Abstract
The turmoil and tragedy wrought by Henry VIII’s divorce, remarriage, and usurpation of Church power form a violent backdrop against which is set the careful dispersal of many books from religious and lay alike safeguarded from destruction or redirection by the King. The passage of one of those books, The Book of Margery Kempe, out of one of the most beleaguered of all the religious houses ultimately destroyed and dissolved by Henry’s government is nothing short of miraculous. But the agency is wholly human even though clothed in holy monastic robes. Two Carthusian monks of the London charterhouse made the survival of this important book possible. One died horrifically in resistance. The other survived to carry, send, or spirit Kempe’s Book out from under the keen watch of Henry’s agents ensconced in the Carthusians’ London charterhouse. Between 1534 and 1539, the Carthusians remaining at the London house watched their life of quiet contemplation fall literally and figuratively into ruin.
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Notes
Amanda Capern, The Historical Study of Women: England, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 203.
See A. D. Cheney, “The Holy Maid of Kent,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society n.s 18 (1904): pp. 107–129;
E. J. Devereux, “Elizabeth Barton and Tudor Censorship,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 49 (1966): pp. 91–106;
see also Alan Neame, The Holy Maid of Kent: The Life of Elizabeth Barton 1506–1534 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971);
and for more recent work, see Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 51–80.
See esp. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (1964; repr. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1989);
G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979);
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992);
Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised (1987; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
the essays in Diarmaid MacCulloch, ed., The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and Bernard, The King’s Reformation, among others.
Gilbert Huddleston, “St. John Fisher,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Appleton Co., 1912), www.newadvent.org/cathen/084622b.htm, accessed August 1, 2008.
See M. L. Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996);
R.W. Hoyle The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
and the essays in Paul Slack, ed. Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Gerald Bray, ed. Documents of the English Reformation (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1995), p. 109.
See J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 28–30, for Harmer’s response to Burnet in 1693.
Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 46.
Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 91.
Henry Gee and William John Hardy, eds., Documents Illustrative of English Church History (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1896), p. 257.
Colin Platt, Medieval England: A Social History and Archaeology from the Conquest to 1600 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), p. 210.
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© 2013 Julie A. Chappell
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Chappell, J.A. (2013). Death, Dissolution, and Dispersal. In: Perilous Passages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277688_3
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