John Jewel

W e need to make a distinction between the various forms of debate that historians classify as "polemical theology." Anti-Catholic preaching at St. Paul's Cross was something different because it addressed a lay audience untrained in the theological details of the question at issue. The strategy...

It is no exaggeration to say that one sermon dominated anti-Catholic preaching in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, and that was the Bishop of Salisbury John Jewel’s Challenge sermon, first delivered on November 26, 1559, and again on 31 March 1560. But before we examine the sermon, we need to...