I pray you let me lay my beard over the
block, lest you should cut it.
Sir Thomas More
Lord! Open the king of England’s eyes.
William
Tyndale
The two quotations given above are the
reported final words of two great men of the sixteenth century: Sir (now St.)
Thomas More and William Tyndale. Each
man sought to serve God with his whole heart, and each died a martyr to
conscience. Their final words reflect
their differing temperaments: Tyndale always deadly earnest; More ever jesting,
even on the gallows with the axman about to cleave his neck. However, it was not their differences in
temperament, but a much deeper theological divide that, in 1528, less than ten
years before the death of both men in 1535-36, would lead them to collide
head-on in a vicious war of words, ostensibly over Tyndale’s attempt to put the
entire Bible into clear idiomatic English for the first time.
The story
begins with Tyndale’s bold decision to translate the Holy Scriptures into
English, but it has a preface in his education.
Tyndale studied at Oxford from ca. 1506 to 1515, receiving both BA and
MA degrees from that university’s Magdalen Hall (Daniell 22). He then most likely spent some time at the
younger Cambridge University (49-54).
Whether at one university or the other, or both, Tyndale gained great
proficiency in the Greek language; so great, that when he later sought support
from the Bishop of London for his project of translating the New Testament, he
brought with him as an example of his translating skill a rendering into
English he had done of the rather difficult Greek orator Isocrates (47-48; cf.
Tyndale “W.T. to the Reader” 5).
Tyndale’s
decision to translate appears to have grown out of the disputes he had with
local members of the clergy while working as a tutor in Gloucestershire. These disputes grew eventually into trouble
for Tyndale, with some accusations of heresy (Daniell 74-79). The moment of decision is said to have come
in an exchange recorded by Tyndale’s earliest biographer, John Fox:
Not long after, Master
Tyndale happened to be in the company of a certain divine, recounted for a
learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, he drove him to that
issue [the question of the authority of the pope], that the said great doctor
burst out into these blasphemous words, “We were better to be without God’s
laws than the pope’s.” Master Tyndale,
hearing this, full of godly zeal, and not bearing the blasphemous saying,
replied, “I defy the pope and all his laws;” and added, “if God spared him
[sic] life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know
more of the scripture than he [sic] did.” (Fox 178)
This is presented as the event that decided Tyndale in his
resolve to translate the entire Bible into English. His final words in the passage rival only his
final words at the stake as his most famous statement.
As noted
already, Tyndale, determined to translate the Scriptures, went first to the
bishop of London, one Cuthbert Tunstall (the year was 1523; Mozley Coverdale
29). At the time, going to the Bishop
was necessary, for printing an English Bible was only legal with an episcopal
license (Duffy 80). He tells us that he
found help neither there, nor anywhere else in London, and, deciding he would
have to leave England itself to complete his work, he went to the continent
(Tyndale “W.T. to the Reader” 5). In
spite of certain difficulties, he was able to complete a translation of the New
Testament and publish it in 1525/26 (Daniell 134). His was not the first English version of the
New Testament, but it was the first printed version, as well as the first to
have been translated from the original Greek (Ferguson 132).
Within two
years of completing his English New Testament, in the midst of studying to
master Hebrew and beginning work on an English version of the Old Testament,
Tyndale began writing polemical pamphlets in which he attacked Catholicism and
promoted the new Lutheran interpretations of such matters as the relationship
of works and faith to salvation. The
first of these was The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, published 8 May
1528 (Daniell 155ff.). Another, The
Obedience of a Christian Man, came out 2 October that same year (Daniell
Introduction Obedience viii; cf. Tyndale Obedience). It was shortly after this (Pineas dates the
letter involved 7 March 1528; Thomas More and Tudor Polemics 39) that
Bishop Tunstall, who had earlier rejected Tyndale’s offer of an English Bible,
recruited Sir Thomas More to write in response to Tyndale’s works. As Brian Edwards observes on this point, “It
was a mark of the effectiveness of Tyndale’s work that the greatest literary
man in England should be urged to write against him” (Edwards 125-26).
By 1528, More
was one of the leading men of England.
Tutored in Greek by William Grocyn; educated at Oxford, New Inn, and
Lincoln’s Inn; he had been knighted in 1521; he became Chancellor of the Duchy
of Lancaster in 1525; and by the year following Tunstall’s request (1529),
would be Lord Chancellor (Lewis 165 n.1).
