Prophetic Futures 3031185188, 9783031185182

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Prophetic Futures

Edited by Joseph Bowling · Katherine Walker

Prophetic Futures

Joseph Bowling • Katherine Walker Editors

Prophetic Futures

Previously published in postmedieval Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019

Editors Joseph Bowling University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI, USA

Katherine Walker University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, NV, USA

Spinoff from journal: “postmedieval” Volume 10, issue 1, March 2019 ISBN 978-3-031-18518-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Prophetic histories, portentous figures .......................................................................................................... 1 Joseph Bowling and Katherine Walker: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:3–7 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0110-6 English political prophecy and the problem of modernity ........................................................................... 7 Eric Weiskott: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:8–21 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0117-z The prophetess and the pope: St. Hildegard of Bingen, Pope Benedict XVI, and prophetic visions of church reform ....................................................................................................... 21 Nathaniel M. Campbell: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:22–35 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0111-5 Valencia’s miraculous prophet: The Inquisition dossier of Catalina Muñoz (1588) ............................... 35 Nicholas R. Jones: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:36–49 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0113-3 Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool......................................................................... 49 Misha Teramura: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:50–67 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0116-0 Wasting time in The Committee-man Curried .............................................................................................. 67 Marissa Nicosia: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:68–81 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0115-1 ‘The carcasse speakes’: Vital corpses and prophetic remains in Thomas May’s Antigone ..................... 81 Penelope Meyers Usher: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:82–94 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0114-2 Prophecy and poetry: The Second World War and the turn to biblical typology in George Herbert’s The Temple ................................................................................................... 95 Martin Elsky: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:95–110 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0112-4 Histories and temporalities past, present, and future................................................................................111 Dennis Austin Britton: postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2019, 2019: 10:111–126 (03, April 2019) https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0118-y

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Editors’ Introduction

Prophetic histories, por tentous figures

J o s e p h B o w l i n g a a n d K a t h e r i n e Wa l k e r b a

Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. b

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0110-6

The terrain of political discourse in 2016 bore some surprising resemblances to medieval and early modern Europe. In the lead-up to the US presidential elections, many Americans trusted in the predictive abilities of polling and algorithms with as much faith as a medieval or early modern parishioner receiving end-time prophecies. Premised on ostensibly scientific protocols, the practice of polling and the language around it has become as rarefied – as impenetrable to the political laity – as the intricate Merlinic prophecies that once circulated in manuscript and cheap print. Nonetheless, communities formed around the data: the left took solace in the proleptic certainty of Hillary Clinton’s win; the right responded to the polling consensus by decrying the elitism of the media and heralding Donald Trump as a savior. The election results produced a crisis for not only US politics and civic life but also for the established discursive practices of what could be seen as prophetic polling.

Chapter 1 was originally published as Bowling, J. & Walker, K. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0110-6.

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The above comparison demonstrates, as this issue ‘Prophetic Futures’ will explore, how thinking about prophecy and divinatory practices undermines our self-conception as living in a secular modernity – a disenchanted world. As recent political elections demonstrate and as our authors show, prophecy is never a neutral form of discourse. It is a speech-act that, like conjurations or vows, implies cause-and-effect relationships. The language can be poetic, couched in terms of political flattery, lampooned in doggerel, or markedly unadorned. Within the texts of prognostication, prophecy’s anticipatory functions point to its powerful role, or intervention, in a range of genres and discourses. In the medieval and early modern periods, prophetic discourse incited contentious debate about its efficacy or the prophet’s resemblance to the juggler or conjuror. For Montaigne, the verity of divination is less at issue than its epistemic and passionate provocations, for ‘there remain among us some means of divination by the stars, by spirits, bodily traits, dreams, and the like – a notable example of the frenzied curiosity of our nature, which wastes its time anticipating future things, as if it did not have enough to do digesting the present’ (de Montaigne, 2003, 32). Implicit in Montaigne’s discussion is how prophecy can create knowledge, despite its dangers as a confounding, everpresent distraction. Projection of the future and reading the past, for the French philosopher and others, always circle back to the present. This special issue aims to present new approaches to the study of prophetic discourse, the figure of the prophet, and historicist analyses of the genre in the medieval and early modern periods. We seek also to show how prophecy might shed light on the entanglement of the pre- and postmodern. From a span of historical specialties and disciplinary approaches, our authors collectively focus on three consequences of vatic pronouncement: 1) disciplinary protocols of periodization; 2) the surprising presence of bodies (gendered, racialized, human and nonhuman, alive and dead, whole, and in parts); and 3) scholarly method, including both historicist and presentist approaches. ‘Prophetic Futures’ contributes to the ongoing re-enchantment of modernity, recognizing that a rationalist and Whiggish narrative of history and literature fails to account for the temporal complexities and imaginative expansiveness of the prophetic. The authors in this issue attend to this problem and offer new means for reading the past. In this vein, Eric Weiskott’s ‘English Political Prophecy and the Problem of Modernity’ and Misha Teramura’s ‘Prophecy and Emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool’ demonstrate how a focus on the production and circulation of prophetic texts in medieval and early modern Europe necessitates a reconsideration of periodization and textual scholarship. Weiskott’s essay introduces the issue by tracing how prophecy as a literary genre overturns any stable notion of modernity or any binary between the medieval and the early modern. Indeed, the capacious genre of prophetic writing continues along this imposed temporal divide, flourishing, even, in the early modern. Weiskott thus

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concludes that ‘prophecy lays bare the artificiality of the periodization that still occludes it.’ Teramura’s article offers a granular analysis of prophecies’ defiant historicity by discussing a specific textual example, the use of the popular, but misattributed, ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ in the Fool’s speech of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Teramura traces the widespread circulation of Chaucer’s prophecy in the period to offer an argument for how Shakespeare engages with the text as well as making a claim that intervenes in the editorial history of the Fool’s speech. More than this, the article demonstrates how editorial entanglements arose from assumptions about prophecy, thus limning how contemporary editorial practices emerge from the epistemological and disciplinary structuring of modernity that Weiskott studies. In theoretical tandem with Weiskott’s and Teramura’s unsettling of neat periodic division, Nicholas R. Jones’ ‘Valencia’s Miraculous Prophet: The Inquisition Dossier of Catalina Mun˜oz (1588),’ Penelope Meyers Usher’s ‘‘‘The Carcasse Speakes’’: Vital Corpses and Prophetic Remains in Thomas May’s Antigone,’ and Marissa Nicosia’s ‘Wasting Time in The Committee-man Curried’ showcase how prophecy leads to a similar reconsideration of the relation between discourse, identity, and the body. In Jones’ study of Catalina Mun˜oz, an enslaved black woman in early modern Spain, Jones recovers the historical narrative of how she carved out a place of power for herself within the confines of her master’s home, doing so specifically through branding herself as a prophet. Jones identifies ‘Catalina’s racial status as a black African [. . . as a] key variable in analyzing the subversive nature of the prophetic acts located in her dossier.’ Prophecy allowed her to take control over her reputation, or ‘escandolo,’ through which she could highlight – rather than hide or suppress – her racialized, gendered body. Whereas Catalina uses the intersection of the racialization and gendering of both herself and the figure of the prophet in Inquisitorial Spain, Meyers Usher studies, through Thomas May’s adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone, how prophecy possesses an intimate relation to the violated body. Focusing on the figure of the corpse, Meyers Usher examines the relationship among bodies, violence, and knowledge granted through prophecy, proving that ‘prophecy is a bodily business.’ Normally treated as language games, prophecy appears here in a new light, as special knowledge granted through the transgression of the body through either ritualized violence (marring the body) or mixture (mingling the animal with human, animate with inanimate), thus endowing it with a new vitality that is a condition of its prophetic meaning. Meyers Usher concludes that we often discover prophecy so prominently in tragedy because it ‘comments on the precariousness of knowledge – and on the inseparability of knowledge and violence.’ Nicosia turns to the body in time and shows how the texts and bodies of prophecy could be manipulated to more duplicitous ends. In Nicosia’s essay, we encounter a host of self-serving Parliamentarians in Samuel Sheppard’s play pamphlet series The Committee-man Curried. These men waste time and seek bodily pleasures,

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and Sheppard harnesses the period’s fascination with prophecy as a means for envisioning a more efficient, Royalist future. Together, these contributions point to the material dimension of prophecy: how the prophet’s body can be fashioned, violated, or adopted to manipulate. A thread running through all of these studies, and with which this introduction opened, is the continuity between the different temporalities that prophecy evokes. In their respective articles, Nathaniel Campbell’s ‘The Prophetess and the Pope: St. Hildegard of Bingen, Pope Benedict XVI, and Prophetic Visions of Church Reform’ and Martin Elsky’s ‘Prophecy and Poetry: The Second World War and the Turn to Biblical Typology in George Herbert’s The Temple’ traverse historical periods – the twelfth, seventeenth, and twentieth centuries – and study the refashioning of vatic voices from the past to take up questions of transhistoricism and presentism. Campbell studies Pope Benedict XVI’s turn to St. Hildegard of Bingen in Benedict’s understanding and approach to institutional reform. Hildegard experienced prophetic visions that depicted the need for the Church’s reform through encounters with the personification of the Church, Ecclesia, gendered female. For Hildegard, Ecclesia modeled an authority grounded in vulnerability and thus figured a hermeneutic openness to revision within and through history. Benedict found in the twelfth-century prophet a critique of institutions founded on the premise that history is the dynamic unfolding of providence to which the Church must remain receptive and malleable, ready to react and adapt. Taking a different tack, Elsky demonstrates how the implicitly anti-presentist scholarship of historicist literary critic Rosemond Tuve – whose work has left a deep and lasting impact on the scholarship of Renaissance poetry – was motivated by her own political investments. Through analysis of Tuve’s typological reading of George Herbert, Elsky demonstrates how considerations of prophecy – which is by its definition anachronistic, necessarily out of time – implicate the present of the critic in the past of the text. Elsky thus shows how World War II shaped Tuve’s seemingly strict historicist method, on which she herself ruminated in lectures delivered at Connecticut College. Our hope is that readers will respond to this call for renewed attention to prophecy and temporality with inquiries of their own, challenging in the process critical lenses that adhere to strict dualities of medieval/modern, superstitious/ rationalized, and other problematic dyads that occlude our understanding of vatic language. The language, texts, and bodies of prophecy challenge commonplaces about a disenchanted modernity and point the way to new critical approaches to texts out of time. As we are writing this introduction in 2018, we recognize how social, political, and economic upheaval furnishes fruitful ground for new prophecies, new hopes for a future less contingent on seemingly abstract forces. But lives in medieval and early modern Europe were equally shaped by these desires, and we have much to learn about how prophecy from the past can teach us ways to read our current moment.

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About the Authors Joseph Bowling is an Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work has appeared in Renaissance Drama. He is currently completing a book on the Trojan myth in early modern England (Email: [email protected]). Katherine Walker is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work has appeared in the journals Preternature, Studies in Philology, Early Modern Literary Studies, and others. She is currently writing Shakespeare and Science: A Dictionary for Arden Shakespeare Studies. She is also completing her book on early modern vernacular science and drama, titled Intuition and Knowledge on the Early Modern Stage (Email: [email protected]).

Reference de Montaigne, Michel. 2003. Of Prognostications. In Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. D. M. Frame, 32–5. New York: Everyman’s Library.

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Original Article

English political prophecy and the problem of modernity

E r i c We i s k o t t Department of English, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA.

Abstract This essay engages the methodological problem of medieval/modern periodization through study of political prophecy, a literary genre in which distant and recent historical experience mixes with imagined futures. To the question ‘Was English political prophecy medieval or modern?’ no answer can be given. The written tradition of political prophecy straddles the centuries now designated as medieval and modern. Public and governmental interest in prophecy peaked in the first half of the sixteenth century, the period of English literary history served most poorly by the medieval/modern periodization. The first section of the essay summarizes the generic, linguistic, codicological, political, and social dimensions of English political prophecy. The second section identifies points of contact between the field of political prophecy and the problem of modernity. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 8–21. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0117-z

A nineteenth-century note in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1835 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth century), fol. Vr, offers a hypothesis and a censure: It is probable that a great part of the subjects of this volume are in the hand writing of Ashmole himself copied from printed tracts – at least, for the greater part – He was exceedingly superstitious, and beleived in phrophecies, visions, and various absurdities. Yet this man was the founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford –

Chapter 2 was originally published as Weiskott, E. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 8–21. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0117-z.

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The hypothesis is correct. Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), astrologer and antiquarian, copied some of the later items in this collection of English political prophecy (Clapinson and Rogers, 1991, 1:32). Ashmole’s belief in ‘absurdities’ appears here as supplementary paleographical evidence: this was the sort of material he would copy. Moving beyond the logic of scribal attribution, the conjunction ‘yet’ registers a discrepancy between political prophecy and modernity. The two cohabited in the mind of Ashmole, a collector of medieval arcana and the founder of the University of Oxford’s premier scientific institution. Many of Ashmole’s surviving manuscripts contain political prophecies. Four are organized around the genre: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole Rolls 26 (olim Ashmole 27) (late fifteenth century); MS Ashmole 337, pt. V; MS Ashmole 1386, pt. III; and MS Ashmole 1835.1 With the clarity of an obiter dictum, the note in Ashmole 1835 expresses the historical stakes of English political prophecy. The author of the note distances nineteenth-century modernity from an alchemical seventeenth century, just as Ashmole’s antiquarian activities ostensibly distance his modern present from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Yet, in consigning political prophecy to the past, the note joins a long line of anxious literary activity surrounding the genre, extending back beyond Ashmole’s life to the centuries that the nineteenth-century notator would recognize as medieval. From 1150 to 1650, political prophecy was always dangerous, and it always belonged to the past. Ironically, for a twenty-first-century reader, the invocation of a defunct literary genre, like the spellings beleived and phrophecies, marks the Ashmole note itself as the product of an earlier era. Political prophecy has disappeared from the literary landscape, even as a target of derision. Between the end of English political prophecy and the Ashmole note lay the eighteenth century, when the idea of modernity stabilized and the discipline of English studies came into its own. In building a time and place called ‘modernity,’ post-Enlightenment writers reconstituted centuries of conflict and complexity as an arrow pointing toward secularized Europe (Davis, 2008). In England, the arrow pointed toward the British Empire. Paradoxically, Henry VIII’s new religious regime and the humanists’ self-conscious re-articulation of a classical past secured England a place in secular modernity. Across Europe (thereby able to name itself as such), the arrow pointed away from a time and place henceforth known as ‘the Middle Ages.’ The Middle Ages, a surprisingly young idea, is the negative image of the ideological territory claimed for modernity. If modernity was characterized by secularization and imperial order, then the Middle Ages were characterized by fanaticism and feudalism. If modernity was characterized by an open-ended future and a nuanced understanding of the past, then the Middle Ages were characterized by fatalism and a lack of historical perspective. Twenty-first-century scholars of English literature inherit these judgments. Faculty hiring, college curricula, academic publishing,

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1 All late sixteenth/ early seventeenth century except for Ashmole Rolls 26 (late fifteenth century).

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and the very tools of critical analysis are shaped by the basic distinction between modernity and something historically prior to it but, in fact, conceptually codependent with it. How can one study the Middle Ages or modernity without reifying the secularist and imperialist historiography of which these chronological categories are expressions? But how can one reject secularist and imperialist historiography without squandering two hundred years of research directed at objects of inquiry called ‘the Middle Ages’ and ‘modernity’? Whatever else it has come to represent, the question of modernity is a question of scholarly method. To the question ‘Was English political prophecy medieval or modern?’ no answer can be given. The written tradition of political prophecy straddles the centuries now designated as medieval and modern. Public and governmental interest in prophecy peaked in the first half of the sixteenth century, the period of English literary history served most poorly by the medieval/modern periodization. Nor did English political prophecy engender any recognizably modern literary progeny. The tradition ended with a whimper around the turn of the eighteenth century, long after the political and religious upheavals that would herald modernity for later historians, but long before the emergence of the modern discipline of English studies and its ideological complement, the English literary canon. English political prophecy is an unmodern literary tradition, that is, a literary corpus resistant to established retrospective procedures of periodic segmentation. By forging a third way between medieval romance and the modern novel, prophecy lays bare the artificiality of the periodization that still occludes it. This essay explores connections and tensions between political prophecy and modernity. Because the genre is now unfamiliar, it is necessary to set out some coordinates of form and history before turning to historiography. The first section summarizes the generic, linguistic, codicological, political, and social dimensions of English political prophecy, with emphasis on literary genre. This survey of the field reveals political prophecy to be a large, problematic, and underappreciated historical archive, which shaped policy and everyday life in pre-Enlightenment England. Each of the dimensions of prophetic writing, and especially its status as a distinct genre reducible neither to medieval romance nor to the classical drama/epic/lyric triad, has effectively exiled political prophecy from the purview of modern literary studies. The second section identifies points of contact between the field of English political prophecy and the problem of modernity, arguing that prophecy describes a centuries-long period neither medieval nor modern in the contrastive historical senses that these labels acquired in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These issues are inscribed with particular clarity in the print history of The Whole Prophesie of Scotland, England, & Some-part of France, and Denmark (first published 1603).

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English political prophecy: Coordinates of form and history Around 1138, a Monmouthshire cleric named Geoffrey published Historia regum Brittaniae. At the center of the Historia is the Prophetie Merlini, in which Merlin, at the request of the British king Vortigern, tells the future of the Saxon and British peoples (Reeve, 2007, §§109–17). The Prophetie may have been composed separately from the Historia and certainly circulated independently from at least the late twelfth century. Geoffrey’s accomplishment was to weave together two strands of Welsh literary tradition. Henceforth, Merlin the prophet and Arthur the British king would travel together. The Historia and its vernacular adaptations exported both figures, recontextualized through juxtaposition, to non-Welsh-speaking audiences in Britain and on the continent. Geoffrey’s insertion of a prophetic set-piece into historical narrative bespeaks an attitude toward history that characterizes political prophecy as a whole. In medieval and early modern culture, prophecy expressed the same truth as historiography. Prophecy was ‘history written in the future tense’ (Taylor, 1911, 3). Merlin’s prophecies begin not with an act of imagination but with two real dragons, one white and one red, whom Vortigern observes fighting. Merlin opens his discourse by identifying the dragons with the Saxons and the Britons, respectively. The symbolic world of political prophecy, in which nations are dragons and lightning bolts shoot from Scorpio’s tail, occupies the plane of reality (Reeve, 2007, §§111–12, §117). It is difficult to overstate the imposing stature of Geoffrey’s text for later writers and readers. The Historia has exerted a continuous influence on literary production in several languages from the twelfth century to the present. Britain knew other prophetic traditions, notably those associated with the Bible, Hildegard of Bingen, Joachim of Fiore, and Sibyl. Each of these connected the island to the European continent.2 However, none of these other traditions achieved the intellectual and codicological density of Galfridian political prophecy in Britain. The number of individual prophetic texts in English, Anglo-Norman/French, Latin, and Welsh from the period c. 1150–1650 is very large – unknowable, in fact, in advance of exhaustive bibliographical study. English political prophecy stands as a major understudied literary archive. Despite some valuable essays and book-length studies on the subject,3 most prophetic texts are still unindexed, unedited, and untitled. The following survey of the field lays special emphasis on the last phase of active production of political prophecies, after c. 1450, when prophecy became an available organizing principle of manuscript collections and political prophecies in English began to predominate in books produced in England. Most immediately, political prophecy is a literary genre. The Prophetie Merlini presents its salient features: ascription of a prophetic utterance to an

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2 See Barnes (1988), Jostmann (2006), Kerby-Fulton (2000), Lerner (2009), and Sahlin (2001). 3 See Coote (2000), Flood (2016), Jansen (1991), Moranski (1998), Taylor (1911), and Thornton (2006).

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authoritative figure from the past, animal symbolism, and political topicality. Specifically, Geoffrey bequeathed to later writers a vocabulary for negotiating the relationship between ethnicity and empire. ‘Britons’ and ‘Saxons’ in political prophecy do not simply refer to Celtic and English polities, as can be readily inferred from the number of English political prophecies, written in England for English audiences, that imagine a final showdown in which righteous Britons triumph over Saxon invaders. For example, the alliterative Ireland Prophecy (NIMEV 366.5/2834.3/3557.55) (late fifteenth century) predicts that ‘Þese liouns bees lusked | and lased on sondir’ [‘these lions will be struck and bound together’] (l. 5; qtd from Weiskott, 2017, 258), where ‘liouns’ refer to Saxons, from the royal coat of arms of England. Yet the same poem looks to Ireland for the victorious king (ll. 83–6), in what is likely an allusion to Richard, duke of York, Lieutenant of Ireland from 1449. Within the logic of political prophecy as historiography, there was no contradiction between anti-Saxon and pro-Yorkist propositions. By appropriating anti-imperialist prophetic British historiography, English writers could represent themselves as the exclusive possessors of political intentions. In manuscript books, prophecy frequently co-occurs with historiography as well as heraldry, genealogy, astrology, medicine, and wisdom literature. The production of political prophecy was multilingual, a key feature that makes the tradition more difficult to apprehend as such within modern singlelanguage disciplines. Political prophecy begins, historically, in Welsh poetry such as Armes Prydein (tenth century) and Latin prose historiography as in the Prophetie Merlini. Geoffrey presents the Historia as a translation from ‘quendam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum,’ ‘a very old book in the British tongue’ (Reeve, 2007, §2), though this need be no more than a rhetorical flourish. Whereas Brut chronicles after the twelfth century passed from Latin through Anglo-Norman to English, Galfridian political prophecy proceeded more or less directly from Latin to English. Few Anglo-Norman/French political prophecies circulated in English manuscripts. Pre-1450 English manuscripts containing political prophecy are overwhelmingly in Latin, especially those further up the scale of formality. Even as late a manuscript as Ashmole Rolls 26, a Yorkist genealogical roll, mostly contains Latin texts. Meanwhile, from Armes Prydein to the death of Elias Ashmole, the production of political prophecies in Welsh proceeded apace. Surviving trilingual prophecy books, English/Latin/ Welsh, such as Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 94 (late sixteenth/early seventeenth century; Trefriw, County Conwy: Evans, 1898– 1910, 1.3: iii–iv), illustrate the commerce in prophetic texts and ideas in and around the Marches. The prophecy tradition was manuscript-centric, another consideration that helps explain its marginality in scholarship on insular literature, particularly scholarship sited in the era of print. Written testimonia and court records imply the extensive circulation of political prophecies by word of mouth and in loose

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sheets (Jansen, 1993, 240–2), but manuscript books remain the richest form of evidence for the genre. There are around 40 English prophecy books, where ‘English’ means prophecy books produced in England and/or containing prophecies in English or Scots. The prophecy books range in date from the mid-1440s or 1450s to the eighteenth century, but they cluster in the late fifteenth century and the late sixteenth century. Apart from Ashmole Rolls 26 and a few other Yorkist books of the 1460s, collections of political prophecy are relatively down-market products, wrought in casual handwriting and filled with household accounts, letters, signatures, pentrials, and other ephemeralia on paper or modest vellum. At the back of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B.8, pt. R (mid-sixteenth century), for example, is a short drinking song beginning ‘what aileth thee thou musinge man ta va vow, ta va vow’ (fol. 301v). The mise en page of individual pages in prophecy books often has the character of a nonce solution. Yet scribes could devote significant energy to constructing paratextual apparatus for reading prophecy. For example, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E.VII (late fifteenth century), another Yorkist propaganda book, offers a neatly numbered contemporary list of incipits of 56 prophecies, with spaces for eight more (fol. 81r). From the Prophetie Merlini forward, political prophecies constituted responses to contemporary political events. The combination of literary conventionality and political topicality in prophetic writing frustrates standard scholarly reading practices, exacerbating the alienation of prophecy from modernity. Chief among the objects of prophetic discourse is a small number of wars, monarchs, and upheavals, such as the Wars of Scottish Independence, Edward III, the Wars of the Roses, and Henry VIII. The representation of events and figures in English political prophecy was cumulative, not sequential. Thus, the poet of the English alliterative Wynnere and Wastoure (late fourteenth century) imagines Edward III conquering Paris and marching into Cologne, a reenactment of the movements of the boar-king in the popular Prophecy of the Six Kings (early fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century across several revisions in multiple languages and forms).4 The depiction of the boar in the Prophecy of the Six Kings, in turn, expresses aspirations for (the future) Edward III in terms of Arthur’s siege of Paris in Geoffrey’s Historia (Reeve, 2007, §155). Prophetic texts moved through political history just as political history moved through prophetic texts. For example, in the opening years of the fifteenth century, chronicler and Lancastrian sympathizer Adam of Usk applied lines from John of Bridlington’s Prophecy (early fourteenth century), originally aimed at Edward III of England and Philip VI of France, to Henry Bolingbroke and Richard II (Strohm, 1998, 9–12). Another part of the difficulty for modern scholars in coming to grips with political prophecy, I submit, is the social fluidity of the genre. Some studies of political prophecy describe it as a vehicle of propaganda, others as a tool of social protest. It was both. If romance was the genre of the urban gentry

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4 See Flood (2015, 432–7), and Smallwood (1985).

