Impudent and abhominable fictions: Rewriting saints' lives in the English Reformation

This article explores the growth of polemical controversy over the nature of the English church and its history in the sixteenth century. It examines the work of a number of sixteenth-century Protestant history writers, with particular focus upon their treatment of medieval ecclesiastical history. Their rewriting of the "Life" of Dunstan is indicative of the shift in perceptions of holiness that took place not only between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, but between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end. The appeal to the past was not simply a search for the historical origins of beliefs and practices, but an effort to rewrite the history of the church by reassessing the reputations of its heroes.