|
Robert Crowley also Robertus Croleus, Roberto Croleo, Robart Crowleye, Robarte Crole, and Crule (c. 1517 – 18 June 1588), was a stationer, poet, polemicist and Protestant clergyman who was among the Marian exiles at Frankfurt. Crowley appears to have been a Henrician Evangelical who favoured a more reformed Protestantism than was sanctioned at that time by the king and the Church of England. Under the more favourable conditions of the brief reign of Edward VI, Crowley took part in a well-organised London network of evangelical stationers to argue for the reforms he sought, particularly on behalf of ordinary people, for the spiritual and material health of the nation. In this regard he resembles his contemporaries Hugh Latimer, Thomas Lever, Thomas Beccon, and others, who upheld a vision of England as a reformed Christian commonwealth. Like these others, Crowley attacked what he perceived as corruption and uncharitable self-interest among the clergy and wealthy, land-holding elites whom Crowley saw as inhibiting the progress of true reform. It was during this time that Crowley participated as writer, editor, and/or printer in the production of the first printed editions of ''Piers Plowman'', the first translation of the gospels into Welsh, and the first complete metrical psalter in English, which was also the first English psalter with harmonised music. Toward the end of Edward's reign and later, Crowley criticised the Edwardian Reformation as being compromised by self-serving, insufficiently reformed aristocrats, and he came to regard the Dissolution of the Monasteries, not as a boon to the people as was originally hoped, but as the replacement of one form of corruption by another. Upon his return to England following the reign of Mary I, Crowley produced a revised and up-dated version of a historical chronicle in which he represented the Edwardian Reformation as a substantial failure because of the corruption of its supposed supporters such as Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley; Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset; and John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland. In Crowley's account of the Marian persecutions and martyrs he represents them as the tragic but potentially redemptive cost – mostly paid by commoners – for the failures of the Edwardian Reformation. This work became the basic source for John Foxe's account of the Marian period in his famous ''Book of Martyrs''. In the early to mid 1560s Crowley held several positions in the church, and he focused his energies on effecting change from the pulpit and within the church hierarchy. In reaction to what has often been called the Elizabethan Religious Settlement despite its failure to achieve a true consensus, Crowley led the anti-vestiarian faction in resuming the vestments controversy which had taken place during the reign of Edward VI. This role eventually cost Crowley all his clerical offices. During this dispute he produced, in collaboration with other London clergy, what has been called by Patrick Collinson "the first Puritan manifesto". Late in life Crowley was restored to several positions within the church, and he appears to have charted a more moderate course by defending the established church from both Roman Catholicism and the more extreme, emerging nonconformist and Puritan factions which espoused a Presbyterian church polity. ==Early life== Crowley was born in about 1517 in Gloucestershire, possibly in Tetbury, although John Bale says that he was a native of Northamptonshire, and A. B. Emden's ''A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford'' says that Crowley was twenty on 25 July 1539. Crowley himself wrote in 1578 that he was then sixty-one years old. Crowley began his studies at the University of Oxford in about 1534, and was listed as a demy1 of Magdalen College on 25 July 1539. He experienced an evangelical conversion about this time which entailed religious convictions more in line with continental Protestant reformers, but quite at odds with the Church of England under Henry VIII and the Act of Six Articles, known to those who chafed under it as "the whip with six strings". Magdalen was then "a hotbed of evangelicals," (according to Brett Usher ). Four of its members during this period became bishops under Elizabeth I, and with Crowley, Lawrence Humphrey was a key leader in the vestments controversy that took place during her reign. Most of the Magdalen evangelicals became exiles under Mary I, and their influence was purged from the college by Stephen Gardiner in 1554. Crowley received his B.A. on 19 June 1540, and became Probationer Fellow on 26 July 1541 or 1542. In 1542 he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, but he left the same year. Crowley's departure may have been due to a purge of evangelicals, or because, like John Foxe, he objected to the necessity of taking holy orders which entailed a vow of celibacy. It is known that Foxe, like many evangelicals, did not accept the rationale for mandatory clerical celibacy, and evidently Crowley did not either, as he married some years later. At this time Foxe also left the college, naming Crowley and the future bishop Thomas Cooper in a letter to Magdalen's president, Owen Oglethorpe, as being among his circle. Foxe described this group of his fellows as being persecuted by other members of the college, although – unlike Foxe and Crowley – Cooper did not leave the university, and while Oglethorpe himself was no evangelical, years later in Crowley's psalter's dedication letter to him, Crowley holds his former teacher in high regard. From 1542 to about 1546 Crowley tutored for the Protestant household of Sir Nicholas Poyntz (1510–1556/7) in Iron Acton, Gloucestershire, his own home county. (Poyntz's aunt on his father's side, Lady Anne Walsh and wife of Sir John Walsh of Little Sodbury, had taken in William Tyndale as a tutor for their sons from 1521 to 1522/1523.) At the same time as Crowley, Foxe found a similar arrangement, following a pattern whereby promising, young, university-educated men who sought greater changes in the church were supported by members of the lesser nobility until political circumstances were more favourable for public and institutional engagement. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Crowley (printer)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|