It seems that historians will never tire of debating the impact of the Protestant Reformations on diverse aspects of the social, cultural and institutional structures of early modern Europe. To appropriate the titles of some recent books, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed The reformation of the parishes, The reformation of ritual, The reformation of community, The reformation of the image and The reformation of the keys.Footnote ¹ Alongside these transformations of social and community life was a crucial parallel development, one that Craig Koslofsky has dubbed The reformation of the dead. Rituals of the deathbed, funeral ceremonies, burial patterns, commemorative practices – all these were comprehensively remodelled across the Protestant world from the middle decades of the sixteenth century.Footnote ² Behind the reforms lay what was perhaps the single most audacious act of theological downsizing in the history of western Christianity. The medieval Church had come to recognise five distinct places or states which defined the location and condition of the dead: in addition to heaven and hell, there was a purgatory for the souls of the moderately sinful, a limbo for unbaptised infants, and a second limbo for the righteous patriarchs and prophets who had died, of necessity non-Christians, before the incarnation of Jesus. This latter place was usually thought to be empty, since Christ had liberated its inhabitants in a kind of daring commando raid performed between his death and resurrection – the so-called harrowing of hell.Footnote ³ But Protestant reformers, Lutheran and Reformed alike, would have no truck with this. Purgatory and the limbos were declared unscriptural and therefore unreal, unhealthy fictions of the clerical imagination. The reformers recognised only two places in the hereafter: heaven and hell. Heaven has its own history.Footnote ⁴ But is it possible to speak meaningfully of ‘the Reformation of hell’ in this period? And if not, why not?

Despite an explosion of interest in the social history of death among scholars of the early modern period, the immediate and medium-term impact of Protestantism on teachings about and perceptions of hell has not attracted much attention as an object of study. D. P. Walker's seminal discussion of ‘the decline of hell’ has a firmly later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century focus.Footnote ⁵ Those who have considered the earlier period tend to conclude that continuity and traditionalism were the order of the day. Writing in the 1920s, the Anglican theologian Darwell Stone remarked that ‘the widespread rejection of any kind of purgatory by members of the English Church in the sixteenth and following centuries was not accompanied by much modification of the corresponding ideas about hell’.Footnote ⁶ More recently, the literary scholar C. A. Patrides has argued that Protestant writers ‘transcended the bounds of their theological differences from Catholics’ in writing about hell.Footnote ⁷ A similar argument is made by the French cultural historian Jean Delumeau, in his exhaustive survey of ‘the emergence of a western guilt culture’. Hell features prominently in Delumeau's chapter on ‘shared aspects of the Protestant and Catholic doctrinal programs’. Indeed, he questions whether historians have yet ‘adequately underlined this penetration of Catholicism and Protestantism during a period of intense religious conflict’. To Delumeau, Catholic and Protestant sermons and treatises on hell and judgement from across Europe seem virtually interchangeable. They all hark on the same regulatory message: change your ways, or face the excruciating consequences. Indeed, he asserts that ‘this pressing and constant plea makes any lengthy study of the Protestant hell unnecessary’.Footnote ⁸

I am not quite alone in wondering whether matters were really so straightforwardly monochrome. In an enlightening recent essay on ‘the good side of hell’ in early modern Spain, Carlos Eire suggests that ‘more work is … needed on comparing the relative place of hell among early modern Catholics and Protestants, both literally and figuratively’.Footnote ⁹ This essay seeks to take up the challenge, representing a tentative foray into the field of what one is tempted to call comparative infernalism. It concerns itself with English sources of the period c. 1560–1640, the era and area in which Delumeau perceived a particularly marked convergence between Protestant and Catholic approaches, something he ascribed to a predilection for Augustinian pessimism among English theologians of divergent stripes.Footnote ¹⁰ The texts I have consulted include sermons, catechisms, instructional tracts, polemical writings and devotional manuals. Some are foreign works in translation, counted as English sources in this context, since my interest is in what was represented to and received by English readers. The sample is weighted towards the serious rather than the truly popular or recreational in vernacular print, and most of my authors are clergymen. Nor have I concerned myself with representations of hell in overtly fictive and literary sources. I have, as it were, stopped before Milton, and swerved around Marlowe and Shakespeare. Yet by examining images and tropes around hell-fire and damnation from a variety of orthodox and rather mundane sources, I hope to focus some significant questions about the dynamics of intellectual consensus and intellectual fragmentation in the later Reformation period.

