Patronage, Performativity, and Ideas of Corpus Christi

This chapter details relations between Church and state in Richard Fox’s age. The break with Rome, the royal supremacy, and the dissolution of the monasteries irreversibly altered the way in which the early Tudor polity would be conceived. Already in the sixteenth century, accounts of this period were informed by the Reformation. Incidents such as Bishop Fox’s change of plan at Oxford—transforming a primarily monastic ‘Winchester College‘ into the secular Corpus Christi College—became overlaid with foreshadowed significance. Ultimately, Fox’s was the last great age of bishops founding university colleges, since the requisite mix of authority and wealth seldom coalesced so favourably thereafter and certainly could not during the assault on episcopal incomes later in the sixteenth century. Clerical dominance in Church and state made Corpus.