medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
John Briggs wrote:
> On 01/08/2010 00:26, John Dillon wrote:
> >
> >On Thursday, July 8, 2010, at 7:42 pm, I wrote:
> >
> >>4) Adrian Fortescue (Bl.; d. 1539)...
> >>Arrested for treason in February 1539 and, for reasons
> >>unspecified, included in the act of attainder of that year, A. was
> >>duly beheaded on Tower Hill. His missal and book of hours show that
> >>he had conformed to Henry VII's creation of a national church, with
> >>the king rather than the pope at its head.
> >
> >Er, Henry VIII's creation...
> >
> >Apologies for the typo.
>
> In the circumstance, his beatification would appear to have been as
> indiscriminate as his execution.
Atherton was beatified in a job lot in which not a few other English proposed as saints were rejected as "wanting in proof or requiring further evidence". The evidence that got him in, if I remember correctly, was a narrative of the execution that circulated among English recusants and that mistakenly claimed that he had been a Knight of Malta executed as a papist spy. On that basis A.'s cause was taken up in the seventeenth century by the Knights of Malta and it may have been in part to please them that, during the nineteenth-century review of 353 such cases of long standing, the documentation proffered they was allowed to stand.
Best again,
John Dillon
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