An initial problem in setting out to study the Catholic–Protestant controversy over hell in later Reformation England is that there doesn't appear to have been one. Hell was not, formally and prescriptively, an object of religious disputation. Neither the existence nor the essential purpose of hell was ever at issue between Catholic and Protestant theologians. English Catholics would have had few problems in accepting a definition like that of the Caroline minister Thomas Phillips: ‘A place of infinite and extreame torment, created by God, and appointed for the punishment of the wicked after this life, to the glory and manifestation of his justice.’Footnote ¹¹ It is not surprising therefore that hell does not appear as a topic in the seminary priest Anthony Champney's compendious A manual of controversies (Paris 1614; RSTC 4958), nor in the Jesuit James Gordon's 1618 A summary of controversies … now a dayes in dispute between Catholicks and Protestants (n.p. 1618; RSTC 13998). From the Protestant side, there was no need for any substantial discussion of hell in, for example, William Perkins's seminal work of quasi-courteous controversy, A reformed Catholike: a declaration shewing how neere we may come to the present Church of Rome in sundrie points of religion, and wherein we must for euer depart from them (Cambridge 1597; RSTC 18735.8).

In fact, far from aggressively diverging, Catholic and Protestant hells often drew on the same sources of inspiration. Some Protestant writing on the theme, for example, displays a remarkable indebtedness to medieval texts and motifs. Respectful citations of Aquinas pepper Protestant accounts, and a few authors unselfconsciously recycled the lurid descriptions of medieval vision literature, or, like the eleventh-century Cluniac St Odilo, pointed to the roarings and flashings of volcanoes like Vesuvius and Etna as presages of the fate awaiting the damned. Such traditionalism was even more evident in the cheap print and ballad literature of post-Reformation England, where the Dante-esque notion of specific torments tailored to the particular sins of the damned was often wholeheartedly affirmed, and liars might expect to have molten lead poured down their throats. Such notions were decidedly not the preserve of a kind of Catholic survivalism. During his possession by the devil in 1596, according to the pamphlet printed about the case, the Puritan youth Thomas Darling had a vision of the ‘place of torments where drunkards are hanged by the throats, swearers and filthy talkers by their tongues’.Footnote ¹² In more sober and didactic sources there are frequent reiterations of what was perhaps the most familiar of medieval tropes on hell: both Protestant and Catholic writers in our period regularly repeated St Augustine's striking suggestion that in comparison to hell-fire, earthly fire was but like a fire painted on a wall.Footnote ¹³

Even more remarkably, Catholic texts with substantial amounts of material on hell were sometimes printed or reprinted in Protestant editions. That classic of fifteenth-century devotion, The imitation of Christ, appeared in five Protestant translations between 1567 and 1639. Its eucharistic passages were heavily bowdlerised, but Protestants found nothing to object to in the chapter ‘On judgment and the punishment of sinners’, which emphasised how ‘lovers of luxury and pleasure will be drenched in burning pitch and stinking sulphur, and the envious will howl in pain like mad dogs’.Footnote ¹⁴ An equally notorious case of pious appropriation was the Puritan Edmund Bunny's 1584 edition of the Booke of Christian exercise by the Jesuit Robert Persons. Bunny thoroughly edited and expurgated Persons's text, cutting, for example, all the material relating to purgatory and prayer for the dead. But he reproduced without any significant amendment all the sections on hell. Not long afterwards, the Lincolnshire gentleman Francis Meres produced a translation of the Spanish Dominican Luis de Granada's Guía de pecadores. This too contained a vivid chapter explaining how ‘hell fire doth bind us to seeke after vertue’.Footnote ¹⁵ Another example of the process is the 1613 translation of Bernard of Clairvaux's Dialogue betwixt the soule and the body of the damned by the Puritan minister William Crashaw, an intensely physical vision of the yawning prospect of hell, with hideous demons dragging the damned soul off to perdition. Crashaw defended his endeavour on the grounds that his was ‘an age that needs all helps to holiness’. Although the original was ‘made in the mist of popery … yet it is not tainted with popish corruption, nor scarce smels of any superstition’.Footnote ¹⁶

There is little suggestion, therefore, that the sometimes lurid physicality of traditional Catholic descriptions of hell failed to appeal to Protestants' sensibilities. Indeed, it often characterised their own writings. The Jacobean bishop Lewis Bayly, whose Practise of pietie was the best-selling home-grown devotional work of the period, unflinchingly enumerated the particular torments that would afflict the damned, stressing how dainty noses ‘shall be cloyed with noysome stench of Sulphur’.Footnote ¹⁷ Protestant writers also vied with each other in their attempts to evoke the almost unimaginable horror of eternal torment. Arthur Dent invited his readers to imagine all the arithmeticians of the world spending a lifetime writing down the largest numbers they could think of, and then adding them all together: they could still ‘never come any thing neere to that length of time wherein the wicked shall be tormented’. John Denison observed that if the damned had as many thousand years to endure as there were grains of sand on the shore, fish in the sea or stars in the firmament, then they could entertain some hope and comfort. But alas it was not so.Footnote ¹⁸

