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Mark Rankin, John Leland, Henry VIII, and Albert Pighius’s Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio, The Library, Volume 25, Issue 4, December 2024, Pages 461–470, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/fpae055
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THIS ARTICLE SHEDS NEW LIGHT UPON John Leland’s Antiphilarchia, a prose dialogue on the royal supremacy of Henry VIII.1 The Tudor antiquary and bibliographer John Leland (c. 1503–1552) is best known for visiting monastic libraries during the 1530s and for De uiris illustribus, an encyclopaedic bibliography of British authors. The author’s presentation manuscript to the king survives in Cambridge University Library, a fair copy prepared by a scribe with Leland’s own annotations.2 He composed the Antiphilarchia in response to the Dutch theologian Albert Pighius’s Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio (1538).3 Pighius, or Pigghe (c. 1490–1542) is known for his critique of Calvin’s 1539 Institutes in De libero hominis arbitrio et diuina gratia (1542), which prompted the latter’s reply.4 His part in the story of Henry’s break from the Church of Rome, and in Leland’s reading and researches, however, has been relatively neglected. The copy of Pighius’s Assertio now at Worcester Cathedral Library preserves substantial manuscript marginalia in Leland’s own italic hand.5 The discovery of these marginalia increases Pighius’s importance to the understanding of the polemical literature produced in England during the 1530s and early 1540s. They also clarify Leland’s literary activities during these years, by revealing evidence of his method of reading and refutation of one of the many books published on the continent against Henry’s break from Rome.
