'Before the Coming of Popular Heresy: The Rhetoric of Heresy in English Historiography, c. 700–1154'

This chapter looks at two attempts to understand the historical nature of heresy in seventeenth-century England: Hobbes's Historical Narration Concerning Heresy, and Archbishop John Sharp's writings on heresy's historical functions. The juxtaposition of Hobbes and Sharp does not pretend to a complete picture of writings critical of the arbiters of heresy, but it gives a fair idea of the resourcefulness of debate on the eve of the first full-scale history of heresy by the tome-maister Gottfried Arnold. Discussions of heresy in seventeenth-century England take their place in the tense periodic struggle over office of the priest. Traditionally and Catholicism, or more precisely the theologian, extended to the demarcation of heresy and thus to policing the bounds of the church. This understanding did not go unchallenged as the views of the Hussites and the relentless arguments of William of Ockham attest. During the seventeenth century there were additionally economic pressures on the church requiring increased lay involvement.