There was much of the same in contemporary Catholic texts, though despite the impression given by some modern commentators, Counter-Reformation writers were fully capable of approaching the topic with caution and restraint. Cardinal Bellarmine, a favourite of the exiled English Catholic clergy, declared his intention of avoiding ‘uncertaine or coniecturall points’ in his treatment of hell's torments. He would deal only with what was clearly indicated in Holy Scripture, lest he be suspected of trying to arouse vain fears, and ‘force teares from the eyes of the simple and ignorant’. The French Jesuit Nicholas Caussin, in the translation of the recusant gentleman and poet Thomas Hawkins, argued that silence was the only appropriate descriptor for the enormity of hell: ‘I let passe this world of punishments figured by vultures, gibbets, tortures, snakes, burning pincers.’ His contemporary, Bishop Jean Pierre Camus of Belley, advanced the virtues of brevity, in eschewing ‘those vulgar similitudes or conceipts, which give to weaker wits slender ideas of eternitie’. Not for him the sands of the sea, or leaves on the trees, though he could not resist one such metaphor of immeasurable duration: a little immortal bird attempting to empty the ocean by drawing from it in its beak a drop of water once every hundred thousand years.Footnote ¹⁹

In neither Protestant nor Catholic texts of the period, however, is there much sense of writers wallowing sadistically in descriptions of hell-fire and torment for its own sake. On both sides of the confessional divide, the intent was much the same: such passages were a wake-up call for sinners, a counter-blast against what the Protestant preacher Henry Greenwood called ‘the presumptuous security of this our age’, and the Catholic Bishop Camus dubbed ‘the lethargie of pleasures’.Footnote ²⁰ Readers were to meditate on hell so that they would never have to go there. A speaker in one moralistic Protestant dialogue even dared his interlocutors to ‘suppose there were no hell (as euery good christian doth beleeue there is one)’. Yet to think that there was such a place would lead only to good, and ‘cause us to shunne that evill, that otherwise we should doe’.Footnote ²¹ Historians will be tempted to call this social control; contemporaries, however, thought of it as a spur to repentance, a primary concern of pastors on all points of the religious spectrum.

There were, of course, some distinctive dynamics to Catholic and Protestant understandings of repentance, underpinned as they were by radically different soteriologies. Protestant authors were sometimes sensitive to the charge that the abolition of purgatory, along with the abrogation of mandatory auricular confession, had significantly weakened their arsenal of moral deterrence. The Jacobean court preacher George Hakewill, a fierce anti-papist, denied the necessity of lay people having personal confessors: ‘yet might and ought inferiors be kept in awe of hell fire by their preachers’. As for purgatory, William Tyndale had made the case years earlier: ‘to fear men … Christ and his apostles thought hell enough’.Footnote ²² In a sense, then, hell was of necessity more central to the Protestant than to the Catholic scheme of moral regeneration because it was, ultimately, the only sanction available. Though at the same time it is possible, as Alexandra Walsham has intriguingly suggested, that the loss of purgatory may have sharpened Protestant interest in the notion of retributive providences in this world.Footnote ²³

Moreover, Catholic and Protestant strategies for avoiding hell could hardly be the same. Under the Catholic dispensation of free will and resistible grace, dying outside of mortal sin was the key test. But for the orthodox Calvinist predestinarians who dominated the Elizabethan and early Stuart Church, no individual could presume to alter a divine decree of election or reprobation. A turning away from sin, spurred on by the fear of hell, was of course understood as part of the effectual calling of the elect. But Protestant divines sometimes recognised that more tangible incentives were required for the entire body of humanity, whether saved or not. A partial solution was found in another characteristic of hell that Protestants could agree upon with their Catholic opponents: the notion that different degrees of punishment were to be experienced within it. So, for example, the editors of the Catholic Rheims New Testament of 1582 glossed Christ's words in Matthew x.15 – ‘Amen I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city’ – to suggest that it is ‘hereby … evident there bee degrees and differences of damnation in hell fire according to men's deserts’. Here the Presbyterian controversialist Thomas Cartwright, engaged in denouncing the translation, readily conceded that there is ‘nothing material in the note to bee suspected’. For Calvinists, this meant that good works had a positive role to play after all, because they might ameliorate the situation of the damned in hell. George Abbot was thus able in 1600 to offer these words of dubious comfort: ‘suppose that thou belong not to him … yet flie from sinne, and do moral vertues, … that at least shall ease some part of the extremity of those torments, which thou shalt have in hell fire’.Footnote ²⁴ By contrast, his Catholic opponents could tender a more absolute assurance that if the right steps were followed without deviation or digression, hell could be avoided altogether.

