With characteristic pugnaciousness, Martin Luther, embroiled in debate, succinctly and confidently defined the Christian church: “thank God, a seven-year-old child knows what the church is, namely, holy believers and sheep who hear the voice of their Shepherd.”1 His definition, of course, never quite settles the matter, and retreats to a biblical metaphor (the sheep) rather than a direct answer. And it begs the follow-up question, who are the sheep? For centuries, the true church, they thought, had been easy to descry; it aligned perfectly with Christendom and comprised all believing Christians—essentially, at least in its conception, all the peoples of Europe. With the fragmentation caused by the Reformation, however, the contours of the church became difficult to discern. This never resulted in a lack of confidence about the church itself, which all still held to exist as a global phenomenon, but membership in that community became contested. Still, even in the face of threats of excommunication from the Roman Church, Reformers universally insisted on the necessity of membership in the true community. For Luther, “outside the Christian church there is no truth, no Christ, no salvation.”2 Calvin stresses that “away from her bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation.”3 It was not, therefore, that the pope’s insistence on membership in the church was false; the pope had simply misconstrued a communion of devil worship for the true church.
The uncertainty over the borders of the holy church prompted voluminous discussion and a series of questions about membership and belonging that, in turn, provided a foundation for early modern thinking about community. How were the visible and invisible churches related? How are particular churches connected—and relatedly, what do they owe one another? Just how few members truly belong to the Christian church? How can the church be understood both inside and outside of time? Was the Catholic church ever a true church, and if not, what are the ramifications of England’s past Catholicism for the souls of their ancestors? In their most simple terms, each question circles around the frightening ambiguity of the religious community. The questions were so challenging and anxiety-provoking that the clergyman William Fulke could claim in 1570, “The greatest controversy that this day troubles the world is where the true church of God should be.”4
Because of this conflict and uncertainty, the early modern period witnessed a flourishing of ecclesiological treatises.5 Ecclesiology constituted a transnational debate, and almost certainly the most prolific body of writing on community, as writers from both sides, Catholic and Protestant, attempted to prove the legitimacy of their church and often exclude their opponents. Treatises and pamphlets were written and translated across the languages of Europe. In England, Bale’s Image of Both Churches (1545) framed the debate with the apocalyptic binary drawn from Revelation, implying all humans were either in the holy church or in its antipode. For Protestants, however, though there were numerous marks of a true church, its exact membership remained forever inaccessible; no one could see inside another’s heart and discover who believed truly, or whom God had chosen. The uncertainty drove theologians and laypersons repeatedly back to the biblical metaphors in their discussions of the holy community; if the church was invisible, its members unknowable, then it could best be approached through figurative language. While the resources for the later, collective identity of nationalism may have emerged from this rhetorical matrix, I hope to demonstrate in this book that Protestantism proved a less centripetal force than proponents of an early modern English “nation” usually imagine. My claim throughout is that discussions of the church—popular, poetic, and theological—were much more likely to imply a transnational than a national community.
For many literary critics who read early modern England as a nation and see the English as possessing an early kind of nationalism, the church plays a central role. Claire McEachern even claims that Bale’s Image of Both Churches provides the foundational typology of the nation.6 The interpenetration between nation and church does offer a metaphoric space for the emergence of the nation; but Bale’s church, as Bale’s fellow Protestants recognized, was comprised not of the national community but, as he quite explicitly says, “of all nacions of the earth, of al peoples of the world, and of all languages vnder heauen.”7 It was a global and, importantly for this study, multilingual phenomenon. Ironically, as Bale recognized, this vision of the church fractured the national community, superimposing on the English nation a more true and universal division between the saved and reprobate. Despite the frequent claim that the English Protestant church enabled the construction of the English nation, when most early modern men and women heard the church discussed, it placed them inside of a transnational community. The early Reformers, breaking from Rome, were especially keen to stress this transnationalism; theirs was not just a novel, local church, but rather part of a universal true church, stretching both directions in time and drawn from all the world. In Calvin’s debate with Cardinal Sadoleto, for example, he defines the church as “the society of all the saints, a society which, spread over the whole world, and existing in all ages, yet bound together by the one doctrine, and the one spirit of Christ.”8 Often, Reformers suggested that this transnational characteristic either mitigated or even eliminated local or national identity, drawing on Paul’s claim that the church contained neither Jew nor Gentile. Heinrich Bullinger, who followed Zwingli in Zurich and, because of the early connections between English and Swiss Reformers, became a powerful reforming voice in England, drives in this transnationalism repeatedly in Of the Holy Catholic Church (contained in his widely popular Decades):
It [The Church] sends out its branches into all places of the wide world, in all times and all ages; and it comprehends generally all the faithful the whole world over. For the Church of God is not tied to any one region, nation, or kindred; to condition, age, sex, or kind: all the faithful generally and each one in particular wherever they may be, are citizens and members of this Church. St. Paul the apostle says: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bondman nor free, neither man nor woman: for ye be all one in Christ Jesus.9
In England, William Tyndale appropriates and modernizes the same Pauline passage: “In Christ there is neither French nor English; but the Frenchman is the Englishman’s ownself, and the English the Frenchman’s ownself.”10
A transnational understanding of the church drawn from the Reformers thus became orthodox in its expression in songs, hymns, treatises, and catechisms throughout Europe. In England, even Richard Hooker, who came in time to stand in for a parochial, national church, writes clearly in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity that the church throughout the world is one: “That Church of Christ, which we properly term his body mystical, can be but one… Only our minds by intellectual conceit are able to apprehend, that such a real body there is: a body collective, because it containeth a huge multitude; a body mystical, because the mystery of their conjunction is removed altogether from sense.”11 Indeed, Hooker, too, draws on the Pauline passage to stress transnational unity: “be they Jews or Gentiles, bond or free, they are all incorporated into one company, they all make but one body.”12 Regional or national churches, for Hooker, might have their own ceremonies and traditions—as, it should be noted, Luther and Melanchthon had claimed since the beginning of Protestantism—and this likely in time did serve to distinguish the Church of England from its continental sister churches; but at the same time, Reformed writers and preachers continually reminded re...