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(Johnston, 2014), and English alliterative verse was the meter of the clerical class (Mueller, 2013), then political prophecy was the genre that could draw kings, monks, merchants, and commoners into the same conceptual arena. Geoffrey represents the Historia as anti-imperialist historiography: once and future British resistance to Saxon hegemony. Whatever the status of this claim for Geoffrey, a socially mobile cleric, the Historia was forcefully co-opted by elite imperialists almost immediately after its publication (Crick, 2011). Simultaneous movement up and down the social scale would characterize political prophecy throughout its history. Known scribes and early owners of manuscripts containing political prophecy include, for example, Henry VII, who owned London, British Library, MS Arundel 66 (1490), a sumptuous astronomy book with Latin political prophecies (Carey, 2012; Coote, 2000, 235–6); Henry Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, who owned Vespasian E.VII (Coote, 2000, 225–6); the Wigstons, merchants of Leicester, who owned London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 101 (late fifteenth century), a miscellany containing recipes, religious verse, political prophecies, and other items, in Latin and English (Coote, 2000, 236); Welsh physician Thomas Wiliems, who copied Peniarth 94 (Evans, 1898–1910, 1.2: 578); and household official Reginald Andrew of Winchester, Hampshire, who owned and partly copied Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 35 (late fifteenth century), a commonplace book including political prophecies in English and Latin (Coote, 2000, 232). Predictably, the ownership of manuscripts containing English political prophecy skewed toward the rich and almost exclusively toward men. Nonetheless, all sectors of literate society participated in the production and consumption of these books. Ironically, the best evidence of the use of political prophecy by ordinary people comes from accounts and records of legal proceedings in the wake of legislation criminalizing unauthorized prophetic activity, enacted first in 1406 and then periodically in the early and mid-sixteenth century. Many of these official documents quote the offending text in part or in full. For example, one can find part of the text of the cross-rhymed English alliterating Marvels of Merlin (late fifteenth century) in the mouth of a servingman named Richard Swann at his 1538 trial for spreading the prophecy (Elton, 1972, 59; Jansen, 1991, 52–3). While always mediated by the conventions of legal documentation and the social prejudices of the powerful, the texts embedded in these court cases attest to the incendiary power of vernacular political prophecy. Through these cases one can glimpse the politicization of the fear of social disintegration. Above all, English political prophecy was a historiographical tradition. The literary style, languages, and political purposes of the genre all illustrate its fundamental orientation toward history writing. Recognizing political prophecy as a sustained historiographical tradition requires modern scholars to ignore the boundary supposedly dividing literature from history. It also requires scholars to appreciate the contingency of modernity as the measure of historical

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consciousness and literary value. The next section takes up these issues of periodization in relation to political prophecy.

The Age of Prophecy The period from c. 1450 to c. 1650 constitutes a distinct phase in the production of political prophecy. Call it the Age of Prophecy. In the longer history of the genre from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Mother Shipton, the middle of the fifteenth century marks a turning point. For the Wynnere and Wastoure poet in the fourteenth century, political prophecy was only one stop on the tour of genres. In the 1440s and 1450s, the first English prophecy books appeared, a new alignment of literary genre and book construction. In the 1450s and 1460s, the Jack Cade rebellion (1450) and the Wars of the Roses catalyzed the dissemination of old and new prophecies. Several of the most successful prophetic texts, including the Ireland Prophecy and the Marvels of Merlin, are datable to these decades. Socio-literary conditions favoring the production of prophecy books remained in place through the reign of James VI/I. During this period, political prophecy occupied a position of honor in cultural discourse and the literary field. It motivated political action, shaped public perception of national politics, and captured the imagination of writers and compilers. As late as the first decades of the seventeenth century, English political prophecy was being actively produced, as witness ‘A prince out of the north shall come,’ a tetrameter prophecy on James VI/I that enjoyed a vogue in seventeenth-century commonplace books and manuscript anthologies (Clifton, 2011, 256–7). By the middle of the seventeenth century, the center of power in prophetic writing had shifted from manuscript to print. One determining factor must have been the printed Whole Prophesie of Scotland, &c., which went through numerous printings in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Mid and late seventeenthcentury political prophecy departs from the specifically Galfridian literary tradition summarized in the previous section. In place of Merlin, the folk heroes Nixon and Mother Shipton ‘authored’ the prophecies that proved most popular with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century audiences (Coote and Thornton, 2000; Thornton, 2006). In the nineteenth century, political prophecy came to appear as an antique curiosity or a mental defect. Missing from this capsule description of the Age of Prophecy is language. To judge from such mid fifteenth-century hits as the alliterating, cross-rhymed First Scottish Prophecy, the promotion of English in prophetic writing roughly coincided with changes in political culture and manuscript form. Yet the surviving manuscripts indicate a lag between the production and dissemination of English political prophecies. English prophecy books transmitted predominantly Latin texts until nearly the end of the fifteenth century. When English emerged as the default medium of prophecy, it did so precisely through its

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5 See Teramura in this issue.

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entanglements with other languages – Latin, but also Anglo-Norman/French, Scots, and Welsh. Prophetic texts shared sources, literary styles, and political targets across languages. And, of course, many texts traveled across linguistic lines. The directionality of travel was not uniformly from Latin to the vernaculars: the Prophecy of the Six Kings jumped from Anglo-Norman to English, Welsh, and Latin, and a unique Latin prose translation of the First Scottish Prophecy appears in Vespasian E.VII, fol. 132–33r, soon after the composition of the English poem around 1450. Overall, however, Latin ceded ground to English. By the mid-sixteenth century, English prophecy occupied the former cultural position of Latin prophecy. In comparison with other English literary genres, political prophecy was a late bloomer. The mainstreaming of English literary activity occurred significantly earlier in romance, biblical translation, and historiography. These genres experienced the slow transition from manuscript to print in real time, in the fourteenth and very early fifteenth centuries. Romance and historiography were both foci of William Caxton’s early printing efforts in the late fifteenth century; prophecy was not. By the mid-sixteenth century, romance, scripture, and historiography could be found as abundantly in English printed books as in English manuscripts; prophecy could not. The Whole Prophesie of Scotland, &c., printed in 1603 to celebrate the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I, shows that political prophecy could flourish in print when presented as the literary paraphernalia of political union, but the genre was otherwise ostracized from print culture. To conclude that political prophecy was a conservative literary genre is already to accede to the teleologies that lead from manuscript to print and medieval to modern. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers and readers lacked foreknowledge of post-Enlightenment literary modernity. For them, prophecy was a way to inhabit the modern political world. If romance was the genre of ‘the Middle Ages,’ and the novel is the genre of modernity, then political prophecy was the genre of an overlapping intermediate period stretching from the Jack Cade rebellion to the English Civil War (1642–1651). These three genres, I would venture, inflected all other English literary production. Prophecy is distinguished from the other two by transgressing the medieval/modern dichotomy, thereby evading full modern critical awareness. My neologism ‘the Age of Prophecy’ is meant not only as a characterization of one phase in the production of English manuscripts but also as an invitation to reunite a balkanized literary dominion. After the end of the Age of Prophecy, political prophecy contributed to literary modernity – as a path not chosen. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Fool recites a version of the short English verse prophecy ‘When faith faileth in priests’ saws’ (NIMEV 3943; King Lear, 3.4.79–95).5 In 1 Henry IV, Hotspur deprecates Glendower’s rebellious belief in the Prophecy of the Six Kings (3.1.144–51). Shakespeare’s deployment of political prophecy in these two

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plays, as also in Macbeth and Richard III, occupies an equivocal place in the transition from production to repudiation of the genre. On the one hand, Shakespeare knew prophetic texts and put them to serious use in his drama. On the other hand, Galfridian prophecy for Shakespeare clearly belonged to the past. It appears only in plays set in pre-1500 Britain. A century after Shakespeare’s death, the printed Whole Prophesie of Scotland, &c. kept political prophecy visible in English literary culture, if only as an atavism. In 1718, royal printer James Watson brought out the Whole Prophesie in Edinburgh. An advertisement at the end of the book announces: THERE is in the Press, The History of King ROBERT THE BRUCE, The Acts and Deeds of Sir WILLIAM WALLACE, and, The Works of Sir DAVID LINDSAY; All of them printing in the same Volume and Character with the preceeding Prophecies, (from the best and most ancient Copies) in Order to transmit to Posterity, those Pieces of Antiquity, in a better and correcter Manner than has been commonly practis’d these Hundred Years past. (ESTC T85466, 44) The complementarity between prophecy and history survives from the Age of Prophecy, but now prophecy represents ‘Antiquity,’ a time capsule for ‘Posterity.’ Watson’s interest in political prophecy was one expression of a larger concern with the literary past. He set the Whole Prophesie in black letter, a typeface that held strong though not determinative associations with romance and antiquity after the ascendance of roman type in English-language printing in the early seventeenth century (Lesser, 2006; Mish, 1953). One motivation for Watson’s choice of type may have been his interest in the history of printing. He had produced a History of Printing in 1714 based on Jean de la Caille’s Histoire de l’imprimerie et de la librairie (1689). By 1833, when David Laing reprinted the 1603 Whole Prophesie of Scotland, &c. as Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies, in Alliterative Verse for the Bannatyne Club from the copy now known as Cambridge, MA, Houghton Library, STC 17841.7, political prophecy had exited the literary field. To the extent that it continued to circulate, it did so orally. The social stigmatization of prophecy, perceptible from its first appearances in writing, was now complete. The untitled preface to Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies begins: It seems difficult for any one, at the present day, to be fully aware of that degree of fond credulity with which, at a period even within the last century, certain political prophecies were regarded and cherished by the partisans of opposite factions in this country [i.e., Scotland], which the least instructed peasants of a later age would probably treat with contempt and derision. (Laing, 1833, v) Here the emergence of a modern present from the medieval past is transacted by social class and literary genre. Modernity puts ‘the least instructed peasants’

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6 See, for example, Summit and Wallace (2007) and Cummings and Simpson (2010).

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above even the noblest benighted ‘partisans’ in the hierarchy of literary good sense. It should be noted that for Laing, the Middle Ages extend into the eighteenth century (‘even within the last century’). The opening sentence of the preface simultaneously celebrates a break with the past and positions Scottish literary culture as belated. This double gesture – we are modern, but by the skin of our teeth – was characteristic of the Bannatyne Club and, indeed, nineteenthcentury medievalism in Britain. Recall that modernity began in the eighteenth century for the nineteenth-century notator of MS Ashmole 1835. The preface in Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies ends by inviting readers to ‘detec[t] the sources of antiquated delusion’ (Laing, 1833, viii). In Laing’s brave new world, political prophecy has become a new kind of historical evidence and a new kind of literary game. Laing, like Watson, sets the Whole Prophesie in black letter, a quite self-conscious archaism by the early nineteenth century. Like the MS Ashmole 1835 note, Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies wields the genre of political prophecy as an instrument in the periodizing procedure. So, too, does Keith Thomas in the expansive chapter on prophecy in his Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971, 389–432). Thomas numbers prophecy among the literary and religious behaviors that English subjects had to reject in order to become modern. Secular modernity, for Thomas, far from a discourse or a cultural paradigm, is simply the fact that makes historical inquiry into political prophecy possible. Here, as in Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies, class appears as an index of modernization. Thomas’s subtitle promises Studies in Popular Beliefs. The researcher’s and audience’s distance from the past can be measured by literary genre, skepticism, and social standing. Thomas’s book is the most detailed study of English political prophecy between Rupert Taylor’s field-defining Political Prophecy in England (1911) and Sharon L. Jansen’s Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII (1991). Yet in its large-scale and teleological historical claims, Religion and the Decline of Magic illustrates how political prophecy, as an object of interest for the religious historian, is constituted by the ideological structure called modernity. The study of English political prophecy has suffered not only from the medieval/modern periodization itself but from the terms in which that fissure has historically been negotiated. Periodization and its discontents have always shared religious and political history as common ground.6 English political prophecy contributed to these historical series, but in a fashion that has not animated a commensurate body of scholarship. In studies of prophecy, religious and political history appear as immutable background rather than as objects of inquiry in their own right. Consequently, in studies of periodization, prophecy is invisible. Prophecy has fared poorly in the historicist atmosphere of literary criticism since the 1980s, because the genre’s implication in history emerges most clearly through the work of literary style – where historicism has learned not to look. For political prophecy, probably more so than for romance or the

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novel, naı¨ve historicism founders on the shores of literary technique. Historical contextualization can yet illuminate the ideological pathologies of prophecy, but thus far it has failed to account for the stupendous volume of creative effort poured into political prophecy by early writers, readers, and compilers. That English political prophecy should have escaped the rehabilitating gaze of stylistic analysis is, ironically, one consequence of the historicist failure that makes rehabilitation necessary in the first place. As long as prophecy was understood to possess no literary value, it could only function as the embarrassing target of critical gestures drawn from the study of some richer literary corpus. Accordingly, many studies of political prophecy begin with an apology: ‘As specimens of literary composition, the contents of this volume have but slender claims to regard’ (Laing, 1833, vii); ‘Unfortunately, many of them […] are such doggerel that they lack interest even as literaria curiosa’ (Robbins, 1975, 1516); ‘This strange talk of eagles, cows, chickens, and sea shells seems now to be little more than nonsense’ (Jansen, 1991, 1); ‘This serious interest in prophecy strikes the modern reader as superstitious at best’ (Kay, 2006–2007, 73). Future work must break this critical deadlock by demonstrating the stylistic subtlety and literary urgency of political prophecy through its historical transformations. In its rhetorical habits and literary style, its methods of summoning futures, the tradition of political prophecy illuminates the historicity of modernity, an otherwise invisible idea.

About the Author Eric Weiskott is the author of English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (Cambridge, 2016) and co-editor, with Irina Dumitrescu, of a collection of essays entitled The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, forthcoming). He is at work on a book about English meter and the division of history into medieval and modern periods (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Barnes, R. 1988. Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Carey, H.M. 2012. Henry VII’s Book of Astrology and the Tudor Renaissance. Renaissance Quarterly 65(3): 661–710. Clapinson, M., and T.D. Rogers. 1991. Summary Catalogue of Post-Medieval Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library Oxford. 3 vols. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

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Clifton, N. 2011. Manuscripts of ‘A Prince out of the North.’ Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 14: 251–60. Coote, L.A. 2000. Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England. Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press. Coote, L. and T. Thornton. 2000. Merlin, Erceldoune, Nixon: A Tradition of Popular Political Prophecy. New Medieval Literatures 4:117–37. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Crick, J. 2011. Geoffrey and the Prophetic Tradition. In The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature: The Development and Dissemination of the Arthurian Legend in Medieval Latin, ed. S. Echard, 67–82. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press. Cummings, B. and J. Simpson, eds. 2010. Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Davis, K. 2008. Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Elton, G.R. 1972. Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [ESTC] English Short Title Catalogue. The British Library, et al. http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func= file&file_name=login-bl-estc. Evans, J.G. 1898–1910. Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language. 2 vols. London: Historical Manuscripts Commission. Flood, V. 2015. Wynnere and Wastoure and the Influence of Political Prophecy. Chaucer Review 49(4): 427–48. Flood, V. 2016. Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune. Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer. Jansen, S. L. 1991. Political Protest and Prophecy under Henry VIII. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Jansen, S. L. 1993 and 1994. ‘And he shall be called Edward’: Sixteenth-Century Political Protest and Folger MS Loseley b. 546. English Literary Renaissance 23(2): 227–43 and 24(3): 699–714. Johnston, M. 2014. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Jostmann, C. 2006. Sibilla Erithea Babilonica: Papsttum und Prophetie im 13. Jahrhundert. Hanover, Germany: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Kay, M. 2006–2007. Prophecy in Welsh Manuscripts. Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 26/27: 73–108. Kerby-Fulton, K. 2000. Prophecy and Suspicion: Closet Radicalism, Reformist Politics, and the Vogue for Hildegardiana in Ricardian England. Speculum 75(2): 318–41. Laing, D., ed. 1833. Collection of Ancient Scottish Prophecies, in Alliterative Verse: Reprinted from Waldegrave’s Edition, M.DC.III. Edinburgh, UK: Bannatyne. Lerner, R.E. 2009. The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lesser, Z. 2006. Typographic Nostalgia: Playreading, Popularity, and the Meaning of Black Letter. In The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. M. Straznicky, 99–126. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Mish, C.C. 1953. Black Letter as a Social Discriminant in the Seventeenth Century. PMLA 68(3): 627–30. Moranski, K.R. 1998. The Prophetie Merlini, Animal Symbolism, and the Development of Political Prophecy in Late Medieval England and Scotland. Arthuriana 8(4): 56–68. Mueller, A. 2013. Translating Troy: Provincial Politics in Alliterative Romance. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. [NIMEV] New Index of Middle English Verse. 2005. Eds. J. Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards. London: The British Library. Reeve, M.D., ed., and N. Wright, trans. 2007. Geoffrey of Monmouth: ‘The History of the Kings of Britain’: An Edition and Translation of ‘De gestis Britonum’. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Robbins, R.H. 1975. Political Prophecies. In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ed. A.E. Hartung, vol. 5, 1516–36, 1714–25. New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sahlin, C.L. 2001. Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Smallwood, T.M. 1985. The Prophecy of the Six Kings. Speculum 60(3): 571–92. Strohm, P. 1998. England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Summit, J. and D. Wallace, eds. 2007. Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization. Special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37: 447–620. Taylor, R. 1911. The Political Prophecy in England. New York: Columbia University Press. Thomas, K. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Thornton, T. 2006. Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. Weiskott, E. 2017. The Ireland Prophecy: Text and Metrical Context. Studies in Philology 114(2): 245–77.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

The prophetess and the pope: St. Hildegard of Bingen, Pope Benedict XVI, and prophetic visions of church reform

Nathaniel M. Campbell School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Union College, Barbourville, KY, USA.

Abstract Pope Benedict XVI seemed an unlikely fellow to declare Hildegard of

1 On 10 May, 2012, the Pope made Hildegard’s longtime German veneration universal; her feast day is 17 September. On 7 October, 2012, she became the fourth woman among the 35 Doctors of the Church.

Bingen a Doctor of the Church in 2012. Yet Joseph Ratzinger’s studies as a medievalist disposed him to the symbolist tendencies of Hildegard and her contemporaries in reflecting on the relationship among scripture, history, and the Church. Deeply affected by the abuse of political power and corruption within the Church, both Ratzinger and Hildegard developed prophetic outlooks on the nature of the Church and its mission in the world, centered on the singular light of Christ’s Incarnation. We find, across the centuries, a shared embrace of the enigmatic tension between the Church’s corrupted institutions and their prophetic renewal. Ironically, Hildegard came to distrust the authority of the papacy and prophesied its ending, even as Benedict would be, as pope, her greatest champion. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 22–35. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0111-5

When news broke in 2011 that Pope Benedict XVI intended to formally canonize Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and declare her a Doctor of the Church, it caught many of her admirers by surprise (Newman, 2013, 36–8).1 The visionary prophet and fiery critic of churchmen seemed to some an ill fit with a pope often characterized as an arch-conservative. It was not hard to see

Chapter 3 was originally published as Campbell, N. M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 22–35. https:// doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0111-5.

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that the Hildegard of popular imagination – the co-opted mystic of ‘creationcentered’ New Age spirituality, the guru of holistic healing, or even the icon of feminist defiance rumored to have been a lesbian – might have influenced previous papal rejections of formal canonization. But Benedict, the first German pontiff since the Middle Ages, showed an enduring fondness for the ‘prophetissa teutonica’ (Clendenen, 2012, 210–5). The affinities run deeper than nationality, however. The abuse of political power deeply affected both Ratzinger and Hildegard as they developed prophetic outlooks on the nature of the Church and its mission in the world. For Hildegard, the context was schism and the clashes between Empire and Papacy in the twelfth century. For Ratzinger, it was the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, whether Nazi or communist.2 Both looked to the Church’s eternal source within Christ to find a way past corrupted human fallibilities. The irruption of divinity into time in the moment of the Incarnation stands for both Hildegard and Ratzinger at the fixed center-point and end of all created order; as history past and future bends towards that asymptote, its path is prophetic. Neither considers prophecy simply as an obscure future-telling text. Rather, each looks past the words to see the Word whose creative and redemptive acting orients everything. This shared prophetic outlook encourages us to critically examine the assumptions that would make them seem such strange companions. It also shows that when prophecy is an act rooted in the Incarnation, it can escape the limitations of specific historical moments to speak, grow, and enlighten the Church across the centuries. The seeds of this orientation were sown for Ratzinger in his post-graduate studies on the work of the thirteenth-century Franciscan, St. Bonaventure, and they sprouted during his pivotal time as a theological advisor during the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). But it was after the student protests of 1968 that they bore fruit, as Ratzinger reacted against a politicized means of salvation. Hildegard’s own disgust at institutional abuses of power then became a prophetic companion during his papacy (2005–13), as the now Pope Benedict called upon her to help shape his visions for Church reform. In 2010, he devoted two General Audiences to Hildegard, with particular focus on her prophetic charism speaking out against abuses of the Church. Her preaching against the Cathars recognized that ‘a true renewal of the ecclesial community is obtained with a sincere spirit of repentance and a demanding process of conversion, rather than with a change of structures’ (Benedict XVI, 2010b). But Hildegard also spoke out against internal corruption of the Church, ‘wounded also in that time by the sins of both priests and lay people’ (Benedict XVI, 2010a). Hildegard the reproaching preacher made her starkest appearance in the Pope’s address to the Roman Curia at the end of that year. In response to a flood of new allegations of the clerical abuse of children and its hierarchical cover-up, he invoked Hildegard’s bitter condemnation to the clergy at Kirchheim in 1170:

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2 Following convention, I refer to Ratzinger by his given name for references before his 2005 papal election, and as Benedict for references thereafter.

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Campbell

3 Edited elsewhere as Ep. 149r (Hildegard, 1998a, 333–7; 1998b, 92–4); see analysis in Newman (1987, 241–3) and KerbyFulton (1998, 78–80).

4 On this image, see Emerson (2002). 5 As discussed later, Hildegard’s prophetic identity was stronger because of her virgin femininity; the gendered term ‘prophetess’ is thus not just appropriate but essential.

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I had a vision of a woman of such beauty that the human mind is unable to comprehend. She stretched in height from earth to heaven. Her face shone with exceeding brightness and her gaze was fixed on heaven. She was dressed in a dazzling robe of white silk and draped in a cloak, adorned with stones of great price. On her feet she wore shoes of onyx. But her face was stained with dust, her robe was ripped down the right side, her cloak had lost its sheen of beauty and her shoes had been blackened. And she herself, in a voice loud with sorrow, was calling to the heights of heaven, saying, ‘‘Hear, heaven, how my face is sullied; mourn, earth, that my robe is torn; tremble, abyss, because my shoes are blackened! […] For my Bridegroom’s wounds remain fresh and open as long as the wounds of men’s sins continue to gape. And Christ’s wounds remain open because of the sins of priests. They tear my robe, since they are violators of the Law, the Gospel and their own priesthood; they darken my cloak by neglecting, in every way, the precepts which they are meant to uphold; my shoes too are blackened, since priests do not keep to the straight paths of justice’’ (Benedict XVI, 2010c)3 This allegorical figure of Ecclesia, the virgin Mother Church, was one of Hildegard’s most frequent visionary images – ‘a living and substantial person,’ dwelling eternally in heaven to mediate God’s eternal plan as ‘it follows its painful but triumphant course through history to a consummation at the end of time’ (Newman, 1987, 248 and 196). Hildegard’s images of the Church are vast, powerful, vibrant – yet also vulnerable. Despite the procreative, saving energy that courses through Ecclesia’s gleaming body, she suffers like her Bridegroom the ravages of sin. Evil’s abuse is even more graphically depicted in Hildegard’s vision in Scivias III.11 of the Antichrist’s leering, monstrous head, born violently from the Church’s vagina. This rape is a direct assault on the Church’s motherhood of the faithful, as Antichrist takes over her womb and corrupts her fertile mission. The abuse is also domestic, the result of ‘fornication and murder and rapine’ committed by Ecclesia’s own ministers, their ‘vile lust and shameful blasphemy […] infused’ in them by the Antichrist’s ‘voracious and gaping jaws’ (Scivias III.11.13–14: Hildegard, 1990, 497–8).4 This powerful prophetess speaking out against corruption in the Church is the Hildegard that Joseph Ratzinger would have met in his studies in Munich and Freising as he delved into medieval ‘symbolist’ theologies of history.5 In 1957, the future pope and budding medievalist completed his Habilitation (second dissertation) on The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (published 1959). Focused on the Seraphic Doctor’s Collationes in Hexaemeron, the book explored Bonaventure’s complicated relationship to Hildegard’s slightly later prophetic contemporary, Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202), and his intricate, exegetical patterns of salvation history. In considering the theological meaning of his own particular moment in history, Bonaventure – and Ratzinger with him

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– took from Joachim an understanding of the prophetic latency of all history within God’s Word. Joachim’s ‘symbolist’ approach to history and exegesis belongs to a wider current of twelfth-century monastic thought, and Hildegard stands next to him at its summit (Dempf, 1929, 229–84; Ratzinger, [1959] 1992, 97–110; 1971a, 95–108).6 Inculcated in the deep engagement with Scripture characteristic of monastic lectio divina and liturgy, this approach explores its symbolic, progressive, and correlative revelation of history across the Old Testament into the New Testament and beyond into the life of the Church. As Ratzinger explains: Objectively, Scripture is indeed complete, but its meaning is grasped in a constant unfolding throughout history that is not yet complete. Like the physical world, it contains ‘seeds’ – seeds of meaning that as time grows are perceived in a constant state of growth. […] New insights thus are always growing out of Scripture, within it something is continuously taking place; and this happening, this history, continues as long as history exists. For the theologian as expositor of Scripture, this is an important insight, as it proves that in his exposition, he cannot ignore history, whether future as much as past. So the exposition of Scripture becomes a theology of history, the illumination of the past becomes prophecy of what is to come. (Ratzinger, [1959] 1992, 11–12; 1971a, 9)

6 Translations of Ratzinger (1959) are the author’s, but references are also given to Ratzinger (1971a, trans. Z. Hayes).

