Matthew Parker Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Matthew Parker

Occasionally history produces an individual who embodies the virtues of his time. Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, was not merely a product of the Renaissance and Reformation of England during the sixteenth century. He contributed, through his life of endeavor and influence, to the events and institutions that define those eras as cultural movements. In all, it is as much to Parker's credit as to any other's that the turmoil of the sixteenth century did not undo the English ecclesiastical system altogether or arrest the progress of the intellectual awakening. He was a clergyman whose practice and position took him into the political arena and an academic who applied his classical methodology to the process of rendering texts in the vernacular. His staunch support of the Reformation was both innovative and conservative, based upon historical precedent as well as the need for a contemporary compromise. His role at the time was as a shaper of the newly reformed Church of England, but his legacy today is in the library that he left to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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