ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that similarity in Robert Crowley's and John Foxe's writing here is not coincidental, and that the Protestant interest in Piers Plowman. Early English Protestants represented themselves, and perhaps even understood themselves, in terms of a powerful form of polemical pastoralism. Much of the revisionist work done by historians on the nature of the English Reformation has made it clear that a great deal of earlier historiography harboured a deeply partisan strain of Foxean triumphalism. The chapter seeks to delineate some of these dynamics of Protestant self-fashioning, to see how central polemical pastoralism was to early English Protestant identity. Polemical pastoralism of this sort contains, of course, a number of paradoxes. Both corpora of writings have an important, and hard to avoid, investment in similar forms of polemical pastoralism, and for similar reasons. The efficacy of Protestant pastoralism, then, circulated around the idea of widespread access to the Bible.
