Predestinarian Theology Research Articles

Who was Arnobius the Younger? Dissimulation, Deception and Disguise by a Fifth-Century Opponent of Augustine

Twentieth-century scholars believed that Arnobius the Younger was an African monk living in Rome. This is untenable. There is now considerable doubt over the authorship of several works ascribed to him by Germain Morin: the Expositiunculae has been proved to date from the early medieval period, but the author of the anti-predestinarian Commentarii in Psalmos, one ‘Arnobius’, is also responsible for writing the mid fifth-century Praedestinatus, an attack on Augustine's predestinarian theology and its champion, Prosper of Aquitaine. The content of these works and related evidence point to Julian of Eclanum as the true author.

Hurried to Destruction: Reprobation in Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness

This essay demonstrates that Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness explore important tensions in the Elizabethan understanding of the lived experience of the damned. Calvinist theologians tended to describe reprobation in terms that unintentionally suggested direct divine agency and responsibility, despite their insistence that culpability for sin lies in human nature. Aligning closely with Calvinist visions of reprobation, the plays characterize their villains as feeling compulsions to sin so powerful that they are experienced as external impositions, even as these characters presume their own internal sinfulness. The agonizing inescapability of these characters’ compulsions is emphasized through contrast with the ambiguous liberations of the plays’ female protagonists. The plays highlight the contradiction in Calvinist descriptions of reprobation by generating dramatic effects that prompt audiences to suspect that what the tortured reprobates experience as divine interference is real rather than merely a projection of guilt. Despite their Calvinist elements, the plays reinforce the doubts raised by anti-Calvinists about English Calvinism’s predestinarian theology.

Calvin, Beza, and Perkins on Predestination

Abstract: Given the importance of predestination to Reformed theology and the place that Calvin, Beza, and Perkins have in its development and in modern historiography, this article asks what these theologians actually said about predestination. It offers a brief exposition of their teachings on this important topic and seeks to demonstrate their basic complementarity of belief, their shared intention, and their desire to promote godliness by this aspect of sola gratia. It is no surprise that succeeding generations of Reformed orthodoxy such as the divines of the Westminster Assembly and the Dutch further Reformation looked to their writings as stellar examples of a predestinarian theology that is biblical, christological, and practical.

Society and ‘Heaven and Hell’—The Interplay Between Social Structure and Theological Tradition During Early Calvinism

ABSTRACTThe paper reexamines the Calvinist reformulation of the doctrine of predestination and its social underpinnings. It applies a sociological approach by exploring whether and to what extent social, especially class, structure affected the Calvinist version of the doctrine of predestination. This application is based on the sociological premise that theologies, religions, and other beliefs originate within certain social settings, as well as influence the latter. The paper therefore represents an exercise in the sociology of theology and religion by analyzing the interplay between social structure and theological tradition in the form of the doctrine of predestination. It does so by investigating the interrelations between social forces and theological doctrine in the process of emergence and expansion of Calvinism as a predestinarian theology and religion as well as a radical political movement. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of the social conditions and effects of theology and religion in general, and of Calvinism in particular.

