A Brefe Dialoge Bitwene a Christen Father and His Stobborne Sonne: The First Protestant Catechism Published in English

Pamela B. Giles is a senior doctoral candidate in 16th-century
literature at the University of Saskatchewan.

A Brefe Dialoge, first printed by Johann Schott, Strassburg, in 1527, is
William Roye’s translation of Wolfgang Capito’s De Pueris
Instituendis Ecclesiae Argentinensis Isagoge (also 1527; reprinted as
Appendix B). One of the earliest English Protestant printed texts, the
catechism presents a father explaining the “largely, but not
exclusively Lutheran” beliefs his son must hold to lead a Christian
life.

Parker and Krajewski’s beautifully typeset edition seeks to make the
catechism accessible to an academic audience. The faithfulness to the
first edition facilitates comparison with the STC microfilm, though it
also makes the text less user-friendly to nonspecialists. The text of
the 63-page dialogue reproduces the spelling, punctuation, and
capitalization of the 1527 edition; line endings and foliation appear as
slashes and bracketed numbers respectively. Mercifully, the editors have
broken from the original’s practice of running the dialogue as one
massive paragraph, instead beginning each speech on a new line.

The critical apparatus is generally helpful. Biblical citations are
footnoted. More extensive notes appear in a commentary designed “to
gloss difficult readings ...; to establish a theological context ...;
and to gloss all Old and New Testament references.” These notes are
usually informative and relevant, though occasionally they make
connections that are more distracting than illuminating. For example, A
Brefe Dialoge’s explanation of salvation by faith is contextualized
through a three-page discussion that skips from Luther, to Tyndale, to
Spenser (Faerie Queene), to Shakespeare (Love’s Labour’s Lost). A
glossary, a bibliography, and an index complete the critical apparatus.

Less revealing than the commentary is the introduction. Discussion of
Roye’s early collaborations with Tyndale locates Roye in his early
Reformation context. Still, the reader is left with only a vague sense
of the importance of the Brefe Dialoge itself. A section entitled “The
Catechism in Sixteenth-Century England” broadens the category of
catechism to include “any literary work that purports to inculcate
Christian virtue,” a definition illustrated with Faerie Queene and
Paradise Lost. These examples will interest literary scholars, but they
obscure the specific goals of didactic theological treatises such as A
Brefe Dialoge.