against rhetoric may be seen in his adopting – and in some cases virtual
plagiarizing – of some of the arguments and phrases of Erasmus’s
Encomium. While not alluding to them all, Hoyt Hudson notes several
passages where, in reference to Cicero and Demosthenes, Jewel lifts
whole phrases and ideas from Erasmus’s text.^118 Coupled with this, in a
passage dealing specifically with matters of education and religion,
Jewel, having already berated orators for use of the public square in their
destruction of ancient commonwealths, turns his attention to the recent
halcyon days of traditionalism, the age of Scholasticism,
when Cicero, neglected and scorned, lay in mould and darkness;
when Scotus held the ports (aditus: approach or admission) of the
schools and the paths of literary study; when they did not know so
much that by others, who had not learned the mysteries, they were
thought to be mad and to rave. Yet how beautifully learned they
seem, what acute philosophers, what estimable theologians! Then
how great an admiration there was for sound literature! What a
throng of studious youths! There were the seats, these the shrines of
letters, here was the fountain, the source, of all humanities.^119It would seem that Jewel’s medium was his message, that his oratory
against oratory put the lie to the content of his message; and that, far
more an exercise in irony than in conservative obscurantism, Jewel
wished to defend that which he calumniated. This interpretation of
Jewel’s oratiois embraced by C.S. Lewis:
What can this be but an insinuation that none could seriously attack
(as Jewel has been ostensibly attacking) the new Ciceronianism,
unless he were a Papist and a scholastic? The whole Oratiois a
laboured academic joke of the kind not then uncommon. Jewel was
no more seriously condemning rhetoric than Erasmus was seriously
praising folly.^120
Another option does present itself. When he delivered this oratio,
Jewel had already been at Oxford for some time, and apparently had a
reputation for his defense of the new learning: ‘I know that many of you
marvel when you hear these very things from me – especially from me.’^121
Such a provision hardly seems the province of irony. Jewel had written
the university’s congratulatory letter to Mary upon her accession,^122 and
he would subsequently also recant his Protestantism, probably as late as
34 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^118) Hudson, ‘Jewel’s Oration’, pp. 380–81, 383, 384–85, 386, 387, 389.
(^119) Ibid., pp. 389–90.
(^120) C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama(Oxford,
1944), p. 307.
(^121) ‘Mirari scio plerosque vestrum, cum ista ipsa ex me, de me praesertim ipso, audiatis.’
Jewel,Works, IV, p. 1284.
(^122) Humphrey, Vita Iuelli, pp. 79–80.
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