Notes and Queries, Number 21, March 23, 1850 by Various
page 20 of 69 (28%)
page 20 of 69 (28%)
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Wood does not appear to have perceived either this difficulty, or a second which this treatise is calculated to excite. He places the _Supper of the Lorde_ at the head of the numerous productions of _Robert Crowley_, as if its authorship was perfectly ascertained. But Crowley must have been a precocious polemic if he wrote a theological treatise, like that answered by More, at least a year previously to his entering the university. The date of his admission at Oxford was 1534; he was elected Fellow of Magdalene in 1542; he printed the first edition of _Piers Plowman_ in 1550; and was still Parson of St. Giles's, near Cripplegate, in 1588, i.e. fifty-five years after the publication of the Tract we are considering. (See _Heylin's Hist. of the Reformation_, ii. 186., E.H.S. ed.) Were there _two_ writers named _Robert Crowley?_ or was _the_ Crowley a pupil or protégé of some early reformer, who caused his name to be affixed to a treatise for which he is not wholly responsible? I leave these queries for the elucidation of your bibliographical contributors. If I have not already exceeded the limits allowable for such communications, I would also ask your readers to explain the allusion in the following passage from Crowley's tract: "And know right well, that the more they steare thys sacramente the broder shal theyr lyes be spreade, the more shall theyr falsehoode appeare, and the more gloriously shall the truthe triumph: as it is to se thys daye by longe contencion in thys same and other like articles, which the papists have so long abused, and howe more his lyes utter the truthe every day more and more. For had he not come begynge for the clergy from purgatory, wyth his 'supplicacion of |
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