An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes by J. Sears McGee

Reviewed by: An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes by J. Sears McGee Ann Hughes McGee, J. Sears – An Industrious Mind: The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. 511. The parliamentary diaries kept by the MP Simonds D’Ewes are crucial sources for the Long Parliament, while his autobiography affords important insights into Puritan piety and family relationships. While most historians have used just a few of D’Ewes’ manuscripts, however, Sears McGee’s authoritative account is founded on half a century’s research in the complete archive: 70 volumes of diaries, letters, notes, and drafts in both Latin and English. Many scholars have found the sources more interesting than their author, often dismissed as a prig and a pedant. McGee is aware of such views, but provides a fundamentally sympathetic and also a more complex and satisfying picture of D’Ewes, as “a Puritan, a Parliamentarian, a lawyer, genealogist and antiquarian” (p. 435)—and, it should be added, as a son, brother, husband, and father. The record of D’Ewes’ life is unparalleled in early modern Europe, and McGee’s book does full justice to its range and depth. His structure, combining chronological and thematic approaches, makes for occasional repetition but is an effective means of dealing with the multiplicities of D’Ewes’ life. Political historians familiar with D’Ewes will learn much from McGee’s study, which also provides many insights into less well known and sometimes surprising aspects of D’Ewes as newshound, antiquarian, and family man. It was typical of this compulsive writer and staunch Calvinist to write, after his own conversion, a treatise of the “marks and signs” of assurance. Predestinarian theology, a powerful sense of God’s providence, and a committed regime of Puritan piety were fundamental to all D’Ewes’ endeavours. His greatest delight, however, was in his “precious studies” in genealogy, numismatics, politics, and history. Like his father, Simonds trained as a lawyer, but marriage to the heiress Anne Clopton and his father’s death removed any need to practise. From 1631, D’Ewes combined life as a country gentleman at Stowlangtoft, Suffolk, with frequent trips to London to gather news and pursue research.The book includes an important account of D’Ewes’ news-gathering networks and methods. An interest in news was in itself a political activity, but McGee notes that until relatively late in life D’Ewes regarded formal political office as a diversion from scholarship. Unlike his father, he was never a JP; only in 1639 was he handed a poisoned chalice as ship-money sheriff for Suffolk, and then in 1640 elected MP for Sudbury in the Long Parliament. McGee’s energy and learning have matched D’Ewes’ own, working steadily through the voluminous sources produced by this “industrious mind.” D’Ewes loved collecting and taking notes of ancient manuscripts; he liked organizing his notes and even planning and drafting treatises on a host of topics from ancient British history to the contemporary triumphs of Gustavus Adolphus, but few works were ever finished. McGee’s account of D’Ewes’ intellectual interests is a very significant contribution to scholarship on the learned gentry. His discussion is inevitably based largely on the intimidating D’Ewes archive, so that we see the world largely through D’Ewes’ eyes; it is not always clear where he is typical or distinctive. Unlike some of his antiquarian contacts, D’Ewes was not nostalgic [End Page 213] for a pre-reformation England; his historical researches reflected Puritan anxieties about contemporary religious developments. D’Ewes was convinced that the true religion of the early Britons had been attacked by the free-will doctrines of the Welsh monk Pelagius; in D’Ewes own time the “brain sicke Arminius” had revived the “dregs of Pelagian blasphemies,” combining with popery to threaten the true Protestant (Calvinist) religion (pp. 127, 159). In discussing D’Ewes’ religious and political life, McGee does locate D’Ewes within recent scholarship, but he is rather reticent on how this account of D’Ewes might modify that scholarship. McGee elaborates a familiar distinction between a man radical in his religious views, while being...

Doctrinal Doubleness and the Meaning of Despair in William Perkins’s “Table” and Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience

This article explores the “double vision” of experience produced by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predestinarian thinking, focusing in particular on the vexed question of despair and its significance within the Protestant spiritual journey. Through an analysis of two under-examined and seemingly very different Elizabethan texts—the theologian William Perkins’s “Table Declaring the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation” and the rector Nathaniel Woodes’s play, The Conflict of Conscience — the article reveals the extent to which the doctrinal complexities embedded within the Church of England’s predestinarian theology became bound up in the problem of narrative storytelling, with writers looking for recognizable causality and sequentiality in the unfolding of the spiritual life even as the underpinning belief system refuted it. The eventual result of this paradox, this article argues, was the total embrace of active, even aggressive personal interpretation as a means for understanding and clarifying the double vision of despair, engaging with its dramatic plurality while also striving to bring it to a unified and focused conclusion.