As it was for Bonaventure and for Hildegard, so the Gospel is for Ratzinger fundamentally not words, but the Word made flesh. Revelation is a process, an act, and a relationship. The unveiling of God’s truth and love can only happen in relationship to a person (both the individual and collective humankind) for whom the veil is removed. This is the sense in which Ratzinger understands Scripture and the Church to speak prophetically together in history: in bearing witness to the radical act of love that poured itself out to unite time and eternity, humankind and God. To be a recipient of revelation is not simply to read Scripture, but to be prophetically inspired by God’s grace to understand its deepest mystical meanings, which all circle about the Christ-event at its center (Ratzinger, [1959] 1992, 63–71; 1971a, 62–9). The idea that Scripture can still speak prophetically of the Church’s history, however, provokes the inherent tension between prophetic hope and the Church’s presently incomplete mission to a fallen world. The Gospel proclaims a new world order in the Sermon on the Mount, but that order proves unrealizable in institutional form before the eschaton (Ratzinger, [1959] 1992, 41–3; 1971a, 40). As Ratzinger noted in the preface to the 1992 reprinting of his study: ‘The question of whether one as a Christian can entertain a kind of thisworldly perfection, of whether something like a Christian utopia, a synthesis of utopia and eschatology, is possible, is perhaps the theological heart of the debate over liberation theology’ (Ratzinger, [1959] 1992, n.p.). Ratzinger recognizes that the marriage of a this-worldly ideology to the Gospel undermines the

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latter’s radical optimism, which is oriented to and rooted in the truly Other beyond the limits of the world. Having lived through the horrors of the Nazi promise of salvation to the German people, Ratzinger knew not to trust in political ideology to accomplish what only the Gospel can. His skepticism of political power joined a prophetic voice inherited from his medieval forebears in a radio address Ratzinger delivered in the winter of 1969–70, offering a vision of ‘What Will the Church Look Like in 2000?’: From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge – a Church that has lost much. It will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. […] The Church will be a more spiritualized Church, not presuming upon a political mantle, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right. It will be hard going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost it much valuable energy. It will make it poor and cause it to become the Church of the meek. The process will be all the more arduous, for sectarian narrow-mindedness as well as pompous self-will will have to be shed. […] But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. […] And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult […], but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that it was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming, and be seen as humanity’s home where they will find life and hope beyond death. (Ratzinger, 1971b, 103–6) The reformist rhetoric of this passage offers a complicated mixture of pessimistic crisis and optimistic renewal. The enigmatic tension between those poles is also a defining feature of Hildegard’s reformist and apocalyptic tendencies. Two aspects of Ratzinger’s reformist vision find striking parallels in her thought: the political relationship between Church and Empire (or secular world), and the renewal of the Church as a purified but diminished institution. Although Hildegard must be situated within the legacy of the eleventh-century Gregorian reform, what is most striking are the ways in which she departs – sometimes radically – from a Gregorian vision of the Church. Ratzinger follows her lead. Though the reform movements of the eleventh century initially targeted pervasive moral corruptions within the clergy, they came to espouse the wider reform of all Christendom under the influence of their namesake and boldest partisan, Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85). For Gregory, the Church, with himself at its head, was the highest leader of Christian society, and secular authority was subservient to it. Hildegard represents one of the fiercer proponents of the Church’s moral reform in the generations after Gregory, but also one of the more ambivalent regarding the relationship between imperium and sacerdotium.

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Her ambivalence towards both sources of institutional authority – empire and papacy – grew out of an increasing frustration at the moral failures of each. When Anastasius IV came to the papal throne in 1153–4, his failures to continue reform earned Hildegard’s harsh disapprobation (Ep. 8, in Hildegard, 1991, 19–22; 1994, 41–3); so too did Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s perpetuation of the papal schism of 1159–77 (Ep. 313 and 315, in Hildegard, 2001, 74–5; 2004, 113–4). That schism deepened Hildegard’s pessimism over the state of the Church. All institutions of Christianity seemed hopelessly corrupt, but it was the corruption of the Church’s own ministers that particularly disturbed her. The roots of her reformist concern for the internal state of the Church preceded the schism, as in the violent vision of Antichrist raping the Church in Scivias III.11. But that book’s description of the ‘five ages’ to come from Hildegard’s time until the Antichrist remains vague, and she still seems optimistic that contemporary reform can be effective. Thus, when she writes in admonition to the German King Conrad around 1152, even the prophesied corruption is tempered by her hope that the King might lead God’s people back to the holiness of ‘the first dawn of justice,’ her distinctive term for the apostolic Church (Ep. 311r, in Hildegard, 2001, 71–2; 2004, 110–1). Over the course of the next two decades, as papacy and empire alike appeared ever more corrupt, Hildegard’s visionary denunciations grew sharper. Yet, as her pessimism deepened over the current state of the world – the ‘tempus muliebre’ [‘womanish age’], as she called it, purposely employing every misogynistic connotation the phrase could conjure – it was translated into an ever-brighter optimism about periods of renewal awaiting the once and future Church. The most extraordinary aspect of that renewal, however, is that it would involve the radical confiscation of clerical wealth and the disestablishment of the Church’s claims to secular authority. In these images of the Church’s future, Hildegard’s visions are strikingly similar to those of Ratzinger. The proving grounds for those visions of Church reform were her great preaching tours in the 1160s. Her public sermons to the clergy throughout the Rhineland were tours-de-force of fiery rhetoric and sharp castigation of clerical turpitude. In the 1170 sermon at Kirchheim, from which Pope Benedict quoted to the Curia at the end of 2010, her disgust at clerical corruption eclipses any earlier restraint as she grows more certain that disendowment is the only sure and just way forward to a holier Church. After Ecclesia laments her oncesplendid vesture now soiled by the sins of priests, she thunders down a woeful prophecy of coming vengeance, not only upon the clergy but upon the viridity [viriditas] of the earth itself – for in Hildegard’s eyes, the moral health of society and the ecological health of the earth are closely intertwined.7 She bluntly declares, ‘the princes of the earth and the rash mob will rise up against you [the clergy], cast you out, and put you to flight’ (Ep. 149r, in Hildegard, 1998a, 333–7; 1998b, 92–4). Meanwhile, in the famous sermon preached at Trier in

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7 Newman notes (in Clendenen, 2012, 224): ‘There is no question that Hildegard is a precursor to deep ecology – the interconnectivity of all creation. […] Hildegard was a theological ecologist, and bringing her ecological imperatives to the fore […] is a unique feature of this papal choice at this time in history.’

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8 Cited hereafter as LDO and by part, vision, and chapter.

1160, Hildegard prophesied a future period of renewal: ‘Afterward, the justice and judgment of God will arise, and the people will know the discipline and fear of God. There will also be good and just individuals among the spiritual people, who, nevertheless, will remain few in numbers because of their humility, but who, like the hermits, will turn back to the first dawn’ (Ep. 223r, in Hildegard, 1998a, 490–6; 2004, 18–23). Out of her preaching emerged the dominant themes of Hildegard’s vision for Church reform: a deep pessimism about the current state of the Church; an equally optimistic vision of future prophetic renewal; the confiscation of ecclesiastical property as its prelude; and its foundations in a small, central band of saints, returning the Church to her ideal apostolic state (Kerby-Fulton, 1989; and 1990, 26–51). These themes would find their most extensive and dramatic treatment in Hildegard’s last and grandest visionary work, completed in 1174, the Liber diuinorum operum.8 Freed from the constraints of the preacher’s sermon, the book’s last vision (3.5) explodes with prophetic power into Hildegard’s most detailed treatment of the times to come. The cycles between corruption and reform grow more radical and acute – the crises deeper, the renewals more holy. The key to understanding these cycles lies in Hildegard’s symbolist mode of thinking: the history of the Church after Christ recapitulates not just thematically but sacramentally, as it were, its history prophetically foretold in Scripture. Thus, ‘the dialectical triad of building up, falling away, and restoration’ is a key historical principle, foreshadowed and foreordained in the process of creation, fall, and redemption at the heart of salvation history (Rauh, 1973, 510–1). In ecclesiastical history, creation corresponds to the foundation of the apostolic Church, while the Fall can be seen in the ‘womanish time’ of corruption Hildegard views all around her. Although the final, complete restoration will only come at the end of the world, there is nevertheless the possibility for this process of establishment, crisis, and resolution to be repeated and renewed. These historical cycles of established, lost, and reformed holiness are the most prominent feature of Hildegard’s vision of the end times, intricately developed from the simple ‘five ages’ in Scivias 3.11. An illuminating example can be found in one of the cyclic periods of crisis Hildegard elaborates out of the age of the pale horse (the third in Scivias), described in LDO 3.5.21–6. This period, as with others before it, begins with a time of peace and prosperity in Christendom, lasting only a short time before the two great world powers of the Middle Ages are destroyed: Yet in those days, the Emperors of the Roman office will fall from the strength by which they once held tightly the Roman Empire, and become weak in their own glory, so that the imperial power in their hands by divine judgment will shortly decrease and fail. […] But after the imperial scepter is in this way broken up beyond repair, then too the miter of the

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apostolic office [i.e. papacy] will be broken. For because neither princes nor any other persons of either the spiritual or the secular order will then find any religion left in the apostolic title, the dignity of that title will diminish. They will prefer other prelates and archbishops under other titles in various places, so that after it has been diminished by the adjournment of its original dignity, the apostolic see will then maintain only Rome and a few nearby places that still lie under its miter. (LDO 3.5.25: Hildegard, 2018, 460–1) One might expect the destruction of both imperial and papal power to have prompted the Antichrist’s coming. Remarkably, however, this is just one of the many crises to come before the end times. Shortly after the reduction of the papacy to simply another bishopric, ‘Justice will stand for a time in her uprightness, so that the people of those days will turn themselves with integrity to the ancient customs and disciplines’ (LDO 3.5.26: Hildegard, 2018, 461). This return to the simple life of the early Church will also be reflected in the renewal of material creation: ‘The air too at that time will again grow sweet and the fruit of the earth useful, and humans will be healthy and strong.’ Finally, the faithful ‘will prophesy in that same spirit in which the prophets of old announced the mysteries of God, and in the likeness of the apostles’ teaching’ (Hildegard, 2018, 461–2). The rhetoric of reform as a return to the apostolic Church has served Christianity for as long as it has needed reform – that is, for as long as its institutions have existed. What is extraordinary about Hildegard’s portrait of that renewal is her distrust of institutional authority in carrying it out. This golden age of reform grounded on the ideal of the apostolic Church will come after the fall of the papacy. Such antipathy toward the institutional Church is often seen as a hallmark not of medieval or Roman Catholic thinking, but of the Protestant Reformation.9 Indeed, dissent from Vatican authority was a central concern in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 2012 ‘Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious,’ an association of American nuns. Among the Assessment’s concerns were controversial statements made at the LCWR’s annual assemblies (CDF, 2012, 2–3). In particular, Sr. Laurie Brink’s 2007 Keynote Address suggested that the Gen-X crisis in religious vocations might demand that some religious congregations ‘sojourn in a land yet unknown’ – a reference to the story of Hagar, Sarah’s slave girl and mother of Abraham’s first child, Ishmael. Following Hagar into the desert and away from the Covenant, ‘[a] sojourning congregation is no longer ecclesiastical. It has grown beyond the bounds of institutional religion. [… In] most respects [it] is Post-Christian’ (Brink, 2007, 15–9). The Doctrinal Assessment was issued just a few weeks before the final raising of Hildegard to the altar, and the coincidental timing led some commentators to link the two, posing Hildegard as a model of

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9 See Widmer (1955, 260–1) and Newman (1987, 241).

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10 See, for example, Clendenen (2012, 198–227).

11 See, for example, Kienzle and Walker (1998).

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feminist activism against the hierarchy, with seemingly more freedom in the twelfth century than nuns have today.10 Yet, Hildegard’s theology could in no way envision a ‘post-Christianity,’ let alone an extra-ecclesial exercise of the religious life. For Hildegard, the Church ‘embraced the whole of humanity,’ thus demonstrating ‘that humankind in its totality – women and men in history, community, in relation with God – had a feminine face’ (Newman, 1987, 248–9). We must distinguish, in Hildegard’s critiques of the Church, between her often corrupt ministers and her eternally virginal presence as Ecclesia, the Mother of all Christians and Bride of Christ. Hildegard’s prophetic rejection of the papacy’s ultimate authority is not a rejection of the Church or even necessarily of the ecclesiastical hierarchy – for in the aftermath of the papacy’s fall, the bishops and archbishops of each local and regional church endure. Furthermore, her images of the Church as feminine were always balanced by an awareness of the masculinity of the Church’s ministers – a balance that her theology of gender demands, for it views masculine and feminine as different but complementary principles (Thompson, 1994; Newman, 2013). Hildegard’s voice of authority, then, was not presbyterial but prophetic – two charisms in which she saw, in principle, no conflict (Newman, 1987, 254). Throughout Christian history, women have served as prophets who complement but do not replace the priest, and the ‘prophetic place on the margins’ was also key to Sr. Brink’s evaluation of the religious life today.11 Even the Doctrinal Assessment acknowledged that the prophetic office complements ecclesial life as a grace – yet problematically, the Vatican seemed to denounce any prophecy that is critical of ecclesiastical abuses as a ‘distortion’ (CDF, 2012, 5), despite the nearly simultaneous declaration of one of the greatest critical prophets of the Middle Ages as a Doctor of the Church. This more radical Hildegard is, in turn, tempered by Pope Benedict’s insistence on her orthodox obedience to ecclesiastical structure. As Newman notes, citing Rainer Berndt, one of the authors of the canonization protocol: ‘Pope Benedict had long been stressing the saint’s obedience to authority, to the amazement of historians who recall her fiery reprimands to the leading prelates of her day. But ecclesial authority, Berndt maintains, must be understood on an ‘‘early medieval partnership model’’ rather than a ‘‘modern authoritarian model’’’ (Newman, 2013, 49). This casts light on a final wrinkle to this complicated relationship between the sharply critical prophetess and the German Shepherd pontiff: in February 2013, Pope Benedict voluntarily chose to renounce the Petrine office and retire into monastic seclusion. He was succeeded by the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who took the name of Francis. According to his declaration, Benedict had become keenly aware that his own advanced age left him without adequate strength ‘in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the barque of Saint Peter’ (Benedict XVI, 2013). In severing the long-standing link between man and office, this final act sealed Benedict’s vision of his papacy as ministry

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rather than monarchy, and hearkened back to his younger visions for the reform of the Church. The rehabilitation of the papacy as the pastoral service of the Bishop of Rome rather than the regal government of a worldly institution could be seen, perhaps, in Benedict’s early choice to replace the papal tiara with a bishop’s mitre in his pontifical coat-of-arms. It took a final, radical act of renunciation, however, to confirm just how much ‘pompous self-will’ would have to be shed in the service of reforming the Church so that she might then reform the world (Ratzinger, 1971b, 105). But his renunciation should not be seen as a form of discontinuity. For him, as for Hildegard, no event today – even a papal resignation or the fall of the papacy itself – can be the radical rupture of history. Rather, the decisive and epochal event that indelibly defines the entire character not just of the Church but of the whole world, is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Christ is the end – both terminus and goal – of the world. From the beginning of time to its ending, Hildegard thus sees prophecy’s beam focused on Christ, shining ‘from generation to generation through the diverse ages of humankind, like a light in the darkness, and it will not rest from its sound until the world’s ending, offering words of multivalent signification because it is imbued with diverse mysteries by the Holy Spirit’s inspiration’ (LDO 3.2.2: Hildegard, 2018, 360). The moral purpose of this revelation is woven into the very fabric of creation: ‘For prophecy exists in humankind like the soul in the body, because as the soul is hidden within the body and the body is governed by it, so prophecy that comes from God’s spirit, which excels all creation, is invisible, and by it every failure is reproached, and all who leave the path of righteousness are led back’ (LDO 3.2.2: Hildegard, 2018, 360). As Liebeschu¨tz noted, this prophetic process involves the same macrocosmmicrocosm structure that defines the place of humankind within the world: ‘God has continually embodied his creative power both in the great world of the cosmos and in the small one of the person – and this power is precisely the heart of the eternal office of prophet to prepare for the God-Man, the seal of the entire process’ (Liebeschu¨z, 1930, 136; my translation). With this ‘light of living knowledge’ – an ‘inner sight [that] teaches a person about divine things’ – Adam was first created, but the ancient serpent obscured that light within him, like the eyelid obscuring the pupil’s vision (LDO 3.2.12: Hildegard, 2018, 377–8). This Adamic knowledge was ‘like prophecy, and it endured until the Son of God became Man, so that he enlightened it through himself as the sun illuminates the whole earth, and all the things foretold […] he fulfilled spiritually within himself’ (LDO 3.2.12: Hildegard, 2018, 377–8). This living light is obscured for the mortal human body, ‘[b]ut when humankind is taken out of mutability and made immutable, then will they see and know God’s radiance and dwell ever with him’ (LDO 3.2.10: Hildegard, 2018, 375). Alongside light, Hildegard describes prophecy with the organic image of the tree, whose root and branches transmit prophetic knowledge of Christ. The prophets declare ‘in shining shadow / a living, piercing light / that buds upon

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12 The author’s translation of the antiphon, ‘O spectabiles viri’: ‘in lucida umbra / acutam et viventem lucem / in virga germinantem, / que sola floruit / de introitu / radicantis luminis.’

that single branch / that flourished at / the entrance of / deep-rooted light’ (Hildegard, 1988, 158).12 That branch blooming with divine radiance is the Virgin Mary. Her pure womanhood has a unique power to be assumed into the changeless divinity, for the first man’s substance was changed from earth to flesh, ‘but woman, taken from that man, remained flesh from flesh, never to be changed into something else’ (LDO 3.2.3: Hildegard, 2018, 361). Woman’s capacity as the peculiar matrix of the divine image – the garment of the incarnate Christ – gives her the central role in mediating the drama of salvation: O Son of God, you assumed [your] garment from the unique and complete Virgin, whose enclosure no man ever opened or touched. For as dew upon the earth you entered into her, taking root not from man’s root but from divinity, like a sunbeam caressing the earth so that it brings forth its bud. From her you came forth as you entered into her, without any corruption and pain, as if in sleep, just as Eve was taken from the man as he slept. […] Indeed, Eve was created not from man’s seed but from man’s flesh, because God created her with the same power by which he also sent his Son into the Virgin; and so thereafter one can find no others like Eve, a virgin and mother, or Mary, a mother and virgin. In this way God clothed himself in human form and with it covered over his deity […] to be his dwelling. (LDO 3.2.13: Hildegard, 2018, 378–9) The Virgin Mother Church is, for Hildegard, the successor of this pair of virgins and mothers (Newman, 1987, 196–7). Yet the Visionary Doctor was also aware that Ecclesia was not static, but sojourning in time. Hildegard’s exegesis of the Genesis account of the seven days of creation (LDO 2.1.17–49; Hildegard, 2018, 287–347) tracks the distinct ‘days’ of Church history in its allegorical interpretation, from the apostolic ministry of the first and second days to the persecutions of the third, the establishment of sacred and secular authorities in the sun and moon on the fourth day, and the culminating development of monastic orders on the fifth. The creation of humankind on the sixth day recapitulates the Church’s ‘edificatio,’ and the seventh day’s rest spirals back to the fullness of Christ, with the order of virgins, ‘the blooms of roses and lilies,’ gleaming as the crown jewel (LDO 2.1.48: Hildegard, 2018, 346). Like Mary’s rose, Hildegard’s bloom shone with prophetic light. The modern historian could tell that same history of the western Church, in a sense, through the tensions between local ecclesial communities, like Hildegard’s house of virgins, and the ever-more centralized authority of the episcopal hierarchy, with Rome as its crown. In Hildegard’s later and more radical years, she sometimes saw that authority as dangerously corrosive. But though she fought injustices in the hierarchy, she also never broke the fundamental bonds of ecclesiastical obedience to which she was sworn at an early age. At times, Pope Benedict seemed fiercely protective of the centralized Roman authority he held

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in his hands. Yet in the end, he renounced it in an attempt to reform it. When faced with corruption within the Church, Hildegard’s prophetic voice found its surest might by orienting itself, not around structures of worldly power, but around the gleaming hope of redemption offered by the Incarnation. Benedict too was shaken by the Church’s corruption, especially in the form of child sexual abuse and its cover-up, and he took Hildegard’s humiliating words in condemnation of the sins of priests as a prophetic call for renewal (Benedict XVI, 2010c). The Visionary Doctor became for him an essential partner in the search for an authentic reform of the Church, understood ‘not as an empty change of structure but as conversion of heart’ (Benedict XVI, 2012). The organic flexibility of the Church’s prophetic roots in the Word of God is what can allow such renewal to flourish. By focusing their attention on ‘the event of revelation’ unfolding across time, both Benedict and Hildegard could with ‘prophetic sensitivity’ attend to ‘the activity of the Church that extends in time the mystery of the Incarnation’ (Benedict XVI, 2012).

About the Author Nathaniel M. Campbell is an adjunct instructor in the humanities at Union College, Kentucky. He works on medieval visionary and apocalyptic texts and their visual traditions, with a focus on Hildegard of Bingen. His translation of Hildegard’s The Book of Divine Works appeared from the Catholic University of America Press in 2018 (Email: [email protected]).

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Brink, L. 2007. A Marginal Life: Pursuing Holiness in the 21st Century. Keynote Address at the Annual Assembly of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Kansas City, MO, 2 August. https://lcwr.org/sites/default/files/calendar/attachments/2007_Keynote_ Address-Laurie_Brink-OP.pdf. Clendenen, A. 2012. Experiencing Hildegard: Jungian Perspectives (Expanded and Revised). Wilmetter, IL: Chiron Publications. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). 2012. Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. April 18. http://www.usccb.org/loader. cfm?csModule=security/getfile&pageid=55544. Dempf, A. 1929. Sacrum Imperium. Geschichts- und Staatsphilosophie des Mittelalters und der politischen Renaissance. Munich and Berlin, Germany: R. Oldenbourg. Emmerson, R.K. 2002. The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and Visionary Experience. Gesta 41(2): 95–110. Hildegard of Bingen. [1988] 1998. Symphonia, ed. and trans. B. Newman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hildegard of Bingen. 1991/1998a/2001. Epistolarium I-III, eds. L. Van Acker and M. Klaes-Hachmo¨ller. CCCM 91, 91a, and 91b. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Hildegard of Bingen. 1990. Scivias, trans. C. Hart and J. Bishop. New York: Paulist Press. Hildegard of Bingen. 1994/1998b/2004. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen. Vols. 1–3, trans. J.L. Baird and R.K. Ehrman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hildegard of Bingen. 2018. The Book of Divine Works, trans. N. M. Campbell. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Kerby-Fulton, K. 1989. A Return to ‘the First Dawn of Justice’: Hildegard’s Visions of Clerical Reform and the Eremitical Life. American Benedictine Review 40: 383–407. Kerby-Fulton, K. 1990. Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kerby-Fulton, K. 1998. Prophet and Reformer: ‘Smoke in the Vineyard’. In Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. B. Newman, 70–90. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kienzle, B.M. and P.J. Walker, eds. 1998. Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Liebeschu¨tz, H. 1930. Das allegorische Weltbild der Heiligen Hildegard von Bingen. Leipzig, Germany: Teubner. Newman, B. 1987. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Newman, B. 2013. St. Hildegard, Doctor of the Church, and the Fate of Feminist Theology. Spiritus 13(1): 36–55. Ratzinger, J. [1959] 1992. Die Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura. Munich, Germany: EOS Verlag. Ratzinger, J. 1971a. The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Z. Hayes. Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press. Ratzinger, J. 1971b. Faith and the Future. Chicago, IL: Franciscan Herald Press. Rauh, H. D. 1973. Das Bild des Antichrist im Mittelalter; von Tyconius zum deutschen Symbolismus. Mu¨nster, Germany: Aschendorff. Thompson, A. 1994. Hildegard of Bingen on Gender and the Priesthood. Church History 63(3): 349–64.

