laudable Practice

One of the lines of argument used by Gardiner in his critique of Cranmer's Reformed eucharistic theology was that such a view of the Sacrament was an innovation, contrary to established 'catholic' (the term was, of course, contested) teaching. Gardiner pointed to condemnations of Ratramnus, Berengar, and Wycliffe to illustrate this.  In his Answer to Gardiner (1551), however, Cranmer turns this argument against his opponent. The very fact that Ratramnus in  De corpore et sanguine Domini (c.831), Berengar in  De sacra coena (c.1050), and Wycliffe in De Eucharistia Tractatus Maio  (1379) denounced corporeal presence and affirmed a spiritual partaking of Christ by the faithful, is evidence of antecedents of Reformed teaching across the centuries.  Cranmer first considers Ratramnus (Bertrame): And as for Bertrame, he did nothing else but at the request of King Charles set out the true doctrine of the holy catholic Church from Christ unto his time, concerning...

As our readings from  In The Teaching of the Anglican Divines in the Time of King James I and King Charles I on the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1858) - by Henry Charles Groves, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland - begin to draw to a close, we turn today to a reference to the 9th century Frankish theologian Ratramnus (or Bertram). Groves notes that Keble and Pusey both appeal to Bertram's work,  De corpore et sanguine Domini , in defence of their own eucharistic teaching. For Groves, such invocation is very odd: Both he and Dr. Pusey appeal to the book of Bertram often. And yet, with their profound learning, I should have thought that they would rather have avoided a book which was placed in the Index librorum prohibitorum, which speaks so strongly against the Objective Presence, that some Roman authors, as Sixtus Senensis and Possevin, (Cosin, Hist. of Transub., p.131,) affirmed that it was written by the Zuinglian, Ecolampadius; a book, of the author of which the ...