Yet in many ways it is surprising how little the rival theologies of grace seem to have impacted upon Reformed and Counter-Reforming discourses about hell. The question of where on the ecclesiological spectrum hell loomed largest in this period turns out to be unanswerable in any meaningfully statistical way. One of the striking features of the imagined obsession with hell in early modern sources is how relatively little of it there seems to have been about.Footnote ²⁵ If one uses the subject term ‘hell’ to search the nearly 25,000 volumes now digitalised in Early English Books Online for the period 1560–1640, the exercise produces a mere twenty-seven titles, all but four of which are concerned with the very discrete and rather technical controversy over the meaning of the phrase in the Apostles' Creed that Christ ‘descended into hell’. Attention to the topic was of course diffused much more widely than this, and hell featured regularly in the homiletic and devotional writings of both confessions. It never seems, however, to have dominated or unbalanced them. Its treatment in both Catholic and Protestant catechisms of the period appears to have been similarly measured and limited, not usually attracting more than a few lines, and with Christ's descent into hell often once again the main focus of interest.Footnote ²⁶ It should be noted too how regularly the context for discussion of hell was a parallel evocation of heaven, the descriptions of misery serving to underscore the felicity of the saved in works like Samuel Rowlands's Hels torments, and heavens glorie and John Denison's Three-fold resolution … Describing earths vanitie. Hels horror. Heauens felicitie. On the Catholic side, Thomas Everard, translator of Bellarmine's Of the eternal felicity of the saints, inserted into it a ‘Discourse of the torments of hell’ from another of the cardinal's works, on the Ramist grounds that ‘the common axiome in philosophy is, that contraries compared one to the other, do afford a greater illustration’.Footnote ²⁷ For both Catholics and Protestants, then, hell was instrumental; an object of improving meditation, just as much or even more than it was a subject for systematic theology. Bearing this in mind probably helps to explain why some contemporary discussions of hell can seem rather vague on apparently important points – for example, over whether they are describing hell as currently configured, or as it would be after the final judgement and resurrection of the dead.

One stimulus for meditation did change after the Reformation. In late medieval England, most parish churches were furnished with a prominent and striking image of the prospect of hell, part of the last judgement or ‘doom’ painted on the tympanum above the chancel arch. Protestant iconoclasm removed this visual dimension, and also reduced the options for the mimetic representation of hell, as the traditional cycles of civic mystery plays were wound up in the 1580s. It has been suggested that the Protestant imagination compensated for these losses by developing habits of intense ‘inner picturing’, a substitutive real presence of the divine, which came into the mind on hearing or reading the Word. Thus, the Puritan Richard Bernard's 1610 volume of Contemplative pictures offered ‘certain pictures, not popish and sensible for superstition, but mental for divine contemplation’. One of the themes of the volume was the contemplation of hell, and readers were left in no doubt that it offered a prospect ‘wofull, dolefull, horribly fearefull, insufferably painefull’.Footnote ²⁸ Could it be then that the impoverishment of visual culture paradoxically made the imagining of hell more real and immediate for devout believers? Perhaps; though care should be taken not to exaggerate the contrasts here. For a start, Catholic writers, and not just Jesuits, were quite as capable of inducing internalised images as Protestants were.Footnote ²⁹ Nor was the visual quite so thoroughly expunged from post-Reformation religious culture as it was once fashionable to think. Historians like Tessa Watt and Alexandra Walsham have modified Patrick Collinson's influential emphasis on the ‘iconophobic’ impulse of the later English Reformation by pointing to the survival of graphic material in Protestant literature of various kinds.Footnote ³⁰ Hell (literally) fits the picture here. Illustrations depicting the flames and demons awaiting the damned accompanied several godly ballads and pamphlets on witchcraft and possession. Samuel Rowlands's Hels torments, and heavens glorie of 1601 boasted an illustration of souls being dragged down by demons into a gaping hell mouth. In addition, a whole series of striking woodcuts itemising the torments of hell continued to appear in editions of the popular late medieval work, The shepherds kalendar, into the middle decades of the seventeenth century. The story of Lazarus in heaven and Dives in hell was often depicted on domestic wall hangings in the later sixteenth century, and hell, as Dr Faustus and others were to discover, still had a place on the secular stage.Footnote ³¹

Thus far, I have not made much, if any, progress towards establishing my initial contention: that Catholic and Protestant discourses about hell show some significant and revealing disparities. The broad parameters, the rhetorical strategies, the pastoral objectives; all look pretty much the same. But if we move from the general contours of the landscape to examine some specific features of the terrain, a few interesting fissures start to open up. In particular, we can compare and contrast approaches to the two questions that St Augustine had considered the most uncertain of all matters relating to hell, requiring for their resolution a special revelation from the Holy Spirit. These were the precise nature of hell-fire, and the question of hell's location.Footnote ³² Taken together, attempts to address these questions do indicate some clear patterns of divergence along broadly confessional lines.

