The three articles in this issue all reveal different facets of the English and Dutch Reformations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They range from debates over marriage impacting the lives of many ordinary English men and women in the early sixteenth century, through translation and its influence on English and Dutch devotional culture, to the clash between Cartesian and Reformed visions of the Trinity and the renewal of age-old debates over the relationship of faith and reason. In doing so, they serve as a reminder of the distinctiveness of national Reformation narratives, as well as their interconnection with a much wider narrative of confessional exchange and conflict. Two of them also highlight the importance of the Reformation of the middle as a vital connection between both top-down and bottom-up reform.
The first article by Rachel Ciano is ‘Clerical celibacy and clerical marriage in the Henrician reformation: William Turner’s protest in the wake of the Six Articles’. Its focus is on the English Reformer William Turner and his protest against the imposition of clerical celibacy following the 1539 ‘Act of the Six Articles’. Ciano highlights the complex and shifting landscape of debates surrounding clerical celibacy in Henrician England, seeking to compare the official stance ‘from above’ with the reaction ‘from below’. She argues that, as an ordained deacon and writer of religious polemic who took the unusual and courageous step of marrying in protest against the Six Articles, Turner offers a unique perspective on this issue. Placing his protest helpfully in the context of King Henry VIII’s hardening attitude towards clerical marriage in the 1530s and the collapse of negotiations with the Lutherans on this issue, she provides a detailed analysis of the legislation of the Six Articles and what it reveals about wider attitudes to clerical celibacy and marriage. She also argues that Turner’s illegal marriage served not only as a defiant protest against the Henriican regime but also as a source for his own increasing polemic against clerical celibacy. In doing so, Ciano reveals the important role that debates over clerical marriage played in wider English debates over the authority of Scripture and Tradition.
The second article by Jan van de Kamp is ‘Towards an understanding of the relationship between confessional mobility and translation in early modern Europe. Seventeenth century translators of English devotional literature in the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic’. It seeks to both contest and nuance the common assumption that migration and exile were the major determinants in promoting early modern translation endeavours. Instead, van de Kamp argues that confessional mobility was often more important and seeks to corroborate this claim through a detailed comparison of highly mobile translators within the influential Hartlib circle and the three most prolific Dutch and German translators of English devotional literature. In particular, his analysis reveals that patterns of movement often stimulated translation endeavours by providing access to translocal networks such as that of Samuel Hartlib himself. In this regard, migration could actually be a hindrance to translation as it cut off mobility and reduced access to such important networks.
The third article by Kuni Sakamoto and Yoshi Kato is ‘Between Rationalism and Revelation: Petrus van Mastricht’s Critique of the Cartesian Doctrine of the Trinity’. This examines the important but neglected work Novitatum cartesianarum gangraena (1677) of the seventeenth-century Duch Reformed theologian Petrus van Mastricht, which the authors identify as ‘the most comprehensive critique of Cartesianism ever written in the history of Reformed theology’. The authors argue that van Mastricht’s controversy with the Cartesians Nicolaus Smiterus and Christopher Wittich reveals two sharply opposing Cartesian understandings of the Trinity – one holding that it could be proved by reason and the other that it cannot be discussed rationally. By contrast, van Mastricht offered a via media in line with wider Reformed orthodoxy. According to this he argued that the result of accepting Cartesianism would be either for revealed theology to lapse and degenerate into natural theology or to promote a kind of fideism. Specifically, van Mastricht refuted Cartesian demonstrations of the Trinity grounded on necessary production in God, while still affirming Reformed beliefs of the communicability of the divine essence and the modal distinction between the divine essence and persons. In doing so, he upheld the mystery of the Trinity against Cartesian rationalism while affirming its rational intelligibility against Cartesian fideism.