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Thomas Cranmer and Johannes Dantiscus: Retractation and Additions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
Extract
The friendship of Thomas Cranmer with the Polish humanist and diplomat Bishop Johannes Dantiscus is one of the most interesting among Cranmer's European-wide circle of acquaintance. Although it was extremely episodic and petered out in religious disagreement, it was a vivid and early illustration of the international cast of mind of this central figure of the English Reformation. So one of the archival discoveries which pleased me most in writing my biography of Thomas Cranmer was a pair of letters from Cranmer to Johannes Dantiscus. I learned of these letters through the generosity of Dr Stephen Ryle, who sent me an unsolicited letter about them while I was actually reading the proofs of my book, and supplied me with photocopies of the originals in the Czartoryski Library in Kraków, preserved amid other fragments of the Polish royal archives. As I hastened to read these, in a frighteningly brief window of opportunity before my proofs had to be completed, I found a beguilingly and startlingly novel addition to Cranmer's career, which necessitated last-minute alterations to my text. The letters were dateable to early summer 1527. The first letter was written from Bilbao on the Basque coast, while the writer was waiting for a ship to England, and passed on greetings to Dantiscus from a number of mutual acquaintances in diplomatic circles at the emperor's court in Spain.
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Footnotes
In preparing this note, I am greatly indebted to Tomasz Ososiński of the Centre for Studies on the Classical Tradition in Poland and East-Central Europe, University of Warsaw, who is one of the team in the ‘Dantiscus Lab’, a project to publish the correspondence of Johannes Dantiscus (see the site at http://www.obta.uw.edu.pl/obta/dantyszek/eng_index.html). He took the trouble to send me an unsolicited message courteously alerting me to the real identity of the ‘Cranmer’ writer of 1527, and subsequently has been extremely helpful in the preparation of this note. I am also very grateful to Anna Skolimowska, leader of the Dantiscus Project, for checking my transcription of Uppsala, Universitetsbiblioteket MS H. 155, fos 30r–31v. All the correspondence referred to in this article will be published by the Dantiscus Lab. I also extend my thanks to Dominic Smith.