That hell was a place of fire seemed on the surface easily the most uncontentious of theological commonplaces. The Bible abounded with references to ‘the fire that shall never be quenched’, and to tormenting ‘with fire and brimstone’.Footnote ³³ The fire of hell belonged, in a distinction well understood by both Protestant and Catholic interpreters, to the torments of the senses, the poena sensus, rather than to the spiritual or psychological torment of being deprived of the sight of God, the poena damni.Footnote ³⁴ But the precise nature of this fire had long been a source of puzzlement in Christian thought. Among the Fathers, Origen had argued that the fire spoken of in Scripture was merely figurative, a judgement shared by Ambrose, though many others disagreed.Footnote ³⁵ In the high Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas had posed the questions of ‘whether the fire of hell will be corporeal’ and of ‘whether the fire of hell is of the same species as ours’. He had answered both cautiously in the affirmative, while conceding that the fire in hell most probably would subsist in a different kind of matter, and would exhibit different properties from earthly fire – such as giving out no light, and not requiring kindling to start it or fuel to keep it alive.Footnote ³⁶ Similarly, in the period under discussion, it was characteristic of Catholic writers to insist upon the genuinely material nature of the fire to be found in hell, while conceding that the question inevitably threw up some tricky metaphysical issues. The Jesuit Persons ascribed the infinitely greater heat and power of hell-fire over earthly fire to the fact that ‘ours is out of its natural place and situation’, abated by the coldness of the air, whereas ‘that of hell is in the naturall and proper place wherein it was created’.Footnote ³⁷ Yet more commonly, Catholic authors reversed the emphasis and wondered how it was possible for a real and corporeal fire to rage eternally in hell. Nicholas Caussin admitted that ‘libertines’ would ask how a material fire could burn spiritual souls, a question that had earlier perturbed Aquinas. Caussin's answer was that the soul retained the same sensitive faculties as the body, and hence an ability to perceive pain. It was, he wrote, true that ‘the soule separated from the body hath not a natural antipathy and disagreement from fire, but what this imperious element cannot have remaining within the limits of nature, it obtayneth by a particular ordinance and disposition of God’.Footnote ³⁸ Cardinal Bellarmine also conceded that the issue of the affliction of spirits by a corporeal fire was ‘a large disputation’. Again, an emphasis on the miraculous sustenance of Almighty God was the appropriate response to those who ‘over curiously should demaund, from whence this continuall fyre doth receave its nourishment and supply’. Yet at the same time Bellarmine was inclined to take rather literally scriptural allusions to brimstone or sulphur as the fuel for the fires of hell.Footnote ³⁹ Luis de la Puente thought that ‘the eternal breathe of almightie God’ would be sufficient to preserve the fire of hell, but he similarly did not rule out the presence of real brimstone, likewise preserved from depletion by the motion of God.Footnote ⁴⁰

In Protestant texts, by contrast, we find a much greater willingness to accept that details such as the brimstone should be understood as metaphor or allegory. We need to be clear about what we mean by allegory in this context. It was not that Protestant writers entertained doubts about the literal, physical reality of hell, or the certainty of its intense torments. In fact, its torments were unimaginably real, in the sense that analogies to familiar earthly phenomena were hardly adequate to describe them. The tone here had been set by Calvin, who argued in the Institutes that because ‘language cannot describe the severity of the divine vengeance on the reprobate, their pains and torments are figured to us by corporeal things’.Footnote ⁴¹ The metaphorical nature of the worm that ‘dieth not’ (Mark ix. 46), signifying the torment of conscience, was rarely contested by either Protestant or Catholic authors; this had been the common scholastic interpretation.Footnote ⁴² But, more controversially, some Protestant writers extended this line of interpretation to the fire of hell itself, as a figure for the literally indescribable torments awaiting the damned in hell. William Perkins gave his readers to understand ‘that by hell fire is not meant any bodily flame, but it signifies the seazing of the fearful and terrible wrath of God’.Footnote ⁴³ Perkins's disciple Thomas Tuke also discounted the possibility of a corporeal fire: ‘if the fire of Hell bee corporall, it must bee fed by corporall fuell, which beeing once wasted it also must goe out’. Rather, Tuke suggested, ‘it pleaseth the Holy Ghost by these words to point out, and as by similitudes to shew vnto vs the griefes and gripes of the damned’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Puritan minister of Dedham in Essex, John Rogers, similarly argued that as ‘we cannot conceive nor utter the extremity of these torments …. yet the Scriptures expresse them by the sharpest and most intolerable punishments we can know or can conceive; as fire, brimstone, darkenesse, weeping, &c’.Footnote ⁴⁵ As the Canterbury clergyman Thomas Wilson put it in his Christian dictionarie of 1612 – the first dictionary of the Bible to be published in English – ‘fire being a most terrible element, is fittest to expresse the dreadfull state of such as be in hell’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The most emphatic statement of this position came from the pen of the semi-separatist Puritan minister, Henry Jacob, who in 1598 dismissed the very notion of a material fire in hell as a ‘toyish fable’. One might as well say, he argued, that there was ‘materiall brimstone and much wood which the fire burneth upon’. Until very recently, he suggested, all Protestants had shared his view on this, and only papists had dared contradict it.Footnote ⁴⁷

