This chapter offers a survey of religious dissimulation in early modern England, where questions concerning its legitimacy were, owing to the unpredictable course of the English Reformation(s), arguably more pressing than anywhere else in Europe. While most Catholic and Protestant theological authorities condemned dissimulation in principle, the practice must have been widespread and was perceived, at least by those in power, as a political reality that could not simply be ignored. This chapter outlines both ecclesiological and political justifications for tolerating those who dissembled their faith and argues that their ambivalent status and the often unstable practices of policing such religious dissimulation should be considered a central aspect of early modern approaches to the problem of religious toleration. Religious dissimulation was a highly controversial practice, and toleration for inward dissent was never a given. Especially in times of political crisis, church and state authorities frequently resorted to aggressive measures to access the secret beliefs of religious dissenters, which belied the Queen’s alleged refusal to make windows into men’s hearts.

This Introduction discusses why dissembling one’s faith in order to avoid religious persecution was, despite its ubiquity, such a contentious practice for the early moderns and how the controversies surrounding such dissimulation were informed by early modern views on lying. It further provides an account of the various points of contact between debates on the legitimacy of religious dissimulation and theatrical dissimulation, respectively, both of which were indebted to shared theological concerns. Plays that stage religious dissimulation as their subject matter are therefore also legible as meta-theatrical reflections on the political and religious implications of their medium. Finally, this Introduction provides an overview of scholarship on the early modern stage and its position vis-à-vis contemporary debates on conformity and nonconformity, which has frequently been thematised in the supposedly antagonistic relationship between the theatre and the Puritans. Arguably, however, the relationship between the stage and various contemporary positions on the question of religious dissimulation was more dynamic and unstable than previous scholarship has often suggested.

John Thompson describes how Martin Luther and John Calvin treated conscience. For Luther, natural conscience is beset by knowing that a person can never meet the rigorous requirements of the law. Faith can relieve a person’s downtrodden conscience, which would otherwise condemn him. Once a person accepts the favor of God that flows solely from trusting him, his conscience is liberated. He knows he can do nothing himself to merit that favor. His conscience is freed “to trust God’s promise of mercy and forgiveness.” The highest functioning conscience for Luther, then, is the one that does not depend on its own goodness or perfection. Calvin teaches that, though a person’s conscience is a natural faculty, it is marred and affected by the fall. Once a person is saved, however, his conscience is transformed so that he desires to obey the will of God found in the law. This is true even though adherence to the law will not add in the least to his salvation. For this reason, Calvin created a catechism to train and chasten Genevan Christians’ consciences. Calvin also helped to establish the Geneva consistory, which was less a disciplinary body, and rather “a school for consciences.”

This chapter examines the memory of those who conformed and compromised – so-called ‘Nicodemites’ – in the English Reformation. It takes as its starting point and central case study Matthew Parker (1504-75), the first Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury, and his self-memorialisation in his memorial roll, a curious document which has often been described as autobiographical. The chapter considers the format, content and purpose of this unique manuscript, focusing particularly on the section dealing with Parker’s life during the reign of Mary I (1553-8) and the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England; a period in which Parker, unlike many other celebrated Protestants, was neither a martyr nor an exile, choosing instead the partial compromise of remaining in his newly hostile homeland. Both Parker himself and then his subsequent presented these years as either a period of inner spiritual constancy or as a time of suffering, a quasi-martyrdom. This, the chapter argues, reflects and illuminates a much larger process in which individual compromise was rewritten or forgotten in the creation of a larger, collective cultural memory of Protestant resistance and triumph.

Idolatry is a fighting word, feisty and judgmental, freighted with disapproval. After all, to call any sacred object an idol is to question its legitimacy.