<i>Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom Diana Stanciu Gerald Bonner. Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine’s Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 142. This is a comprehensive and well-argued book that manages concisely to summarize disputed questions concerning Augustine’s alleged incapacity to reconcile divine omnipotence and human free will. Both students of Augustine’s thought and general readers will find Gerald Bonner’s brief study extremely helpful in understanding the paradoxical nature of Augustine’s thought regarding predestination and human freedom as well as the relevance of his style (rhetorical rather than systematic, especially during his debates with the Pelagians), the role of his [End Page 270] sources in shaping Augustine’s view, and the differences between his early and late writings. With respect to divine predestination, these differences in Bonner’s view are clearly marked (43–44, 118), by Ad Simplicianum (396), which concentrates on explaining 1 Corinthians 4.7 and which is regarded by Augustine himself in his De praedestinatione sanctorum (428/9) and De dono perseverantiae (428/9) as a statement of his mature theology. Bonner insists that Augustine here ceases to acknowledge any role for human initiative in salvation and that Ad Simplicianum actually concludes a process which had developed in the bishop’s work for several years (43–44). If until 394 Augustine maintained that God gives grace to those whose future faith he foresees, later he insisted against the Pelagians that free choice for good requires the gift of a special grace, necessary for the fallen human condition and greater than the one of creation (68–69). The Pelagians are themselves theologically and historically reconsidered by Bonner, who seeks to offer an impartial view of the controversies between them and Augustine. He explains that while their error was an overestimation of the human capacity for free choice after the Fall in an attempt to defend human responsibility (ix), Augustine’s approach was an attempt to belittle human free will since he was more interested to defend divine omnipotence against Manichean dualism. Consequently, for Bonner, neither is Pelagianism such a shallow theology as its critics maintain, nor is Augustine’s predestinarian theology a doctrine of the universal Church (125). Furthermore, although Bonner warns against an overestimation of Augustine’s theory of grace and maintains that the bishop’s eucharistic theology or his emphasis on divine love and Incarnation are equally important (ix, 2), he also observes that the flaws in Augustine’s theology regarding predestination and free will actually appear in the entire Western theology, most especially in Calvin, and they arise from an emphasis on the theory of creation ex nihilo and on its consequences (21–24). Accordingly, beyond its obvious benefit of doing away with the Manichean dualism, this theory inspired by neoplatonic thought was itself the source of numerous problems since it made humans absolutely dependent on God and accentuated God’s wrath toward the disobedient. Moreover, beyond the theory of creation ex nihilo, Augustine borrowed from the neoplatonists the concepts of participation (metousia, metochē), of the restoration of the image of God lost by humans because of the Fall (30–31, 51–52, 61–62), and of the insubstantiality of evil, which is only a privation of goodness (71, 111). And if in Sermon 192, while commenting upon Galatians 4.5, Augustine extended the neoplatonic concept of participation towards a special union between humans and God, a deification (theosis) effected by divine adoption (51, 62), this view was not to endure. Later, Augustine maintained that after Adam’s Fall all that humans deserve is damnation since all created things exist only by participating in God, and once they cease to participate, they lose their existence (51–52). It is only God’s mercy that makes him chose a few elect to be saved (47). And here the neoplatonic inspiration is itself abandoned, and Augustine emphasizes divine grace (26) since in the system he constructed the regeneration of human beings and their return to God can be initiated only by God, who becomes human through Christ and restores human...

Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman by Lucinda M. Becker (review)

MLR, 100.3, 2??5 777 agree, 'A Common-wealth their Government shall be' (p. 199); given that the crabs inhabit a prostitute, surely 'Common-wealth' is primarily a bawdy pun. A more serious problem is this book's wider argument about the persistence ofthe baroque within the neoclassical: this seems to rely,on the one hand, upon an extremely wide definition of the baroque, and on the other, upon a definition of neoclassical art as dull, frigid,and static, a dubious assumption that Canfield seems to invoke solely in order to reject it. Indeed, given that some ofthe material here derives from articles up to three decades old, it is hard not to see Canfield's thesis as apost hoc means of uniting otherwise disparate material. Another problem with his approach is its paradoxical conservatism: despite Canfield's evident alertness to ideological or artistic tensions within ostensibly orthodox works, by redefining them as baroque he gives them a new kind of coherence, containing their subversive potential. Canfield's book works best ifread as the sum of its parts rather than as a thorough going account ofthe baroque. J.Paul Hunter remarks in his foreword, 'Teachers will find much useful here: classes could readily be structured around the issues [Can? field] isolates' (pp. 11-12), and I think he is right: this book provides perceptive and stimulating readings of a wide range of texts. London South Bank University Tom Rutter Death and theEarly Modern Englishwoman. By Lucinda M. Becker. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2003. x + 226pp. ?45. ISBN 0-7546-3349-7. With this book, Lucinda M. Becker attempts an exploration of the gendering of death in early modern England. Becker's assumptions of how gender (and, indeed, human behaviour) works are somewhat mechanistic. She posits pervasive and potent norms?notably chaste, silent, and compliant womanhood and the ideal of 'dying well'?and assumes that these norms fully govern and explain both early modern women's preparations for dying and the many texts that concern themselves with women's deaths. The overarching argument is that both early modern women and the chroniclers of their deaths care, beyond anything else, about achieving a 'lasting image' of a good death. Women are schooled, mostly by printed manuals, about what it takes to die well and feel compelled to follow the model. In a final chapter, Becker discusses instances where women take the 'opportunity' of death to bolster their image further by writing, by leaving religious instructions fortheir children, for instance. Undoubtedly, the pervasive reinforcement of social norms, including patriarchy, is a defining feature of early modern culture. What Becker's study lacks, unfortu? nately, is a sustained engagement with the details, the diversity, the complexity, and the ambiguities with which the norms are re-created in local contexts and specific texts. There is too much reliance on the simple identification of 'common trends'. I often found myself wanting either more critical analysis or more of the biographical, historical, or cultural picture in which a given death plays a part. Becker states in her introduction that she will be engaging with religious differences only in very broad terms. The broad brushstrokes lead to some lost opportunities. Quaker women's deathbeds, forinstance, are discussed at some length as an example of women enabled to speak at an extreme moment. The persecution of Quakers and the debate over women's speech within the movement are gestured at, but the arguments are not placed within the evolving and changing story of the Quaker movement from the 1650s on. At what point in this complex story do published deathbeds become important and why? Furthermore, Quaker deathbeds here look very much like everyone else's. Since Quaker discourse so oftenopposed the 'deadness' ofworldly 778 Reviews things, practices, and honours to the life- and light-filled utterances and experiences that made up their testimony, one might reasonably expect that something more distinctive could be said about the Quaker response to death. A less excusable omission is that ofCalvinist predestinarian theology, which receives not even a gesture. So many of the deathbed accounts and posthumous publications discussed in this book issued from Puritan or Nonconformist women and their ministers...

Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England by Pamela Allen Brown (review)

778 Reviews things, practices, and honours to the life- and light-filled utterances and experiences that made up their testimony, one might reasonably expect that something more distinctive could be said about the Quaker response to death. A less excusable omission is that ofCalvinist predestinarian theology, which receives not even a gesture. So many of the deathbed accounts and posthumous publications discussed in this book issued from Puritan or Nonconformist women and their ministers . Becker writes again and again of the pressure to perform well on the deathbed, to leave a 'lasting image' of a 'good death'. But the picture is incomplete without an understanding that the early modern deathbed, especially for Calvinists, was under? stood not so much as a place of image-making as of reading. The intense scrutiny and posthumous rehearsal of the details of the deathbed were part of the interpretative hunt for signs of election. For the godly, this final reading was, moreover, the culmination of a lifelong process of self- and collective scrutiny, so that to understand the Calvinist deathbed necessitates a broader context, an understanding of the lives and communities of those whose deaths were written up for edification. This book is a version of the author's doctoral thesis. Becker modestly ends with a listing of what the book could have and did not do: it did not consider manuscript sources, it did not compare female and male deathbeds, it could have taken more account of religious difference. Like most theses, it shows the limitations ofthe genre, including heavy dependence on the original research of others, omissions, and factual errors. In the current academic climate, there is intense pressure to publish one's thesis as soon as one can. We ought to be thinking harder, though, whether this is a good thing. University of Alberta Sylvia Brown Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women,Drama, and the Culture ofjest in Early Modern England. By Pamela Allen Brown. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell Univer? sity Press. 2003. xii + 263pp. $49.95 (pbk $19.95). ISBN 0-8014-4024-6 (pbk 0-8014-8836-2). The title of this book challenges received notions about early modern culture in two respects: firstly,in that it appears to recommend awkwardness above obedience as a model forfemale behaviour; and secondly, in that it comes from a proverb. As Brown points out, proverbs and popular literature are often assumed by critics to have been 'generically antifeminist' (p. 2), part of a cultural apparatus meant to keep women in their place. Instances of female cleverness or success in jest literature have usually been read either as 'male-authored satire against women's unchaste tongues' (p. 6) or, at best, as temporary subversion designed to be contained. Brown, however, argues that women's importance as consumers and retailers of jests (in which she includes jest books, plays, ballads, tales, and woodcuts) meant thatjest-writershad to anticipate women's possible reactions to their product: 'As judging spectators who could grant or withhold laughter, women wielded a small but palpable form of social power' (p. 32). Furthermore, the mobility ofjests, and their susceptibility to retelling and reshaping, could have worked to subvert their ostensible antifeminism: 'The meaning of a jest is never fully encompassed by its content or the teller's intentions' (p. 18). Brown begins by stressing the importance of the neighbourhood as an arena in which jest literature was read, heard, and repeated, where gossip was circulated, and where women passed judgement on their neighbours' behaviour. Plays such as The Merry Wives of Windsor exploit the theatrical potential of this 'shared space' (p. 55) in a manner that Brown suggests would have appealed to female audiences. Alehouses offered women another space in which to observe or participate in the MLR, 100.3, 2005 779 drama of neighbourhood life; although their clientele is often assumed to have been predominantly male, Brown finds evidence in plays, ballads, and the popularity of folk heroines such as Mother Bunch to support a view of alehouses as more sexually mixed environments. In the three chapters that follow, she considers jests featuring cuckoldry, jests that show women retaliating against male violence, and examples of female rogue...