That was not quite accurate. A number of Protestant writers had always sat somewhere on a spectrum between Calvin's portrayal of hell-fire as a scriptural allegory for divine retribution, and a perceived Catholic insistence on its being, as Thomas Phillips put it, ‘ejusdem speciei, of the same kind with our fire both elementary and culinary’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Henry Greenwood suggested in a sermon published in 1615, ‘the most and best of the learned’ (including such luminaries as Heinrich Bullinger) held it to be a true and substantial fire, albeit not a material one.Footnote ⁴⁹ Some Puritan writers of the early seventeenth century made reference to a ‘spiritual fire’ in hell, emphasising its action on the internal sensation of the soul, while some more conservative or ‘conformist’ Protestants preferred to speak about a ‘true’, ‘external’, or ‘sensible’ fire.Footnote ⁵⁰ Catholic observers like the lawyer James Anderton (alias John Brereley) could thus gleefully point to Protestant divisions over the issue.Footnote ⁵¹ But reformers of various stripes often agreed that the precise nature of hell-fire was a ‘curious’ question into which there was no necessity to inquire closely.Footnote ⁵² The Essex minister John Smith, writing in 1632, lambasted the supercilious certainties of the papists, for ‘it be not a point of faith, for a man to beleeve or know what a kinde of fire it is’. At the same time, he made short shrift of the notion that a material fire might miraculously endure in hell without spending fuel, without giving light, or without finally consuming the bodies of the damned: ‘hell’, he sententiously pronounced, ‘is no place for miracles’.Footnote ⁵³

The uncertainties about the exact nature of hell-fire were linked to another ‘curious’ question exercising both Catholic and Protestant minds in the later Reformation period: that of where in the created universe the fires of hell were to be found. The nature of hell-fire was more easily comprehended, for example, if it were supposed that hell was located in the proper sphere or element of fire. Scripture was decidedly unhelpful on this issue, and no formal pronouncement of the medieval Church had ever sought to resolve it. Such luminaries as Augustine and Gregory had been cautious about any categorical pronouncement on the matter. None the less, a convention had long been established that the place of hell was under the earth, most likely in the very centre of the world. The Latin term for hell – ‘infernus’ – seemed to imply a location below, and the notion fitted with a cosmology in which God inhabited an empyrean beyond the planetary spheres – as far as could be from a subterranean hell. Metaphysically, the medieval association of sin with weight and heaviness reinforced the connection.