He was also already well experienced and well known as a humanist and a
writer: the dedicatee of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly in
1511 (Marius 88-90), he had himself published his Utopia in 1517 (Powell
and Cook 151), and had both aided King Henry VIII in the monarch’s writing of Assertio Septum Sacramentorum against
Luther, and written against Luther himself in 1523 (Anderson 341; Greene and
Dolan).
It is in that year—1528—that a series of
events began to unfold that would within eight years see More executed as a
traitor to the crown, Tyndale burned at the stake as a heretic, England broken
from the unity of Christendom, and the publication of the first complete and
authorized English Bible. First, More
composed “A Dialogue Concerning Heresies” in 1529, aimed not just at Tyndale,
but also at Luther and “heretics” in general (Zagorin 69). Tyndale then reposted in An Answer unto
Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue in
1531, having printed in the meantime his translation of the Pentateuch in 1530
(Daniell 269ff; cf. Tyndale Pentateuch).
The following year, More came back with his lengthy Confutation of
Tyndale’s Answer, which came out in two installments (Daniell 269ff.) Also, in May of 1532, More resigned as Lord
Chancellor in protest against Henry VIII’s attempts to obtain an annulment of
his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (Marius 415ff.; cf. Belloc How the
Reformation Happened 55-75). In 1534
Tyndale produced a new edition of his New Testament (cf. Tyndale New
Testament). By 1536, Tyndale’s
persistent translating and pamphleteering, and More’s refusal to abandon—as one
biographer has it—“Papal Supremacy” (Belloc Characters 66-67), had cost
both men their lives…
It all began
with Tyndale and his tracts.
How did it
happen? Tyndale is usually presented as
having died for having the audacity to put the Bible into the English
language. Everett Ferguson explains the
circumstances in which Tyndale was working:
Since the time of Wycliffe
the bishops in England had forbade the making and reading of English versions
without episcopal license. The spreading
Lutheran movement made the clergy wary again and unreceptive to the idea of an
English translation. (Ferguson 132)
However, one can see from
Ferguson’s own statement, with its qualifying phrases, that this was not a
simple case of pure opposition to the idea of an English Bible. English versions are only forbidden without
episcopal license (which Tyndale did not have); and such wariness grew out
of the events surrounding the Lollards and was increased by the agitations of
Lutheranism (tendencies of which Tyndale clearly demonstrated). Furthermore, such restrictions were limited
to England, which was the only European nation without a vernacular Bible (King
53; cf. Daniell 92ff.).
On
account of this last point, Thomas More, fierce opponent of the translator
Tyndale, has been accused of being “out of step” with the times (King 53); but
being “out of step” is hardly a proper characterization of so protean an
individual as Thomas More; and to say Tyndale was opposed because he wanted to
make an English Bible is simplistic (for a good example of this sort of
simplistic historiography, cf. Brian Moynahan, God’s Bestseller).
More
actually favored the idea of an English version of the Bible (Duffy 80), but
intensely opposed heresy and heretical versions (Zagorin 326 n.45). By the time More was recruited to write
against Tyndale, the latter had already published the two major essays noted
above, which together clearly present him not as a man merely wishing to
provide the Bible in English, but as a believer after the general fashion of
Luther on several points (cf. Tyndale Obedience 75-76, 108-29). It was for this reason primarily that More
confronted Tyndale, with the translation getting tangled up in the discussion.
We must not
make the mistake of painting with too broad a brush here. Although More and Tyndale (as we shall see
presently) differed on many points and in many ways, they were far more similar
than some—Moynahan, for example—would have us believe. In his study English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, C.S. Lewis describes these points of
similarity:
They must not, except in
theology, be contrasted as the representatives respectively of an old and new
order. Intellectually they both belonged
to the new: both were Grecians [i.e. Greek scholars] (Tyndale a Hebraist as
well) and both were arrogantly, perhaps ignorantly contemptuous of the Middle
Ages. And if the view be accepted (it is
said to be very doubtful) that a feudal world was at this time being replaced
by something harsher in the social and economic sphere, then More and Tyndale
both belonged to the old. Both inveighed
against enclosure and sheep-farming and demanded that the desires of the
“economic man” should be completely subordinated to traditional Christian
ethics. Both disapproved of the
annulment of the king’s marriage…Nor is it, perhaps, irrelevant to add that
they were alike in their fate; even curiously alike, since both risked death by
torture and both were mercifully disappointed, for More was only beheaded (not
disemboweled alive) and they strangled Tyndale at the stake before they lit the
fire. (164-65)
One more point
of similarity worth mentioning is the fact already noted that More—contrary to
the portrait often painted of him—did indeed want vernacular versions of the
Bible. Yet, in spite of these basic
similarities, the men were poles apart on two very important points:
temperament and theology—two qualities which cannot here be separated.
