The Theology of John Fisher

This book investigates the intellectual career of Bishop John Fisher (1469–1535), the early sixteenth-century bishop of Rochester and victim of Henry VIII's Reformation, whose numerous writings included one of the most influential refutations of the century of Martin Luther. Richard Rex investigates the life and work of Fisher the scholar from his arrival in Cambridge in the 1480s to his prolonged literary campaign against Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon in the years 1527–31. He traces the intellectual influences of scholasticism and humanism in his education and his subsequent career, and the way in which Fisher attempted to cope with the tensions between the authority of the church and the critical implications of humanist study. The heart of the book is concerned with Fisher's most important works, his treatises against Luther and Oecolompadius in the 1520s. Rex draws attention to the perceptiveness and originality of his critique of Protestant doctrines, and attempts to restore one of the greatest intellectuals of early sixteenth-century England to his rightful place as a central figure in the scholarship of the age.