The Pelagian controversy in Britain and Ireland

The question of the influence of Pelagianism in western christendom, and especially in Britain and Ireland, has been a matter of debate since the appearance of J. N. L. Myres’s and John Morris’s articles more than forty years ago, which presented Pelagianism as a movement for social reform, as well as being religious. Subsequent research has called this suggestion into question. This article argues that the scanty evidence does not point to any enduring influence in either country and that what was called Pelagianism may have been a reaction against extreme Augustinian predestinarian theology.

Wyclif by Anthony Kenny

REVIEWS In short, while it is useful to have this text in print, this edition will have to be used with great caution. SARAH M. HORRALL University of Ottawa ANTHONY KENNY. Wye/if Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pp. ix, 115. $12.95. One of the difficulties facing those who teach the history of the late fourteenth century to undergraduates has been the lack of a brief and succinct summary of John Wyclif's theology and philosophy. Kenny's book, however, goes a long way towards remedying this deficiency. Its aims, he states, are "to sketch the mind ofa man who combined philosoph­ ical insight with reforming zeal," and "to reassess his significance in an age in which philosophy has become secularized and theology has become ecumenical." The value ofthe book lies perhaps more in its achievement of the first aim than the second, particularly for the historian or the student of English literature, and it offers the reader an account of the essential elements of Wyclif's thought couched in straightforward language which illuminates the issues without over-simplifying them. Kenny is at pains to demonstrate the orthodoxy of much of Wyclif's theology and philosophy. In criticizing the nominalism ofOckham and his followers, Wyclif "was aligning himselfwith conservative orthodoxy," and his treatise on universals in the Summa de Ente is not only thoroughly orthodox but also, as Kenny observes, central to Wyclif's whole philosoph­ ical position. Kenny also stresses that Wyclif's belief in predestination stood firmly in the Augustinian tradition, and the condemnation after his death of his doctrine of necessity has allowed the impression to arise that his predestinarianism was both more rigid and more unorthodox than it actually was. Wyclif accepted the traditional Catholic view of the distinc­ tion between God's foreknowledge and His foreordaining of events; he recognized the problem of reconciling God's foreknowledge with the freedom of the human will, but he did not go so far as to argue that the damned as well as the saved are predestined by God. Here, as elsewhere, Kenny is at pains to show that Wyclif did not depart as far from Catholic orthodoxy as some of the reformers of the sixteenth century. Wyclif's 213 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER predestinarian theology is not, it seems, as crucial an element in his attack on the hierarchy of the church as has sometimes been supposed. It was not Wyclif's views on predestination but his treatise On Civil Dominion which incurred the censure of the ecclesiastical authorities in Romeandbroughthimsome popularity withthelay political community in England. The political implicationsofWyclif's thesis that "a man in sin has no right to dominion or lordship" were only too apparent, and far from unwelcome, to the anti-clerical laity in England in the mid-1370s, and Wyclif went on to argue that the property of clergy who failed to carry out theirspiritualdutiescouldbeconfiscatedbythesecularauthority.Thethesis elaborated in On Civil Dominion provides the key to understanding Wyclif's political career, and Kenny re-emphasises the importance of the treatise in bringing about his conflict with ecclesiastical authority both in RomeandinEngland. Itisperhapsunfortunatethat Kennydoesnotpursue the question ofWyclif's views on the authority of the secular ruler and the relationshipbetween church and state witha fuller analysisof Onthe Office ofKing, a work which enjoyed some popularity withWyclif's followers. Afterthecondemnationof On CivilDominion,Wyclif'swritingsbecame at once more unorthodoxand moresplenetic, yet even here Kenny warns us againsttooreadyacondemnationofWyclif'slastwritingsasatvariancewith Catholic tradition. He makes the point that Onthe Truth a/Holy Scripture is orthodox in its insistence on the truth and the authoritative nature ofthe Bible, and he suggests thatWyclif did not adopt a literal, fundamentalist approach to theinterpretationof Scripture. ButWyclifalso argued, though the point is not emphasised as strongly as it was to be in a later work, that Scripturecontainedalltruth; therefore, Scriptureshouldbeavailabletoall, and all men, laymen as well as clerks, should read the Bible and interpret it forthemselves.Kenny isrightlycautiousindiscussing theextent ofWyclif's responsibilityforthefirstEnglishBible, buttherecanbelittledoubtthathe encouraged it, and Kenny makes the useful point that there is little, if anything, in the first English translation which could be taken as objection­ able or tendentious by the Catholic reader. In common with others who...