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Widmer, B. 1955. Heilsordnung und Zeitgeschehen in der Mystik Hildegards von Bingen. Basel, Switzerland and Stuttgart, Germany: Helbing & Lichtenhahn.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

Valencia’s miraculous prophet: The Inquisition dossier of Catalina Mun˜ oz (1588)

Nicholas R. Jones Departments of Spanish and Africana Studies, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA.

Abstract Preserved in the archives of the National Historic Archive in Madrid, the life story of Catalina Mun˜oz uncovers the ways in which she, as a triply marginalized subject – black, woman, and slave – obtained power and social clout by capitalizing on the fame she acquired because of her role as spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious community of Sanct Martı´n Church. This essay positions Catalina as an astute agent and spiritual advisor who navigated with savvy the intricacies of Valencia’s sixteenth-century religious elite. In doing so, the article aims to re-assign and parse Catalina’s agency as a prophet. It is through the caveat of prophecy where Catalina obtains her power and position by capitalizing on the fame – often referred to as ‘esca´ndolo’ [‘scandal’] – she acquired as a spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious communities. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 36–49. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0113-3

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

Catalina Mun˜oz was not an important personage in the reign of Felipe II. Nevertheless, she did achieve some notoriety in her lifetime, as a healer and prophet. The Holy Office’s court secretary identified Catalina as ‘[la] sclava que fue de Germo Mun˜oz, ymaginario, de color negra vezina de Valencia’ [‘the slave who belonged to Jero´nimo Mun˜oz, astrologer and sculptor of images; a black woman and resident of Valencia’] (Archivo Histo´rico Nacional [AHN], 1588c, fol. 100v).1 The court notary, Josephe Bellet, confirmed Catalina to be 45 years old

Chapter 4 was originally published as Jones, N. R. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 36–49. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0113-3.

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at the time of her arraignment and to have already acquired her manumission. The most likely means by which a black African slave could have acquired her freedom was by: first, buying it; second, being voluntarily freed by the slave master; or, third, the master dying. Since Catalina’s master died in 1592, I surmise she obtained her freedom either by purchasing it or by Jero´nimo’s freeing her before his death, each of which I link to her fame in Valencia as a healer, seer, and prophet figure. This ‘Prophetic Futures’ special issue is so necessary and timely because it allows for the categories of race and gender to be taken seriously as critical approaches in the analysis of Catalina’s subversion of empowering and healing others via Catholic rites of healing traditionally designated for men. This essay aims to re-assign and parse Catalina’s agency as a prophet. I both understand and situate Catalina’s skill as a prophet to function as an extension of her Inquisition dossier’s language framing her as a healer and seer. It is through the caveat of prophecy (as I frame it by Catalina’s visionary acts as a healer and seer) where Catalina obtains her power and position by capitalizing on the fame – often referred to as ‘esca´ndolo’ [‘scandal’] – she acquired as a spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious community of Sanct Martı´n Church. Evoking a black feministic theoretical perspective, I contend that Catalina and her practices are not exceptions to the way in which her blackness undergirds the ideological implications of indecency and scandal. Across space and time, black women have always fashioned their complex identities, subject positions, and voices to contest patriarchal authority, and their gender cannot be disconnected from their blackness. Catalina shines as one of many examples of African-descended women, across the early modern Ibero-Atlantic world, who utilized her intellect and wit to improve her lot in society as a former slave. To build upon my conceptualization of Catalina Mun˜oz as a prophet figure in this study, I situate her perceived ‘scandalous’ presence within the literary representation and tradition of Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (Burgos, 1499). Catalina’s embodiment of the alcahueta figure manifests in her dossier when she heals the sick, ends men’s adulterous relationships with their concubines, and defies the Catholic Church’s patriarchal dominion by reciting masses for her clients. Ultimately, in my reading of Catalina’s performance as a prophet, via her spiritual work and activity as an alcahueta, I underscore the words ‘service’ and ‘client’ throughout her trial record because these terms highlight the prophet-like as well as transactional nature of her in late sixteenth-century Valencia. Catalina’s dossier frames her biographical information around her slave master, Jero´nimo Mun˜oz, and he had a long-lasting influence on her profile as a prophet, or so-called sorceress, in the eyes of the Inquisition of Valencia. I argue that Catalina’s spiritual activities as a healer and seer are not mutually exclusive from her close proximity to and interactions with her slave owner’s life and career, most notably his role as judiciary astrologer to Felipe II and his prediction of the Tycho Brahe Supernova in 1572.2 Historians Benjamin Ehlers

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2 Benjamin Ehlers urges against taking at face value the Jero´nimo’s influence on Catalina via his prediction of a supernova in 1572. See Ehlers (1997), 101–16.

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3 See Ehlers (1997, 102); Mun˜oz (1981 [1573], 21–3); Garcı´a Ca´rcel (1979, 255).

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and Ricardo Garcı´a Ca´rcel inform us that Jero´nimo ‘carried out his teaching duties in Valencia until his late sixties, receiving a salary of 150 libras a year, more than necessary to buy a slave’ (Ehlers, 1997, 102). In 1578, Jero´nimo moved to the University of Salamanca where he held the endowed chair, or ca´tedra, of mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. Vı´ctor Navarro Broto´ns explains that, in 1582, Jero´nimo received a salary of 100 libras per class taught, plus an additional 50 libras for moving expenses from Valencia to Salamanca.3 The word imaginario is one of the first words used in the title of Catalina’s deposition and serves a central role in helping us define the fluidly inspirational relationship between Jero´nimo and Catalina. The lexicographer Sebastia´n de Covarrubias Horozco, in his dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espan˜ola (1611), associates imaginario with images and imaginary figures formed in heaven by constellations. Covarrubias’s thinking behind the term allows us to see a nexus between the astrological/spiritual activities of Catalina and her master. Especially taking pieced-together descriptive clues from the trial record, it is plausible to imagine the house where Catalina lived and worked. It transforms into a site that would possibly encourage and inspire her ability to imagine things and have visions. So, in relation to Catalina’s visions, I view them as influenced by her master’s scholastic profession as an astrologer and mathematician who sculpted and created images. In many ways, Catalina’s position in the Mun˜oz household reflects the historical terrain of early modern Iberia where black Africans –both enslaved and free– worked as apprentices in workshops and under their masters or patrons. And further, since black women were excluded from most officially recognized paid jobs, it is even more necessary for us to read Catalina’s relationship with Jero´nimo as a kind of apprenticeship before and after her manumission. Given the rich variety of semantic registers that the word imaginario captures, I further liken it to the various iterations of Catalina’s ‘in-betweenness’ as an alcahueta. On Sunday 19 June 1588, a date that both encapsulates and recounts Catalina’s spiritual activity, the Inquisitors of Valencia, Spain, Don Pedro Giro´n, Don Pedro Pacheco, and Doctor Frexal, found Catalina guilty of heresy and having a pacto diabo´lico [pact with the Devil]. On this date, the public sentence transformed the cathedral at La plaza de Seu and the streets of Valencia into a theatrical locale, in which a state institution of formidable influence in society could display its notorious ‘pedagogy of fear’ (Bennassar, 1981, 94–125, esp. 94–95). Catalina’s crime was publicly decried as an intolerable assault on the Catholic faith: ‘[Catalina] con poco temor de Dios, Nuestro Sen˜or, y en grande esca´ndolo de ser herege y sentir mal [disentir] de las cosas de nuestra santa fee y tener pacto con el demonio’ [‘Catalina feared little God and Our Lord (Jesus). As a heretic, she stirred up a huge scandal and dissented against the things that represent our holy faith’]. She has a pact with the Devil (AHN, 1588c, fol. 100v). In retaliation, Catalina’s body served to stage a violent and abject spectacle: the inquisitors sent her to the scaffold, a high and magnificent

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wooden structure strategically positioned for all to see. Upon delivery of her trial’s verdict, she was gagged by the mouth, holding a candle in each hand, and received 100 lashes. Although not of primary focus in this present study, I find it worth relating that the Inquisition of Valencia sentenced Catalina for a second time on 30 June 1602 for ‘diversas hechizerı´as’ [‘many kinds of sorcerous acts’], where she was involved in the jewel robbery of the Marchioness of Denia during the royal wedding festivities of Felipe III (AHN, 1600–02). With the recruited assistance of 14-year-old A´ngela Piedrola, Catalina was called in to locate the missing jewels. Catalina passed away on 16 March 1603 in her sixties. Mun˜oz established a personal and public relationship with God and the saints. Before her trial in 1588, Saints Francis, Domingus, Sebastian, Vicente Ferrer, Michael the Archangel, and Lady Magdalene appeared to Catalina in holy visions. Walking through the streets of Valencia, she displayed the wounds and crown of thorns of the Passion of Our Lord. As a healer, she healed the infirm and returned straying lovers to their partners from concubines by breaking illicit relationships with her prayers. Mun˜oz’s trial record states that she ‘atrajo un pu´blico de muchas gente [que] ocorrı´an a ella pidiendo les anunciase cosas ocultas y secretas que se deseavan saber’ [‘amassed a large clientele who ran after her, begging her to reveal occult and secret things that they desired to know’] (AHN, 1588c, fol. 100v–101r). According to those who confessed against Catalina, she also had ‘diabolic,’ or malevolent, visions in which she spoke to enchanted Moors and a demon named Lucifer. While in the house, Catalina ‘havı´a visto una visio´n con cuernos y cola larga en figura de hombre y pelo como de gato. Y le dixo que por que´ no le dava cre´dito’ [‘had a vision of a man with horns, a long tail, and cat fur. He told her why he didn’t believe her’] (AHN, 1588c, fol. 100v). As established by the Holy Office of the Inquisition of Valencia, Catalina’s fame and fascinating life are credited to her ability to attract a crowd of followers, who confided in Mun˜oz to announce secret aspects about their lives. But unfortunately, the very same people for whom Catalina provided her spiritual services, from her parish at Sanct Martı´n Church, condemned and reported her to the Inquisition’s tribunal. What I find compelling about Catalina’s dossier and its discussion of her spiritual activity as a prophet in sixteenth-century Valencia is that it reveals an image of her as a black woman who worked to improve her social standing through the powers of divination – whether we believe them to be true or not. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, most blacks living in the Iberian Peninsula were slaves. They contributed to early modern Hispanic imperial expansion by serving as cartographers on long-distance transatlantic voyages, building urban infrastructure, and producing crops and material goods. Writing on sub-Saharan African slavery in Valencia, historian Debra Blumenthal remarks that ‘it is fair to say that black Africans were a conspicuous minority of the city of Valencia’s overall population – according to varied estimates, numbering some 70,000 inhabitants. However, it would seem that they comprised a considerably

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4 Blumenthal (2005, 225–46).

5 Graullera Sanz (1978, 136–69).

6 Casares (2005, 247–60); see also Casares (2014). 7 Casares (2005, 257); see also Levack (1995).

8 Conversos and moriscos were the baptized converts to Catholicism from Judaism and Islam. 9 For more information on these two women’s trials, see Homza (2006).

more significant portion of the city’s slave population’ (Blumenthal, 2005, 229). In her notarial research, Blumenthal adds, ‘by the latter half of the fifteenth century, black Africans constituted at least 40% of the slaves purchased and sold both in public auctions and private sales between households’ (Blumenthal, 2005, 229).4 Around the time in which Catalina Mun˜oz lived, Vicente Graullera Sanz in La esclavitud en Valencia explains that a slave would cost some 20 libras between 1570 and 1580.5 And among slave owners in sixteenth-century Valencia, all professions were represented, ranging from bakers, to farmers, to shepherds. In early modern Spain, women of African descent earned their living working as sorceresses – making love filters, finding lost objects, and curing illnesses with herbal remedies.6 Like Catalina Mun˜oz, a good portion of them were tried and condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, although witch hunts, torture, and terrorizing were not as extreme in Spain (except for isolated cases in Asturias, Basque Country, and Galicia) as in Northern Europe.7 Racially gendered as a black African, female slave – who later acquired her freedom – Catalina’s labor was primarily relegated to the domestic space of her master’s home. And it is within the confines of Jero´nimo’s home where I situate Catalina’s labor as codified in her spiritual work as a prophet. To that effect, this essay departs from Benjamin Ehlers’s study on Catalina’s trial, ‘La esclava y el patriarca’ [‘the slave and the patriarch’], that privileges a binarized reading of Catalina’s relationship to her master, his home, and his scholarly profession as an astrologer and a mathematician at the Universities of Salamanca and Valencia. Catalina’s story must be retold. I emphasize her racially gendered position as a black woman, for accounts like hers, on the one hand, give evidence to the strong presence of African-descended women in early modern Spain, and, on the other hand, reveal Iberian black women’s non-passive role in Counter-Reformation Spain. As a meticulous record keeper, the Spanish Inquisition catalogued the cultural practices and spiritual activities of women belonging to all ethnic backgrounds, ranging from conversas and moriscas to Amerindians and East and South East Asians.8 More specifically, Catalina’s case can be compared to the Inquisition trials of other female prophets and seers such as Francisca Herna´ndez and Magdalena de la Cruz.9 While scholars have overlooked Catalina’s racial status as a black African, I (re)claim it as a key variable in analyzing the subversive nature of the prophetic acts located in her dossier.

C a t a l i n a M u n˜ o z a n d Va l e n c i a ’ s p e r i o d p l a g u e d by scandals The Inquisitors who presided over Catalina’s case framed her as a victim of her scandalous delusions. In her testimony, Catalina reaffirms her identity and her position as a good and devout Catholic: ‘Sobre razo´n que el dicho por su acusacio´n que ante no´s presento´ [Catalina] dixo que, siendo la susodicha

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cristiana bautizada y gozando de las gracias y privilegios que los dema´s fieles y cato´licos cristianos suelen y acostumbran gozar’ [‘On grounds of the accused person presented before us, [Catalina] said that she was a baptized Christian and enjoying the graces and privileges that other faithful and Catholics usually enjoy’] (AHN, 1588a). Of course, Catalina’s visionary experiences modified her reception and treatment in the eyes of the inquisitors. And before an inquisitorial gaze, visions were women’s way to subvert and deny gender stereotypes that always limited their voices in a male-dominated society. In Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, Elizabeth Petroff notes the importance of visions in the lives of visionaries. Visions led women to the acquisition of power in the world while affirming their knowledge of themselves as women. Visions were socially sanctioned activities that freed a woman from conventional female roles by identifying her as a genuine religious figure. They brought her to the attentions of others, giving her a public language that she could use to teach and learn. Her visions gave her the strength to grow internally and to change the world, to build convents, found hospitals, preach, attack injustice and greed, even within the church. She could be an exemplar for other women, and out of her own experience she could lead them to fuller selfdevelopment. Finally, visions allowed the medieval woman to be an artist, composing and refining her most profound experiences into a form that she could create and recreate for herself throughout her entire life. (Petroff, 1986, 6) Catalina exemplifies the visionary woman described by Petroff, a figure who has negotiated with savvy her role as a prophet figure to amass a following in both her religious and secular communities. Without this skill, Catalina would not have prospered and elevated her marginal standing; I would even venture to argue that she purchased her freedom with the monies earned from her services. To that end, there is no doubt that the question of Catalina’s racially gendered position in Counter-Reformation Valencia functioned as a source of power for her, even though, paradoxically, her racially gendered position as a black woman places her under the watchful scrutiny of the Inquisition. In a letter written by doctor of theology Marco Antonio Anselmo Palao at the turn of the seventeenth century, he recalls having met Catalina in Valencia: I met a black woman slave taken to be so saintly that she performed miracles and administered the Sacrament to angels. She acquired and rose to such esteem and veneration that the Patriarch Don Juan de Ribera liked to chat and spend time with her, with which he accredited her holiness. The fraudulent acts were discovered, and the Holy Office sentenced her to

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10 Palacio o Palao (1644, fol. 167v).

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200 lashes and to wear the habit of the guilty and a few years later I saw her once again, the famed alcahueta, pay and suffer the same fate.10 For many years, Marco Antonio Anselmo Palao served as dean of the Cathedral of Orihuela. In the above-cited correspondence, Palacio’s memory fails him by confusing the dates of Catalina’s two sentences. As noted earlier, she did appear before the Inquisition in 1600, and this time she received a punishment of 200 lashes. It is very unlikely that Palao would refer to any other woman but Catalina. Further, no other black woman slave with the profile of Catalina interacted so closely with Archbishop and Patriarch Juan de Ribera. And as demonstrated by Ehlers’s research, the connection and the episode between Catalina and Ribera suggest that within post-Tridentine Catholicism there existed a precarious balance between the fear of uncontrolled revelation and the attempt to affirm again the traditional manifestations of the faith. Catalina’s spiritual activities as a prophet demonstrate very clearly the possibilities offered in this balance, and her fame proved problematic for Archbishop Ribera, who remained in his philosophy open to recollection in a time rife with scandals. Catalina’s racial difference as a woman of African descent who heals, sees, and takes Catholic religious practices into her own hands magnifies her heavily felt presence and role in Valencia, which then escalates how ‘scandal’ operates in her dossier. In other words, her blackness undergirds the ideological implications of scandal and indecency. The identity imposed by the inquisitors and the secretary of the tribunal upon Catalina – a black woman who causes a ruckus and deceives – is repeated throughout its process. From the outset of her deposition, the court clerk explicitly refers to the ‘gran esca´ndolo del pueblo cristiano’ [‘great scandal of the Christian people’], which clearly racially genders Catalina’s religious activities and experiences as a healer and seer. For the Inquisition, Catalina’s religious actions fit within the definition of the iludente [Spanish: engan˜adora, burladora; English: deceitful, mocking cheat]. As Claire Guilhem has shown, the work of the iludente belongs to ‘demonic illusion, temptation, lies, vanity, and let’s say, spiritual weakness’ (Guilhem, 1984, 193). From the perspective of the inquisitors, Guilhem adds that ‘the accusation of illusion is an accusation forged by women. Illusion is not a male crime. Man [as a category] is free to choose; woman [as a category] is ‘‘trapped’’ in a nature of which she is not sovereign; necessarily deceived’ (Guilhem, 1984, 193). Catalina’s case reveals how her visions and religious services illustrate a controversial, yet dissident, position in the eyes of the city of Valencia’s patriarchal religious order, which I weave into her dossier’s recurring narrative of ‘gran esca´ndolo,’ or ‘huge scandal’.

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Catalina’s hagiographic presence as Alcahueta In medieval and early modern Iberia, hagiography was a kind of mediating text that fomented women’s participation in medicine and encouraged the sick to rely on their capabilities. Saints in the medieval and early modern periods were honored for their ability to do things. Catalina’s Inquisition case is filled with numerous hagiographic references that characterize her as a prophet via her ability to heal with saints. She healed her clients through praying to the Divine by calling and summoning Saints Domingus, Francis, Vincent Ferrer, and Michael the Archangel. From the Marian cult, and the healing context of Marian miracles, Catalina was widely sought for her healing mediations through the Virgin Mary and Lady Magdalene. In this regard, Catalina performed the duty of a priest or a nun, and I link her healing practices – as they are linked to her characterization as a prophet – to the more expansive medieval Iberian literary corpus of the ‘Learned King’ Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Marı´a (1252–1284) and Gonzalo de Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Sen˜ora (c. 1260), which also employed Marian miracles and cures through the Divine. In adjudicating their case against Catalina, the inquisitors of the Valencia tribunal indicted her for working as an alcahueta, the intermediary go-between, healer. A figure who can mend and break illicit relationships and marriages. For example, her dossier states that ‘[u]na persona le dixo rogase por su marido que se apartase de la manceba. Y cierto mozo se le havı´a aparecido, amenaza´ndola que le darı´a de palos si descubrı´a en que´ casa tenı´a la amiga, si no, so´lo rogase por la salvacio´n del dicho hombre’ [‘someone asked Catalina to pray that her husband left his concubine. Later, a young man showed up threatening Catalina by saying he’d beat her if he’d discover where her friend was hiding, and to only pray for his salvation’] (AHN, 1588a). This passage also positions Catalina as an ensalmadora, a popular woman healer who invoked the incantation known as the ensalmo, a logotherapeutic, secular prayer to influence preternatural powers and persuade them to relieve a patient’s affliction.11 Although not entirely an ‘illness,’ I do read the above-cited ‘affliction’ of marital infidelity as illustrative of Catalina’s healing intervention. Catalina makes possible for her female clients to reclaim their control over legal privileges and the rights men held over women. The female body is an enabling ground for launching a spiritual career as a healer. It is an irony of history – and one traceable in Catalina’s dossier – that the contrary of this very notion will become a major objective of the Inquisition in the seventeenth century. Although the inquisitors presiding on Catalina’s trial never refer to her as an alcahueta, she in fact exhibited similar qualities to that of the renowned literary character Celestina of Fernando de Rojas’s bestseller La Celestina (Burgos, 1499), particularly in Acts 1 and 10. Celestina was translated into all the major European languages and reprinted in some 84 separate

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11 See Dangler (2001).

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Castilian editions before 1650 (Gerli, 2011, 13). Rojas’s Celestina was by all accounts one of the most popular and influential books of early modernity (Gerli, 2011, 13). The Catalina-Celestina union that I forge in this study considers various constitutions of what it means to be an alcahueta, ranging from the concept of the maestro (a woman of knowledge) to the buhonera (the one who belongs to the artisan and practical world, involved in ill-perceived forms of ‘sorcery’). The buhonera also makes shawls and potions and engages in capitalist and spiritual transactions. Like the literary Celestina, women like Catalina Mun˜oz were trapped by authorities who sought to malign them for traditional practices that they had been taught to follow and in other situations where their knowledge and prowess as healers obscured male-dominated knowledge and institutionalized religious authority. Given the historical context and literary history of Celestina, I situate Catalina as a Celestinesque figure, a mirrored iteration of Rojas’s Celestina, who employs her rhetorical arts and knowledge of medicine, herbs, astrology, weaving, sewing, and cosmetics to practice the art of making the suppressed desire of all with whom she comes in contact speak (Geril, 2011, 48). Ultimately, I urge my audience to read Catalina – as well as other historical representations of women of color who lived their lives as go-betweens, healers, and witches in early modern Iberia – as representative of the cultural study and literary history of Celestina. Medical healing links Catalina to Celestina. Catalina’s deposition, for instance, discusses an episode where she cures an individual suffering bleeding to death: E que otra cierta persona que padecı´a quatro an˜os havı´a fluxo de sangre [pe´rdida de sangre] se le havı´a encomendado rogase a Dios por ella y havı´a curado. Y otro dı´a oyo´ una voz que le dixo tres veces: ‘Sierva de Dios, estas demandas me agradan.’ Y que fuese, que ya estava sana. [And some other person, who suffered from blood hemorrhages for four years, had entrusted [Catalina] to petition God to cure her. The next day, Catalina heard a voice that said three times: ‘Serve God! These demands please me.’ And be it as it were, the lady was cured.] (AHN, 1588a) The word ‘encomendado,’ from the Spanish verb encomendar [‘to enlist; to entrust’] explicates and nuances the economic, or proto-capitalist, metanarrative of Catalina’s spiritual services. This excerpt also demonstrates the professionalization of medicine, where women healers take into their own hands the care, safety, well-being, and ultimately curing of their patients. Covarrubias constitutes encomendado as a financial exchange and relationship, where services are placed as an order. In other words, as implied by the dossier, Catalina received payment for the spiritual/religious work she rendered to cure the hemorrhaging client.

