Abstract:
Abstract
Henry VIII’s Act of the Six Articles (1539) represented conservative reaction in the early years of the English Reformation. Among other things, it outlawed clerical marriage, making it a capital crime. When the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer met Henry’s bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner in 1541, Bucer criticised the act’s reintroduction of mandatory celibacy. Defending the act, Gardiner cited I Cor 7. 36-38, which he read as authorising a father’s absolute right to decide whether his virgin daughter married or stayed unmarried. Gardiner argued that the king, as father of his nation, had the same absolute right. This interpretation of 1 Cor 7. 36-38 is rejected by most modern commentaries, but it reflects the medieval and early modern consensus about the passage’s meaning. Medieval commentators had tried to mitigate the father’s authority by insisting on the need for his daughter’s consent. However, Erasmus and Evangelical commentators like Luther and Calvin, had criticised this focus on the consent of the child and tipped the scales in favour of the authority of parent. Ironically, in this debate it was the traditionalist Gardiner who ran with this modern emphasis on parental authority, and it was Bucer, the reformer, who re-emphasised the need for the daughter’s consent. Even so, Bucer’s case rested on the Evangelical claim that celibacy was a special vocation and charism, not given to most Christians. Gardiner made his case for parental authority by arguing that everyone could freely choose celibacy or marriage and the particular graces that came with either. Once they had vowed themselves to either state of life, parents and kings had the right to hold them to it.
