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    A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics
    A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics
    A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics
    Ebook47 pages40 minutes

    A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics

    By Matthew T. Racine

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    In 1562, Jerónimo Osório, a Portuguese Humanist, sent a copy of his Epistola ad Serenissimam Elisabetam Angliae Reginam to Queen Elizabeth of England.  This work attempted to persuade Elizabeth to return England to Catholicism and initiated a twenty-year, four-book polemical battle. 

     

    The Epistola was translated into English in 1565 by exiled English Catholics in Louvain who attempted to spread Osório's message to a non-academic audience within England.  The study of this English translation and its repercussions reveals important information about the philosophy of the exiled English Catholics, recusant book culture, and the structure of the community at Louvain.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEclectic Esquire Media, LLC
    Release dateMay 15, 2023
    ISBN9798223926108
    A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics

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      A Pearle for a Prynce - Matthew T. Racine

      Table of Contents

      A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics | By, | Matthew T. Racine

      A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics

      By,

      Matthew T. Racine

      COPYRIGHT © 2001, 2023 by Matthew T. Racine

      Reprint Permission: This article originally appeared in the Catholic Historical Review July 2001 (Vol. 87, No. 3) and is reprinted courtesy of the Catholic University of America Press.

      Cover image is modified from an image found on the British Library’s Flickr page. The original image may be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11169961736/

      At the end of 1562, Jerónimo Osório, a Portuguese Humanist, sent a copy of his Epistola Hieronymi Osorii ad Serenissimam Elisabetam Angliae Reginam (1562) to Queen Elizabeth of England.[1]  This letter employed theologically based rhetorical arguments to persuade Elizabeth to rejuvenate Catholicism in England and drive all heretics from her kingdom. It was the first of four works in a twenty-year long polemical battle, a battle in which John Foxe, the famous martyrologist, eventually became involved. Additionally, this was the first controversy regarding the Elizabethan religious settlement initiated by a non-English writer.[2]  In March 1565, Richard Shacklock, an exiled English Catholic living in Louvain, published A Pearle for a Prynce, his translation of Osório's Epistola. By this date, Osório's letter had been in circulation for nearly two and one-half years, and Walter Haddon's reply to it, Gualteri Haddoni pro reformatione Anglicana epistola apologetica ad Hier. Osorium, Lusitanum (1564), had been in print for one.[3]  An examination of the content of Osório's letter, which angered Elizabeth and was perceived by her Secretary of State, William Cecil, as an act of lèse-majesté, will explain why it appealed to Shacklock and why he chose to translate it. Furthermore, the printed version of A Pearle, the means by which Shacklock's translation was conveyed to his audience, reveals much about the ideology of exiled Catholics during the first few years of Elizabeth's reign.  

      Although some Europeans of the time indeed may have followed the debate between Osório and Haddon because of the commanding reputations of both men as Latin stylists,[4] the reason for continued interest within England and its significance for historians of this period has more to do with the translation and appropriation of Osório's Epistola by exiled English Catholics. The use of Osório's work was part of a larger program to sustain survivalist Catholicism within England by publishing Catholic works and smuggling them into the kingdom.[5]  Indeed, if the English Reformation was a revolution of the book, a replacement of books in Latin by books in the vernacular,[6] then the Catholic exiles were willing to fight a counter-revolutionary action on the same terms.

      By looking at Osório's Epistola more evenhandedly than others have, this study increases our knowledge of this period of religious change in England. The English-speaking world has been inclined to dismiss or belittle Osório's Epistola as well as the entire Osório-Haddon debate. This attitude began in the sixteenth century as Englishmen loyal to Elizabeth quickly declared their opinions on the merit of Osório's letter. Thomas Smith, the English ambassador to France who eventually succeeded in having Haddon's reply to Osório printed in Latin in Paris, wrote to William Cecil in 1563, declaring that Osório's letter showed "eloquentiae satis, theologiae nihil.[7]  Francis Bacon was later to state that Osório's style suffered from a vanity of words."[8]  This judgment

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