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To that effect, it is plausible to treat Catalina as a businesswoman. In Valencia, she provided her spiritual services (communicating with the saints, performing miracles, and healing) that subverted and usurped the knowledge and power of male priests. For example, she connected with the Divine by telling her clients the number of masses they needed to deliver their relatives from Purgatory. Archbishop Juan de Ribera, who continued to support spiritualists despite his staunchest critics, confided in Catalina and sought her spiritual foresight and wisdom. Catalina utilized her visions to successfully intervene in a variety of spiritual and religious problems for her clientele. This fragment from her deposition exemplifies how Mun˜oz communicated with the ‘muchas a´nimas de personas sen˜aladas’ [‘the many souls of specified people’]: Item, le acusava que havı´a dicho y afirmado que se le havı´an aparecido muchas a´nimas de personas sen˜aladas d’esta ciudad que nombro´, roga´ndole tratase con ciertas personas que cumpliesen ciertos descargos [obligaciones] porque estavan detenidas en purgatorio y dixesen ciertas missas. E que haviendo cumplido lo susodicho, se le havı´an aparecido alegres, da´ndole las gracias e diziendo que ivan a gozar de Dios. [Item, the witness claimed Catalina had said and affirmed that the souls of many individuals from Valencia had appeared before her. She pleaded with certain persons that they fulfill their spiritual duties [obligations] to pray for and to say masses for their loved ones’ souls that were detained in Purgatory. So, having fulfilled the said charge, the clients had appeared to [be] happy, thanking and telling her that they were going to enjoy God.] (AHN, 1588a) This above-cited passage captures a moment of despair in which Catalina’s clients wanted to know how many masses needed to be recited so that their relatives could leave Purgatory and enter the gates of Heaven. This testimony justifies why people of her parish at Sanct Martı´n Church relied on Catalina’s spiritual interventions. As a prophet figure, her visions and the masses she gave offered direct, expeditious results to her clients that male priests simply could not deliver. In an economic sense, Catalina had a desirable product. As a prophet figure who heals and has visions, Catalina offers services that provide solutions for those in need of spiritual agency and help.

Conclusions, or a Derridian closure: The Pharmakon Catalina Mun˜oz’s significance to a revitalized field of Iberian cultural studies consists precisely in the multiplicity of discourses she devised in the face of attempts to normalize and discipline her as a subaltern. Rather than submissiveness, the Inquisition and other disciplinary mechanisms produced a counter-

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effect that proved enormously appealing to sixteenth-century Valencia. While the inquisitorial authorities attempted to reduce Catalina to misogynist cliche´s, the aura of her personality was greater and more variously inflected than the rigors imposed by the Inquisition’s judicial-religious spectacle of binary gender restored. By underscoring the necessity of Catalina’s dossier and presenting it alongside the canonical Celestina, I have sought to challenge the notion of the uniqueness of the literary artifact that so many of us still harbor as an unexamined assumption in scholarship. As a free black woman living in sixteenth-century Valencia who also rubbed shoulders with the city’s elite, Catalina further sustained her social standing and power through capitalizing on the fame of her visions to become the spiritual counselor of her clients and acquaintances. By evoking the literary tradition of Celestina, Catalina’s spiritual activities become enriched, particularly when considering the image of Celestina’s pharmacopoeia–one closely aligned with Derrida’s pharmakon, or ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’–and its triply bound references to poison, remedy, and scapegoat. The Derridian pharmakon serves as a heuristic to excavate the circulation of products and movement of services Catalina’s clients commissioned her to perform and vice versa. Tracing this back to Catalina, I conclude by further theorizing her prophetic techneˆ and notoriety via the concept of scandal we have previously encountered. Following the Derridean thread, scandal in early-modern Castilian had the same contradictory meaning that fame conveyed in early modern English: implying either a good or bad reputation. We can innovate our understanding of Catalina’s double-ness or inbetweenness through Derrida’s definition of the pharmakon as ‘ambivalence.’ And to that effect, this Derridian thinking thus characterizes the broader implications of Catalina’s ‘prophetic future’ along the lines of her Blackness that operates simultaneously as a source of agency, but also as the identity through which her oppression is registered. I have attempted to reclaim Catalina from the safely marginal and reductive readings of criminology or tabloid history. Catalina was astute, and we must not dismiss the fact that she navigated elite circles of the Spanish nobility. Her canny moves across the Spanish religious elite, albeit amidst the ideological boundaries of sixteenth-century Spain, highlight the fact that black women – Catalina is not the only one, or the ‘exception’ – occupied a paradoxical position within the upper echelons of early modern Spanish society. As a triply marginalized subject – black, women, and slave – Catalina obtained power and position by capitalizing on the fame brought by her role as spiritual advisor and healer to the Valencian religious community of Sanct Martı´n Church.

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About the Author Nicholas R. Jones is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies at Bucknell University. He researches agency, subjectivity, and the performance of black diasporic identities in early modern Iberia. He is co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) with Cassander L. Smith and Miles P. Grier. His first book, Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, will be published with Penn State University Press in 2019. He is currently at work on his second monograph that examines the role of material culture in the archival and literary history of black women in early modern Portugal and Spain. Jones has also published articles in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Hispanic Review (Email: [email protected]).

References Archivo Histo´rico Nacional (AHN), Inquisicio´n, legajo 533, expediente 2. 1588a. Archivo Histo´rico Nacional (AHN), Inquisicio´n, libro 916. 1588b. Archivo Histo´rico Nacional (AHN), Inquisicio´n, libro 937. ‘Relacio´n auto pu´blico de la fe que se celebro´ en la Inquisicio´n de Valencia, domingo 19 junio 1588.’ 1588c. Archivo Histo´rico Nacional (AHN), Inquisicio´n, legajo 524, #11. 1600–02. Bennassar, B, ed. 1981. Inquisicio´n espan˜ola: poder polı´tico y control social. Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Crı´tica. Blumenthal, D. 2005. ‘La Casa dels Negres’: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Iberia. In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds. T.F. Earle and K. Lowe, 225–46. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Caciola, N. 2003. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Caro Baroja, J. 1966. Las brujas y su mundo. Madrid, Spain: Alianza. Casares, A.M. 2005. Free Black Africans in the Spanish Renaissance. In Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds. T.F. Earle and K. Lowe, 247–60. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Casares, A.M. and R. Peria´n˜ez Go´mez, eds. 2014. Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la Espan˜a de los siglos XVI al XIX. Madrid, Spain: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. Corteguera, L. and M.V. Vicente, eds. 2003. Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Corte´s Lo´pez, J.L. 1986. Los orı´genes de la esclavitud negra en Espan˜a. Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca. Corte´s Lo´pez, J.L. 1989. La esclavitud negra en la Espan˜a peninsular del siglo XVI. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.

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Dangler, J. 2001. Mediating Fictions: Literature, Women Healers, and the Go-Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. de Covarrubias Horozco, S. [1611] 2006. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o Espan˜ola, eds. I. Arellano and R. Zafra. Madrid, Spain: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. de Rojas, F. 1999. La Celestina, ed. D. Severin. Madrid, Spain: Alianza. Earle, T.F and K. Lowe, eds. 2005. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ehlers, B. 1997. La esclava y el patriarca: las visiones de Catalina Mun˜oz en la Valencia de Juan de Ribera. Estudis 23: 101–16. Garcı´a Ca´rcel, R. 1979. Herejı´a y sociedad en siglo XVI: La Inquisicio´n en Valencia 1530–1609. Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Peninsular. Gerli, E. Michael. 2011. Celestina and the Ends of Desire. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Giles, M.E., ed. 1998. Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Graullera Sanz, V. 1978. La esclavitud en Valencia en los siglos XVI y XVII. Valencia, Spain: Instituto Valenciano de Estudios Histo´ricos. Guilhem, C. 1984. La Inquisicio´n y la devalucio´n del verbo feminino. In La Inquisicio´n espan˜ola, ed. B. Bennasar, 171–207. Barcelona, Spain: Editorial Crı´tica. Hamilton, A. 1992. Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Homza, L.A. 2006. The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614: An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kagan, R. 1990. Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kamen, H. 1997. The Spanish Inquisition: An Historial Revision. London, UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Levack, B.P. 1995. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. London: Pearson. Martı´n Casares, A. and R.P. Go´mez, eds. 2014. Mujeres esclavas y abolicionistas en la Espan˜a de los siglos XVI al XIX. Madrid, Spain: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. McKnight, K.J. and L. Garofalo, eds. 2009. Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Mun˜oz, J. 1981 [1573]. Libro del nuevo cometa. Ed. V. Navarro Broto´ns. Valencia, Spain: Pedro de Huete. Navarro Broto´ns, V. and E.R. Galdeano. 1998. Matema´ticas, cosmologı´a y humanismo en la Espan˜a del siglo XVI. Los Comentarios al segundo libro de la Historia Natural de Plinio de Jero´nimo Mun˜oz. Valencia, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Documentales e Histo´ricos Sobre la Ciencia, Universitat de Vale`ncia–C.S.I.C. Ostovich, H. and E. Saber, eds. 2004. Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print 1550–1700. New York: Routledge. Palacio o Palao, M.A. 1644. ‘A, B, C, Cartilla para los que saben leer con la qual tendra´n noticia de cossas raras de entrambas letras divinas y humanas.’ Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Add., A 141. Perry, M.E. 1990. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Perry, M.E. 1998. The Morisca Visionary, Beatriz de Robles. In Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. M.E. Giles, 171–88. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Petroff, E. 1986. Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Pons, F. 1991. Mı´sticos, beatas y alumbrados. Valencia, Spain: Edicions Alfons el Magna`nim, 1991. Surtz, R. 1990. The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Surtz, R. 2002. Female Patronage of Vernacular Religious Works in Fifteenth-Century Castile: Aristocratic Women and Their Confessors. In The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, eds. R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and N. Warren, 263–82. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Sweet, J. H. 2011. Domingos A´lvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the African World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Vicente, Marta V. and Luis R. Corteguera, eds. [2003] 2017. Women, Texts, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World. New York: Routledge. Vollendorf, L. 2005. The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitorial Spain. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

Prophecy and emendation: Merlin, Chaucer, Lear’s Fool

M i s h a Te r a m u r a Department of English, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Abstract This article traces the critical and textual reception of the Fool’s cryptic prophecy in the Folio text of King Lear. I argue that critics have overlooked the widespread early modern circulation of the speech’s main source, six lines of verse ubiquitously known as ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy.’ Reading the Fool’s prophecy as a deliberate riposte to this famous poem, I propose that William Warburton’s 1747 emendation offers the most intertextually engaged and politically subversive text of the speech. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 50–67. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0116-0

The storm that rages at heart of King Lear famously takes on an apocalyptic significance when the powerless and humiliated Lear staggers onto the stage, accompanied by no one but his Fool, and commands the elements – winds, cataracts, hurricanoes – to destroy the world. The scene (3.2) ends, however, with a very different glimpse of apocalypse. In the 1623 Folio text of the play, after Kent ushers Lear off to the nearby hovel, the Fool remains on stage alone and addresses the audience: Foole. This is a braue night to coole a Curtizan: Ile speake a Prophesie ere I go: When Priests are more in word, then matter; When Brewers marre their Malt with water; When Nobles are their Taylors Tutors,

[1735]

Chapter 5 was originally published as Teramura, M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 50–67. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0116-0.

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No Heretiques burn’d, but wenches Sutors; When euery Case in Law, is right; No Squire in debt, nor no poore Knight; When Slanders do not liue in Tongues; Nor Cut-purses come not to throngs; When Vsurers tell their Gold i’th’Field, And Baudes, and whores, do Churches build, Then shal the Realme of Albion, come to great confusion: Then comes the time, who liues to see’t, That going shalbe vs’d with feet. This prophecie Merlin shall make, for I liue before his time.

[1740]

[1745]

Exit. [1750] (Shakespeare, 1623, sig. 2r2v–2r3r)

1

Placed at the center of Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece, the Fool’s speech is among the most familiar examples of early modern prophetic utterance. And yet, the speech itself – temporally disorienting and logically bewildering – is one of the most puzzling passages in Shakespeare’s most disturbing play. The profoundly problematic quality of the lines led an earlier generation of readers and critics, from Tennyson to A.C. Bradley, to dismiss the entire passage as a spurious, non-Shakespearean interpolation (Bradley, [1904] 1912, 452; Hoge, 1976, 152). And yet, for some, this very confusion was a poetic triumph: as G.K. Chesterton effused, ‘I imagine that the great imaginative invention of the English, the thing called Nonsense, never rose to such a height and sublimity of unreason and horror’ (Chesterton, 1964, 55). Other critics, reluctant to embrace such sublime nonsense as authentically Shakespearean yet unwilling to dismiss the passage altogether, have proposed a third solution: that the Fool’s speech as it was printed in the First Folio is textually corrupt. Thus, the scholarly kingdom is divided: is the Fool’s incoherent speech a Shakespearean design or does the Folio text misrepresent Shakespeare’s original intention? And if so, what was that original intention? This essay tracks the changing fortunes of the Fool’s prophetic speech, its shifting textual instantiations and the variety of critical attempts to grasp its cultural and political message. I propose that both the parodic and the subversive potential of the speech have been underestimated in large part because critics have misunderstood its relationship to early modern prophetic traditions. In what follows I argue that the Fool’s speech is best understood as a direct response to the poem known to Renaissance readers as ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy,’ widely credited as the medieval poet’s dire warning for England. By re-approaching the prophetic speech of Lear’s Fool as engaged in a complex intertextual game with this famous poem, it can be read as more satirically precise and politically penetrating than has been hitherto recognized. However, the very nature of prophecy – in its unsettling of temporal boundaries and its

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1 Lineation from Hinman (1968).

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confluence of the political, the spiritual, and the epistemological – makes it particularly vulnerable to the pressures of modern critical desire. How we understand and reshape the Fool’s speech tells us much about ourselves.

The editorial problem

2 Modernized quotations from King Lear refer to Shakespeare (1997); quotations from other plays refer to Shakespeare (2015).

The logical problem of the Fool’s prophecy, as it appears in the First Folio, is obvious. The speech begins with four ‘when’ clauses that seem to describe a set of dystopian conditions: eroded religion, dishonest trade, inverted social hierarchy, sexual promiscuity. However, the six ‘when’ clauses that follow appear to describe the opposite, a set of utopian conditions: unerring justice, aristocratic solvency, no slanderers or cutpurses, transparency in the finance industry, the conversion of bawds and whores. These two jarring sets of ‘when’ clauses are followed in turn by two apparently incompatible ‘then’ clauses, one politically alarmist (‘Then shall the realm of Albion / Come to great confusion’) and one ironically quotidian (‘Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, / That going shall be used with feet’).2 The passage as it stands in the Folio yields no easy interpretation and even seems to defy basic legibility. The first editor to tackle the problem at length was William Warburton, later Bishop of Gloucester, whose 1747 edition of Shakespeare offered a long commentary on the passage with the ultimate conclusion that the Folio reading was flawed: The judicious reader will observe through this heap of nonsense and confusion, that this is not one, but two prophecies. The first, a satyrical description of the present manners as future: And the second, a satyrical description of future manners, which the corruption of the present would prevent from ever happening. Each of these prophecies has its proper inference or deduction: yet, by an unaccountable stupidity, the first editors took the whole to be all one prophecy, and so jumbled the two contrary inferences together. (Warburton, 1747, 6:76–7) Put another way, Warburton discerned in the Folio’s textual jumble two ‘contrary’ prophecies: one that ironically describes the present state of things as though they were not already the case, and another that describes an impossibly utopian vision of a future that will simply never come true. His editorial solution was to transpose the Folio’s final couplet to follow the line ‘No heretics burned but wenches’ suitors,’ resulting in two distinct prophecies (‘When… Then… When… Then…’) that might be paraphrased as follows: ‘When it comes to pass that the world is utterly corrupt, then we shall walk with our feet (which we do – i.e., it already has come to pass); but, when misfortune and crime are abolished, then the kingdom will come to an end (i.e., this will never happen).’ Samuel Johnson enthusiastically approved of the ‘sagacity and acuteness’ of

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Warburton’s solution to the problem of the Fool’s speech and adopted it in his own edition (Johnson, 1765, 6:85). Several other eighteenth-century editors followed suit until Edmond Malone, although he conceded that Warburton’s conception was ‘just,’ nevertheless argued that any re-arrangement of the lines was ‘as unnecessary, as it is unwarrantable’ (Malone, 1790, 9:585), an authoritative judgement that convinced subsequent editors well into the twentieth century. A new textual solution was put forward in 1960 by George Ian Duthie, coeditor of the New Cambridge edition with John Dover Wilson. Agreeing with Warburton that the speech contained two distinct prophecies, Duthie nevertheless opted for the opposite solution: he transposed the ‘Albion’ couplet, rather than the ‘feet’ couplet, to the same apparent breaking point in the speech. In Duthie’s re-arrangement, the two prophecies could be paraphrased as follows: When things shall be as in fact they are, Britain will be in a state of ruin, as in fact she is; when things shall be as they should be, then walking will customarily be done with feet, i.e. the proper order will prevail, and men will walk uprightly – but no one will ever live to see this. (Duthie and Wilson, 1960, 203) In Duthie’s version of the Fool’s prophecy, the confusion of Albion is not deferred to an indefinite future time but rather becomes an ironic description of the Lear universe: Albion is already a land come to great confusion. Duthie’s emendation has proven persuasive to some modern editors and was adopted in the New Penguin and Cambridge editions of the play (Hunter, 1972; Halio, 1992) as well as the Riverside Shakespeare and the Oxford Complete Works (Evans, 1974; Wells and Taylor, 1986). And yet despite the popularity enjoyed by Duthie’s version of the Fool’s speech, more recent editions – such as the Folger Library Shakespeare (Mowat and Werstine, 1993), the Arden Shakespeare (Shakespeare, 1997), the RSC Shakespeare (Bate and Rasmussen, 2008), and the new Norton Shakespeare (Shakespeare, 2015) – have re-enshrined the Folio reading as the new critical consensus. What changed was a fundamental shift in the critical interpretation of the passage. Whereas Warburton and Duthie strove to sculpt sense from textual nonsense, these more recent editors adopt a critical position that the very attempt to re-organize the speech is fundamentally misguided: the Fool’s prophetic lines are deliberately disorganized, meaningless by design. In some respects, the editorial way had been paved by critics who saw in the Folio reading a reflection of the terrible vacuity and disorder that permeate the play (Booth, 1983, 43). However, for others, the meaninglessness of the speech is less a commentary on the world of the play than a commentary on the nature of prophecy. Prophetic verse was a widespread genre in medieval and Renaissance England.3 The circulation of ostensibly ancient prophecies predicting great change flourished during moments of political upheaval and were often

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3 See Weiskott in this issue.

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4 For more on the early modern Merlinic tradition, see Weiskott’s contribution to this issue.

attributed to a range of historical figures, both celebrated and obscure. The Fool’s attribution of his prophetic speech to Merlin is both brazenly anachronistic and typically early modern, not least since the Galfridian prophet was the most ubiquitously cited authority for vatic verse.4 However, the same period also saw a trend of dismissing political prophecy in general – and ‘Merlinesque’ prophecy in particular – as an embarrassing and occasionally dangerous symptom of English superstition (Dobin, 1990, 105–133). Sir Francis Bacon, predictably, loathed predictions: ‘they ought all to be Despised,’ he wrote (Bacon, 1625, 216). One of the most vocal critics of prophecy, Henry Howard, later earl of Northampton, looked with disdain on the Middle Ages, when ‘Merlines prophecies were cheyned to the deskes of many Libraries in Englande wyth great reuerence and estimation’ (Howard, 1583, 2I3v; Thomas, 1991, 467). In the year of the Spanish Armada, John Harvey was exasperated by the sheer number of ‘prophesies fathered vpon Merlin, yea, more, I dare say, than euer that counterfet wrot’ (Harvey, 1588, 52). Shakespeare himself appears to give voice to this contempt for the prophetic in 1 Henry IV, in which Hotspur mocks Glendower’s conviction in the omens and prophecies that purportedly foretell his triumph: Sometime he angers me With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, […] And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff As puts me from my faith. (1 Henry IV, 3.1.143–145, 149–150) In this context, critics have been inclined to see the prophecy recited by Lear’s Fool – and attributed to Merlin – as parodic precisely because of its incoherent mess of ‘skimble-skamble stuff.’ According to Rupert Taylor, Shakespeare ‘showed by the words he puts into the mouth of the speaker his contempt for the whole tradition from Merlin down’ (Taylor, 1911, 128). The nonsensical Folio reading, then, accurately represents this contempt: as R.A. Foakes explained in his Arden edition, the Fool’s speech is a ‘deliberately confusing parody of a tradition of Merlinesque prophecies predicting ‘‘downfall for a state’’ ’ (Shakespeare, 1997, 3.2.79–96n). Indeed, for Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s mockprophecy dealt this floundering tradition ‘a blow from which it never recovered’ (Hawkes, 1960, 332). A new critical and editorial consensus, then, seems to be based on an assumption that the Fool’s speech is at once intentionally nonsensical and pointedly parodic. However, to read it as a response to a generalized ‘Merlinesque’ tradition overshadows the speech’s more precise intertextual engagement. While the Fool himself attributes ‘this prophecy’ to Merlin, its most salient formal features – its tetrameter rhythm, its conditional ‘when’/‘then’ structure, and, most tellingly, its chilling couplet ‘Then shall the realm of Albion / Come to great confusion’ – are all taken from a prophetic poem widely

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attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer. The poem’s status as Shakespeare’s primary source for the Fool’s speech has long been known and is almost universally acknowledged, and yet the implications of this borrowing have gone inadequately explored. What modern Shakespeare editors have overlooked is just how widely circulated – and credited – this ‘Chaucerian’ poem was: indeed, Shakespeare may well have expected his audience to recognize the parallel. In what follows, I want to unpack the reception history of this short poem and to consider how it might affect our understanding of the Fool’s prophecy’s role in the play.

‘ C h a u c e r ’s P r o p h e c y ’ : At t r i b u t i o n a n d r e c e p t i o n When faith faileth in Priestes sawes And lordes hests are holden for lawes And robberie is holden purchace And lechery is holden solace Than shall the lond of Albion Be brought to great confusion. (Chaucer, 1598, }4v) This six-line poem was first printed by William Caxton on the final leaf of his incunable edition of Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, along with two other ‘popular sayings.’ Caxton’s printing of the prophetic poem – which circulated in medieval manuscripts often without authorial attribution – seems to have been less a claim about its Chaucerian provenance than simply a convenient way for the printer to fill up the empty space (DIMEV 6299; Forni, 2001, 172; Skeat, 1894–1897, 1:45–46). The poem’s status as Chaucerian space-filler was canonized in the folio editions of Chaucer’s Workes by William Thynne, John Stow, and Thomas Speght, where it was invariably printed as front matter between the table of contents and the beginning of The Canterbury Tales. However, the poem also circulated far beyond these Chaucer editions, both in manuscript and in print: perhaps most consequentially, George Puttenham quoted it as a poetic example in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), where Shakespeare may have encountered it before writing The Tragedie of King Lear (Taylor, 1983, 382–85). Apart from a few red herrings proposed by scholars, this six-line poem has been recognized since the eighteenth century as by far the closest analogue to the Fool’s speech.5 As such, Shakespearean scholars have tended to assume that it must have had specific associations with Merlin and yet, pace several editors of King Lear, the poem was never actually titled ‘Merlin’s

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5 John Upton noticed the parallel in Urry’s 1721 edition of Chaucer (Upton, 1748, xix), while George Steevens cited the poem’s appearance in Puttenham (Johnson and Steevens, 1773, 9:404).

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6 One fifteenthcentury manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59) does attribute the poem to Merlin (Skeat, 1896; Dean, 1996, 17), and since it was owned in 1614 by William Browne of Tavistock, a friend to Jonson and Drayton, it is perhaps not wholly impossible that Shakespeare could have encountered this manuscript in his lifetime. On Browne, see Edwards (1997). 7 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.15; Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.3.26. 8 Eric Weiskott, in unpublished research, has identified 30 manuscript witnesses.

