1 - Dissolving into Laughter: Anti-Monastic Satire in the Reign of Henry VIII

Summary

Monks, nuns and friars provided plentiful inspiration for satire and laughter in early sixteenth-century England. Jestbooks, ballads and satires penned in private letters or in published tracts all abounded with humour about those in religious orders. There was no theme more ripe for mockery, irony or satire than the perceived discrepancy between the ideal of strict observance to the rule of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the more sobering reality of monastic existence, a reality frequently expressed through the rhetoric of the seven deadly sins. The difference between ideal and reality was complicated by the monastic double bind ‘between the reforming imperative of withdrawal, and the social imperative of integration’. It was the inability to reconcile such disjunctures that provided the inspiration for much early modern satire, and it was on the theme of monasticism and the religious life in the 1530s that humour became politically charged. This humour, which had been used by those who sought entertainment or those who urged reform, took on new resonances in the 1530s. It was lent a new urgency by the political and religious upheavals of a decade that witnessed one of the greatest transformations in the lives and history of religious men and women in England. In 1534 the Act of Dispensation severed the link between the English monasteries and the pope. Under the authority of Henry VIII as head of the national Church of England, monastic houses were subject to visitations between 1535 and 1539, reports of which were sent to Thomas Cromwell. By 1540, monasticism had been virtually extinguished in England, forcing over ten thousand monks, nuns and friars from the confines of their rule or cloister back into the world. Traditions of anti-monastic satire were exploited by the Henrician government in order to construct a politicised discourse to justify the dissolution of the monasteries.

Anti-monastic satire was certainly not a cause of the dissolution of the monasteries, nor should its existence be read as reflective of widespread opinion that sought the destruction of the religious life. A. G. Dickens's emphasis on using this broad anticlerical discourse as a phenomenon to help explain the welcome acceptance of the Henrician Reformation has long been discredited.