The Construction of Reformed Identity in Jean Crespin's Livre des Martyrs

All The True Christians

Jameson Tucker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351789233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Between 1554 and 1570, the Genevan printer Jean Crespin compiled seven French-language editions of his martyrology. In The Construction of Reformed Identity in Jean Crespin's Livre des Martyrs, Jameson Tucker explores how this martyrology helped to shape a distinct Reformed identity for its Protestant readership, with a particular interest in the stranger groups that Crespin included within his Livre des Martyrs.

By comparing each edition of the Livre des Martyrs, this book examines Crespin's editorial processes and considers the impact that he intended his work to have on his readers. Through this, it provides a window into the Reformed Church and its members during the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion. This is the first volume to comparatively study all seven French-language editions of Crespin's Livre des Martyrs and will be essential reading for all scholars of the Reformation and early modern France.

1 The Hussites and Protestant history

The first edition of Crespin’s martyrology, 1554’s Livre des Martyrs, begins with a section depicting the: ‘History of the Holy Martyr Jan Hus’, the Bohemian theologian who had been burned at the Council of Constance in 1415. This idea, that Hus had a central role to play in the history of the Reformation, was not new to Crespin. Hussite documents, works, and histories had been published in Germany almost since the beginning of the Reformation there. Translations of Peter of Mladonovice’s eyewitness account of Hus’ trial and execution were published in Nuremburg in 1528 and 1529, Poggio Bracciolini’s Historia Johannis Huss … was published in 1528, and Aeneas Sylvius’s Historia Bohemica was published in Basel in 1551. German authors also produced their own confessionally inflected histories of Hus, with the Catholic controversialist Johannes Cochlaeus producing a Historia Hussitorium in 1549, and the Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus publishing his 1558 Johannis Hus et Hieronymi Pragensis … Historia et Monumenta, which brought together many of the key Hussite letters and documents into a large-scale history.¹ Johannes Agricola even wrote a drama based on the Relatio of Philip of Mladonovice, Crespin’s principal source.²

This wide, and almost immediate, interest in Hus was driven by an awareness of parallels between his situation and that of Luther. The emperor’s promise of safe-conduct to and from the Diet of Worms for Luther was contrasted with the similar promise offered to Hus in 1414, which had not been upheld.³ Luther himself seems to have been behind some of this renewed interest in Hus. In 1521 he was said to have declared that:

if [Jerome] Emser produces Aristotle and crowns me with the name of Huss and Jerome, I would rather share Huss’s disgrace than Aristotle’s honor … Huss, who, by the grace of God, is again coming to life and tormenting his murderers, the pope and the popish set, more strongly now than when he was alive.⁴

Luther’s 1520 Address to the Christian Nobility contains the suggestion that the claims of the Bohemians be seriously considered, and goes on to state that he has found no error in what he has read of Hus, though he had specifically stated: ‘I do not wish to make John Huss a saint or martyr, as some of the Bohemians do.’⁵ In a letter of the same year to George Spalatin, Luther identified himself strongly with Hus:

I have taught and held all the teachings of John Huss, but thus far did not know it. John Staupitz has taught it in the same unintentional way. In short we are all Hussites, and did not know it. Even Paul and Augustine are in reality Hussites … I am so shocked that I do not know what to think when I see such terrible judgements of God over mankind, namely, that the most evident evangelical truth was burned in public and was already considered condemned more than one hundred years ago. Yet one is not allowed to avow this. Woe to this earth.⁶

The publication of Mladonovice’s Relatio in Latin, in 1528 and German in 1529 by Johannes Agricola seems to have been done at Luther’s instigation, and in 1538 Luther published a series of Hus’ sermons alongside one of his own.⁷ By this point, he was seemingly less reserved in his praise of Hus; in his 1537 sermon on John 16, Luther even went so far as to call him ‘St. John Hus – we can surely do him the honor of calling him a saint, since he had far less guilt than we have …’.⁸ By the 1550s a tradition had developed of linking contemporary Lutherans back to Wyclif, via the intermediary of Jan Hus.⁹ Indeed, some Lutherans were eager enough to claim a direct connection that some Hussite tracts were falsified, in order to better agree with Protestant doctrine.¹⁰ Thus by the time that Crespin produced the Livre des Martyrs, starting the martyrology with Hus and the Hussites would have seemed a relatively uncontroversial choice. From the beginning, the Livre des Martyrs presented Hus as a forerunner of Luther’s in a genealogical, and not simply doctrinal, sense, as the Lutheran books of the 1530s and 1540s had already argued.¹¹

