres."³ Although a resolute defender of orthodoxy as he understood it, Anselm can hardly be considered among the fathers of the Inquisition. It is significant that in Moore's studies of the "persecuting society" and the "war on heresy," Anselm appears only fleetingly, and then in the posthumous guise of saintly intercessor.⁴ Anselm's most direct personal encounter with an individual he evidently believed to be a heretic was his set of written exchanges over the Trinity with Roscelin of Compiégne. But in this he discreetly avoided naming his opponent.⁵

Nonetheless, the age of Anselm was undoubtedly one increasingly concerned with the enforcement of orthodoxy. That process, moreover, was one in which the diagnostic identification of error proceeded squarely from the top downwards. Moore saw little evidence of the origins of persecution lying in "the unregulated passions or prejudices of the population at large." Rather, it emanated from "established governmental, judicial and social institutions," and the clerics and functionaries who staffed them.⁶ For centuries thereafter, definitions of heresy, like the definitions of orthodoxy to which they were inextricably linked, were the business of the church authorities, a matter for the experts, and certainly not for the untutored laity, who were afforded no formal role in this process. The legal category of the heretic was created only at the moment of formal condemnation after due process in an ecclesiastical court.

The aim of this article is to chart both the moment and the mechanisms of a profound shift in the social dynamics underpinning the categorization of heresy. It concerns itself with the specific case of Anselm's adoptive homeland, the kingdom of England, but similar patterns could probably be identified elsewhere in Europe. The Reformation of the sixteenth century, both in English and other European variants, is often seen as a kind of culmination to processes of state-formation and social-disciplining already underway in the later middle ages: a top-down "act of state" which ultimately bound subject populations more closely to the mandates of secular and ecclesiastical authority. It will be argued here, however, that an attentiveness to the ways in which ordinary people felt emboldened in these years to discuss and diagnose the presence of heresy suggests a different trajectory of change. Without anyone intending it to be so, the identification of heresy ceased to be the sole forensic preserve of specialists and increasingly became a matter of group-identity and demotic politics, one of seeking to understand—in a manner which would surely have appalled St. Anselm—what, why, and who to believe.

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Long before the Reformation crisis of the sixteenth century, the authorities in England were aware that they faced a heresy problem: the appearance of Wycliffism in the late fourteenth century and the persistence of Lollardy for a century and more thereafter required...