More was not only Catholic in religion, but
catholic in all things. Catholicism here
means that sort of broad mind that, in its English manifestation, gave us both
Geoffrey Chaucer and the English mystery plays, with their seemingly odd
mixture of high and low, sacred and profane.
James J. Greene describes this breadth of mind as the source of More’s
comic vision, “a vision which can only express itself through a superb irony”
(Greene 13). The same author has
described More as:
The canonized saint who
wrote bawdy epigrams; the loyal servant and friend of the king who translated
politically subversive poems; the amasser of substantial real-estate holdings
who described private property as the source of all political and social ills;
the thinker who examined the attractiveness of religious tolerance and who also
advocated the burning of heretics; the congenial lover of life who beneath his
chancellor’s robes wore a hair shirt; the model family man who wrote a treatise
defending the common ownership of wives (Greene 16).
In contrast to More, Tyndale had the
crabbed, Puritan mindset that, released in the years leading up to and
following his death, would end the tradition of the Mystery plays, causing most
to be lost; and, 106 years after his death, would close every theatre in
England, rupturing the English theatrical tradition irreparably. His Puritan earnestness is seen in various
places, primarily in the fact that, in contrast to More’s employment of the
dialogue form in his first attack on Tyndale (Pineas “Thomas More’s use of
Dialogue Form”) and his extensive use of humor therein (Pineas “Thomas More’s
Use of Humor”), Tyndale prefers the more vituperative techniques of sarcasm,
and what a modern would refer to as “unintentional” Freudian slips, such as the
substitution of “destructions” for “instructions” and “vanities” for “verities”
(Pineas “William Tyndale: Controversialist” 119-21).
Another
manifestation of this difference between the broad mind of More and the crabbed
thinking of Tyndale is in the matter of philosophy. More’s attitude towards philosophy, and the
classical learning that, in his mind, went with it hand-in-hand, is seen in the
following passage, which he addressed to the Vice-Chancellor, Proctors, and
Faculty of Oxford in 1518:
No one has ever claimed
that a man needed Greek and Latin, or indeed any education, in order to be
saved. Still this education which he [Erasmus?]
calls secular does train the soul in virtue…There are some who through
knowledge of things natural construct a ladder by which to rise to the
contemplation of things supernatural; they build a path to Theology through
Philosophy and the Liberal Arts…; they adorn the Queen of Heaven with the
spoils of the Egyptians…I don’t see how [Theology can be studied] without some
knowledge of languages, whether Hebrew or Greek or Latin…The New Testament is
in Greek…not half of Greek learning has yet been made available to the West;
and, however good the translations have been, the text of the original still
remains a surer and more convincing presentation. (qtd. In Harbison 88-89).
Tyndale, in contrast, despite his knowledge
of Greek and his skill at translating it, railed against the application of
“Man’s wisdom [which is] plain idolatry” to the matter of theology, for
“neither is there any other idolatry than to imagine of God after man’s wisdom”
(Tyndale Obedience 24; cf. 20-25).
Furthermore, in spite of his awe-inspiring
grasp of all three languages with which he worked, and the beauty and felicity
of his translation which is obvious to anyone who has an opportunity to read
him, Tyndale manifested at certain points an interpretive pedantry. One manifestation of this was his emphasis on
the literal sense of scripture, over against the three other traditional
senses, which he calls the allegorical, the tropological and the anagogical
(Tyndale Obedience156); the second is more familiar as the “moral”
sense, as in Dante’s exposition of these points (Alighieri). Tyndale says of the literal sense:
Thou shalt understand therefore that the scripture hath but one sense
which is the literal sense. And that
literal sense is the root and ground of all, and the anchor that never faileth
whereunto if thou cleave thou canst never err or go out of the way. And if
thou leave the literal sense thou canst not but go out of the way. (Obedience
156; emphasis added; cf. Ginsberg 49)
Nearly all that Tyndale
says here is true, and serves as a good caution against overly allegorical
interpretation (cf. Tyndale “Aprologue” 11).
