Defending the Faith

It is good to have a book on John Jewel (1522–71), a major figure who helped shape the nature of the Anglican Church, but one easily forgotten. Yet, as Lucy Wooding notes, in 1609, Richard Bancroft, the incumbent archbishop of Canterbury, valued Jewel’s works highly enough to order that they be placed in every church in Elizabeth’s dominions (Foxe’s Acts and Monuments only made it into cathedral churches, but then it was a very expensive volume). Like Foxe, Jewel was a vigorous defender of the faith, trying to demonstrate the antiquity of the Church of England and show that it had a distinct identity from the Catholic Church, one that could be identified and articulated. Accordingly, as Wooding points out in her introduction to this timely volume, edited by Angela Ranson, André A. Gazal and Sarah Bastow, we should acknowledge that ‘the emergence of the confessional identity in the English Reformation owed much to Jewel and the responses he provoked’ (p. 2). Both sides adopted a hostile rhetoric, making grand claims for their churches, although the truth was that ‘the controversy that was unfolding was in fact a highly self-referential argument between quite small groups of academics, all of whom knew each other well’ (p. 3). Jewel’s aim was to provide an answer to the question posed by Catholics: ‘Where was your church before Luther?’

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