• Early Life and Education: Thomas Cranmer was born in 1489 in Nottinghamshire, England, and received his education at Cambridge University, where he earned his Doctor of Divinity in 1526.

• Role in King Henry VIII's Annulment: Cranmer assisted King Henry VIII in obtaining an annulment from Catherine of Aragon, which led to the king's break from the Catholic Church and the establishment of the Church of England.

• Archbishop of Canterbury: In 1533, Cranmer was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, a position he held until 1555, during which he played a crucial role in shaping the Church of England's doctrines and practices.

• Development of English Religious Texts: Cranmer was instrumental in the creation of The Book of Common Prayer, which standardized English liturgy and had a lasting impact on the English language and religious practice.

• The Ten Articles and The Thirty-Nine Articles: Cranmer helped author The Ten Articles in 1536 and The Thirty-Nine Articles in 1537, which outlined the theological foundations and practices of the newly formed Church of England.

• Challenges and Controversies: Cranmer faced significant opposition from traditionalists and was involved in controversial actions, including the execution of Anne Boleyn and the suppression of Catholic uprisings.

• Impact of King Edward VI's Reign: Under King Edward VI, Cranmer's influence grew, leading to the widespread adoption of his religious reforms and the publication of the Common Book of Prayer in 1549.

• Legacy and Humanism: Cranmer's humanism and contributions to the English language and religious practice have left a lasting legacy, making him a key figure in the history of the Reformation.

• Primary and Secondary Sources: The document references various primary sources, including Cranmer's own writings, and secondary sources that provide historical analysis and context for his life and work.

Thomas Cranmer: Humanist, Reformer

  In the year 1527 CE King Henry VIII broke with the Pope and the Catholic Church, declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England.  Henry VIII was determined to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragorn, and to reacquire lands and wealth in England previously ceded to the Holy See.  Into this activity stepped Thomas Cranmer, offering plans for an annulment, cementing his place beside Henry VIII for the rest of his reign.  Considered the ‘Architect of the Church of England,’ and known widely as a reformist, scholar, and writer during the reigns of three monarchs, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury is considered by his detractors as a “craven, self-preserving” heretic and by his supporters as a martyr and paradigmatic of the Reformation.  His contributions to the English language were immense.  Dr. Joan Lockwood O’Donovan notes that Cranmer “produc[ed] those defining documents of the reformed church in the royal domains which have given theological, spiritual and institutional shape to Anglicanism over the centuries.” This paper examines Thomas Cranmer’s scholarly achievements, contributions to the English language, and fidelity to temporal power that cemented his legacy as a seminal evangelical reformer and argues that his humanism elevated his status to that of a revolutionary figure in world history.

Thomas Cranmer was born in 1489, in Aslockton, Nottinghamshire, England.  Thomas’ father, a local gentleman, made sure he received an education.  After grammar school, he was admitted to Cambridge University, Jesus College, receiving his master’s degree in 1515, and his Doctor of Divinity in 1526.  During this period of his life, Cranmer married a woman named Joan, who died during childbirth, along with this newborn son.  His early and life-long affinity for marriage is notable for its unconventional nature for men of the cloth during the era.

“There was a distinct silence about Cranmer’s reforming sympathies,” during these years at Cambridge, but by the summer of 1529 things had begun to change.  In this year, he became chaplain for Thomas Boleyn, and shortly thereafter Cranmer began his career in politics, working for Henry VIII “to produce arguments for the annulment [of his marriage to Catherine], a task to which the King would send him back repeatedly over the next four years.” In 1530, while in Rome, he was made Rector of Bredon, and the next year Cranmer was elevated to the position personal chaplain for Henry VIII.  In 1533 he was made Archbishop of Canterbury, a position he would retain until 1555. 

It was during this time that Cranmer evolved his prose.  Historian and biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch notes, “he revealed his connoisseurship of words: at the time it was not common to present an academic treatise in a vernacular language, and so Cranmer tried to make the English language work harder than it had done before.”

King Henry’s annulment, known as the ‘King’s Great Matter’ had spilled into public view by 1531.  On Cranmer’s suggestion, the Crown had removed the case for annulment from the Papal Courts and taken it to “theologians throughout Europe,” speeding up the proceedings, and on May 23, 1533, Cranmer, in his capacity as Archbishop, declared the marriage annulled.  On June 1 of that year, Anne Boleyn was declared Queen.  The Catholic Church excommunicated King Henry.  There was some irony in this situation, where on the one hand, Cranmer took the Catholic position of Archbishop of Canterbury while on the other, he exhibited his anti-papal sentiments more openly than ever before.  This shift in religious sentiment toward evangelicalism represented a new type of individualized faith, in which the written word of God is central to a more personal Christianity.  Evangelicalism encompasses the Protestant faiths including Puritanism and Methodism, and prominently features the rejection of the rites and vestments, Latin liturgy, and the power structure of the Catholic Church.  King Henry VIII would be the first monarch of England to rule supreme over the fledgling Church of England.  MacCulloch states that “the royal Council now quickly took the decision to face out papal wrath, unleashing a full-scale campaign of preaching against the Pope as the center-piece of an unprecedented propaganda drive to justify a complete break with a millennium of close Anglo-papal relations.”

By this time Cranmer had been granted the title of Vicegerent. As vicegerent, Cranmer had been delegated powers by the monarch.  This power of vicegerency saw Cranmer in the halls of parliament advocating for the Reformation on behalf of King Henry VIII.  “His parliamentary strategy was paired in his gameplan for the future with the fact that the king had made him vicegerent in spirituals; in other words, he would act as a lieutenant for the newly recognized supreme governor in the church…As such, he wielded a royal power as all-embracing as that of the pope.”

Thomas Cranmer found a reform-minded ally and friend in Anne Boleyn.  His relationship with the Boleyn family had begun when he was at Cambridge University.  Her outspoken support for Cranmer and his efforts was instrumental in his early career.  But Queen Anne’s first child was a girl.  In concert with his friend and mentor, Thomas Cromwell, Lord Protector of England and confidant of the King, Cranmer was very busy at the opening of Parliament on 15 January 1534, overseeing the passage of the first Act of Succession, which declared the King’s daughter Mary illegitimate, because of the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  The first Act of Succession named Queen Anne’s daughter Elizabeth as heir to the throne, instead.  

In 1536, Cranmer was instrumental in helping to author, and gain Parliamentary approval for, The Ten Articles.  These articles established the rituals of the newly formed Church of England.  This early iteration of the contours of the church mixed traditional Catholic rites and activities with evangelical replacements for others.  It was said that images could be used but not worshipped, or that saints were only to be seen as regular people instead of worshipped.  This was, in effect, “Catholicism without the Pope.” These articles served to normalize the new church’s activities for people as they worshipped at churches across the country.  There were heated arguments leading up to their publication, as strong traditionalist factions objected or wanted to include their own material. This included a list of saints and the ailments they may cure.  Cranmer made enemies through the course of his career that favored traditional Catholic values, rites, and sacred objects.  The arguments between evangelicals and traditionalists became so acute that King Henry had to step in “to put our own pen to the book” and “conceive certain Articles’ for Convocation to agree.”

1536 was a pivotal year in Tudor history.  Catharine of Aragon died, and King Henry injured his leg in a sporting accident.  Thomas Cromwell engineered the fall of Anne Boleyn, and she was executed.  Cranmer was a participant in the proceedings, where they found her guilty of  treason and slander. MacCulloch writes that “the judgement is a stain on Cranmer’s reputation, the unacceptable face of his loyalty to the Supreme Head.” Shortly thereafter, King Henry VIII married Jane Seymour, on May 30, 1536.  Jane was a young and beautiful courtesan that Henry had already been seeing for some time.

In “autumn of 1536 and 1537, Lincolnshire and the north of England were convulsed by the series of risings collectively known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.” This uprising was one of the most serious of all the Tudor period and was precipitated by the sudden changes to the church.  People rebelled against King Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church. The authorities appropriated monasteries and other church lands, and implemented Thomas Cranmer’s updated rules that governed the operation of the newly formed Church of England.  The uprising was quelled, but many thousands of English citizens participated, and it was coincidental with substantial change occurring for common people across the country.

In 1537, Cranmer headed up a group of bishops who drafted The Thirty-Nine Articles, also known as The Bishops’ Book or The Institution of the Christian Man, which added to the existing rules for the Church of England established by The Ten Articles a year earlier.  These Thirty-Nine Articles codified theological determinations about the newly formed Church, including outlining baptism and the use of the Eucharist.  From 1537-1539, Cranmer made progress ensuring his revised rules and procedures were implemented, he pushed back against conservative Parliamentary members, and participated in a synod where he expounded on England’s Articles and battled with conservatives over the nature of the sacrament.  And Cranmer was busy with his own work The Book of Common Prayer.  A first draft was prepared during this time.  Finally, “two themes which provide some of this coherence are identified by MacCulloch. The first was Cranmer's determination to promote the 'evangelical' reform of the Church—understood, as he explains, in the wider sense employed by some modern historians to describe the 'religious reformism which developed in England during the 1520s and 1530s' in preference to the narrower (and often misapplied) term 'Lutheranism' or any other variety of continental Protestantism.”

That same year, Jane Seymour died during childbirth, and King Henry was stricken with grief.  The death of Jane Seymour convinced King Henry religious reforms were moving too fast.  Scholar G.W. Barnard reflects that “Henry's quarrel with the pope was thus straightforwardly a dispute over jurisdiction, namely who determined the legitimacy of the king of England's marriages, rather than a matter of grand constitutional principle...More theoretically put, in its ecclesiological structures, liturgical use and theological positions, Henry's church remained far closer to western Christendom than anything else, and was still essentially catholic.” So, in 1539 he had passed the Act of Six Articles, guaranteeing the right to certain Catholic rituals, and, importantly, requiring that priests and other representatives of the clergy remain celibate.  This Act forced Cranmer to divorce his wife, and MacCulloch writes that she was “sent abroad.” On the whole, however, as MacCulloch notes, the act had not affected his reforms over the past decade.

As of 1539, the first English translation of the Bible was approved by Cranmer’s mentor Thomas Cromwell.  The book was called The Great Bible.  The beautifully illustrated cover conveys a “message…of unity: two estates, clerical and lay, harmoniously and gratefully receiving the word of God from the hands of a benevolent monarch, and drawing from it his preferred message of discipline and obedience.” The conversion to the Church of England was complete.

At the end of 1539, King Henry VIII once again decided to wed, and chose, sight unseen, Anne of Cleaves, who arrived in Dover from Calais on December 27.  Thomas Cromwell had arranged for them to marry after showing King Henry a painting of the young foreign bride.  When she arrived, King Henry was displeased.  He married her nevertheless, on January 6, 1540.  By this time, Thomas Cromwell had overstepped his authority.  Besides the situation with Anne of Cleaves, Cromwell’s advocacy for reform had offended powers in Calais.  On June 10 of that same year, he was imprisoned at the Tower of London, and beheaded on July 28th, 1540.  Here is a recount of Cranmer’s plea to King Henry VIII to spare Cromwell’s life, notable for its prose, and for its carefully crafted “tormented defense” of his mentor:

"He that was such a servant, in my judgement, in wisdom, diligence, faithfulness, and experience, as no prince in this realm ever had…I loved him as my friend, for so I took him to be, but I chiefly loved him for the love which I thought I saw him bear ever towards your Grace, singularly above all other.  But now, if he be a traitor, I am sorry that I ever loved him or trusted him, and I am very glad that his treason is discovered in time; but again I am very sorrowful; for who shall your Grace trust hereafter, if you might not trust him?...I pray God continually night and day to send such a counsellor in his pace whom your Grace may trust, and who for all his qualities can and will serve your Grace like to him.”

Cranmer was “on his own for the first time since he had made Archbishop” but the world did not slow down, and politics soon swept up Thomas Cranmer once again.

At the same time, the King sought an annulment from his new wife, Anne of Cleaves.  Cranmer worked on behalf of the King.  “Immediately [he] found himself thrust into a position of new political prominence.” Subsequently, King Henry VIII wed Katherine Howard, his fourth wife.  “Throughout the rest of Henry’s reign, however, Cranmer had every incentive to cling to Henry’s authority,” and successive crises in the following years would be crucial to Cranmer’s very survival.

G.W. Bernard identifies some key features of The Henrician Reformation: a break from Rome (Royal Supremacy), Henry’s treatment of Purgatory, Henry’s attitude toward religious images and ceremonies, his attitude toward the Bible, the dissolution of the monasteries, and his attitude on pilgrimages and superstition. These features were influenced by the thinking of Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, a tutor of Henry’s who remained a Catholic all his life and sought to reform the Church from within.

When King Henry VIII died on January 28, 1547, his son Edward VI ascended to the throne. “In September 1548, there came a step extraordinary in a protestant reformation: the government forbade all preaching. The pretext was the usual one that it was necessary to avoid divisive public argument, because now a major decision on liturgy was imminent – and indeed a parliamentary committee, mostly composed of bishops, was putting the finishing touches to a uniform vernacular prayer book for the realm.” The preceding years had indeed seen infighting in Parliament, but Cranmer had revised and completed his Book of Common Prayer.  This book was made compulsory in all churches across England on June 9, 1549, Whit Sunday.  Small scale rebellions broke out, but it was relatively well received, and read, in churches around England. It transformed what had traditionally been Latin liturgy into English – a common language shared among all the people who might want to study it.  In many ways, the Book of Common Prayer has had a similar impact on the English language as Shakespeare. This is because it created a common verse that most Christian people read regularly and helped to create a shared identity for Christians across space and time.  In Methodist churches all over the Midwestern United States, remnants of the Book of Common Prayer, including the Apollo’s Creed, and instructions for following along with the church leaders, can be found today.

Language is “intimately bound up with early modern England's emergent national identity as well as some of its more refractory implications, [and] the Reformation's emphasis on language, and particularly the vernacular, [is] a politically and religiously significant category.” Inherent in the Common Book of Prayer was a communal spirit.  Since so many worshipped at church on a regular basis, the text of the Book became a way for people to bond and share culture.  “This elevation of England/English/Protestantism over Rome/Latin/Catholicism was intimately bound up with the contemporary struggle to justify the English language rhetoric.” One of Cranmer’s most enduring legacies is the Common Book of Prayer for its contributions to the English language.  By weaving together the linguistic, religious, and political autonomy afforded by the break from the papacy, Cranmer hoped to create “a unified and coherent identity manifested in the national conformity the Book of Common Prayer demanded.” Just the act of using the English language defined England as a separate political entity from Rome.  This shift with the English language had two sides.  For worshippers it opened “a means to fuller and more authentic individual religious experience. It refocused religious authority, in other words, on the individual rather than the institution,” segueing with the general trend toward broader social diffusion throughout the 16th century.

When King Edward VI took the throne, “the long war of attrition which had been fought between evangelicals and conservatives at Court” was ended with the newly crowned reformist King.  Two symbols of Cranmer’s newfound power were a grant of personal estates and the successful use of divorce for a favored noble. In Parliament, reform-minded speakers that had been arrested or suppressed under Henry VIII became more visible. By 1550, after the distribution of the Common Book of Prayer, evangelicals consolidated their gains, routing remaining Catholic-leaning bishops and publishing “A defense of the true and Catholic doctrine of the sacrament of the body and blood of our savior Christ…” disputing the commonly accepted belief that, like grain forms bread, the eucharist, through transubstantiation, became the actual flesh and blood of Christ.  This point of contention was a defining point underscoring the differences between conservative and evangelical theology.

In 1548, Cranmer published the Catechism.  “The importance of the Catechism in the study of Cranmer's views has often been recognized, not least because it contains teaching on the eucharistic presence which appears to conflict with his later claim to have abandoned both the doctrines of transubstantiation and the real presence before its publication.” Cranmer’s prose were popular and well received.  Writing on the purpose of the Catechism in the introduction, he explains:

“A short Instruction into Christian religion for the synguler commoditie and profite of children and yonge people. Ouersene and corrected by the moost reuerende father in God the Archebyshoppe of Canterburie.”

In December 1548, the government used the House of Lords to stage a four-day debate on the eucharist. Cranmer’s position on the eucharist was quite controversial during his time.  This ceremony mimics the Last Supper event in the Christian mythos.  For Catholics, transubstantiation is involved, but for evangelicals the tradition involves honoring the bread and wine as symbolic.  Cranmer’s thoughts about the eucharist changed over time.  “This doctrine, originally proposed by Ratramn in the ninth century, holds that while the communicant eats the elements, which remain unchanged, his soul feeds upon the spiritual Christ...The opponents of Ratramnianism charged that the doctrine debased the holy sacrament by making it nothing more than the fulfillment of Christ's promise that ‘Wherever two or more are gathered in my name, there shall I be also,’ a promise which does not require a sacrament to be fulfilled." In 1548, in a debate in the House of Lords, Cranmer explained his view on the subject:

“They be two things to eat the Sacrament and to eat the body of Christ…I believe that Christ is eaten with the heart. The eating with our mouth cannot give us life. For then should a sinner have life. But eating of his body gives life. Only good men can eat Christ's body. When the evil eateth the Sacrament, bread and wine, he neither hath Christ's body nor eateth it… no man drinketh Christ or eateth him, except he dwell in Christ and Christ in him.”

Cranmer’s differing views about the eucharist were a regular theme during his service in Parliament and in synod.  “That word ‘mass’, hated by evangelicals including the king himself, had been generally absent from official statements during 1548, but its ungracious return to the 1549 book was probably the pilot which guided the liturgy past the shoals of conservative hostility in parliament.”

At the same time, the Crown ordered burnings.  A defiant Joan Bocher was thrown into the fire in 1547 for pronouncing her traditional Catholic faith.  “She died utterly unrepentant, offending all the proprieties both as a woman and as a subject of punishment by ‘ranting and railing’” against a priest speaking at her burning, with whom she disagreed.  Even though burnings had been outlawed by Parliament, Cranmer used “common-law powers of the Crown” to enforce evangelical practices on the citizens of England.  People can make “the obvious comparison between the fiery deaths of Joan and of Cranmer himself… [and that] radicals… [later] reproach to the official hero-martyrs…Cranmer for the burning of Joan…even to the extent of seeing their deaths as a divine vengeance for hers.”

One original source from this time is John Foxe.  MacCulloch notes of him that “Foxe was very unusual among English evangelicals in deploring all executions for religion even of those who were clearly in error.” Humanists like John Foxe and Thomas Cranmer were influenced by Enlightenment-era thinking.  Under this rubric, they eschewed “the old practice of hiding new discoveries in private jargon, obscure language, or even anagrams.  [These] gradually gave way to the ideal of universal comprehensibility.” And then, “new canons of reporting were devised so that experiments and discoveries could be reproduced by others. This required new precision in language and a willingness to share experimental or observational methods.” This humanism manifests itself in some rare letters Cranmer wrote to his good friend Johannes Dantiscus, a Polish diplomat.  MacCulloch notes that “Cranmer had revealed himself…as a humanist of traditionalist sympathies in religion, supportive of Erasmus and hostile to Martin Luther.” and that their letters were written in “sophisticated humanist Latin.”

Ultimately the results of their work to punish dissenters “had not been a waste of energy…the English Church [had been] purged of all past corruption and mov[ed] straight to parity with the most thoroughly reformed of civic churches in Switzerland.” But then, King Edward VI died, probably of tuberculosis and Mary I ascended to the throne.  A devout and practicing Catholic, Mary I threatened all of the work that Cranmer had done to support the Reformation and the Church of England.

At this time, the tides changed in England, and reformers who had been outspoken the year before gave way to traditionalists with their own grievances regarding Cranmer’s work.  Roger Edgeworth, preaching probably soon after Queen Mary’s accession, spoke bitterly about the deceit embodied in the reforming legislation from the 1530s to 1553:

“In the acts of Parliaments that we have had, made in our days, what goodly preambles hath gone after in the same? Even quasi oraculum Apollinis [like the oracle of Delphi]; as though the things that follow, had come from the counsel highest in heaven, and yet the end hath been either to destroy abbeys or chantries or colleges or such like, by which some have gotten much lands, and have been made men of great possession which (by God’s just judgement) they have but a short while enjoyed, but many an honest poor man that been undone by it, and an innumerable multitude hath perished for default and lack of sustenance, and this misery hath long continued, and yet hath not an end.”

Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary, was aligned with the Spanish and a devout practicing Catholic. She intended to reshape religious life in England, and she demanded fealty.  Many people during her reign were burned at the stake.  But one of her first targets was Thomas Cranmer, whom she blamed for his part in the first Act of Succession, denying Mary her rightful place on the throne.  Even though she targeted and only fined other people involved in the ‘plot’ to keep her from the throne, this was not the case with Cranmer.  He was arrested and plead guilty to treason for his beliefs in 1553.  In 1556, after renouncing his Protestant beliefs and embracing Catholicism publicly, Mary I persisted still with his execution by burning.  The last moments of Thomas Cranmer’s life were recorded by John Foxe, in his monumental work Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, where he recounts Cranmer’s last words and moments:

"'And as for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy, and antichrist, with all his false doctrine. And as for the sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the bishop of Winchester...that it shall stand in the last day before the judgment of God, where the papistical doctrines contrary thereto shall be ashamed to show their face.' Upon the conclusion of this unexpected declaration, amazement and indignation were conspicuous in every part of the church. The catholics were completely foiled, their object being frustrated...A chain was provided to bind him to the stake, and after it had tightly encircled him, fire was put to the fuel, and the flames began soon to ascend. Then were the glorious sentiments of the martyr made manifest;—then it was, that stretching out his right hand, he held it unshrinkingly in the fire till it was burnt to a cinder, even before his body was injured, frequently exclaiming, ‘This unworthy right hand!’ Apparently insensible of pain, with a countenance of venerable resignation, and eyes directed to Him for whose cause he suffered, he continued, like St. Stephen, to say, ‘Lord Jesus receive my spirit!’ till the fury of the flames terminated his powers of utterance and existence. He closed a life of high sublunary elevation, of constant uneasiness, and of glorious martyrdom, on March 21, 1556.”

Thomas Cranmer’s death by burning made him a martyr for the evangelical cause.  While there was a long line of reformers who burned before him, and he does stand on their shoulders in that regard, Cranmer witnessed the actual schism and resultant birth of a new church on his watch.  While he had his detractors, his achievements far outweigh his very human faults, including avarice and the use of violence to achieve his ends.  Throughout his imprisonment, Cranmer tried to reason with Mary I, indicating that his past faults were attributable to his fealty to his King.  He vacillated on important questions of the time, including the nature of the eucharist and the authority of the Pope, but ultimately acquiesced to Mary I’s viewpoint and renounced his evangelical convictions, on several occasions.

