1. Few Reformation scholars, however, would be willing to go so far as to call the controversy over marriage and celibacy “a major cause of the Lutheran, Anglican, and Calvinist Reformations” with Screech, Michael A., The Rabelaisian Marriage (London, 1958), p. 2.Google Scholar Yet Luther accurately perceived the importance of the issue when he claimed in his 1535 commentary on Galatians that the Reformation movement would have made little headway against the papacy if clerical celibacy had been observed as rigorously then as in the time of Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine before the practice of it became so corrupt. See Luther, Martin, Luther's Works, ed. Pelikan, Jaroslav and Hansen, Walter A. (Saint Louis, 1963)Google Scholar, vol. 26, Lectures on Galatians 1535, pp. 458–459. For a general treatment of the problem of celibacy and clerical marriage during the Reformation, see Franzen, August, Zolibat und Priesterehe in der Auseinandersetzun der Refermationszeit und der Katholischen Reform des 16. Jahrhunderts (Munster, 1969)Google Scholar and Ozment, Steven, “Marriage and the Ministry in the Protestant Churches,” in Celibacy in the Church, ed. Basset, William and Huizing, Peter (New York, 1972).Google Scholar Franzen omitted the English Reformation and Ozment had time to make only a few brief but insightful observations about it. Although intentionally avoiding the religious polemics, the best account of celibacy and clerical marriage in the English Reformation remains Lea, Henry C., History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church, 3d ed. rev., 2 vols. (London, 1970), 2: 77–149.Google Scholar I am preparing a monograph on the changing attitudes of the Protestant reformers toward marriage and celibacy in the English Reformation.