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Prophecy’ nor is there substantial evidence that it was often attributed to him.6 What the evidence does show is that early modern readers overwhelmingly attributed the poem to Chaucer and knew it simply as ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy.’ In Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie, where it is reproduced in full to illustrate the rhetorical figure of merismus, or ‘the distributor,’ the prophecy is clearly attributed to ‘Sir Geffrey Chaucer, father of our English Poets’ ([Puttenham], 1589, 187). In John Willis’s Art of Stenographie, the whole prophecy is quoted as the work of Chaucer (Willis, 1602, D4r) while Thomas Churchyard reminds his readers that ‘those were Chawsers woordes’ (Churchyard, 1575, fol. 71v). Renaissance manuscripts show us that readers were interested in ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ for a variety of reasons. While some completist readers diligently transcribed the poem into their manuscript copies of Chaucer’s works, for others, the poem’s importance lay in its status as prophecy.7 It appears in several sixteenth-century collections of prophecies, such as British Library, Additional MS 24663, where it is given pride of place as the first entry in the volume, attributed to ‘Ieffrae chawser’ (fol. 1r).8 In Huntington Library, MS EL 6162 (compiled c. 1603), a commonplace book of political, religious, and legal material, the prophecy ‘out of Chaucer’ follows a copy of the 1539 Act of the Six Articles and a derisive epitaph on the earl of Leicester (fol. 8av; Huntington Library, 1982, 43; CELM). Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 781 (c. 1620–1637) similarly contains comparatively recent works by Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney, a 1619 sermon by John Donne, and works of political interest, including copies of correspondence, petitions, and epitaphs (Black, 1845, cols. 395–401). In these contexts, ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ stands out not as an antiquarian curiosity, but as a medieval text with an uncanny contemporaneity. As prophetic verse, it necessarily distorted the chronological boundaries of past, past, and future, but the Chaucerian poem in particular owed its continued relevance to its apparently transhistorical political message. Indeed, what is most striking about the poem’s afterlife is that early modern readers seem to have taken its prophetic energies very seriously. In 1589, the recusant intelligencer and scholar Richard Verstegan invoked ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ in his political pamphlet The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written by a Spanish Gentleman, to His Friend in England, a response to the anti-Catholic pamphlets being disseminated in the wake of the Armada. Having rehearsed at length the evils of the English state’s tyrannical persecution of Catholics, Verstegan’s Spanish gentleman makes an appeal to an English authority when describing his chance encounter with the works of ‘an old Englishe poet, beeing the moste renowmed, that euer wrote in the Englishe tounge: in the begining whereof were certaine verses, which in manner of a prophesy, so perfectly discribed then, the future state of England, that at this day, it is the very liuely pourtraict thereof ad Viuum’ ([Verstegan], 1589, 25–6). Quoting the prophecy in its entirety, Verstegan clearly expects his English readers to identify the lines

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as Chaucer’s and to take seriously the prophecy’s vision of dystopia as chillingly resonant with the present state of the country. In an even more telling index of the poem’s popularity, Verstegan describes his later pamphlet A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles, Presupposed to Be Intended against the Realme of England as ‘a commentarie vpon Chaucers prophesie’, simply assuming his readers’ familiarity with the poem such that they can interpret his whole pamphlet intertextually ([Verstegan], 1592, 5). Just as the Catholic Verstegan looked to Chaucer’s prophetic insights, so too did Protestant writers. In 1577, Meredith Hanmer (soon to be vicar of the actors’ church, St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch) quoted the entire poem in his preface to his translation of Evagrius Scholasticus in hopes that ‘the dayes shall neuer be seene when the prophesie of Chaucer shall take place’ (Hanmer, 1577, 408). The preacher John Dove did the same in a 1594 sermon: ‘I wish that all men to whom the sword of iustice is committed, would remember the prophesie of the poet Chaucer’ (Dove, [1594], B7r-v). Even in private correspondence, an anonymous informant writing directly to Lord Burghley on 7 July 1586 invoked the poem to condemn English piracy of French ships: ‘Surely, Chawcers provysey never toke so deepe effect yn yngland & especially yn the west parts as now, for theaft ys made good purchace,’ recalling the third line of the prophecy (‘And robberie is holden purchace’).9 The writer evidently assumed that Burghley would be familiar enough with the prophecy for the allusion to have the rhetorical effect he clearly desired, and the fact that Burghley underlined the Chaucerian echo suggests he was not wholly dismissive of its message. One sensational example of how seriously some readers took the poem can be found in an eschatological pamphlet printed during the Civil War under the title Doomes-Day, where ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ becomes the basis for a prediction about the approach of apocalypse. Not only does the pamphlet offer a line-byline explication of how the prophecy was fulfilled in the year 1644 (‘the fulfilling of Chaucers Prophecie none but a mad man will denie’), but even more remarkably, reproduces another prophetic poem predicated on Chaucer’s: ‘When Chawcers Prophesie shall be / Found true by folk of Britanie, […] Then loe the Pope shall tumble downe, / And F. shall weare his triple crowne’ (Anon., 1647, 3). In this prophetic mise en abyme, ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ is so important that its fulfillment has become the ominous condition of a later one. The willingness of some early modern readers to ascribe prophetic credence to Chaucer might seem strange today, but this phenomenon becomes far more explicable in light of Chaucer’s broader Renaissance reception as a kind of Protestant avant la lettre.10 Just as Protestant evangelists like John Foxe could claim Chaucer as a spiritual visionary who ‘saw in Religion as much almost, as euen we do now’ (Foxe, 1570, 965), early modern readers apparently also

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9 National Archives, SP 15/29, fol. 190r.

10 On the ‘Protestant Chaucer,’ see Georgianna (1990), Jones (2015), and Simpson (2015).

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11 On the comparable case of Piers Plowman as a prophetic resource for early modern readers, see Weiskott (2015).

12 On the formal conventions of prophecy, see Dean (1996, 1–2).

turned to Chaucer for his foresight into the fate of national politics.11 So pervasive was this reputation that the Oxford philosopher John Case could name Chaucer in a list of the most famous prophets: ‘An omnia Sybillæ folia, Merlini somnia, Chauceri de rebus futuris carmina, pro oraculis tibi habentur?’ ‘Do you regard all the Sibyl’s leaves, the dreamings of Merlin, Chaucer’s poems about things to come, as oracular?’ (Case, 1588, sig. }}4v; Boswell and Holton, 2004, 125). Clearly the specific carmen de rebus futuris that Case has in mind is Chaucer’s famous six-line prophecy and in his rhetorical question, although he hopes his reader will be as skeptical as he is, Case reveals that it was common knowledge that many, such as the Oxford-educated Hammer, treated it as more than mere ‘skimble-skamble stuff.’ Given the poem’s widespread attribution to Chaucer, why does Lear’s Fool attribute his own prophecy based on that poem to Merlin? The question is perhaps not so difficult to answer. The Fool’s prophecy is obviously not the same as Chaucer’s and since ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ could be seen within a British tradition of prophetic utterances,12 Shakespeare preserves the integrity of the legendary world of Galfridian history by having the Fool attribute them to a familiar prophetic figure on the same side of Holinshed’s great epochal divide, the Norman Conquest. The Fool’s attribution to Merlin, however, has set the terms of much analysis of the passage’s intertextual resonance, shifting attention away from Chaucer and ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ and onto Merlin and the ‘Merlinesque’ tradition more generally. Yet, the widespread familiarity of the Chaucerian poem suggests that Shakespeare’s audience might themselves have recognized the parallel, allowing us to imagine the Fool’s speech more directly playing with the audience’s expectations and engaging in a more complex intertextual game with its source. But this returns us to the question of how we understand the text of the speech.

T h e Fo o l ’s p r o p h e c y : I n t e r p r e t a t i o n a n d e m e n d a t i o n Whichever course an editor of King Lear chooses to follow in representing Fool’s prophetic speech – whether to accept the order of the lines as they appear in the First Folio of 1623 or to adopt Warburton’s emendation of 1747 or Duthie’s of 1960 – that decision must necessarily be based on a critical account of how the speech works, including how it engages with other prophetic texts and traditions. Even the decision not to emend requires an interpretive rationale. One of the earliest critics to offer such a rationale was John Upton. Writing in 1748, Upton provided a defense of the original Folio reading of the Fool’s speech as a response to William Warburton’s rearrangement of lines in his recent edition of 1747. While agreeing with Warburton’s observation about the incoherence of the speech, Upton was convinced that this was intended to be a function of oracular disarray. Upton was the first critic to discover the

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Chaucerian source of the Fool’s speech and this discovery only affirmed his conviction in the Folio reading: Shakespeare has taken this prophecy; but to make it more resemble the oracular responses of antiquity and the prophetical stile, he has artfully involved it in a seeming confusion […] and if by this humourous addition [i.e. the final couplet], there is any seeming irregularity, it is more after the cast, as I have said above, of Oracles. (Upton, 1748, xix) Like editors today, Upton assumes that the Fool’s speech is deliberately nonsensical. In a play with so many depictions of language on the verge of breakdown, there is some appeal to this argument. And yet Upton’s logic is revealing. His reconstruction of Shakespeare’s manipulation of the lines (‘to make it more resemble the oracular responses of antiquity and the prophetical stile’) admits that the Chaucerian prophecy, in its clear three couplets, is not at all disorganized, and therefore, in Upton’s view, not stereotypically oracular. Nor, it seems, was Upton’s account of the speech satisfying to many readers: as Edward Capell would observe, ‘though the speech in this garb has obscurity, it is not the obscurity of those responses [of the oracles], nor anything like it’ (Capell, 1779–1780, 1:165), and editors such as Johnson were left unconvinced and continued to adopt Warburton’s solution. Of course, Upton’s reading of the speech as an oracular parody closely resembles the twentieth-century defenses of the Folio text based on the assumption that Shakespeare deliberately disordered ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ in order to parody the ‘Merlinesque’ tradition. However, as with Upton’s interpretation, the chaotic result seems to lack some of what early modern readers found most risible about the ‘Merlinesque.’ Just as Hotspur rankled at the allegorical animal predictions cited by Glendower, for John Harvey, it was the bestial fixation of this tradition that caused incredulity. After a long roll call of ominous animals who make up the menagerie of ‘Merlinesque’ prophecy, Harvey writes: ‘Merlin and all Merlinists must be faine either to pardon such incredulous persons, as I am, or else to yeeld sounder proofe of their monsterous Heraldicall blazonings, than yet appeereth’ (Harvey, 1588, 54–55). For the defenders of the Folio reading of the Fool’s speech, the assumption must be that Shakespeare took the clear and straightforward Chaucerian prophecy and scrambled it in order to parody the oracular incoherence of a different prophetic tradition, whether classical or ‘Merlinesque.’ And yet, in both of these cases, Shakespeare’s purported parody seems not to address the most salient feature of its supposed target.13 A wholly different approach is offered in George Ian Duthie’s emendation: by moving the intertextual emphasis from the Merlinesque tradition to ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy,’ the speech becomes less satire than homage. In Duthie’s version, the first six lines of the Fool’s speech map precisely onto the contours of Chaucer’s six-line poem, and the remaining eight lines constitute a kind of prophetic

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13 Space prevents me from discussing the ingenious defense of the Folio reading presented in De Grazia (2012).

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palinode. Gary Taylor, accepting Duthie’s emendation, argued that Shakespeare’s inspiration for this two-part structure came from Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, in which the dystopian Chaucerian prophecy is followed by another poem that presents a benign vision of social order (Puttenham, 1589, 188; Taylor, 1983, 382–85). In Taylor’s account, these two examples of merismus created an ironic juxtaposition that Puttenham naı¨vely ignored; Shakespeare thus gave Lear’s Fool a pair of antithetical prophecies for the Fool to highlight this irony, implicitly arguing that those in power will never perfectly execute their offices and that ‘political beatitude instead depends […] upon the reformation of every level of society’ (383–84). If, for Taylor, this second prophecy constitutes ‘Shakespeare’s vision of Utopia’ (384), much depends on how we understand the final couplet of the Fool’s speech, ‘Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, / That going shall be used with feet.’ It seems one must accept the gloss offered by Duthie and Wilson: ‘[then] men shall walk uprightly – but no one will ever live to see this’ (Duthie and Wilson, 1960, 203). The implicit concession of impossibility of that final (unspoken) clause is noteworthy, not least since it diametrically contradicts the more intuitive reading of the couplet: namely, when these things come to pass, then men will walk with their feet. In this reading, the implication of the couplet is not that ‘no one will ever live to see this’ but rather that that is exactly as things are now. But even if one does accept Duthie’s gloss, his rearrangement of the Fool’s speech into two prophetic units nevertheless remains somewhat unsatisfying. The logic of Duthie’s emendation that has appealed to so many editors is perfectly plain – and humourless: when social conditions are dystopian, then England shall come to confusion, but when social conditions are utopian, then men shall walk uprightly. So organized, the Fool’s speech is astonishingly po-faced and, in Hawkes’s assessment, ‘heavyhanded to say the least’ (Hawkes, 1960, 332). In each account of the Fool’s speech, textual arguments are conditioned by an understanding of Shakespeare’s engagement with his sources. Defenders of the Folio reading such as Upton, Hawkes, and Foakes assume that the speech parodies a tradition of confused prophecies. Taylor’s emphasis on Puttenham’s curation of poems leads him to prefer the Duthie emendation for its clearly bipartite structure. However, if we approach the passage not from the perspective of Merlin or Puttenham but rather Chaucer – the poet who was so closely associated with the source text – another solution might be preferred. Let me at last show my hand and finally make a case for a specific emendation, one that has had no defenders since the eighteenth century: Warburton’s. There’s a certain perversity in championing Warburton’s emendation, which was adopted before ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ was known to be a source for the Fool’s speech and which has been dismissed as a symptom of naı¨ve Augustan optimism (Egan, 2004, 118). I’d like to suggest, however, that, of all the editorial possibilities, Warburton’s solution offers arguably the most compelling intertextual engagement with its source and the darkest political message.

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As we have seen, a wide variety of Renaissance writers quoted the prophecy, reliably in its full six-line form, or else assumed that their readers were already familiar enough with its content not to require quotation. Let us imagine that Shakespeare capitalized upon this familiarity. The Fool’s speech prepares the audience to expect a prophecy (‘I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go’), and the opening line, ‘When priests are more in word than matter,’ could easily have evoked the opening of the familiar Chaucerian verses, ‘When faith faileth in Priestes sawes.’ The next line, ‘When brewers mar their malt with water,’ veers from Chaucer in its specific reference, but it is nevertheless a watered-down instance of Chaucer’s third line, in which ‘robberie is holden purchace.’ The Fool’s third line, ‘When nobles are their tailors’ tutors,’ spoofs the serious authoritarianism of Chaucer’s second line (‘And lordes hests are holden for lawes’), while the vision of sexual promiscuity in the fourth line of the Chaucerian prophecy, ‘And lechery is holden solace,’ is echoed in the Fool’s fourth line, ‘No heretics burned but wenches’ suitors.’ It is here that the audience would have expected to hear the familiar concluding lines: ‘Than shall the lond of Albion / Be brought to great confusion.’ Let us imagine that they did not. Instead, let us imagine that they heard: ‘Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, / That going shall be used with feet.’ And let us understand these words not as a description of men walking uprightly, but as what they surely are: an inspired moment of anticlimax. Shakespeare’s great theatrical characters have a fondness for such moments of anticlimax. In Hamlet, immediately after the performance of ‘The Mousetrap’ has confirmed the guilt of Claudius, the ecstatic prince addresses Horatio in a ballad: ‘For thou dost know, O Damon dear, This realm dismantled was Of Jove himself, and now reigns here A very, very—’ pajock. (Hamlet, 3.2.260–263) The word we expect (‘ass’) is conspicuously withheld – ‘You might have rhymed,’ Horatio responds (3.2.264) – and in its place, the bathetic, anticlimactic ‘pajock’ is substituted. Similarly, in Othello, Iago entertains Desdemona with a series of witty epigrams about women of various qualities (fair and wise, black and witty, fair and foolish). With sing-song regularity, each takes the form of a rhyming couplet, until his final essay, describing the perfectly temperate woman, delays the expected conclusion for a full ten lines (Othello, 2.1.144–153). After the prolonged suspense, his penultimate line reveals that a conclusion is imminent: [IAGO] [‘]She was a wight, if ever such wights were’ – To do what? IAGO ‘To suckle fools and chronicle small beer.’ DESDEMONA O most lame and impotent conclusion! (Othello, 2.1.154–58) DESDEMONA

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Where we anticipate grandeur, we are given nothing but banal anticlimax. Lear’s Fool, too, has a propensity to elicit a sense of anticlimactic disappointment from his audience (‘This is nothing, fool’ [1.4.126]), but in the case of his prophetic speech, the sense of anticlimax is generated by subverting the audience’s expectations. A similar intertextual transgression is on display elsewhere in the play when Edgar (as Poor Tom) follows Lear and company into the hovel with the lines: ‘Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man’ (3.5.179–80, my emphasis). Where we expect the familiar ‘English man,’ the word ‘British’ is at once acoustically jarring and politically timely amidst early Jacobean efforts to unify England and Scotland (Shapiro, 2015, 44). Edgar’s rhyme exploits the audience’s familiarity with a well-known text to make a political point. Let us imagine that Lear’s Fool, at the very moment the audience anticipates the confusion of Albion, gives us a lame and impotent conclusion in which our formal and moral expectations are frustrated: ‘Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, / That going shall be used with feet.’ The pedestrian image is both bathetic and cunningly pointed in its implications: the dystopian conditions are not located in some feared future time, but are patently on display in the present world. The Fool would, of course, not be alone in this observation: such was the dire warning of Richard Verstegan and the author of the Doomes-Day pamphlet. Indeed, if the Fool’s prophecy satirizes anything, it is not the incoherence of prophecy but the confirmation bias of its devotees: the dystopian conditions of ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ are, in fact, perennially legible to an eschatological enthusiast. However, as the Fool’s ironic couplet reminds us, the fulfillment of such conditions is hardly a sign of end times; rather, the world of empty priests, crooked brewers, and lechery is all just business as usual. For an audience familiar with ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy,’ anticipating its familiar concluding couplet about Albion brought to great confusion, the ‘feet’ couplet would sound like an imperfect cadence. Thus, when the Fool begins his next line, ‘When every case in law is right,’ it becomes clear we are in a new prophecy: the first apodosis has just been revealed to be not an impotent final conclusion but rather a sly false bottom. The couplet that the audience expected to hear has yet to be delivered, and throughout the wholly unexpected sequence of ‘when’ clauses, they await that promised end. What, then, is the message of the second half of the prophecy? Like a palinode, the conditions of the second half rewrite the vision of ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy.’ Instead of lords’ arbitrary desires being held for laws, justice prevails in every case; instead of robbery being a legitimate way of earning one’s livelihood, cutpurses will no longer practice; instead of lechery abounding, bawds and whores will repent by constructing churches, hopefully implying that faith in priests has not yet failed. Of course, the sequence of the second half is indelibly ironic in its hyperbolic dream of a naı¨vely idealized world, one that will simply never come to pass. Duthie’s po-

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faced emendation places this utopian world at a far-off time when ‘men will walk uprightly.’ Warburton’s reading, however, gives us a much darker punch line. If the first half of the Fool’s speech leads the audience to anticipate a prophecy of national catastrophe, the second half of the speech reveals to the audience that its expectations were precisely backwards: when utopian conditions are fulfilled, then the realm of Albion will come to great confusion. Put another way, national downfall will come not when religious, social, and political vices abound (as ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ would have us believe) but rather when these vices are corrected: so thoroughly are these vices woven into the fiber of Albion’s identity that to imagine the state without them is necessarily to imagine Albion undone. In this respect, the Fool’s prophecy prepares us for the broader social vision of injustices in Albion that unfolds later in the play with Lear’s epiphany about the ‘Poor naked wretches’ of whom he has ‘ta’en / Too little care’ (3.4.28, 32–33) and his remarkable description of ‘the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office’ (4.6.154–55). The corruption described in the first half of the Fool’s prophecy is then specifically not a portrait of Britain after Lear’s downfall, but of Lear’s Britain as seen from the perspective of the disenfranchised. In this respect, the prophecy provides an appropriate conclusion to the scene that began with Lear imagining the storm in morally apocalyptic terms. Just as the Fool provided then a voice of deflating pragmatism (‘O, nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’door’ [3.2.10–11]), denying the supernatural eschatological vision that Lear imposes, so too does his bitter mock prophecy deflate the expectation of apocalypse where we expect it, and then reapply it with withering sarcasm. Far from a ‘meaningless’ send-up of the incoherence of the ‘Merlinesque,’ the Fool’s speech takes the familiar prophetic poem attributed to Chaucer and turns it inside out, resulting in a devastatingly precise inversion of traditional prophetic wisdom and an indictment of Lear’s kingdom. Or, at least it is with Warburton’s emendation. What did Shakespeare actually write? The question is, of course, impossible to answer definitively and my defense of the merits of Warburton’s 1747 emendation is less a truth claim than a self-consciously untimely provocation. In the wake of ‘unediting’ movements in Shakespeare textual studies, editors today have not only become increasingly faithful to the original print witnesses that serve as their copy texts, but also are more inclined than their eighteenthcentury counterparts to consider incomprehensibility an authentically Shakespearean aesthetic strategy (Orgel, 1991; Zucker, 2016). Yet it remains true that all textual decisions – including the decision not to emend – are predicated on interpretative ones. And while such decisions always reflect the assumptions and desires of editors, the Fool’s speech proves something of an extreme test case. The critical impulse to read the speech as pure nonsense, for example, seems intimately linked to a desire to see Shakespeare as ‘our contemporary,’ an agent of enlightened modernity delivering a parodic coup de graˆce to an ailing vestige

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of medieval superstition. But such an account, I have suggested, is misleading. My argument is that we must first recognize the complex role that prophecy in general – and ‘Chaucer’s Prophecy’ in particular – played in the intellectual, literary, and political landscape of Shakespeare’s world in order best to evaluate the work that the Fool’s speech does in King Lear and how it engages with its audience’s expectations. I have proposed that Warburton’s emendation, of all the textual solutions offered to date, is the most responsive to this complexity. Of course my own reading of the Fool’s speech as a condemnation of systemic institutional corruption could easily be seen as a symptom of the early twenty first century. The uncanny temporality of prophecy itself, by which Chaucer seemed eerily ‘contemporary’ to his early modern readers, seems an appropriate site for such moments of critical self-reflection. Our attempts to understand the past’s vision of the future is invariably conditioned by our own critical present. As enigmatic as it is, the Fool’s speech places itself at a high-stakes nexus of politics, religion, and history, and just how satirical, subversive, and prophetic we understand – or desire – the speech to be arguably sheds more light on ourselves than on the text itself. One predicts that this will remain true for critics and editors in ages to come. But we live before their time.

Ac knowledgem ents I am grateful to audiences at the 2017 MLA Convention and Stanford University’s Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies for their feedback on earlier versions of this article, and to Katherine Walker and Joseph Bowling for their detailed editorial attention.

About the Author Misha Teramura is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His work has appeared in ELH, Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, The Review of English Studies, The Chaucer Review, and other journals. He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare’s adaptations of Chaucer (E-mail: [email protected]).

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Original Article

Wasting time in The Committeeman Curried

Marissa Nicosia Department of English, The Pennsylvania State University–Abington College, Abington, PA, USA.

Abstract Samuel Sheppard’s play pamphlet series The Committee-man Curried (1647) satirizes Parliamentary agents as corrupt, drunken, lascivious, and generally hypocritical. Since Sheppard wrote for Royalist newsbooks and celebrated King Charles I in his literary works during the English Civil Wars, his scorn for these opposition figures is not surprising. But throughout the play, Sheppard insists that, above all other ills, these assemblymen, excise collectors, priests, and moneylenders waste time. He shows them running late and shirking their responsibilities, depicts their sexual exploits as a mockery of good scheduling, and he likens their usurious moneylending to sodomy: wasted time leads to poor governance. In this article, I show that Sheppard blends quotidian images of timekeeping and oracular language to critique rule by Parliament. I contend that Sheppard’s scenes of prophecy and wasted time not only decry the committeemen of his present, but also interrogate the future consequences of their actions. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 68–81. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0115-1

Suck-dry is late. Samuel Sheppard’s play pamphlet series The Committee-man Curried (1647) begins with Suck-dry, a committee-man, looking at his watch, cursing Phaeton, and realizing that his morning meeting has already started. He exclaims, ‘The Sunne was up too soon; Phebus is / Grown as rash as Phaeton, and drives his / Waine too fast; how passe the houres?,’ and then, according to the stage direction, he ‘Looks on a Watch’ and reads the time: ‘Blesse me my

Chapter 6 was originally published as Nicosia, M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 68–81. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0115-1.

