Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2010
In the years around 1580, a feeling was growing amongst England's more zealous Protestants that the most terrifying threat to truth came no longer from the Catholics but from the Family of Love, “a deadly heresie of all others.” The Family's enemies sounded the alarum for a new battle in the old war between heresy and truth, and they discussed the subject in the starkest of theological terms. Followers of the Family's Dutch founder, H. N. or Hendrick Niclaes, were fiercely criticized for each of their central tenets: that “good-willing” humans could reach a state in which they were inhabited by divinity, or “godded with God” that in this state, sin was vanquished and perfection attained; and that much of scripture was to be interpreted allegorically. Such heresies, in association with the Family's controversial belief in the legitimacy of dissembling before hostile inquisitors, opened “a very window” to all manner of other dangers. Through this window, John Knewstub and others peered anxiously at the dark prospect of a Familist future, marked by “the overthrow of the common wealth,” “lewdnesse of life,” and “a monstrous new kind of speech never found in the scriptures.”
In practice, however, the perils of heresy were not as black and white as this. All heresies were connected with one another in the eternal battle, but some were worse than others. Orthodoxy and its opposites were very much in the eye of the beholder.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.