He is President of the Southern Conference on British Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an obsessive bread baker. Karl is currently working on a second book (Wrong! Confronting Error in Reformation England) on the ways in which Catholics and Protestants tried to make sense of religious pluralism in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. His first book, Reformation Unbound (CUP, 2014), was a finalist for the RHS Whitfield Prize and the Runner-up for the ASCH Brewer Prize, and his articles have appeared in Past & Present, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, History Compass, and Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte. Karl Gunther is Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami. Focusing on these claims, the paper argues that contemporaries did not necessarily interpret the Reformation as an intellectual or epistemological crisis, but rather as a serious moral crisis marked by insincerity and a willing disregard for truth. Prominent figures like More, Tyndale, Gardiner, Cranmer, and others argued that their opponents were liars - indeed, quite literally goddamned liars - who knew the truth, but willingly defended errors. This paper considers one of the most sweeping explanations found in Tudor poetry and polemic. When sixteenth-century English Catholics and Protestants argued with each other, they often tried to explain why their opponents held such erroneous beliefs.
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