Note 11 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

In England, before and at the Reformation, both “infidel” and “faithless” usually had the theological force of “non-Christian.” Thus Tyndale says of the Turks that though they “knowledge one God,” yet they “have erred and been faithless these eight hundred years”; adding the same of the Jews.11 Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, “infidel” seems thus to have commonly signified only a “heathen” or Jew or Mohammedan. Bishop Jewel, for instance, writes that the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain “then were infidels”;12 and the word appears to be normally used in that sense, or with a playful force derived from that, by the divines, poets, and dramatists, including Shakespeare, as by Milton in his verse.13 Ben Jonson has the phrase: