A Translation of Richard Morison's Apomaxis Calumniarum
A Translation of Richard Morison's Apomaxis Calumniarum
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Date
1968
Authors
Eakin, Mary H.
Advisor
Zeeveld, W. Gordon
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Abstract
The thesis includes a foreword and a translation from the Latin of
the Apomaxis Calumniarum, a book written by Richard Morison, apologist
for Henry VIII, hired by his secretary, Thomas Cromwell. The work was
composed as a rebuttal to an attack by the German theologian Johann
Coclaeus, and contains a defense of Henry's divorce from Catherine of
Aragon and of the executions of Thomas More and John Fisher, and an
attack upon the papacy.
Morison maintains and supports by Biblical testimony that the
divorce merely righted a wrong, as Henry's union with Catherine had
been incestuous. He claims that More and Fisher were respectively
sick and old, and were seeking the glory of martyrdom, but both were
deserving of an ignominious death for the horrendous crime of obstinately
upholding the power of the pope in England. He charges that
the papacy had a spurious origin, and that throughout history popes
have had a harmful effect. A large part of Morison's book consists
of a personal attack on Coclaeus.