Editing Edmund Bonner (section)

==Bonner in historical memory==
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Contemporary Catholic writers attributed to Bonner and the other bishops who died in prison the honour of martyrdom: ''in vinculis obierunt martyres''. On the walls of the [[English College, Rome]], an inscription recording the deaths of eleven bishops, but without naming them, found a place among the paintings of the martyrs. Bonner was attacked during life with a rare hatred which has followed him into the grave, so that in English history few names have been so execrated and vilified as his.

A more charitable assessment of Bonner's character was made by an Anglican historian, [[S. R. Maitland]], who considers him,<blockquote>... {{lang|en-emodeng|a man, straightforward and hearty, familiar and humorous, sometimes rough, perhaps coarse, naturally hot tempered, but obviously (by the testimony of his enemies) placable and easily entreated, capable of bearing most patiently much intemperate and insolent language, much reviling and low abuse directed against himself personally, against his order, and against those peculiar doctrines and practices of his church for maintaining which he had himself suffered the loss of all things, and borne long imprisonment. [...] In short, we can scarcely read with attention any one of the cases detailed by those who were no friends of Bonner, without seeing in him a judge who (even if we grant that he was dispensing bad laws badly) was obviously desirous to save the prisoner's life}}.
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This verdict was generally followed by later historians. [[John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton|Lord Acton]] in the ''[[Cambridge Modern History]]'' (1904) argued: "The number of those put to death in his diocese of London was undoubtedly disproportionately large, but this would seem to have been more the result of the strength of the reforming element in the capital and in Essex than of the employment of exceptional rigour; while the evidence also shows that he himself patiently dealt with many of the Protestants, and did his best to induce them to renounce what he conscientiously believed to be their errors."<ref>[[John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton|Lord Acton]], ed., ''[[Cambridge Modern History]]'', vol II (1904), p. 533</ref>

{{wikisourcelang||Homelyes XIII in Cornysche|Tregear Homilies}}
Twelve of Bonner's ''{{Proper name|Homelies to be read within his diocese of London of all Parsons, vycars and curates}}'' (1555; nine of these were by [[John Harpsfield]]) were translated into the [[Cornish language]] by John Tregear in around 1560,<ref name=BSLA>{{cite journal |author1=Jon Mills |title=Cornish Lexicography in the Twentieth Century: Standardisation and Divergence. |journal=Bulletin Suisse de Linguistique Appliquée |date=1999 |volume=69 |issue=1 |pages=45–57 |url=http://doc.rero.ch/record/20686/files/Mills_45-57.pdf |access-date=11 August 2021}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Peswora Gradh Dedhyasow |url=https://www.kesva.org/sites/default/files/documents/KDL/kdl4a%20Dedhyasow.pdf |website=[[Kesva an Taves Kernewek]] |access-date=12 August 2021}}</ref> and the "[[Cornish_literature#Tregear_Homilies|Tregear Homilies]]" are now the largest single work of traditional [[Cornish literature|Cornish prose]].<ref name="EB">{{cite web |title=Cornish literature |url=https://www.britannica.com/art/Cornish-literature |website=[[Encyclopedia Britannica]] |access-date=11 August 2021}}</ref>