Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole…
Sunday past was the 413th anniversary of the execution of Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake for heresies such as proposing that the Sun is a star and that the other stars in the sky are also Suns, probably accompanied by planets very much like ours). Today, more auspiciously, is the 460th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus. He managed to postulate that the solar system revolved around the Sun, rather than the Earth, while remaining a Chapter Canon of Frombork Cathedral and important local civil servant during the early decades of the Reformation. Gallileo was put under house arrest for saying much the same things less than a century later and 1500km or so to the south. Times change.
It took time for the Reformation to settle into the political and military battle it later became. The Peasants’ War in 1524 encouraged both Catholic and Protestant rulers in German-speaking Central Europe to play a cautious hand and, in almost all cases, co-operate to serve their common interests. The England of Henry, Mary and Elizabeth, however, with its fanaticism of both Puritan and Ultramontane varieties, murderous dissolution of the monasteries, Secret Police and bloody executions of religious dissidents was an unusual epicentre of violent fanaticism in the Reformation’s early decades. But then England had always tended to be a little bit fanatical when it came to religion. Here, alone in the Catholic world, the laity were banned from reading the Bible in the vernacular before the Reformation, the electrifying effect of Wycliffe’s late 14th Century translation terrifying the authorities. The continent-spanning cult of martyr-pilgrimage surrounding Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral also marks England out as an unusually devout country with a history of religious intolerance and brutality by the state. English latitudinarianism and later secularism needed to have Puritanism test itself to destruction during Cromwell’s Commonwealth before it found fertile territory.