SOURCE: “‘A whore at the first blush seemeth only a woman’: John Bale's Image of Both Churches and the Terms of Religious Difference in the Early English Reformation,” in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1995, pp. 245-69.

In the following essay, McEachern focuses on Bale's use of the image of the Whore of Babylon in The Image of Both Churches as a symbol of the corruption and duplicity of the Catholic Church.

“When shall Goddes sonne be unto you no syne of contradiction?”(1) 

John Bale is a precocious figure in the chronology of Tudor literature. Antiquary and playwright, he ushered in forms diverse as the chorography and the history play, which were to acquire full presence only with the arrival of Elizabethan conditions of textual production. Perhaps Bale's most trenchant contribution, however, to the textual practices of his century was a text that was itself concerned...