There is no doubt, however, that Catholic authors in our period held on to this tradition much more resolutely than Protestants, locating hell in the midst of the earth, as a place, in Bellarmine's words, ‘furthest remote from the glorie of the blessed’. The cardinal believed that hell was ‘certainly thousands of myles’ under the earth's surface. Persons cited the authority of the Fathers and of Augustine in favour of the proposition, and Camus, after weighing the patristic and scriptural evidence, pronounced that for anyone ‘to doubt whether hell be in the center of the earth … seemes to me a thing impossible’. Some continental Catholic authors not translated into English in this period were even more precise in their determinations. The sixteenth-century Spanish priest Alejo Venegas, for example, calculated that hell was exactly 1,193 leagues beneath the surface of the earth. The presentation of the afterlife by the Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal, so Carlos Eire assures us, was ‘as geologically precise as a National Geographic diagram’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Catholic convictions about the geographical location of hell help to explain a feature of their descriptive writing which seems much less evident in Protestant sources: an emphasis on the ‘straitness’ of hell, on physical overcrowding as an anguish of the damned. According to Luis de la Puente, the number of men descending to hell would be so great that each would barely possess the space of a crowded grave: ‘they shall bee crowded together like brickes in a fiery furnace’. In Bellarmine's opinion, the straitness of the place would be such ‘as it shall scarce be able to take the multitude of the damned bodies’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Bavarian Jesuit Jeremias Drexel arrived at the conclusion that if hell had the dimensions of a square German mile, it would none the less have capacity for 100,000,000,000 of the damned, forced together ‘like grapes in the press, or like sardines in the barrel’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Protestant writers, by contrast, were usually markedly reluctant to pronounce definitively on the question of where hell was to be found. In an anti-Catholic work of 1592, the Calvinist theologian Andrew Willet expressed no doubt ‘that there is a locall place of torment’. But he took Bellarmine to task for asserting that ‘the place where damned spirites are tormented … is about the center of the earth, the lowest of all places’. The scriptural texts Bellarmine cited simply did not prove the case.Footnote ⁵⁷ ‘As for the situation of hell’, reflected Thomas Tuke, ‘to say precisely where hell is, it is not easie’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Some Puritan theologians drew attention to the passage in Ephesians ii. 2 which seemed to imply that the devil's habitation was in the air.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Hebrew scholar Hugh Broughton even argued that ‘they are much deceaved who thinke hell to be in this world, lowe in the earth’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The majority of Protestant writers probably did think it likely that hell was under the earth, but they often expressed the opinion guardedly, and never reproduced the precise topographical calculations of some of their Catholic contemporaries.Footnote ⁶¹ Since Scripture did not pronounce definitively on the location of hell, ‘curious’ enquiry was best avoided.Footnote ⁶² In a sermon of 1626, John Donne mocked the Swiss cosmographer Sebastian Münster for pronouncing categorically ‘that hell cannot possibly be above three thousand miles in compasse’.Footnote ⁶³ The Norwich preacher Samuel Gardiner was similarly contemptuous in 1627 of those who ‘so punctually doe describe unto us the space thereof, as if with a reed or metwand in their hand they had taken the iust measure of it’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Protestant guardedness about affirming the precise whereabouts or dimensions of hell provided an opening for Catholic opponents to exploit. The Jesuit John Radford claimed in 1605 that some heretics ‘stick not to confesse … that hell is only in the brest and but a darknes of the minde and conscience, or some biting of the same’. In 1631 the former vicar apostolic of English Catholics, Richard Smith, made the charge that ‘Protestants expressly say, that hell is no place, no corporall place, no prison; that it is nothing but a wicked conscience’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such sentiments – imagining hell as a purely internal or psychological punishment – would in time be articulated by radical separatists of the civil war era, but there were few real antecedents of this among the orthodox Calvinist theologians who were Smith's intended target. It is certainly true that inner, psychological torments had always figured prominently in Protestant enumerations of the pains of hell.Footnote ⁶⁶ But in fact it was a devotional trope common to both Catholic and Protestant writers that a consciousness of the deprivation of God – the poena damni – would be a more intolerable punishment to the reprobate than sensory torments.Footnote ⁶⁷ Ironically, the idea of a purely internal hell, a hell within oneself, in some ways made more sense within a Catholic theological framework. For Protestants, it was simply inconceivable that damned souls might ever come forth out of hell. Yet the Catholic teaching on ghosts allowed for the possibility in some circumstances. In such cases, noted Drexel, ‘yet still he should carry an hell about him’.Footnote ⁶⁸

On the question of the location of hell, and on issues relating to the nature of its punishments, it appears therefore as if English Protestant commentators can be meaningfully distinguished from their English and continental Catholic counterparts. There was a greater reluctance to affirm the unknowable with certainty, a greater openness to the possibility of allegory and metaphor in making sense of the reality of hell. It looks as if we are on the curve of a familiar trajectory, along which Protestantism journeys more naturally and easily towards a concern with empirical verification, and ultimately, towards modernity itself. But caution should be exercised here. For insofar as the position of Protestants might sound more recognisably ‘modern’ on some of these issues than did that of Catholics, it was determined, not so much by temperamental cousinage to ourselves, as by the tactical demands of theological polemic. Hell, I will suggest by way of conclusion, was never quite so uncontroversially ecumenical a topic as it might at first appear.

To start with, questions about the situation of hell could not easily be separated from speculations about the existence and location of that Protestant bête noire, purgatory. In the Catholic topography of the hereafter, the place of eternal punishment was one of a series of ‘hells’ which were generally understood as being in descending proximity to each other under the ground: Limbus patrum or the limbo of the fathers; purgatory; Limbus infantium, or the limbo of unbaptised infants; and hell proper. The latter was sometimes glossed in Catholic sources as ‘the hell of the damned’ to distinguish it from these other subterranean regions.Footnote ⁶⁹ A professed Protestant agnosticism about the exact location of hell was in large measure intended to disrupt and disparage this eschatological system.Footnote ⁷⁰ The trend towards the allegorisation of hell-fire, or at least to deny its strictly material nature, could similarly serve to unsettle medieval and scholastic speculations, such as the idea that the proximity of hell and purgatory allowed the very same fire to torment souls in both locales.Footnote ⁷¹ One medieval conjecture about hell, still rehearsed in the sixteenth century by Catholic authorities like Bellarmine, but which seems to be largely absent from Protestant discussions, is the notion that part of the happiness of the souls in heaven derives from their contemplation of the torments of the damned – an idea which in the nineteenth century was christened ‘the abominable fancy’. Noting the absence of this motif from seventeenth-century English sources, D. P. Walker ascribed the development to a changing attitude in society towards the suffering of others.Footnote ⁷² But it seems equally plausible to invoke a more tactical explanation for this. A key proof-text for the idea was Luke xvi, where the rich man in hell is able to see Lazarus ensconced in the ‘bosom of Abraham’, and begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers of the fate in store if they do not mend their ways. Protestant exegetes were made distinctly uneasy by this passage's apparent encouragement of the notion of traffic and communication between worlds, and they tended to emphasise its character as a parable and an allegory. Moreover, while Protestants generally regarded ‘Abraham's bosom’ as a circumlocution for heaven, Catholic tradition saw it as a synonym for Limbus patrum, that outer skirt of hell, and thus identified a literal proximity of Dives and Lazarus in the next life. As the Elizabethan Catholic controversialist Gregory Martin put it, not just Dives, but ‘Abraham and Lazarus also were in hell, but in a place of great rest and refreshing.’Footnote ⁷³