The problem occurs in the final line, where Tyndale seems to equate all
senses beyond the merely literal with error.
It is this narrowness and lack of judiciousness that causes much of
Tyndale’s trouble. Another place where Tyndale’s pedantry
manifests is in some of his choices of terminology in his translation. It is in examining this that we can enter
more deeply into the actual discussion between these two great men, Tyndale and
More.
It were too long
an endeavor to examine each of the three documents involved in the conflict
between these two men. Thankfully, that
is largely unnecessary, since in his Confutation, More deals with
matters at such length, giving us in the process the essence of Tyndale’s own
argument, that this document alone will suffice for an examination of the
case. It should allow us to see the ways
in which these two men differed, and what the nature of their conflict was.
James
Hitchcock observes that the most fundamental differences between More and
Tyndale are over “the nature of revelation and the status of the Bible”
(449). He observes that at the heart of
More’s argument lies an appeal to the Vincentian canon: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ad omnibus creditum est—what has
been believed everywhere, always, and by all (Hitchcock 451). On the other hand, Tyndale insists on
rejecting that which he does not find clearly stated in Scripture (cf. e.g.
More Confutation 85). This, of
course, is the classic Catholic/Protestant divide. However, we can get a better sense of the
nature of More’s objection to Tyndale by looking at how he treats one aspect of
Tyndale’s translation: his translation of ekklesia as “congregation” rather than “church” (164-77). While More goes on at great length about this
point, the greatest understanding can be gained by looking at how he deals with
an objection Tyndale had made in his Answer to More. This is best appreciated by reading More’s
own words in the Confutation, which are quoted here at great length and
without ellipsis (the spelling has been modernized by this author for the sake
of clarity):
Then he asketh me why I have not contended with Erasmus whom he calleth
my darling, of all this long while for translating of this word ecclesia into this word congregatio.
And then he cometh forth with his fete proper taunt, that I favor
him of likelihood for making of his book of Moria [i.e. Encomium Moriae, In Praise of Folly] in my house. There had he hit me low save for lack of a
little salt. I have not contended with
Erasmus my darling, because I found no such malicious intent [here we remember that More was a lawyer]
with Erasmus my darling as I find with Tyndale.
For had I found with Erasmus my darling the shrewd intent and purpose
that I find in Tyndale: Erasmus my darling should be no more my darling. But I find in Erasmus my darling that he
detesteth and abhoreth the errors and heresies that Tyndale plainly teacheth
and abideth by and therefore Erasmus my darling shall be my dear darling
still. And surely if Tyndale had either
never taught them, or yet had the grace to revoke them: then should Tyndale be
my dear darling too. But while he
holdeth such heresies still I cannot take for my darling him that the devil
taketh for his darling.
Now for his translation of ecclesia
by congregatio his deed is nothing
like Tyndale’s. For the Latin tongue had
no Latin word before used for the church, but the Greek word ecclesia[;] therefore Erasmus in his new
translation gave it a Latin word. But we
in English had a proper English word therefore and therefore was no such cause
for Tyndale to change it into a worse.
Erasmus also meant none heresy therein as appeareth by his writing
against heretics but Tyndale intended nothing else thereby as appeareth by the
heresies that [he] himself teacheth and abideth by. And therefore was there in this matter no
cause for me to contend with Erasmus, as there was to contend with Tyndale with
whom I contend for putting in congregation instead of church[;] except yet
Tyndale peradventure meaneth that I should have been angry with Erasmus because
that instead of congregation in his Latin translation, he had not put in our
English word church. (177-78)
From this (relatively) brief quotation, More’s prolixity
is obvious (imagine 1034 pages of this).
However, one can see from this the nature of More’s objection. It is characteristically subtle, and thus was
no doubt lost on Tyndale (or would have been had he read it, which he almost
certainly did not). More does not object
to the translation of the Scriptures, nor even to the literal translation of ekklesia; rather, he objects to Tyndale’s tendentious
translation of said word as “congregation” for the purpose of furthering his
anti-clerical agenda (for a good look at how this agenda shaped Tyndale’s
writing on church history, notably his abuse of the very word “clergy,” see
Pineas “William Tyndale’s Use of History as a Weapon of Religious
Controversy”). Tyndale commits the
etymological fallacy of thinking that the root meaning of a word is its “real”
meaning (this is entirely consistent with his eschewing of all but the literal
sense). More points out that Erasmus
uses the word congregatio to
translate ekklesia because his only other choice was to leave
the word wholly untranslated, as it had been in the Vulgate (on this point, we
must remember that Erasmus’ Latin version was published together with his
edition of the Greek New Testament, and thus was intended partly as a crib; in
such a case, translating ekklesia literally as
“congregation” makes perfect sense).
