The Decalogue, Patriarchy and Domestic Religious Education in Reformation England

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The Decalogue was central to religious education in Reformation England, but this had not always been the case. The early Christian communities sought to distance themselves from the Ten Commandments and what they saw as the legalism of the Jewish faith, while the Middle Ages saw the ascendency of a parallel moral tradition: that of the seven deadly sins. Although the Decalogue never disappeared entirely from Christian life, by the fourteenth century, the parson from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales could remark of the Commandments that ‘so heigh a doctrine I lete to divines’. The eventual triumph of the Decalogue over the sins during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was enormously significant, for the Ten Commandments not only taught religious doctrine; they also conditioned personal and communal devotions and moral and ethical behavioural norms. To an unparalleled extent, the Ten Commandments engendered a sense not only of the individual’s bond with God but also of the social and familial bonds they shared with mother and father, brother and sister, master and servant, and the broader community of neighbours wherein they dwelt. This essay will argue that one unintended consequence of the increasing prominence of the Decalogue in the households of sixteenth-century England was that it not only reinforced traditional understandings of household authority: it also modified them significantly. Understandings of gender relations in early modern England have been framed in a number of different ways over the past forty years: in terms of the essential stability of the household, the tightening of patriarchal control, and even in terms of crisis. But what these approaches fail to recognize is that, while the Decalogue undoubtedly reinforced parental (and particularly patriarchal) authority, it did so by stressing in equal measure the responsibility that was also inherent in authority, and the duties of care owed by superiors to inferiors. In both senses of the word, the commandments came to constitute a new, universal ‘moral system of the west’, given authority by Scripture and ubiquity through catechesis. An important aspect of this system was a much more nuanced understanding of patriarchal responsibility than has often hitherto been recognized.