It was in fact controversy about the very meaning of the word ‘hell’ that proved the single most formative influence on late Reformation modifications of thinking about the place of the damned. Specifically, much of the discussion of the location of hell, the character of hell-fire, and other related matters, was driven by debates over the proper interpretation of the clause in the Apostle's Creed which stated that Christ ‘descended into hell’ between his death and resurrection. The so-called ‘Descensus Controversy’, which ran from the early years of Elizabeth to the middle of the reign of James i, was a spirited three-way quarrel between Catholics, Puritans and those more establishment-minded Protestants best described as ‘conformist’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Catholics related the credal article to the ‘harrowing of hell’, the belief that during the three days that his body lay in the ground, Christ descended to Limbus patrum or Abraham's bosom to free the souls of the patriarchs and carry them triumphantly to heaven. This idea was anathema to Protestants of all stripes – Limbus patrum was, perhaps literally, only a short step from purgatory – though reformers were far from united in putting forward an alternative explication. The article was interpreted literally by Jacobean conformists like Thomas Bilson or John Higgins, who insisted that Christ's soul did ‘really and locally, actuallie and effectually descend into hell’ in order to signify his triumph over the powers of evil.Footnote ⁷⁵ The consensus of much Reformed theology, by contrast, was that there had been no local or spatial descent. Many English theologians endorsed Calvin's spiritual interpretation that Christ experienced the pains of hell on the cross. The debate took a decidedly philological turn, with Puritans emphasising non-literal uses of ‘hell’ in the Bible, and arguing that the key Hebrew word ‘sheol’ should be translated as ‘death’ or ‘the grave’. ‘Christ's locall descension’, so Andrew Willet argued, ‘was but to the grave’.Footnote ⁷⁶ If it could be established that hell itself was not necessarily or demonstrably ‘below’, a subterranean abode of corporeal fire, then the proponents of a merely spiritual descent had moved the ground, as it were, from under the feet of their opponents.

The late J. H. Hexter famously observed that historians can be divided into ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’.Footnote ⁷⁷ This essay has undoubtedly been an exercise in splitting; perhaps, one might think, in splitting hairs. It has picked over the unpromising terrain of Catholic and Protestant writings about hell in a search for, if not the tyranny, then at least the existence of small differences. It would be reckless to contend that arguments about such matters as the quality of hell-fire and the geography of hell were more than side issues in the great confessional controversies of the day. None the less, these minor divergences presaged some larger transformations, and paying attention to them adds a suggestive dimension to existing discussions of the ‘decline of hell’. Jean Delumeau's ‘evangelism of fear’ was a collaborative Catholic-Protestant exercise, undergirded by a series of vast collective disasters stretching from the Black Death to the end of the wars of religion. It was, in his view, ‘the alleviation of serious threats to daily life’ from the end of the seventeenth century onwards which undermined the potency and persuasiveness of traditional threats about the punishments of the next world. D. P. Walker meanwhile attributed the waning of belief in the idea of eternal torment over the same period to inherent weaknesses in the scriptural and functional arguments for hell, and to the gradual advance of rationalist modes of religious thought.Footnote ⁷⁸ However, a close reading of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century clerical discourses suggests that – for England at least – the beginnings of a process by which hell could become less emphatically ‘real’ can be detected in the polemical and strategic requirements of Reformation theology, as much as in the changing macro-environment, or in an inevitable triumph of reason.Footnote ⁷⁹ On the surface, writings about hell were some of the most solidly consensual of all Christian doctrinal productions of the later Reformation period. Yet, almost in spite of themselves, they managed to play a discernible part in processes of group solidarity and identity-formation, and in laying some of the foundations for changed thinking about the essential relationship between this world and the next.