Jewel’s challenge triggered a public sensation; indeed the response elicited in
both pulpit and press was virtually unprecedented. Breaking the accustomed
pattern, Jewel was invited to deliver the sermon a second time before the
Queen in the Chapel Royal on 17 March 1560, and he preached an expanded
version once again at Paul’s Cross two weeks later.^26 Henry Cole, Dean of
St Paul’s and leading traditionalist, immediately took up Jewel’s challenge, and
the letters exchanged between the two churchmen were published together
with the sermon itself soon afterwards.^27 This was only the beginning. The
disputation sparked by Jewel’s sermon—an event customarily referred to as
the‘Great Controversy’of the 1560s—would consume the theological energies
of a legion of scholars and preachers in the course of the ensuing decade. An
expanded, polished, and widely circulated adaptation of the sermon, published
in both Latin and English under the titleAn Apologie of the Church of England,
constituted the government’sofficial response to Pope Pius IV’s invitation to
England to send an ambassador to attend the Council of Trent.^28 The pub-
lished contributions of Jewel himself and his supporters, combined with the
counter-offensive led by Thomas Harding and the English recusant exiles at
the University of Louvain and Douai, produced more thanfifty published
sermons, treatises, and pamphlets within just eight years of Jewel’sfirst
appearance at Paul’s Cross. For England, such a sustained spate of printed
works devoted to a single scholarly disputation was wholly without prece-
dent.^29 While the controversy swiftly expanded to include a broad selection of
theological concerns—Jewel himself enumerated twenty-seven specific topics
in hisApology—there was, nonetheless, broad agreement on all sides that the
essential core of the controversy was the original question concerning the
nature of sacramental presence broached in Jewel’s initial sermon at Paul’s
Cross. For early Elizabethan traditionalists and reformers alike, the hermen-
eutics of the sacrament became the touchstone in attempts to formulate a
(^26) Mary Morrissey notes that by‘cross referencing theRegisterof Paul’s Cross sermons with
Peter McCullough’s calendar of court sermons reveals no other coincidences like this except for
John Jewel’s repetition of the“Challenge”sermon at court in March 1560. This may be due to the
fact the bishops were less likely to print their sermons and so we have less information about how
often they appeared at Paul’s Cross.’See,Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558– 1642
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 1, n. 135.
(^27) See Jewel,True copies of the letters.
(^28) John Jewel,An apologie, or aunswer in defence of the Church of England concerninge the
state of religion vsed in the same. Newly set forth in Latin, and nowe translated into Englishe
(London: [Reginald Wolf], 1562). For an account of the gestation of the Apology, see John
Booty’s Introduction to his edition ofJohn Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England(Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1963; repr. 2002).
(^29) For a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the Great Controversy, see John E. Booty,John
Jewel as Apologist of the Church of England(London: Published for the Church Historical Society
[by] SPCK, 1963), 58–82. For a full bibliography of the literature of the controversy, see Peter
Milward,Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources(Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 1–24.
Erasmian Humanism and Eucharistic Hermeneutics 103