But a ‘Stage-Play’: A Counter-Reformation View of the Marian Church

Abstract

This essay studies Robert Persons's understanding of the reforms of Mary i of England within the continental discursive context in which he worked. By describing his critiques of Marian reforms together with similar reformist discourses in France and Spain, it is argued that his ideas represent a common Counter-Reformation polemical stance and a set of normal Catholic assumptions about the ‘political’ and institutional reforms necessary to combat heresy. Persons's thoughts about the ‘political’ reforms within a broader field of spiritual imperatives serve as a reminder that the Counter-Reformation was necessarily about politics despite scholarly emphasis on issues of theology and religious practice.