Among the most interesting sections of William Tyndale's Practice of Prelates (1530) is his account of the medieval papacy's rise to ecclesiastical primacy and temporal power. This account, in its structure, contents and some of its imagery, closely follows a section of an anonymous Reformation tract, Vom alten und nüen Gott, Glauben und Ler (Basel, 1521). The two publications include parallel histories of the popes' dealings with the Carolingian dynasty. However, the papal narrative has a somewhat different purpose and orientation in Tyndale's work than it does in his source. In Vom alten und nüen Gott, the story of papal aggrandizement is part of an exposition of medieval distortions of Christianity, which the text contrasts with the recovered Gospel of the reformers. Seeing the difference should help 'all Chrysten men' find their way through the religious upheavals of the early sixteenth century. Whereas Vom alten und nüen Gott thus brings the papal narrative into relation to a dilemma of all Christians, The Practice of Prelates ultimately relates its narrative to a dilemma facing ,England, and England's king. In Practice, the eighthcentury popes' alliance with Frankish rulers, often against the Byzantine emperors, foreshadows Henry VIII's divorce proceedings, which Tyndale believes Wolsey instigated as an agent of a Franco-papal conspiracy against the emperor Charles V (Catherine of Aragon's nephew) and England's best interests. Tyndale adopts Vom alten und nüen Gott's papal narrative, but he also adapts it to his own purposes-as he did elsewhere with material he derived from other Continental Reformation texts.