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Genius, on the stroke of nine’ (A2r).1 By invoking timekeeping, the solar deity Phaeton, and the oracular Phoebus in the opening lines of this play, Sheppard immerses his satire of Parliamentary agents during the English Civil War in premodern debates about the passage of time.2 Suck-dry fails to manage his time, to rise at an early hour, and to attend the committee meeting, and, as Sheppard’s title promises, we will see this committee-man ‘curried’ or defeated, killed, and cut down to size. Sheppard’s play series is not kind to Parliamentary agents like Suck-dry who squander time and ignore omens. To showcase the hypocrisy of Parliament and its agents in support of the King’s cause, Sheppard lampoons a plethora of Roundheads and other contemporary stock characters such as cuckolds, corrupt religious, widows, and ruffians. Throughout these loosely-plotted plays, Sheppard depicts the private immoral behavior of Roundheads, who normally present themselves as irreproachable and austere citizens. Suck-dry and Common-curse exploit the common people through excessive taxation in their respective roles – a committee-man in the General Assembly passing new tax laws and an excise-agent collecting recently levied duties. Although these characters are supposedly part of a godly regime, both use their positions for personal gain. For example, Suck-dry wields his influence to cuckhold the citizen Horne by cavorting with his wife Light-heeles. When Suck-dry, Common-curse, Rebellion, and the corrupt minister Timer-server gather in The Sun Tavern in Act III, they reveal their true nature through lascivious boasts, confessions of feigned religiosity, and general drunken revelry. Likewise, sexual dysfunction reigns in the scenes wherein the clerk Shallowbraine marries the widow Harlate, Time-server seduces Harlate, Dammee and Suck-dry fight over Light-heeles, and Horne laments his lot as a cuckold. The other major strand of Sheppard’s plot transforms the conflict between Royalists and Republicans into a familial conflict between Loyalty, a Cavalier, and his uncle, Rebellion, a wealthy moneylender. Dedicated to Charles, Loyalty hopes to travel to France, join the exiled court, and continue to fight for the King’s cause. While at first Loyalty is rejected by his uncle and pursued by an armed watch tasked with hunting down Cavaliers, he later triumphs by feigning a deadly illness and tricking his miserly Uncle Rebellion into paying his debts so that he can finally flee. Sheppard takes every opportunity to criticize Parliament, its agents, and the opportunistic Londoners who have seized on this moment of upheaval for personal gain instead of supporting their king. Ultimately, Sheppard champions Loyalty and voices, through him, a future vision of Royalist victory. On the surface, it might seem like these plays are simply satires about Roundheads behaving badly, which of course they are, but I am interested in the way they depict that bad behavior as misspent time. Spending time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can simply indicate duration or use in seventeenth-century usage, but it can also mark waste and excess.

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1 Unless marked otherwise, all citations of The Committee-man Curried series refer to Sheppard (1647a, b) by signature number. 2 Sheppard composed these plays after the New Model Army’s victory over the King’s forces in the First Civil War, but before the Second Civil War. During this period, Parliament governed and conducted tense negotiations with Charles as well as its own army. George Thomason dated his copies of the plays ‘July 1647’ and ‘Aug: 14th’ respectively.

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Spending can ‘deprive (a person) of energy, strength, or resources,’ and it can indicate industry as well as excess: ‘To consume, employ, use superfluously, wastefully, or with undue lavishness; to waste or squander; to throw away’ (OED, 2018, s.v. ‘spend,’ v.1, 5.c and 10.a). Squandering here is also connected to ideas of spending seed and sodomitical acts that may lead to sexual pleasure, but not to sexual reproduction. Sheppard’s play turns again and again to failed timekeeping, poor scheduling, and oracular language to satirize the disorderly Parliamentarian rule in the present. His temporal language shapes a play that is not simply interested in poking fun at current events but is immersed also in the problems of temporal reckoning in the present and prophesying future events.

Play pamphlet drama

3 Jason Peacey explains that ‘a pamphlet was conceived within the book trade as anything in size smaller than a folio (i.e. quarto, octavo, duodecimo).’ Although they could contain a range of content, pamphlets were usually publications of 12 sheets or fewer and sold stabstitched rather than bound (Peacey, 2011, 454). 4 See also Spufford (1981) and Watt (1993).

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Sheppard’s Committee-man Curried plays are play pamphlets, a hybrid dramatic form that emerged during the pamphlet boom of the 1640s (McKenzie, 2002). Short, cheap, and timely, these brief plays appeared in the same quarto format as 8- or 16-page pamphlets, but instead of documenting news or making polemical arguments in prose, they retell fictionalized versions of current events in dramatic scenes.3 A reader looking at a play pamphlet in 1647 would see features of printed professional playbooks (act and scene divisions, character lists, dedicatory poems, prologues, epilogues, and stage directions) and printed news (the names of journalists, ‘Mercury’ appellations associated with particular newsbook serials, and short title page ballads that retold the news in verse). Building on Tessa Watt and Margaret Spufford’s groundbreaking studies of cheap print, Daniel Woolf argues that periodical publications contributed to the creation of the ‘present’ as a category for understanding time (Woolf, 2001, 81–2).4 Woolf argues that, by documenting what was happening ‘now,’ publications such as weekly newsbooks and even yearly almanacs dilate the present from a specific instant to a period of longer duration. Since play pamphlets harness the periodical format of printed news and the navigational apparatus of printed playbooks, they also participate in the creation of an extended sense of the present moment. Rachel Willie has recently argued that play pamphlets are not simply pamphlets, but rather ‘paper stages’ for rethinking politics in the early modern public sphere (Willie, 2015, 25–46). Critics such as Janet Clare, Lois Potter, Joad Raymond, Nigel Smith, and Susan Wiseman have studied these rich, if brief, plays to consider political identity, genre, and the relationship between

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literature and news.5 Of course, these play pamphlets were written when the professional theaters were closed. The closure of the public theaters by Parliament in 1642 stifled the composition and circulation of new plays and sparked the creation of new, dramatic forms like the play pamphlet, forms that were designed for reading and private performance. Moreover, as Willie has convincingly shown, the 1647 ordinance that permanently, rather than temporarily, shuttered the theaters sparked an outcry that echoed across works from the preliminary matter of luxe literary collections on the one hand to topical tracts and play pamphlets on the other. For example, the preliminaries to both installments of Sheppard’s Committeeman Curried series take up the 1647 ordinance. Sheppard’s ‘Prologue’ protests

5 See Clare (2002, 1–38), Potter (1989, 22–3), Raymond (1996, 202–3), Smith (1994, 74–84), and Wiseman (1998, 53).

Since it is held a crime, that on the Stage Wit should present it selfe (since that the Age) Degenerates so farre, that nothing may Be countenanct, that shews but like a Play; How shall these Sceanes scape free [?] (A1v) Since playing is a crime, Sheppard’s scenes will emerge on the paper stage, rather than the public stage. Yet Sheppard imagines his illicit drama escaping – fleeing the restrictions of the age to better and happier times. Moreover, Sheppard references the materiality of the play pamphlet by remarking that texts can only appear ‘cum privilegio,’ or approved by the licensing office, in the poem’s final lines (A2r). In the meantime, The Committee-man Curried will be ‘like a play,’ an orphaned publication exiled from its true home on the stage. In addition to penning The Committee-man Curried series, Sheppard wrote numerous play pamphlets, literary pamphlets, newsbooks, polemical pamphlets, lengthy verse romances, and a volume of poems during the 1640s and 1650s. Sheppard frequently combined his literary and journalistic endeavors. As Marcus Nevitt puts it in his study of poet-journalists like Sheppard, ‘the contractions of the demotic sit comfortably beside Virgilian Latin’ and ‘the polyphonic drive behind such news writing had a profound impact on Sheppard’s poetry’ (Nevitt, 2012, 504). From Sheppard’s unpublished Spenserian romance, The Faery King (c. 1650) to his published Spenserian pamphlet The Faerie Leveller (1648), Sheppard embarked on a decade-long experiment in mixing literary and pamphlet forms in the early 1640s (Nicosia, 2016). Sheppard contributed to many Royalist newsbooks including Mercurius Aulicus, Mercurius Elencticus, and Mercurius Pragmaticus, and was also briefly imprisoned for writing and distributing these works in the spring of 1648 (McElligott, 2007, 127–44). On the title page of the first Committee-man Curried play, Sheppard includes a telling quotation from Juvenal’s ‘Satire I’ about the tense relationship between now and then:

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Nil erit ulterius quod nostris moribus addat posteritas, eadem facient cupientque minores, omne in praecipiti vitium stetit. (A1r) [Posterity will have nothing to add to our ways: our descendants will do and desire exactly the same. (Juvenal, 2004, 147–9)] We must document the present for posterity: nevertheless, we will repeat ourselves. By including this quotation, Sheppard forges a connection to the satirical traditions of antiquity and winks at the learned members of his imagined reading public. Juvenal’s programmatic opening poem catalogs contemporary social ills, bewails the repetitive nature of human history, and asserts that it is hard to not write satire in times like these (Juvenal, 2004, 30). Sheppard claims Juvenal’s mantle by filling sheets of paper with his satirical plays that might never be performed. Later in the first play, the Master at the Sun Tavern repeats a version of this quote to the drunken revelers in his establishment: You’d need gentlemen, be all wafted home in a Sedan, you are so light, you hardly feele your selves; and yet so weighty, that you reele under your burdens thus must we thrive by sinne – it must be so, this is the last of ages. Nor can posterity, new vices frame, Our children will but wish, and act the same. (B2v) Sheppard’s translation of Juvenal in the final couplet highlights the vices implied in the Latin original and elided in the modern translation quoted above. Will posterity learn from our vices and desires? Always searching for new political controversies to translate into timely literature, in these short plays Sheppard harnessed contemporary woes about taxation, government corruption, and money-lending to think about the present and the future. 6 Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift show that timekeeping was ‘more public than private; and more aural than visual’ in premodern towns (2009, 141). They challenge dominant narratives about the rigid economic structures of modern life that we conventionally attribute to clock time.

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Wa s t i n g t i m e The ideas about timekeeping that emerge in the opening scene of the first part of The Committee-man Curried attest to Sheppard’s interest in current affairs from clock technology to the excise. Suck-dry’s lateness and his vocation raise essential questions about time, money, and how best to use them: ‘THe Sunne was up too soon; Phebus is / Grown as rash as Phaeton, and drives his / Waine too fast; how passe the houres?’ (A2r).6 Neither a public clock nor sunlight awoke Suck-dry. If the ‘Watch’ on which he reads the time – nine in the morning – was one of the clocks that were making their way into middle class houses, it either did not chime or did not have chiming capability. If Suck-dry was looking at a portable, wearable watch instead, Sheppard’s jab digs even deeper. Aristocratic, ridiculously expensive, and notoriously unreliable before the

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invention of the balance spring in 1657, Suck-dry’s watch might not even be telling the correct time (Glennie and Thrift, 2009, 257). It would, however, tell readers that he had ideas above his station and made frivolous purchases. In any case, these personal timepieces were far less accurate than early modern public clocks. By invoking Phaeton, son of the solar god Helios who lost control of the heavenly chariot and met a tragic end, Sheppard shows that Suck-dry also has other forms of timekeeping in mind. Connecting Suck-dry’s watch to the swift passing of the morning, the playwright bridges mythology and technology, diurnal time and standardized hours. Suck-dry laments that ‘Phaeton’ has displaced ‘Phebus’ or Apollo (A2r). Apollo and Helios are connected in the Hellenic tradition, but more importantly, Apollo is an oracular deity who, like the Sibyl, has long been associated with prophecy (Malay, 2010). By claiming that Apollo is ‘as rash as Phaeton,’ Suck-dry implies that both time and prophecy are confused (A2r). But Sheppard invites us to laugh at Suck-dry’s hubris here as well: the problem that Suck-dry claims to have is that time has moved too quickly, not that he has slept too late. Taking up J.K. Barret’s invitation to consider the language early modern writers used to orient themselves in time, I suggest that Sheppard depicts Suck-dry as temporally confused and links that disorder to his abuse of public funds raised through taxation (Barret, 2016, 22). Awake and busying himself with preparations for work, Suck-dry barks commands at his servant, Sneak: ‘bring me my Parchment bundle – those blankes to signe on all occasions; — I had almost forgot – bring me those Orders too were coyned yesterday to leavy moneys for the reliefe of Ireland. — Let’s away, Ile pocket up the Commons Coyn to day’ (A2v). Taxation is Suck-dry’s business: it is implied by his name and confirmed by his stacked orders and parchment bundles. Money was a problem for the revolutionary Parliament just as it had been for Charles, and taxation schemes fueled the rise and fall of various configurations of monarchical and Parliamentary rule in seventeenthcentury England. As Mark Kishlansky suggests, ‘Acute fiscal distress complicated proposals for radical reform’ in the Commonwealth era as the Rump sold off crown estates and church lands to ‘pay off its staggering debts to Parliamentary soldiers and London moneylenders’ (Kishlansky, 1996, 202). Shifting tax policies during this period bred innovation and catastrophe (Kiser and Kane, 2001). Suck-dry, and his compatriot Common-curse, represent new innovations in this tax regime. Their specific professions were ripe fodder for satire as readers from all social stations would have felt the impact of the new fiscal policies Parliament relied on to operate: property taxes based on land assessment, excise duties, and loans. The new land assessments meant that wealthy landowners paid yearly taxes on their properties like never before. Suck-dry’s blank parchment stacks – ready to fill in at the smallest whim – stand in for this system

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7 See also Coleman (1977, 190–1).

8 In this era before a national bank or a national debt, Parliament ‘had mainly to operate through the only body in existence which was in a position to tap the savings of the London business class as a whole, that is the City Corporation, and through mercantile syndicates and combinations’ (Clay, 1984, 271).

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of property tax. If the assessment paid for Parliament’s ongoing wars, the constant income produced by excise duties kept the government in operation (Kishlansky, 1996, 230). As C.G.A. Clay writes, ‘in 1643 for the first time excise duties were introduced and laid on a wide range of goods including meat (until 1647), butter, beer, salt, soap, leather and cloth, as well as luxuries such as silks, lace, furs and spices’ (Clay, 1984, 264).7 These duties disproportionately impacted the poor by raising the prices of staples. Even while Parliament was collecting these new revenues, it also borrowed substantial sums of money from the City of London and its agents. If Sheppard paints Suck-dry as a representative of the assessment and Common-curse as a figure of the excise, Rebellion stands in for a class of London money-lenders who are, as we shall see, rolling in the profits of loaning the government money at interest.8 When we meet Common-curse, he has just heard news of a citizen uprising against the excise: the burning of the Excise house performed by the ‘Cow-killers of Cowlane, and Smithfield-bars’ (A4r). In this scene, Sheppard references actual excise riots that took place in Smithfield in February 1647 (Braddick, 1991, 597). Upon hearing the news of this revolt, Common-curse sings a prophetic paean to the Excise house: ‘tis a sad OMEN and prognosticates the Excise is not long liv’d’ (A4r). It is equally ominous that Londoners are burning excise men in effigy in their celebratory bonfires: ‘the picture of an Excise man, shapt with reeds; and him they sacrifice to the God of fire’ (A4r). Common-curse reads these flames as an ‘OMEN’ of the duty’s defeat, but he fails to extend his interpretation beyond this obvious correlation. Irresponsible and corrupt, Common-curse and his compatriots retire to the Sun Tavern to drink instead of attempting to shore up support for their tax policy or even save the Excise house from the growing fire. Sheppard may scorn these vocations, but part of the problem here is that Suck-dry and Common-curse fail to perform their jobs: Suck-dry is late and we never see him sit in assembly, Common-curse does nothing while the Excise house burns to the ground. Even though Commoncurse recognizes the conflagration as omen, he responds to the omen by retreating to a tavern to revel while he can instead of industriously working to save the regime on which his life and livelihood depends. Likewise, their friends hope to build sexual exploits into their daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines. Dammee and Time-server are opportunists – the former is already damned, the latter is a self-serving schemer – and their own habits of wasting time have been enabled by this new, Parliamentary regime. Both imagine schedules of erotic conquest and both are completely thwarted by the play even though the partners they are perusing are depicted as easily seduced. Sexual satire may be simplistic, but sexual satire based on scheduling is less so. Writing about routines of play-going in the early modern period, Paul Menzer suggests that ‘Routines require a conceptualization of daily experience that works along a grid where the twin axes of space and time discipline the daily activities of the subject, governing when and where the subject engages in a particular behavior’ (Menzer,

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2011, 30). Like the pleasure-seeking playgoer Menzer considers – a necessary figure for the success of financially precarious playing companies – Sheppard’s Dammee and Time-server discipline their lechery into projected diurnal schedules. When the ‘ruffian’ Dammee shows up to sleep with Horne’s wife, Lightheeles, he lays out a calendar that measures time in a personal, seasonal fashion: This day I’le sacrifice to Venus, Mars shall claime the next, the third I’le consecrate to Iupiter, the fourth I’le be a wit, and Mercury shall be my Clearke: Thus will I drive my dayes to weekes, my weekes to months, my months to yeares, and lavish out my life in lust, in wounds, in artes; I’le make the milke-sops of this age for to doe homage to my shadow’ (B3v). Thriving in this lax age, Dammee will measure time in sex, war, and poetry, even though Light-heeles is busy with Suck-dry when he calls. He will ‘lavish’ his time in scheduled indolence. When the godly minister Time-server tries to sleep with Shallow-braine’s new wife, a widow named Harlate, he proposes an alternative sacramental calendar: ‘I can on the Fast-daies presse abstinence, and on Thanksgiving daies, teach how wee ought rejoice with moderation, on Sabbath daies exhort to strict devotion, and keeping of that day inviolate’ (B1v). In a sacred sexual calendar, Time-server hopes that his new feast days will provide ample time to sleep with Harlate. Although she is unconvinced, Timeserver, an opportunist by name, encourages her to seize the day, succumb to his advances, and forget about the fate of her soul. Unfortunately for Time-server and his carefully-crafted plans, Shallow-braine has rigged the bedroom with a hidden trap, a pit into which the lustful preacher falls. Seeking sex, Dammee and Time-server reorient themselves temporally in new, cyclical pleasure routines. These calendars of days, weeks, months, years, and Sabbaths point to endless future pleasures spent in love, art, and, most importantly, sex. Ultimately, Sheppard depicts this as a large-scale imagined routine of wasted time. However, since Dammee and Time-server fail to consummate their respective affairs, they cannot participate in these imaginary future routines.

Spending money Waste is also a refrain in Loyalty’s conflict with his uncle, Rebellion. In this second strand of the plays’ linked plots, Loyalty struggles to survive and plans his flight to the exiled court in France, while Rebellion lends money to Parliament and thrives on his profits. Destitute, Loyalty seeks out his Uncle Rebellion, his last hope. Just before he knocks on Rebellion’s door, he delivers this description of his relative: ‘a warm furd sir, one that leanes on His bags as on his staffe, and commits Sodomy With Mammon; – he hath pretended zeale For Church and State, hath set out horse and man Against his Soveraigne’ (A3r). Sodomy may be figured as fruitless labor, but sodomy with Mammon seems to

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9 Debates about lending money with interest in early modern England were rooted in the spiritual as well as the economic (Korda, 2009). Parliament did not legalize the practice in 1571 on religious grounds, but ‘the Parliamentary debate which legalized interestbearing loans in 1624 treated the issue as purely economic, a purely secular matter’ (Hutson, 1994, 26–8). 10 Fisher suggests that if ‘coining and sexual reproduction were homologous, counterfeiting and sodomy were to be understood as equivalent perversions of them: just as counterfeiting was considered to be a false imitation of legitimate monetary production, sodomy was figured as a false imitation of heterosexual generation’ (Fisher, 1999, 10).

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be paying off for Rebellion. He wears furs, leans on piles of money, fakes his religious fervor, and, worst of all, he funds Parliamentary war efforts with interest-bearing loans.9 Revolution made Rebellion, like other London lenders, rich. Rebellion’s activities are not simply corrupt, they are ‘Sodomy With Mammon’: Sheppard’s unique, but not entirely innovative, formulation finds Rebellion guilty of worshiping the false idol of greed through usury (A3r). As Valerie Traub writes: ‘In the early modern period, sodomy exists as an imaginary structure … wherever the boundaries and systems of alliance they attempt to enforce are crossed or confused’ (Traub, 1999, 432). Sodomy was a framework for conceptualizing transgression for Sheppard and his contemporaries. Rethinking Alan Bray’s definition, Jonathan Goldberg frames sodomy as ‘a sexual act, anything that threatens alliance – any sexual act, that is, that does not promote the aim of married procreative sex,’ and these acts ‘emerge into visibility only when those who are said to have done them also can be called traitors, heretics, or the like, at the very least, disturbers of the social order’ (Goldberg, 1992,19). Will Fisher specifically traces the early modern interconnection between sodomy and usury, homosexuality and counterfeit money, ‘how terms like counterfeiting and usury fit into the nexus of transgressions that have been associated with sodomy’ (Fisher, 1999, 1).10 Rebellion’s sodomy is not connected to actual sexual acts or even the erotics of political affiliation that Melissa Sanchez has examined, but instead his business concerns and political allegiances are depicted as transgressive and thus sodomitical (Sanchez, 2011). Sheppard’s short plays connect sodomy to economic relations as part of their general depiction of waste. He embellishes these linked discourses by invoking Mammon as a symbol of greed and sodomy combined. Loyalty’s world has been turned upside down and he finds oracles in quotidian interactions: ‘Fortunes wheele / Ever turns’ (A2v). His visit with his uncle does nothing to change his mind. Rebellion not only refuses to aid his kin, but also threatens to use his influence to imprison his Royalist nephew, saying, ‘We have Committees close and sub, and grand, That make strict Inquisition after those, who have Presum’d to fight for Royaltie’ (A3r). Although Loyalty could not disagree with his uncle more, he recognizes Rebellion’s speech as a sign of things to come: ‘By Jove he speakes all Oracle; and may they have no other Trumpet for to noyse out their Fame then thy unwary tongue’ (A3v). Loyalty reads Rebellion’s speech as a prophecy of bad times. But Loyalty, as we shall see, triumphs. He will take on the role of prophet and attempt to shape a future of his own design. Pursued by lenders and Parliamentary agents in the second play, Loyalty concocts a ruse to wrest support from his unhelpful uncle. When Loyalty pretends to be on his deathbed, Rebellion is inspired by familial loyalty to visit. Seeing his nephew in a withered and repentant state, Uncle Rebellion agrees to pay Loyalty’s exorbitant debts. To fill the time it will take for Rebellion’s servant to collect the cash and return, Loyalty presents a prophetic dumb show.

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Mere mortals infrequently summon dumb shows that feature demons in early modern drama, but Sheppard imagines Loyalty conjuring a spectacle and, in turn, draws attention to the play pamphlet’s dramatic potential. Loyalty asks his creditors, doctor, and uncle to sit down, watch his ‘device,’ and take on the role of spectators (B4r): Recorders: Enter Sleep and Death, bearing a young man betwixt them naked, they lay him down, dance about him. Enter Poverty, she bewailes over him, and danceth with the rest. Death and Sleep seem to strive for the body, Sleep prevaileth. Enter Mammon, and placing two bags of gold under either arme, he reviveth, danceth with Sleep and Poverty, then Exeunt. (B4r) The dumb show presents an allegory of suffering. At one level, this is the story of Loyalty’s plight and ultimate victory. At another level, it is the story of the King’s cause, the suffering of his loyal supporters, and an imagined future triumph. The naked young man (Loyalty) is mocked and jostled by Sleep, Death, and Poverty. They torture him with dance, music played on a recorder, and miscellaneous wailing. Then Mammon (Uncle Rebellion) arrives carrying bags of money and the scene changes. Mammon revives the young man by giving him money and he rises to join the dance. In this allegorical dumb show, Rebellion is transformed into Mammon and, ill-gotten or not, his usurious gold will set Loyalty free. Rebellion is baffled by the show. He cannot interpret the oracular allegory even though it is so similar to the conversation he has just had about his nephew’s debts: REBELLION: What’s the conceipt of this? LOYALTY: This is a vision Sir, forewarnes what is to come, and is an excellent preparative for me. (B4r) Loyalty assures his uncle that this dumb show is a depiction of the future, a ‘preparative’ that ‘forewarnes’ of things to come. Perhaps, he implies, this is what Loyalty will experience in the afterlife. Moments later, Rebellion’s gold is placed safely in the hands of Loyalty’s creditors, and the loyal nephew ‘leaps out of the bed’ and dances just as his doppelganger did moments before (B4r). Rebellion’s first question, ‘Does he counterfeit?’ or, is he faking this recovery, draws the conceptual connection between usury and counterfeiting (B4r). Loyalty may have pretended to be dying – his illness was counterfeit – but Rebellion has built his fortune on Mammon’s usurious foundations. Furious and despairing, Rebellion threatens to kill himself and Loyalty urges him to do so. Loyalty allegorically triumphed over Rebellion in the dumb show, now he has realized this imagined future in reality.

