an‘instrumental’real presence as distinct from both transubstantiation and
Zwinglian‘real absence’, Jewel’s deconstruction of medieval sacramental
ontology serves not so much to promote‘disenchantment of the world’as to
propose a radical reformulation of the‘terms of enchantment’—and here we
may detect a glimmer of a post-revisionist path for Reformation historiog-
raphy. With the exception of a handful of religious extremists—e.g. radical
Anabaptists, the Family of Love, and various Puritan separatists—once the
break with Rome had been accomplished, leading magisterial reformers like
Jewel, Archbishop John Whitgift, and Richard Hooker were intent upon
reconstruction of a visible, institutional, hierarchical, and liturgical church
order—i.e. an elaborate, highly formalized institutional system of religious
signs. The reconstitution of the external forms of worship and polity that we
know as the Elizabethan Settlement, however, was founded upon a distinctly
altered moral ontology, a redefined horizon of meaning grounded, as Jewel
argues in his Challenge Sermon at Paul’s Cross, in a radical reconfiguration of
the hermeneutics ofsignumandres significata.^66
This early Elizabethan reconstruction of theological semiotics along lines
adumbrated by Erasmus in hisEnchiridionentailed an analogous clarification
of the distinction between the visible and invisible church, that is between the
historical and the imagined community of the saints, and between individual
and community, as corollaries of the revised understanding of the distinction
between sign and thing signified. This Erasmian revolution also required a
new‘apologetic’approach to bring about popular acceptance of this theo-
logical transformation.^67 This distinction is evident in the two especially
prominent genres of later Elizabethan sermons at Paul’s Cross identified by
Mary Morrissey, namely the‘Jeremiads’and the‘exhortations to charity’, the
former with their emphasis on the vast gulf separating the fallen and derelict
church in history from the splendour of the heavenly city, and the latter
encouraging the faithful to labour towards fulfilment of the heavenly promises
assumption, inherent in the essence of“Catholic”Christianity, became explicit in the work of
the Fourth Lateran council in 1215. The spirit-led Church ministered the sacraments that
reliably conferred grace on those who sought them worthily.’See Euan Cameron,Enchanted
Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion 1250– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 156.
(^66) For a fuller account of the apologetic re-establishment of a semiotic linkage between
signumandsignificata, see Torrance Kirby,‘Of Musique with Psalms:The Hermeneutics of
Richard Hooker’s Defence of the“sensible excellencie”of Public Worship’, in John Stafford (ed.),
Lutheran and Anglican: Essays in Honour of Egil Grislis(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
Press, 2009), 127–51.
(^67) Richard Helgerson,Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England(Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 249–94. See Torrance Kirby,‘Apocalyptics and Apolo-
getics: Richard Helgerson on Elizabethan England’s Religious Identity and the Formation of the
Public Sphere’, in Paul Yachnin (ed.),Forms of Association in Early Modern Europe(Boston, IL:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
Erasmian Humanism and Eucharistic Hermeneutics 113