Defining Heresies: Catholic Heresiologies, 1520–50

Abstract

Few historians nowadays would endorse a simple causal connection between the Reformation and the rise of toleration. Indeed, reformations Protestant and Catholic have become almost synonymous with ‘confessionalization’ and ‘social disciplining’. Nonetheless, the transition from the persecuting society of the Middle Ages to something approaching a pluralist society was an early modern phenomenon which has attracted renewed attention in recent years. This transition was facilitated by the breakdown of the traditional understanding of heresy. The role of Protestantism in de-stabilizing the heresy discourse of mid-seventeenth century England has been expertly delineated by Ann Hughes in her study of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and the responses to it. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the Catholic understanding of heresy was entirely stable during this period. As I hope to show in this survey of Catholic heresiologies from the period 1520 to 15 50, controversialists encountered difficulties when they tried to conscript patristic and medieval heresy discourses into the sixteenth-century conflict. An instability at the heart of the traditional definition of heresy – over whether heresy is primarily a doctrinal error or a moral failing – seemed at first to provide a solution to these difficulties. Ultimately and ironically, however, it made their case vulnerable to a Protestant charge of subjectivism.