The Cult of St. Thomas of Canterbury in Music

The Cambridge Core website recently announced:

British Catholic History, the journal of the Catholic Record Society, is delighted to announce the winner of its Best Article Prize in 2022:

Katherine Emery, ‘Destruction, Deconstruction, and Dereliction: Music for St Thomas of Canterbury during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, 1530-1600’

Katherine’s article was described by the judges as follows:

‘This is an impressive piece of innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship at the forefront of the 'sonic turn’ in the study of lived religion. Focusing on music written and performed in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury, this carefully researched article looks back to the pre-Reformation world but concentrates on the Tudor period, offering a new narrative of English cultural and religious history. Interleaving rich manuscript research with the parsing of a substantial historiography on devotion to the saint, it offers an original angle on pre-Reformation and Counter-Reformation music making and liturgical performances. This is an outstanding article from an early career scholar which eloquently attests to, and will further advance, the expansion and diversification of British Catholic studies.

The article is available for free now (don't know how long) and here is the abstract:

Between the late-twelfth and early-sixteenth centuries, much music (both liturgical and non-liturgical) was written in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury. However, in the 1530s his cult became a major target for reformers and, in 1538, Henry VIII (1491-1547) ordered the destruction of his shrine and the obliteration of all music written in his honour. This article will examine how music composed to memorialise St Thomas was treated during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It explores the process of self-censorship prompted by Henry’s proclamation on the cult of St Thomas that led to his erasure from liturgical books in England. It analyses the attempts by reformers to discredit music concerning St Thomas, particularly by radical reformer John Bale (1495-1563). Finally, it examines music that was composed by Catholics for St Thomas during the Counter-Reformation and asks what it can tell us about the state of the cult in the late sixteenth century. This approach results in an overview of St Thomas’ cult during the later sixteenth century and contributes to our understanding of changing conceptions of the saint by Catholic communities in the post-Reformation world.

I'm still reading the article now, but one thing we should keep in mind is that St. Thomas of Canterbury was and is not just a saint in England--he was and is a saint honored by the whole Catholic Church (and he is recognized on the Church of England sanctoral calendar)! For example, in 2016 a relic of St. Thomas was brought back to Canterbury from Hungary. As a British Museum article stated in 2019: "In death Becket remained a figure of opposition to unbridled power and became seen as the quintessential defender of the rights of the Church. To this end you can find images of his murder in churches across Latin Christendom, from Germany and Spain, to Italy and Norway. Becket was, and remains, a truly European saint." That's why Pope Paul III finally issued the Bull announcing Henry VIII's excommunication in 1538 after the King ordered the destruction of St. Thomas's shrine and the desecration of his remains. 

So, for example, when Emery writes: "Yet Becket’s paramount cultural position was not to last forever. Although reformer James Bainham was burnt at the stake partly for daring to question Becket’s saintly status in 1532, by the late 1530s the mood had turned decisively against St Thomas.", her comment applies to England at that time--not to the Catholic Church as a whole.

Francis Young's Survey of English Reformation History Scholarship

I do not have access to this review article which Francis Young announced on his blog:

My review article ‘Surveying a Field Come of Age’ has just been published in the journal British Catholic History. The book is a review of Robert E. Scully and Angela Ellis’s Companion to Catholicism and Recusancy in Britain and Ireland, but also goes beyond that to take stock of the historiography of early modern British Catholicism and the field’s recent evolution. The appearance of summative companions like Scully and Ellis’s is an indication that the field is approaching, or has attained, maturity and is seeking ways to define its identity and communicate it to scholars in other disciplines as well as to the wider public.

Nevertheless, I just wanted to capture this great list of references I can see:

1. See Christopher Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

2. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Boydell, 1999).

3. See, for example, Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

4. John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975).

5. Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

6. Frederick Smith, ‘The Origins of Recusancy in Elizabethan England Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal 60:2 (2017): 301–32.

7. Ceri Law, Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge, 1535–1584 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018).

8. Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011); Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

9. Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009); James Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

10. R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ulrich Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

11. See, for example, James Kelly and Hannah Thomas, eds. Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580–1789: ‘The World is our House’ (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Teresa Bela, Clarinda Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka, eds. Publishing Subversive Texts in Elizabethan England and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

12. Richard P. Williams, ed. Mannock Strickland (1683 – 1744): Agent to English Convents in Flanders: Letters and Accounts from Exile (Woodbridge: Catholic Record Society, 2016); Philip Perry, Essay on the Life and Manners of Robert Grosseteste, ed. Jack Cunningham (Woodbridge: Catholic Record Society, 2022).

13. Victoria Moul, A Literary History of Latin and English Poetry: Bilingual Verse Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

14. Emilie Murphy, ‘Adoramus te Christe: Music and Post-Reformation English Catholic Domestic Piety’, Studies in Church History 50 (2014): 240–53; Emilie Murphy, ‘Music and Catholic Culture in Post-Reformation Lancashire: Piety, Protest and Conversion’, British Catholic History 32:4 (2015): 492–525.

As Young indicates, the field of English Reformation and Early Modern Catholic history has come a long way from the days when Maurice Powicke's The Reformation in England and H. Outram Evennett's The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation were highlights of the academic, non-confessional study of that era. It's just too bad, for me at least, that so many of these resources are so expensive! The book that tops his review essay, for example, costs $299.00!