At the very least, one can make the following judgment
about More’s opposition to Tyndale: More did not oppose the translation of the
Bible into English (one wonders what he would have thought of Matthew’s Bible,
had he lived to see it); he did, however, oppose Tyndale, whom he saw as, first
and foremost, a heretic trying to spread a pernicious corruption of the truth
and undermine the Church. In More’s
mind, Tyndale’s translation was, like his tracts, just one more way to spread
his ideas, this time making it appear that they had the support of Scripture
itself. Is it any wonder that More
wanted Tyndale stopped?
The End: Two Martyrs
After More’s massive effort to refute
Tyndale and all heretics once and for all, the exchange, so far as there had
ever been one, ended. Tyndale had not
been as passionate about refuting More as More had been about refuting him, and
he no doubt had better things to do.
Already, the clouds were gathering for both men. On May 16, 1532, the day after the clergy of
England submitted to King Henry’s authority, More had resigned his position as
Lord Chancellor, an action he had not been allowed to take until such time. After More, the power of the position
dwindled as that of the Monarch and men like Thomas Cromwell waxed greater
(Marius 407-17). Although he had begun
it before his resignation, More only completed his Confutation
afterwards, and it reads like one man’s last desperate attempt to prove himself
right, and on the right side.
Finally came the oath of succession,
declaring that the child to be born to King Henry and Anne Boleyn would be the
legitimate heir to the throne. All were
required to swear thereto…but More could not.
While he said he would condemn no one who did take the oath, he could
not in good conscience do so himself.
His objection was only to certain parts of the preamble, and though
Archbishop Cranmer requested that More and his fellow conscientious objector
Bishop John Fisher be allowed to take a modified oath, Henry rejected the idea
(Ridley 72-76).
So, on April 17, 1534, Sir Thomas More was
committed to the Tower of London to await trial (Marius 464). While in prison, he was still able to write,
and among the works he composed was A Dialogue of Comfort Against
Tribulation. Here, More seems to
have recovered from whatever loss of literary power had marred his last book
against Tyndale, for the Dialogue is considered one of his greatest compositions
(471-72; cf. More Dialogue). More
remained in the Tower for over a year awaiting trial, but after the trial, his
execution was swift. He was beheaded on
Tuesday, July 6, 1535. A Pamphlet called
the “Paris News Letter” recorded that More said he died the king’s good servant
but God’s first (Marius 512-14).
In
May of that year, just days before More’s trial, William Tyndale was betrayed
and arrested in Brussels, Belgium “on or near 21 May”; he was imprisoned in
Vilvorde castle, six miles to the north (Daniell 364). He remained there for over a year (Daniell
gives the very precise figure of 450 days) before being “formally condemned as
a heretic” (Daniell 374). Still it was
not until early October (the sixth, according to Anglican tradition) that
William Tyndale was executed: tied to a stake, strangled, and his body burned
(382-83).
Epilogue: Beyond the
End
Each of these men had a great impact on the
world after his death. More was
eventually canonized as a Catholic saint on 10 February 1935, just shy of the
400th anniversary of his martyrdom (Sylvester). In a more secular vein, he has continued to
be one of the great figures of 16th-century literature, although his
writings against Tyndale are usually not considered among his most valuable contributions. If for nothing else, he is remembered for his
authorship of Utopia, which gave the world a new word and, in some ways,
a new concept.
Tyndale’s literary influence is in ways
even greater, for he is the author of the English Bible in its essence. Within 11 months of Tyndale’s death, “[the]
crown [had] authorized the publication of the vernacular Bible” (Hecht
825). In 1536—the very year of Tyndale’s
death—Miles Coverdale printed a complete English Bible which was “authorized
for use in England” (Dawley; cf. Daniell 334).
Both the New Testament and the Pentateuch of this Bible were simply
Tyndale’s (Dawley). The following year,
Matthew’s Bible was produced; scholars agree that, with slight changes, it
consists of four groups of material: A. Tyndale’s New Testament B. Tyndale’s
Pentateuch C. an English version of the Historical Books that shows every sign
of having been done by Tyndale D. the rest of the Bible, taken over from
Coverdale’s version (Daniell 334ff.).
