CONCLUSIONThe primary achievement of Jewel’s proposed reconstruction of the semiotics
of sacramental‘presence’was to advocate a decisive reform of England’s
religious identity based upon an Erasmian-inspired critique of the central
cognitive premise of medieval‘sacramental culture’, namely through its theo-
logical assertion of the fusion of sign and thing signified as epitomized by the
Tridentine dogma concerning transubstantiation. By his insistence upon a
figural, instrumentalist interpretation of the relation betweensignumandres
significata, Jewel’s sacramental hermeneutics recapitulates the epistemological
critique mounted by Erasmus half a century earlier in hisEnchiridion. It would
be misleading, however, to portray Jewel’s refashioning of sacramental her-
meneutics by a sharpened semiotic distinction between sign and thing as a
shift away from‘enchantment’towards‘disenchantment’, as has been asserted
byboththe Whiggish narratives of progressandcurrent revisionist historiog-
raphy. Jewel’s deliberate apologetic purpose aims to define religious identity
within a reconstituted liturgical and institutional order wherein the external
and visible signs of sacrament and polity are linked to supernatural and
invisible mysteries through the medium of the conscience, modelled upon
his revision of the theology of sacramental presence. The Christological
implications of this position are certainly worthy of closer inspection. In his
Challenge Sermon, Jewel contributes to a distinctively early modern attempt to
reinterpret the fundamental assumptions of cognition—sacramental partici-
pation as a form ofmetanoia.
By questioning the late medieval sacramental culture and its underlying
assumptions of cognition in approaching the interpretation of signs like
Erasmus before him, Jewel builds upon the humanist foundation by setting a
new example of how to negotiate the space between the inner private realm of
individual conscience and the external public realm of religious and political
community with all of its hierarchical institutions, structures, and coercive
demands. In the course of the Great Controversy of the 1560s, Jewel’s attempt
to recast the hermeneutics of sacramental presence contributed to the pro-
motion of a vigorous ‘culture of persuasion’ which in turn fostered the
emergence of an early instance of a‘public sphere’of discourse as the broadly
recognized and necessary means of mediation between individuals and com-
munity, between subjects and rulers. By igniting the Great Controversy of the
1560s in his Challenge Sermon, Jewel also draws attention to the pulpit at
Paul’s Cross as one of the most important institutions in the formation of
England’s religious and political identity in the latter half of the sixteenth
century.
118 Torrance Kirby