Contents - BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD - INDEX TO CHAPTERS - INDEX TO BIBLIOGRAPHIES - INDEX TO AUTHORS

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VII. Cavalier and Puritan.

XIII. Scholars and Scholarship, 1600–60

§ 5. Baronius’s Annales

But a still higher stimulus to protestant learning was provided in 1588–1609 when the greatest of Roman Catholic researchers, cardinal Baronius, produced his twelve folios of Annales Ecclesiastici.

“The whole case,” says Mark Pattison, “of the Romanists and especially the supremacy of the See of Rome was here set out in the form of authentic annals.… The Annales transferred to the Catholic party the preponderance in the field of learning which ever since Erasmus had been on the side of the innovators.”

It became the object of protestant learning to devote itself to the effective criticism and refutation of the statements and arguments of Baronius. No mere reliance on scriptural texts could meet the emergency. Learning could only be fairly and finally met by learning. Zealously English scholars strained themselves to the utmost. John Rainolds, president of Corpus Christi college, Oxford, attempted, from the puritanic side, the task of refuting Baronius in 1602. All English efforts, however, pale into insignificance beside the work of Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI ad Baronii annales (1614).