Just reading McCulloch on Cranmer’s marriage. Cranmer was of course a catholic priest and therefore obliged to be celibate, but while in Germany as a diplomat trying to sort out the King’s divorce, he married the niece of the Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander. It was a wild and revolutionary thing to do and shows how much he was persuaded by Lutheran theology. Cranmer liked marriage and had been previously wed in Cambridge, before he was ordained, to a girl who sadly died in childbirth. Then, out of the blue, Henry made him Archbishop of Canterbury. What was he to do with Margaret his German wife? Archiepiscopal palaces ‘did not contain women of any sort, except perhaps the washer woman.’ McCulloch says it’s one the mysteries of Cranmer’s career, but what is not in question is the ‘heroic central strength of this marriage.’ We see his understanding that marriage ‘can be fun’ in the words of the 1549 Prayer Book. ‘The traditional justification for marriage in the medieval church had been: faith, children, and sacramental mystery.’ Cranmer retained the bleak reasons for marriage: procreation and avoidance of fornication, but he added ‘the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity’. This was a married archbishop speaking and it might be one of his most distinctive contribution to Christian history.