LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

76 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XV
Cambridge it seems they hoped he would also benefit from the academic
environment of the university. And by all accounts he did. After initial
studies at Cambridge he was sent by his order to study overseas: in fact, to
the very university at which the great humanist Erasmus was then resident,
Louvain. He returned to Cambridge between the years 1521 and 1523, was
in 1523 granted the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and very quickly thereafter
elevated to the position of prior in his Augustinian house. Although there is
no sure evidence that Barnes in fact studied with Erasmus, it is clear upon
his return to Cambridge that he had been very much influenced by the
humanism represented by men like Erasmus. He revised the curriculum for
studies in the Augustinian house, replacing an earlier medieval emphasis on
logic with a notably classical and humanist emphasis on rhetoric. 5 And, very
much like other prominent humanists, he could not resist the occasional
attack on what seemed an excessive worldliness among the clergy of his day.
It was this that led Barnes into his first confrontation with ecclesiastical
authority. By 1525, despite the position of the King and most influential
English churchmen, Luther’s works were becoming increasingly available,
especially in Cambridge, where they were secretly read and discussed.
Despite the incredibly sparse information available, most students of the
English Reformation, especially those with ties to Cambridge, are familiar
with the White Horse Inn. There Luther’s ideas were discussed with some
frequency, and apparently with sympathy; the sixteenth-century historian
John Foxe tells us that the Inn was soon nick-named “Germany”. 6 It is not
altogether clear how many or which people spent their evenings in the White
Horse, but it is clear that Barnes was at this time familiar with many of those
who later became prominent spokesmen, and eventually martyrs, for English
Protestantism. Thomas Bilney and Hugh Latimer are two particularly
important names, as both were involved in the affair leading to Barnes’s first
arrest and imprisonment. Bilney is especially important, as John Foxe, the
source for much early information about Robert Barnes, states that it was
Bilney who was ultimately responsible for Barnes’s conversion to
Protestantism. 7 This is probably in some sense true—Bilney was notoriously
persuasive—but perhaps more interesting for the present examination is the
fact that John Bale, a Cambridge student who knew Barnes at the time, later
says bluntly that Barnes was converted through the reading of Luther’s
works. 8
5 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of John Foxe [hereinafter cited as A&M], 8 vols, ed. J.
Pratt (London, 1877), 5:415.
6 A&M 5:415.
7 A&M 4:620.
8 John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Brytanniae … Catalogus (Basle, 1557), 667.