"A Pestilent and Seditious Book": Nicholas Sander's Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic Histories of the Reformation

Abstract

� in april 1593, the Catholic exile Richard Verstegan wrote from Antwerp to his superior, Father Robert Parsons in Spain, about a proposed “generall ecclesiasticall history of the Churche of England.” This ambitious project, designed as a counterweight to Protestant “histories” such as John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563), included Bede’s eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of the English People (translated into English for the first time in 1565 by Catholic emigre scholar Thomas Stapleton); Nicholas Harpsfield’s Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica (written during the author’s imprisonment under Elizabeth in the 1560s and early 1570s but not published until 1622); and, covering events since “the revolt of King Henry the Eight,” Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani (1585). These works, along with “what else that oute of sundry writinges and good notes may be gathered,” “should be made one intire pece of woorck, the first volume conteyning, as it were, the tyme of the peace of the Churche, and the second the troobles that have bene caused by schisme and heresy.”1 Verstegan’s prospectus shows the diverse genres of Catholic historical writing in early modern England; although this plan to compile a comprehensive history of the church in England was never realized, individual parts of such a history appeared separately during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 2 The most influential—yet least studied—of these components is Sander’s De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani, the first published narrative of events in England from “the revolt of King Henry the Eight” to Elizabeth’s reign told from a