After Thomas Harding, who had been deprived of the title of prebendary (honorary canon) of Salisbury, published his Answer to Jewel in 1564, Jewel wrote his Reply in 1565, which evoked a Confutation from Harding the next year.
To confute a philosopher out of his own mouth is, perhaps, the most effective form of confutation.
However, having spent the New Labour years as a freelancer, and watched the rapid erosion of assumptions about social provision, I now realise it represented the continuation rather than the confutation of Thatcherite policies.
Along with his close friend Hilaire Belloc, he was the proponent of a species of Third Way politics avant la lettre, a plague-on-both-your-houses confutation of capitalism and socialism known as distributism.
The thought of authors and readers burning up the telephone wires with a bit of confutation is giddying.
After Melanchthon returned to Wittenberg, he obtained a copy of the Confutation and decided that a more complete reply to the arguments of the Catholic theologians was necessary.
The first version of the Apology was hastily written and presented to Emperor Charles V on Sept. 22, 1530, at the Diet of Augsburg, after the Emperor had declared that the Confutation (Aug. 3, 1530), prepared by Catholic theologians to refute the Augsburg Confession (June 25 , 1530, properly presented his Catholic faith.
This study is cram-packed with facts such as the following: 'In seventeenth-century Leiden the University Chair of Hebrew was called the Chair 'for the Confutation of Judaism'.'in'in late-nineteenth century France 'writing a letter to the Jews' was a common euphemism for going to the toilet'.
He exalts St. Thomas More over William Tyndale, declaring More's vituperative, scatological "Confutation of Tyndale's Answer" to be "the most important religious polemic in English culture.... Tyndale was a grave and learned scholar; More a distinguished humanist on the European model".
Most arresting of all is his declaration in the Confutation of Tyndale that were anyone to translate his earlier Latin writings and Erasmus's Folly into English, he would burn the books with his own hands, "rather than folk should (though through their own fault) take any harm of them".