Every Bible after this one, down to the Authorized Version of 1611, and
even down to more modern translations in the same tradition, are based on
Matthew’s Bible. As a result, William
Tyndale has a greater claim than any other man to being the father of the
English Bible. Consequently, his
influence on English language and literature is unrivaled, with the sole
towering exception of another Englishman named William: Shakespeare himself.
Conclusion
How then does one describe this series of
events? Shall we call it the story of
one man’s heroic struggle to provide his people with God’s Word in spite of
demonic opposition? Shall we call it one
man’s battle to save his beloved Christendom—or at least preserve his own land
as Catholic—by stemming an onrushing tide of heresy? Perhaps we can see these events rather as
something else; not as something epic, but as something tragic.
Consider: at the dawn of the 1520’s,
England was the only European nation without a vernacular bible. Many leading lights of the literary scene
desired such a version, including Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and Bishop John
Fisher (Duffy 80). Within 20 years, such
an English version would be widely available.
There is no solid reason for assuming that the king’s semi-conversion to
Protestantism and his arrogation of the bishops’ power to authorize a
translation were necessary prerequisites of this event.
Most, if not all, would agree that
Tyndale’s goal of providing the Scriptures in English was a good one; and few
who have read his work—either in the original or as it survives in later
translations—can doubt that he had a gift for translating, perhaps even a
providential call to translate. But his
gift for translation was marred by a passionate hatred of the Catholic Church
as it existed at the time, a hatred which led him to avoid the very word
“church” in his translation of the New Testament.
Meanwhile, Sir Thomas More found himself attempting to navigate between
his own personal Scylla and Charybdis.
On the one hand, he had a radical Englishman trying to use his English
version of the Bible to undermine the people’s faith in the church More loved
and to promote doctrines More saw as abominable heresies; on the other hand, by
1532, he faced a sovereign ready to break from Christendom and behead his highest
officials in order to obtain the male heir he so desired. More can be seen as a man trying, in the face
of the inevitable and irresistible, to do all he could do to resist, and having
done all, to stand. Tyndale was equally
willing to stand for his beliefs, but he was also impatient and lacking in
subtlety of mind. This tragedy—and
tragedy it truly is—is a tragedy of impatience, of a king and a reformer
unwilling to wait for the things they desired.
More and Tyndale were not the first ones to lose their lives in this
tragedy (Fisher was beheaded shortly before More; cf. Marius 503-04), and they
would not be the last.
One wonders, what would have happened if,
instead of running off to Wittenberg and Luther at the first sign of reluctance
to sponsor his translation, Tyndale had been more patient? What if his desire to translate the Word had
not gotten mixed up with a reforming passion more radical than that shown by
any of the leading Protestant thinkers, one that appeared ready to raze the
existing church to the ground so that he and others like him could rebuild
it? What if he had been able to make or
oversee the translation of the first full English version of the Bible, so that
even Job’s lament could be heard in Tyndale’s beautiful voice? What if things had gone only a little
differently, and King Henry had gotten his annulment without breaking with
Rome, as one major Catholic historian believes could have happened (Belloc Happened
64)? What if Henry’s older brother had
not died and England in 1520 had been ruled by a Catholic King Arthur with the
daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella as his queen? It is not vain to speculate about the
alternate possible paths of history.
History, as Emerson reminds us, is properly, only biography, and
biography is shaped by choice. To
reflect on what could have been is to better understand what yet could be, and
what role each of us might play in making it so.
Works Cited
Alighieri, Dante. “The
Four Levels of Interpretation.” Literary
Criticism of Dante Alighieri.
Trans. &
Ed. Robert S. Haller. Lincoln: U. of
Nebraska P., 1973. 112-14.
Anderson, Marvin W.
“William Tyndale (d. 1536): a Martyr for All Seasons.” The Sixteenth
Century
Journal 17.3 (1986): 331-52.
Belloc, Hilaire. Characters
of the Reformation. 1936. Image Books Ed. Garden City, NY:
Image Books,
1958.
---. How the
Reformation Happened. 1928. Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers,
Inc.
1992.
Daniell, David.
Introduction. The Obedience of
a Christian Man. By William Tyndale. 1528.
Ed. David
Daniell. London: Penguin Books,
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