18 March 2025

 

Seminar:  Veritie of Verities: The English Crown, the Great Matter,

and Contested Meanings of Truth, 1520-1560

Daniel Bennett Page, Independent Scholar

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Overview 

Between 1527 and 1536, the traditional virtue Truth was reified in the service of competing propaganda  regarding the so-called Great Matter, the divorce of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. Truth became  the pivotal term in a swarm of clashing publications, most notably the quasi-official 1532 pamphlet A  Glasse of the Truthe, which supported the marriage annulment, and the 1533 Parasceve, which  answered A Glasse with rhetorical rigor and humor. The immense international controversy also  generated over 1000 manuscript pages of draft tracts directly from Henry and Thomas Cromwell. This  was clearly a deeply personal and even existential dispute for the crown. 

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But deliberation about Truth had entered English public discourse somewhat earlier through Erasmus’  Adages and Juan Luís Vives’ 1524 book of moral axioms for the heir apparent, Princess Mary. Both  humanists name Truth as the daughter of Time and stress its ultimate victory after being nefariously  hidden. This rendering of Truth became for the future queen profoundly identified with both her  mother’s lost marital cause and the rightness of Catholicism. Thus, the public marriage controversy of  her teenage years was thoroughly mapped onto her self-definition and her long-term narrative of royal  power. This is particularly obvious in Mary’s first regnal Parliamentary Act nullifying the divorce, whose  preamble was based on Vives’ gloss of Veritas Temporis Filia, her motto. 

 

In these ways, Veritie and its liminal meanings became directly, individually, and publicly identified with Henry and Mary. We can thus assess whether embodied Truth in this context is considered axiomatic or  built up of provable propositions. Similarly, we can discover aspects of Tudor understandings of  historical processes, especially vindication. Such questions are crucial because they involve the  legitimacy of the English monarchy itself: in the royal succession, on the European stage, and as a putative fount of religious authority.

 

Chair

​Valerie Schutte

 

Presenter bio

Daniel Bennett Page (MFA, PhD) is a scholar, musician, and educator studying cultural artefacts from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation, mostly from England. Originally trained in Historical Musicology, he currently researches early printed materials, court culture, liturgy, visual art, and psalmody. A former Fulbright Scholar at the British Library, he presents his work regularly at international and other flagship conferences. Recent publications address confessional alignments among mid-Tudor Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal, music and liturgy for the coronation of Mary I, and Mary's humanist motto. He is currently based in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is the program chair of the local Cathedral Arts Project and a sometime performing musician.