Experiencing the Mass anew in Mary I's England: Bartolomé Carranza's ‘Little treatise‘

Abstract

When Philip of Spain came to England in July 1554 to marry Mary I, he brought with him a number of Spanish ecclesiastical advisers. This article analyses a sermon preached at the royal court by one of them, the Dominican, Bartolomé Carranza (c.1503-1576), in the first week of Lent 1555. In it he gives instruction on how English people should behave when attending Mass. The text discussed is a printed version of the sermon, which was published in Salamanca in the same year, and is first compared with earlier and contemporary English work on the subject. The Spanish sermon is discussed in outline, and there is a particular concentration on its final section, in which the preacher instructs those who know no Latin on how to participate fully in the service, something which was evidently dear to his heart. Having left England to become Archbishop of Toledo, Carranza was arrested in Spain, in 1559, on accusations of heresy, many of them associated with his time in England. Yet his reforming Catholic views were strongly reflected in the teachings of the Council of Trent, and were thus influential for several centuries.