THE MISSIONARY POSITION: CATHOLICS WRITING THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

Abstract

This article retraces the history of the composition, adaptation and proliferation of the foremost contemporary Catholic history of the English Reformation, De schismate Anglicano, in order to raise questions about the hermeneutics of ‘counterfactual history’. Originally written by Nicholas Sander in the 1570s, the work was extensively revised by the English Jesuit leader-in-exile, Robert Persons, and adapted by the Spanish Jesuit, Pedro de Ribadeneyra. Their respective interpretations of the Reformation/schism were shaped by their backgrounds and interests as canon lawyer, missionary activist and Catholic Reformation apologist, but they shared a providentialist belief that it would certainly fail. History proved them wrong even as they were writing, with the result that each version is incomplete and defective, representing a perplexing collapse of their grand narrative, what we might call the ‘missionary position’. As modern readers of these histories, seeking to recover lost perspectives, we can reclaim some residual truth from the narratives by applying Martin D'Arcy's conception of sacred history as running counter to secular history, with only intermittent manifestations of providence. This dual, or equivocal, vision of history seems particularly appropriate in the context of Reformation-era Catholic historians who used the newly-fractured relations of church and state to justify and even demand equivocation.