The Rôle of John Fisher's Memory and Philip Melanchthon's Hermeneutics in the Household of Bishop Stephen Gardiner

Abstract

On 11 August 1553, having received a pardon from Queen Mary, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, returned to the house at Southwark where his household had reassembled, ready for the work ahead. Gardiner's household was a formidable political and ideological instrument. It had been forged during his battles with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the 1540s and early 1550s. It was Gardiner's household which defended him at his trial in the winter of 1550 and supported him through his confinement until 1553. Key individuals, especially Thomas Watson, assisted him in the theological contest with Cranmer which he carried on from the Tower of London. At Mary's accession in 1553, these men began a constant round of preaching engagements, visitations, work in Parliament, and formal disputations, and three, Watson, John White and James Brooks, took up places on the episcopal bench. Of the artefacts of this work that remain to us, some of the most significant are the printed political treatises, books of sermons, and school textbooks produced by Gardiner's household. These items offer a window into the intellectual culture and ideology of the Lord Chancellor's household at a time when Gardiner had more control over national life than ever before in his long career. A study of the ideological literature published by Gardiner's household falls naturally into three areas: material connected with the parliament of April 1554, material which promoted popular engagement with the Fathers of the Church, and material connected with St John's College, Cambridge, and John Fisher. It is this last area that will be the focus of this paper.