Abstract
Over the past twenty-five years, Gerald Bray has made a significant contribution to the study of the history of the English Reformation by compiling and editing key source texts. His Documents of the English Reformation 1526-1701 (1994; revised edition 2004) and The Books of Homilies: A Critical Edition (2015), both published by James Clarke, and his editions of the Canons of the Church of England, The Anglican canons, 1529–1947 (1998) and The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (2000), published by the Church of England Record Society, are useful resources for Reformation historians. This volume adds a further set of inter-related works to the collection: The Bishop’s Book (1537), The King’s Book (1543), and Bishop Bonner’s Book (1555).
The earlier two of these works, The Bishop’s Book and The King’s Book, were published during the reign of Henry VIII. As Bray’s historical introduction observes, The Bishop’s Book, compiled, as its colloquial title suggests, by the English bishops, was produced in the period of Henry VIII’s engagement with Lutheran doctrine, out of which the Ten Articles also emerged. Its full title—The Institution of the Christian Man (where ‘institution’ is to be understood as ‘instruction’)—reveals the work’s intention: it was to be a ‘handbook of Christian instruction that would guide people in interpreting the main pillars of their faith and which would take Protestant positions into account without necessarily subscribing to them wholesale’ (p. 3). This is a catechetical work, explicating the Apostles’ Creed, the sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ava Maria, and discussing free will, justification, good works and prayer for the departed. The King’s Book, officially The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any Christian Man, in large part represented the king’s response to The Bishops’ Book, expressed through annotations on his own copy and in conversation with Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. The resulting revision is close enough to The Bishops’ Book for Bray to combine them into one text. He uses italic type to indicate passages in The Bishops’ Book which were omitted from The King’s Book,
The third text is Bishop Edmund Bonner’s revision of The King’s Book, entitled A Profitable and Necessary Doctrine and compiled for his diocese of London in the course of the restoration of Catholicism after the accession of Mary Tudor in 1553. Here too, Bonner’s additions are shown in
Many theological and historical insights are provided by the juxtaposition of these works, but in a short review a few examples must suffice. All three works treat all seven sacraments. All three affirm the value of infant baptism. They also all affirm the importance of penance: The Bishops’ Book sees it as ‘a thing so necessary for man’s salvation, that no man which after his baptism is fallen again and hath committed deadly sin can without the same be saved, or attain everlasting life’ (p. 86); for The King’s Book ‘confession to the priest … is profitably commanded to be used and frequented’ (p. 91); for Bonner auricular confession belongs to the ‘things most necessary and profitable in the catholic church’, despite having been ‘contemned and derided’ during ‘the late pestiferous schism that overwhelmed this realm’ (p. 307). Regarding the Eucharist, The Bishops’ Book affirms that ‘under the form and figure of bread and wine’ the body and blood of Christ are ‘verily substantially and really contained and comprehended’ (pp. 92–93), a definition also found in the Ten Articles. The King’s Book omits this passage and does not replace it with the equivalent reaffirmation of transubstantiation in the Act of Six Articles, as might have been expected. Bonner offers a comprehensive discussion of Eucharist doctrine, showing deep knowledge of both scripture and the Fathers. All three books name seven sacraments, although matrimony, ordination, confirmation and unction are acknowledged to be not necessary to salvation. Strikingly, all three also use the ‘Reformed’ counting of the ten commandments, with the second condemning the use of graven images.
It has long been clear that a comparison of these works can provide rich resources for our understanding of the English Reformation. In producing this edition, Bray has made these three key texts available to modern scholars. For this he deserves our thanks.