Thomas Cranmer is rightfully considered the ‘Architect of the Church of England’, and his education, political experience, use of language, and his humanism all contributed to his successes in life.  Those include creating a structure for the new church, contributing a prayer book in English that all English speakers could socialize, and managing the budding faith under successive monarchs to advance the Church of England and the Reformation.  For all these traits that contributed to his success, little is said of the humanism he displayed.  He was an advocate for freedom of conscience, as the Catholic church restricted the liturgy to Latin, or designated authorities such as Priests arbitrarily.  By assisting Henry VIII in his effort to eject Papal authority from the kingdom, Cranmer was also instrumental in restoring the agency that comes with Royal Supremacy to the monarch.  Today, “two national Established Churches, the Churches of England and Ireland, [have] transmuted into something else, spawning a worldwide ecclesiastical family which spread in tandem with the British Empire. What to call it? Anglican.”

Diarmaid MacCulloch believes that the aftermath of Thomas Cranmer’s burning “[has] spread through the centuries like ripples from a stone thrown into a pool, from immediate unfinished business through to the creation of religious and cultural identities for England for the English-speaking world.” In the immediate aftermath of his death, storms and even a comet portended the “fiasco” that occurred in London and around England.  The government printed and distributed his original recantation, and popular opinion soured.  After Elizabeth I became queen, it became easier for colleagues and scholars to collect, organize, and preserve Cranmer’s papers.  “The wider aftermath of Cranmer’s death is the history of the later English Reformation, and through it the whole history of religion and culture in the English-speaking world.” In time, he became a martyr for the cause of Reformation, venerated by his peers in the Elizabethan era.  Historians have lauded Cranmer’s as a “godly father” of the English Church and he has also been scorned by Catholic sources.  But it was his humanism that stands out most, for his careful and honest stewardship of the Church through a period of monumental change and new beginnings.

References

Primary Sources:

Cranmer, Thomas. Catechismus, that is to say, a shorte instruction into Christian religion for the synguler commoditie and profyte of childre[n] and yong people. Set forth by the mooste reuerende father in God Thomas Archbyshop of Canterbury, primate of all England and Metropolitane. Kindle Edition. 1548.

Cranmer, Thomas. The Book of Common Prayer. Kindle Edition. 1549.

Fox, John. Fox's Book of Martyrs, or, The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. J. & J.L. Gihon. 1813.

Nichols, John Gough, and Foxe, John. Narratives of the Days of the Reformation: Chiefly from the Manuscripts of John Foxe the Martyrologist. Printed for the Camden Society. 1859.

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Bernard, G. W. “Henry VIII: 'Catholicism Without the Pope?'" History (London). Vol. 101, no. 345 2016.

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Lockwood O’Donovan, Joan. “Thomas Cranmer.” Expository Times. Vol. 126, no. 8. 2015.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. All Things Made New: The Reformation and Its Legacy. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. 2016.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. “Cranmer's Ambiguous Legacy.” History Today. Vol. 46, no. 6. 1996.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. 2015. “Parliament and the Reformation of Edward VI.” Parliamentary History. Vol. 34, ed. 3.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 1996.

MacCulloch, DIARMAID. "Thomas Cranmer and Johannes Dantiscus: Retractation and Additions." The Journal of Ecclesiastical History. 58, no. 2 2007

Rosendale, Timothy. “"Fiery Toungues: Language, Liturgy, and the Paradox of the English Reformation.” Renaissance Quarterly. 54, no. 4. 2001.

Selwyn, D. G. “A Neglected Edition of Cranmer’s Catechism.” Journal of Theological Studies. XV, no. 1. 1964.

Selwyn, David G. 1997. “Reviews.” Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 48, ed. 1