The position of Hus at the very beginning of the Livre des Martyrs did not last long, however. From 1555’s edition onwards, Hus and the Hussites lost their position as the first martyrs of the book to the English theologian John Wyclif, who would retain this position in all of his following editions. This was achieved by adding new pages to the first volume, creating two new quires, with pages numbered i–xxxii, before the Hussite section, allowing the passages on Hus that had been printed in 1554 to be reused. Indeed, Gilmont demonstrates that these sections of the 1554 and 1555 editions of the martyrology were interchangeable.¹² This suggests a certain degree of opportunism in the addition of the English martyrs, as it appears that no major reworking of the structure of the book was being considered. Even with addition of a great deal of material from Foxe on the subject of Wyclif and the Lollards, Hus and his followers provided the bulk of the theological discussion, and narrative thrust, of the early sections of the martyrology.

John Wyclif

In 1555, in the second edition of the martyrology, Crespin provided a lengthy description and defence of his decision to include Wyclif in the martyrology, placing him in a context of Satan’s campaign against the True Church, which has taken place at all times, and in all corners of the world.¹³ He described how even in darkest times, God has ‘in a marvellous fashion always guarded some sparks to relight the great illumination of his truth’ in ‘times he knew were opportune, by His divine prudence’.¹⁴ Wyclif and other early figures are explicitly said to provide a link back to the Apostles themselves, as: ‘since the beginning of the preaching of the Gospel, there has been a continual order of good Doctors and Ministers, which will be easy to show …’, but trusts that his readers will ‘be content this time, if we begin with the times of M John Wyclif, Englishman, to show how this sentence is true, that “The gates of Hell can do nothing against this invincible truth of God”’.¹⁵ Wyclif, then, represented for Crespin only one of a number of potential beginnings for the martyrology, as Hus had in the previous edition, and a particular emphasis is laid on the idea that the Reformed Church can trace its own form of Apostolic succession.

This introduction to the subject of Wyclif provides the reader with a description of the state of the Church during the middle ages, outlining a time when:

the Christian kings and princes, for all the affection and all the zeal that they had to emphasise the religion, employed all of their forces to recover the wood of the cross of Christ, which was in the city of Jerusalem. As if all the religion consisted of that, and as if there were no other cross, than that which was in the city of Jerusalem.¹⁶

It was into this corrupted and misguided climate that Wyclif emerged. Using language also used about Luther and of Vualdo, Crespin suggests that Wyclif’s prominence had a divine origin, that: ‘our Lord and good God raised this good person’; God, ‘by his great mercy, awakened the world, buried under the dreams of human traditions, and this by means of the said Wyclif’.¹⁷ Wyclif, from his position at Oxford, had seen that the ‘true Theology had been villainously corrupted’, and began to dispute small issues, planning to move to greater ones.¹⁸ These took place in debates against the monk John Kenningham, which helped to attract the attention of the Pope.

This interest in Wyclif, and in the history of the Church, derived fairly directly from John Foxe’s Commentarii Rerum of 1554, from which Crespin drew of his information on Wyclif and the Lollards, and a great deal of the introductory material with which he introduced them, including his conception of the state of the medieval Church.¹⁹ Crespin also used the Commentarii Rerum to expand his existing section on Jerome of Prague, to which he added an extra quire of sixteen pages; like the section on Wyclif, this was added to the existing pagination, and had to be paginated in roman numerals.²⁰ This edition of the Livre des Martyrs did not draw on Foxe for the narrative of Hus, however, but continued to use the version published the year before.

Crespin drew heavily on Foxe’s Latin edition for his information on Wyclif, and did not materially change it in the later editions. He included not only a history of Wyclif’s life, but also two of the propositions (to list them all ‘would be too lengthy’), purported...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Hussites and Protestant history
• 2 ‘What little true light they had’: the Vaudois in history and martyrology
• 3 The alpine Vaudois in the 1550s and 1560s
• 4 ‘Luther n’est point mort pour moy’: Crespin and Lutheran martyrs
• 5 The German Peasants’ War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index