Shape-Note Tune Books and Primitive Hymns

appeared since 1800 and the hymnody of the rural South that survives in the oral tradition is a difficult one to analyze, and is at this late date probably lost forever to complete understanding. However, careful study of current singing traditions in light of the published sacred music that has accumulated over the years affords a useful perspective on this relationship. I recently had the opportunity to conduct a field study of Primitive Baptist hymn singing, including both black and white churches, in the Blue Ridge region of Virginia and North Carolina, and found it to be pertinent to this issue in several ways.1 First, these Primitive Baptists are committed to a uniquely conservative philosophy that extends to their way of singing, which is one of the oldest surviving sacred song traditions in America. Second, although the black and white branches of the church are now independent, like many Southern denominations, they were united until the post-bellum divisions of the 1870s and 1880s, and can thus be viewed as two diverging exponents of a single singing tradition, subtraditions that are the products of contrasting cultural preferences. The complicating factor is that both branches possess a tune repertory that may have been strongly influenced by published tune sources. My purpose in this essay is to summarize the findings of my fieldwork and, drawing on some of the historical evidence, to try to clarify some features of the fuzzy relationship between the oral tradition and published tune books. On the face of it, the Primitive Baptists possess an old-fashioned hymnody of remarkable strength and vitality. Largely responsible is the church's nonconformist predestinarian theology and its distrust of innovation. Just as most conservative Primitive Baptists reject Sunday schools, seminaries, foreign missions, and most other proselytizing institutions, they continue to repudiate modernizations in hymn singing that have been taken up over the years by more progressive denominations, including the use of harmony, written music, musical instruments, soloists, and performing choirs. Their position is not rooted simply in a stubborn rejection of new ideas in general or musical progress in particular,

The Doctrine of Predestination in the Early English Reformation

It has typically been said of the English Reformation that the doctrine of unconditional predestination (that is, predestination without foreknowledge of merit or repentance but soley as an act of God's will to redeem some of mankind as a manifestation of grace) was neither emphasized nor of central importance until the “Genevan” influence of the returning Marian exiles and the wide dissemination of Calvin's writings in England after the accession of Elizabeth. It is the purpose of this article to show that, (1) a soteriologically rooted doctrine of unconditional predestination of the type characteristic of the so-called “Rhineland Reformers” was central to key figures of the early English Reformation, was accepted and expressed by many other leaders and theological writers of the English Reformation prior to the accession of Mary and was upheld by important and influential continental divines resident in England; (2) the doctrine of predestination in the English Reformation had been developed to the point of reprobation and double predestination and frequently expressed as such before 1553; (3) while this predestinarian emphasis in English Protestant theology was to a large extent the result of the influence of the continental Reformation, it had been received prior to the return of the Genevan exiles and the pervasive influence of Calvin in Elizabethan England. Thus the Genevan influence reinforced and further refined English predestinarian theology. It might be added that Calvin's influence ought not to be considered an unusually harsh one with respect to predestination; not only does Calvin follow the general pattern of earlier Reformed theology, but also does Reformed theology in the later part of the sixteenth century tend toward a more rigid and scholastic version of the doctrine quite apart from Calvin, whose real influence could well operate in the opposite direction, as the recent study by Brian Armstrong shows.