562JJohn Bale 1495-1563.

The first two partes of the Actes or vnchaste examples of the Englyshe votaryes, gathered out of theyr owne legendes and chronycles by Ihon Bale. 

[Imprinted at London : by Iohn Tysdale, dwellynge in Knyght Riderstrete nere to the Quenes Waredrop, Anno. 1560]   Price. $2,000

Octavo: 14 x 10 cm. Signatures –(π, A⁸) A- M⁸ N⁴, ²A-U⁸. (Lacking the general title page and prelims(8 leaves total) {n.b.I have had two other copies of this edn. and neither have had the first 8 leaves?} The body of work complete with both divisional titles.) Both parts have a separate title page and collation.

Imprint from colophon of the first part; the colophon to part 2 is undated. Bound in Attractive full morocco by Riviere, gilt. Hinges with areas of rubbing. A few small marginal holes (no loss of text) and some light and faded water-stains to last few leaves, some very light foxing in places.

These books are full of salacious accounts of medieval English clergy.

In Englysh votaryes-“… Bale establish[ed] the myth of the pristine pre-Augustinian English Church, the golden age before 597, which was to be influential in Elizabethan thought and a useful weapon against Puritan iconoclasm. But Bale’s target in The Actes was still the Roman Church. His purpose was not to show that in this golden age surplices had existed, but rather that clerical celibacy had not. … Though the Marian experience and events of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period (the Bull of 1570, the miraculous deliverance in 1588, and the Gunpowder Plot of 1604 being the most obvious) combined to heighten and reinforce English anti-Catholicism, its historical justification stemmed from Bale’s earliest works [particularly the ‘Actes of the Englysh Votaryes]. “Fairfield.John Bale: Myth maker of the English Reformation.

Bale became the last Prior of the Ipswich Carmelite house, elected in 1533. He abandoned his monastic vocation, and got married, saying, “that I might never more serve so execrable a beast, I took to wife the faithful Dorothy.” He obtained the living of Thorndon, Suffolk, but in 1534 was summoned before the Archbishop of York for a sermon against the invocation of saints preached at Doncaster, and afterwards before John Stokesley, Bishop of London, but he escaped through the powerful protection of Thomas Cromwell, whose notice he is said to have attracted by his miracle plays.

In these plays Bale denounced the monastic system and its supporters in unrestrained language and coarse imagery. The prayer of Infidelitas which opens the second act of his Three Laws is an example of his profane parody. These somewhat brutal productions were intended to impress popular feeling, and Cromwell found in him an invaluable instrument. When Cromwell fell from favour in 1540, Bale fled with his wife and children to Antwerp. He returned on the accession of King Edward VI, and received theliving of Bishopstoke, Hampshire, being promoted in 1552 to the Irish see of Ossory. He refused to be consecrated by the Roman Catholic rites of the Irish church, and won his point, though the Dean of Dublin made a protest against the revised office during the ceremony.

He also quarrelled bitterly with the aged and respected judge Thomas St. Lawrence, who travelled to Kilkenny to urge the people to reject his innovations. When the accession of Queen Mary inaugurated a violent reaction in matters of religion, he was forced to get out of the country again. He tried to escape to Scotland, but on the voyage was captured by a Dutch man-of-war, which was driven by bad weather into St Ives, Cornwall. Bale was arrested on suspicion of treason, but soon released. At Dover he had another narrow escape, but he eventually made his way to the Netherlands and thence to Frankfurt and Basel. Bale’s intent in his autobiographical Vocacyon was to write a polemical account of his escape from Ireland in parallel with the life of St Paul. Although the Vocacyon is a broadly true account, Bale possessed a “self-dramatizing tendency”.

During his exile he devoted himself to writing. After his return, on the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, he received (1560) a prebendal stall at Canterbury, where he died and was buried in the cathedral..

STC (2nd ed.), 1274