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Wa s t i n g p a p e r Sheppard’s first Committee-man Curried play may take Juvenal’s quote about posterity as its guiding principle, but Sheppard selects a second Juvenal quotation about poetry and wasted paper for the title page of his second play: Stulta est clementia, cu`m tot ubique Vatibus occurras, periturae parcere Chartae. (Sheppard, 1647b, sig. A1r) [It’s a stupid act of mercy, when you run into so many bards everywhere, to spare paper that’s bound to be wasted anyway.’ (Juvenal, 2004, 17–8)] Sheppard, like Juvenal before him, may have found it difficult to write anything other than satire amidst civil broils, but he wrote all the same. Someone was going to waste the paper; it might as well be Sheppard. Taking on the role of ‘vatibus’ [‘the poet/prophet’], Sheppard infused his pamphlet publications with oracular language to think about his own time and beyond it. Sheppard was writing plays in one or two printed sheets, so he could not waste his own time or the time of others: printed plays are made of paper and the duration of time it takes to read a play depends on the number of pages formed by folded sheets. Pamphlets flooded the market in the 1640s even if, as D.F. McKenzie has convincingly argued, there was no increase in the volume of paper imported to England (McKenzie, 2002). Moreover, as Jason Peacey explains in his article about counterfeit issues of Royalist newsbooks, these illicit and topical publications were printed to garner political influence and not necessarily profit (Peacey, 2004). Copies of The Committee-man Curried plays may have been scattered in the streets at night and read for free, rather than sold in a bookseller’s stall. Readers devoured pamphlets, whether the opportunity to compose them was wasted on Sheppard or not. Perhaps Loyalty’s dumb show encapsulates more than a single Cavalier’s struggle or an allegory of the Royalist cause. Perhaps Loyalty’s dumb show is also about imagining performance in an era of paper stages and the limits of what printed play pamphlets can achieve politically and aesthetically in troubled times. In the dumb show and the Loyalty plot, Mammon’s gains were returned to loyal hands. Maybe Loyalty’s internal audience – London moneylenders, a doctor, servants – or Sheppard’s London reading audience might have been moved to reform their behavior, to support the king and stop lending money to the Parliament. Uncle Rebellion was certainly transformed by the experience. Sheppard’s characters waste time, craft lecherous calendars, and revel in their profits: a social satire of Parliamentarians gone wild reveals the corruption at the heart of present policy – the land assessment, the excise, and a government funded by loans – and the fiscal and moral bankruptcy of the future of those policies. The oracular language that runs throughout the plays builds to Loyalty’s ‘preparative’ that ‘forewarnes of things to come.’ Loyalty, and

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Sheppard, hope that their cause will triumph over this new social order. Yet Sheppard’s portrait of squandering – wasted time, paper, profit, effort – draws attention to the tentative nature of the futures proposed by his dramatic retelling of present news. Thrown into the streets, sold for profit, or literally turned into waste paper, Sheppard’s Committeeman-curried plays ‘scape free’ from conventional structures of press and stage to imagine England’s futures on the paper stage. The Royalist opportunity that Sheppard imagines may be squandered or it may ultimately come to pass. But in the end, it is Sheppard’s versions of Juvenal’s laments that ring on: will posterity learn anything from the present civil war? Will all these satires simply waste paper? Will future generations also squander their chance to build a better world?

Ac knowledgem ents I would like to thank the editors as well as Claire Falck, Carissa Harris, Joseph Malcomson, and Thomas Ward for thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this piece.

About the Author Marissa Nicosia is Assistant Professor of Renaissance Literature at Pennsylvania State University–Abington College. Her current book project studies speculative political futures in English history plays. Marissa has published articles in Modern Philology, Milton Studies, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and Studies in Philology, and she runs the food history website Cooking in the Archives (Email: [email protected]).

References Barret, J.K. 2016. Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Braddick, M. 1991. Popular Politics and Public Policy: The Excise Riot at Smithfield in February 1647 and Its Aftermath. The Historical Journal 34(3): 597–626. Clare, J., ed. 2002. Drama of the English Republic. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Clay, C. 1984. Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, Vol. 2. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, D. 1977. The Economy of England, 1450–1750. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

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Fisher, W. 1999. Queer Money. English Literary History 66(1): 1–23. Glennie, P. and N. Thrift. 2009. Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, J. 1992. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. New York: Fordham University Press. Hutson, L. 1994. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England. London: Routledge. Juvenal. 2004. Satire I. In Juvenal and Persius: Loeb Classical Library 91, 130–45, ed. and trans. S. M. Braund. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kiser, E. and J. Kane. 2001. Revolution and State Structure: The Bureaucratization of Tax Administration in Early Modern England and France. American Journal of Sociology 107(1): 183–223. Kishlansky, M. 1996. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714. London: Penguin. Korda, N. 2009. Dame Usury: Gender, Credit, and (Ac)counting in the Sonnets and The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare Quarterly 60(2): 129–53. Malay, J. 2010. Prophecy and Sibylline Imagery in the Renaissance: Shakespeare’s Sibyls. New York: Routledge. McElligott, J. 2007. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press. McKenzie, D. 2002. The London Book Trade in 1644. In Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, eds. P. McDonald and M. Suarez, 126–43. Amherst, MA: U Massachusetts P. Menzer, P. 2011. Crowd Control. In Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642, eds. J. Low and N. Myhill, 19–36. New York: Palgrave. Nevitt, M. 2012. Sing Heavenly News: Journalism and Poetic Authority in Samuel Sheppard’s The Faerie King (c. 1654). Studies in Philology 109(4): 496–518. Nicosia, M. 2016. Reading Spenser in 1648: Prophecy and History in Samuel Sheppard’s Faerie Leveller. Modern Philology 114(2): 286–309. [OED] Oxford English Dictionary. 2018. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Online: http://www.oed.com Peacey, J. 2004. ‘The Counterfeit Silly Curr’: Money, Politics, and the Forging of Royalist Newspapers during the English Civil War. Huntington Library Quarterly 67: 27–57. Peacey, J. 2011. Pamphlets. In The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol.1 Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660, ed. J. Raymond, 453–70. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Potter, L. 1989. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Raymond, J. 1996. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Sanchez, M. 2011. Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Sheppard, S. 1647a. The Committee-man Curried. London.: n.p. British Library Thomason Copy. Sheppard, S. 1647b. The Second Part of Committee-man Curried. London: n.p. British Library Thomason Copy.

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Wasting time in The Committee-man Curried

Spufford, M. 1981. Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Smith, N. 1994. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Traub, V. 1999. Sex without Issue: Sodomy, Reproduction, and Signification in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. J. Schiffer, 431–52. New York: Garland. Watt, T. 1993. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Willie, R. 2015. Staging the Revolution: Drama, reinvention and history, 1647–72. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Wiseman, S. 1998. Drama and Politics in the English Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, D. 2001. News, history and the construction of the present in early modern England. In The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe, eds. B. Dooley and S. A. Baron, 80–118. London: Routledge.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

‘The carcasse speakes’: Vital corpses and prophetic remains in Thomas May’s Antigone

Penelope Meyers Usher English Department, New York University, New York, NY, USA.

Abstract This article examines Thomas May’s Antigone (c. 1631), a play deeply engaged in making sense of somatomancy (body divination) in the context of violence and tragedy, in demonstrating the paradoxical vitality of the prophetic corpse (which occupies an indeterminate position between life and death, between being an active prophetic agent and a passive prophetic instrument), and in puzzling out the role of the mutilated body in producing tragic knowledge. In its reworking of Sophocles, Lucan, and other tragic source material, May’s tragedy brings to light a crucial triadic relationship between the violated body, knowledge, and tragic form, showing how the body – because of the violence to which it is submitted, and via the privileged knowledge it produces – propels tragic action. 1 May’s primary model is Robert Garnier’s French Antigone, ou la pie´te´ (1580), which itself draws on Sophocles, Seneca, and Statius. May also draws on English sources and, as I will show, on Lucan (Miola, 2014; Britland, 2006).

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 82–94. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0114-2

Thomas May’s Tragedy of Antigone, The Theban Princess (written late 1620s and printed 1631) is a curious mash-up of classical and early modern texts.1 In his adaptation of the myth, May sends Creon to consult with a group of three witches, who appear in Thebes as if transported from the Scottish highlands of Macbeth. The witches, who are found combing the battlefield and gathering up a ‘treasury’ of wet limbs, tongues, brains, and other body parts, grant Creon’s request for prophetic knowledge – he did, after all, provide them with the corpses to practice on by refusing to bury the slain Argives. Through

Chapter 7 was originally published as Usher, P. M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 82–94. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0114-2.

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necromancy, the witches cause a dead body to speak and deliver a fatal prophecy to the ruler. Creon, in turn, rejects the prophecy of the corpse, turning subsequently to Tiresias (with no more positive an outcome, much to Creon’s chagrin). I begin with this summary in order to sketch out May’s particularly striking and largely overlooked depiction of prophecy. May’s Antigone is deeply engaged in making sense of somatomancy (body divination) in the context of violence and tragedy, in demonstrating the paradoxical vitality of the prophetic corpse, and in puzzling out the role of the mutilated body in producing tragic knowledge. In this essay, I examine May’s depiction of dismembering and violating the body (or making use of the organs and members of previously violated bodies) in order to divine the future. The body represented by tragedy, May demonstrates, can grant prophetic knowledge – but it first has to be butchered. Through an examination of May’s play, I argue that vital corpses and prophetic remains bring to light the crucial triadic relationship between the violated body, knowledge, and tragic form, allowing us to better understand how the body – because of the violence to which it is submitted, and via the privileged knowledge it produces – propels tragic action.

Context, definitions, sources The body (human and non-human) has long been a rich prophetic medium. Most familiar are practices like palmistry and physiognomy, but a host of other practices have been devised for obtaining prophetic knowledge, from interpreting the sounds of the belly (gastromancy) to holding a boy’s fingernail up to the sun (onychomancy).2 Bodies seem a natural choice as a prophetic medium since they are connected in various ways to notions of mysterious and privileged knowledge. As scholars have widely discussed, early modern practices like anatomical dissection were propelled by an impulse to discover the knowledge contained within the body (Sawday, 1995). And knowledge of a dissected body was closely connected to knowledge of oneself – to understand something of one’s own body, it was deemed necessary to dismantle and look inside the dead body of someone else. Bodies are sealed, covered with skin, secretive; they contain privileged knowledge. They also, in the early modern imagination, have an agency of their own – murdered corpses were supposed to bleed in the presence of their killer (cruentation), and even involuntary gestures such as blushing revealed potentially privileged information about a person’s feelings or a situation.3 In this period, the body acts as a sort of divining rod – an instrument that leads the seeker towards knowledge, but also has an agency of

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2 Both examples are among those listed by Herr Trippa in Rabelais’ TiersLivre (1997, 269).

3 See Floyd-Wilson (2010) Schoenfeldt (2004, 60–1), and Hoffman (2014).

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4 On the divining rod and debates about its agency, see Agricola (1556, 39–42).

5 See Traister (1984), Waite (2003), and Friesen (2010), for example.

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its own.4 As we will see, prophetic bodies are subjects with agency and vitality, but they are also instruments. They are objects that speak and have a paradoxical sort of liveliness. There is a darker side to the prophetic body, particularly in cases in which prophecy is connected with bodily violence, dismemberment, gore, limbs, and death. Much has been written about the subject of necromancy – the introduction of necromancy is May’s primary innovation in his version of Antigone – which I will not rehearse here.5 What I aim to underline, however, is the place of necromancy within a discussion of prophetic bodies and body parts. While necromancy is usually classified within the realm of demonology and witchcraft writ large, often referring to black magic more generally and typically seen as distinct from other forms of body divination, it is indeed a form of somatomancy (body prophecy). Like various somatomantic practices (palmistry, cephalomancy, rumpology, etc.), necromancy involves a prophetic body – the main difference is that the body in question is dead. The word σῶμα [‘soˆma’], which constitutes the Greek root of ‘somatomancy,’ does not necessarily imply a living body, nor even a human one. In fact, in Homer the ‘soˆma’ is always a dead body (in contrast with the ‘de´mas’) (Renehan, 1979). The ‘soˆma’ is thus technically speaking the body, living or dead, of a human or a non-human animal. When, and why, did the ‘nekro´s’ [mejqo´1, the dead body] become distinct from the ‘soˆma’ in the context of prophecy? What is the (prophetic) difference between bodies living and dead, whole and fragmented, human and non-human? Why is it that necromancy is so often held as conceptually distinct from other forms of body divination? Is the dead or dismembered body any less bodily? To be sure, it is less alive, less whole, and less intact … but it is nonetheless a body. Necromancy is usually set apart from other forms of body divination because the body itself is not the sole participant: the ghost or spirit of the dead person, via his or her body, delivers the prophecy. Nonetheless, necromancy, through both classical and early modern lenses, has as much if not more to do with the body than with the spirit. As Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim describes the practice in his books of occult philosophy, quoted here in John French’s 1650 English translation, ‘Necromancy hath its name, because it worketh on the bodies of the dead […] alluring [spirits] into the carkasses of the dead [. . .one kind is] Necyomancy, raising the carkasses, which is not done without blood […] to conclude, it worketh all its experiments by the carkases of the slain, and their bones and members’ (Agrippa, 1650, 489–90). Agrippa repeatedly emphasizes the centrality of the body: he notes that necromancy ‘worketh on the bodies’ (my emphasis); he repeats the word ‘carcass’ three times; and he references bodily substances (blood, bones, members). Though he explains that the practice involves luring a spirit into a body, the body itself is nonetheless at the heart of the prophetic practice. Necromancy is also, in Agrippa’s description, connected to violence and bodily violation, for it ‘is not done without blood.’

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May’s own depiction of necromancy in Antigone draws on a particularly bloody model: Lucan’s Pharsalia. Book 6 of Lucan’s Pharsalia contains the most detailed description of necromancy in classical literature.6 May translated Lucan’s text around the same time as he wrote Antigone (his translation of Book 6 was first printed in 1627, just three years before Antigone). Given that May’s Antigone draws on his translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia quite explicitly (in some cases, transposing almost word-for-word), it is important to begin with an examination of Lucan as Englished by May, for the prophetic corpse in Lucan serves as model for that in Antigone. In Lucan’s necromancy episode, Pompey’s son Sextus asks the witch Erictho to prophesy the outcome of the civil war; Erictho grants his request, making use of the corpse of a Pompeian soldier to obtain the prophecy. This instance of necromancy is described in graphic detail and at great length (the scene is about 200 lines, though I will excerpt only a few): ‘Then with warme blood, opening fresh wounds she fills / His breast: and gore to th’inward parts distills’ (Lucan, 1627, sig. L4v). The practice begins with the body, particularly with its penetration, alteration, and manipulation. Erictho violates the already-dead body by creating ‘fresh wounds,’ dismantling it in order to put into it ‘warm blood’ and to slowly introduce ‘gore’ to its ‘inward parts.’7 The visual and semantic focus in these lines (as so often the case in Lucan) is upon the wounds, the breast, the blood, and the inside of the body; the body is being broken down into parts. In order to gain prophetic knowledge from the corpse, in other words, the body must first be mutilated and violently doctored. Erictho then pours into the corpse foreign bodily substances and fragments of various kinds: foam of mad dogs, pyth (organ tissue) of stags fed with serpents, bowels of spotted lynx, knot (erectile tissue structure) of the hyena, dragon’s eyes, phoenix ashes, etc. The corpse, here, becomes a sort of witch’s cauldron, absorbing and combining with the flesh, fluids, and members of various other dead (non-human) bodies. The necromancy scene in May’s Antigone makes use of several of these same non-human animal parts – Lynx’s bowels, foam of dogs, dragon’s eyes – along with several new additions, such as snake skins, frog’s blood, bat wings, crow’s head (D1r).8 In preparation for prophecy, thus, the body is further altered – in this case, recombined with other (non-human) bodies. Lucan’s scene continues from here in quite graphic and gruesome detail (Lucan, 1928, 6.625–827). Its emphasis throughout is on the corpse, the body’s parts, flesh, blood, and other substances; it shows prophecy deeply connected to and arising from bodily viscera (not just an abstracted corpse or dead spirit). Lucan’s emphasis on the grisly corporeality of the body is not unique to his prophetic corpse; it is a hallmark of bodies throughout his epic (Bartsch, 2001). I underline it, however, in order to render visible the parentage of the prophetic bodies in May’s Antigone and the emphasis on bodily violence that May draws from Lucan.

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6 On Lucan’s necromancy episode, see Santangelo (2015) and his bibliography on 182, n. 21.

7 In the Latin, the inward parts [‘medullas’] are being washed of gore, not infused with it (Lucan, 1928, 6.667–9).

8 All citations of May’s Antigone refer to May (1631) and signature number.

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May’s speaking carcass

9 On the early modern body in parts, see Hillman and Mazzio (1997). The prophetic body is in almost all cases a body in parts, since most somatomantic practices focus upon a specific member of the body.

As we shift from Thessaly (Pharsalia) to Thebes (Antigone), a familiar gory terrain sets the stage for prophecy. May’s Thebes is littered with body fragments, namely, the carcasses and bodily fragments of the unburied Argive soldiers. These bodies pollute the air and soil, waiting for ‘fire or putrefaction / [to] dissolve them’ and making for ‘slaughter-smelling fields’ (C3r). Those who pass by the gate of Thebes repeatedly ‘[stumble] on dead men’ and bodies ‘deform’d with gore, trod downe in dust / and cover’d ore with filth,’ with ‘mortall [wounds] yet gaping on [their] breasts’ (C3v and C5r). It is amongst these ruined and decomposing bodies, bodily fragments, and corpses that we encounter the three witches. In May’s Antigone, Lucan’s Erictho has become three, tripled as if passed through the prism of Macbeth or Middleton’s Witch. Collecting bodily fragments, the witches make their preparations for necromancy. They gather up ‘cold gelled tongues and parched braine, / the slime that on blacke knuckles lyes, shrunke sinnews, and congealed eyes,’ fingernails, beard hairs, ‘dead mens limms wet in the raine,’ fat, ashes, and half-burnt bones (C8r and C8v). As before, the focus is entirely upon the body, and more specifically upon the grotesque body-in-parts.9 The fact that the parts are all corrupted in various ways – the tongue and eyes are congealed, the brain is parched, the sinews shrunk, all is cold, wet, and slimy – draws further attention to the body and its physicality as it decomposes. This landscape of rotting bodies that permeate the earth and air prime the stage for prophecy; from the start, knowledge of the future is bound up with death and violence. As they scavenge among the Argive bodies, preparing for necromancy, the witches narrate their search for a corpse with the paradoxical somatic characteristics necessary for prophecy: it must be dead, but not too dead, fragmented, but also whole. Their language is bodily, tactile, and penetrative: We come too late, nor can this field To us a speaking prophet yield. The carcasses, whose cold dead tongues From whole, and yet unperish’d lungs, Twixt hell and us should hold commerce […] These carcasses I say are growne Corrupt, and rotten every one, Their marrow’s lost, there moistur’s gone, Their organs parched by the sunne. (C8r) In order for a carcass to be a ‘speaking prophet,’ it seems, it must have a ‘cold dead tongue’ but also ‘whole and yet unperish’d lungs’; the prophetic corpse must present a combination of death and decay, and, paradoxically, vitality and wholeness. The prophetic corpse, in other words, must be dead … but not too dead. The corpses on the battlefield, bemoans the witch, are all ‘corrupt and

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rotten,’ unsuitable because their marrow is gone, they have lost their moisture, and their organs have dried out. This bodily description is important; for the witches, prophecy is a bodily business. The corpse is not an abstract concept but rather a material body, composed of marrow, organs, and moisture. Its material makeup matters, and in order for the dead body to be useful prophetically, its insides must be in a particular condition. In short, they need to ‘find a fresher carcasse out’ (C8v). Soon, the third witch enters triumphantly with a ‘new slaine carcasse’ that she has examined (she ‘grip’d him round’) and found that ‘the filletts of his lungs are sound’ and that ‘his vitals all are strong and whole / to entertaine the wretched soul’ who will return from hell and inhabit the corpse (C8v). In this search for an oracular corpse, there is tension between a desire for bodily wholeness and fragmentation, as the witch interacts with and refers to the body in terms of its parts (‘the filletts of his lungs’ and vital organs). These lines suggest that necromancy is not just a bodily business but also a tactile one. The witch ‘grips’ the corpse in an intimate way, handling his lungs and examining his ‘vitals.’ The process of bodily examination is, quite literally, ‘touchy-feely,’ like an anatomical dissection. In this gripping, we find the first instance of bodily penetration and bodies mixed together (the hands of the witch and the organs of the corpse). In Lucan, Erictho’s touchy examination of the corpse is even more explicit, for the witch ‘[grips] with her thummes / their now cold marrows’ (Lucan, 1627, sig. L4r). In order to access the prophetic knowledge within the corpse, it is necessary to probe – in a bodily and tactile manner – the physical inside of the corpse. Most importantly, the prophetic corpse occupies an indeterminate position between life and death; between being an active prophetic agent and a passive prophetic instrument, the prophetic corpse has a paradoxical vitality. The reference to the corpse’s ‘vitals’ serves not just to identify particular body parts but also to signal their agency and vitality. Before this scene, corpses and bodily fragments in May’s Thebes are positioned as vital, and their vitality is itself a portent of their future prophetic interventions. For example, the unburied carcasses ‘exhale [noisome aire],’ as though their lungs are still functioning (C4r). The carcasses also ‘possesse / the ground, and barre the conquerors accesse,’ exerting their agency in defiance of the ruler that denies them burial rites (C3r). Thus, before the witches even arrive, the corpses and body parts that litter the ground of Thebes are alive and active. In the necromancy scene, likewise, the dead carcass is in certain ways a passive instrument, but it is also an active participant, with an agency and vitality of its own. When Creon approaches the witches, asking them to prophesy his future, they warn him: ‘this carcasse shall relate it; do not feare / to heare him speake’ (D1r). The prophecy, thus, is framed as a message to be delivered from the carcass himself. Indeed, the dead corpse is granted a masculine subject pronoun – it is a ‘he,’ not an ‘it’– and a grammatical agency, for it is the subject and agent in the sentence (the

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Figure 1: May, 1631, sig. D2v.

Figure 2: May, 1631, sig. D3r.

10 Antigone herself will occupy a similarly liminal position when buried alive. 11 The corpse ‘not dead, not yet alive’ is fleshed-out at more length in Lucan’s text (1627, sig. L6r; 1928, 6.750–60), which describes the clotted blood growing warm, life’s heat mixing with cold death, etc.

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‘carcasse shall relate it’ and he will ‘speake’). This grammatical agency is already present in (and likely drawn from) Lucan’s Pharsalia, in which Erictho warns Sextus that he ‘neede not feare to heare him [the carcass] speake’ (Lucan, 1627, L4v); in the Latin, moreover, Lucan uses the masculine form ‘loquentem,’ rather than the neuter ‘loque¯ns’ (Lucan, 1928, 6.659–661). The prophetic corpse in May’s Antigone thus seems explicitly to imitate its Lucanian model. Prophecy, in both cases, comes not from the mouths of witches, but from a corpse, both dead and vital. Finally, after much ado, the carcass speaks; the vital corpse issues forth prophecy. Ianthus, Creon’s companion, exclaims, ‘the carkasse stirs’ and Creon adds, ‘the face retaines pale death; yet seemes to live’ (D2v). Again, the corpse is an agent and subject and occupies a liminal bodily position between life and death, decay and wholeness (its ‘face retains pale death’ but also ‘seemes to live’).10 While Ianthus’ remark, ‘the carkasse stirs,’ focuses on the body as a whole, Creon’s remark brings attention back to its parts (its face), which also act as grammatical agents (the face ‘retaines’ and ‘seemes’).11 And, finally, the corpse carries out its vital function: ‘the carcasse speakes’ (D2v). It is striking that, in the printed text, the carcass is not given its own character-speech heading, but is instead referred to via an italicized, centered stage direction (Figure 1). The contrast between the italicized announcement of the corpse’s speech and the speech prefixes for ‘Ian.’ and ‘Cre.’ directly above calls additional attention to the agency and presence of the vital corpse. The corpse has a vitality that positions it between life and death, between actor and object. It acts (and thus has a stage direction) but it is not an actor or character in the same way as the others in the scene, not warranting its own speech prefix or formatting to match that of the living bodies. The vitality of the corpse’s opening stage direction is echoed by its closing one; after it has delivered its prophecy, the corpse ‘fals’ (Figure 2). This action happens, again, liminally on the page: it is not given its own line break, but rather is separated off with spaces and italics.

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‘Falls,’ is both an action that the corpse actively performs and a passive movement, signaling a loss of vitality and control. In this stage direction, the corpse also loses its subject pronoun (‘he’) and is reduced to a verb. Nonetheless, via this verb, it does remain to some degree an agent, vital even in its disappearance from the page. We see in May’s Antigone and in the images above that the effectiveness and clarity of body prophecy hinges on the corpse as not just a passive object or instrument but also an active agent. Echoing Hotspur’s reference to Mortimer’s ‘mouthed wounds’ in I Henry IV, May’s prophetic corpse is a body that speaks and provides information. The prophetic corpse is able to read the bodies of others, rather than just being read, passively, itself. Herein lies a key difference from the other form of body prophecy in the play, haruspicy (prophecy via nonhuman animal bodies). Two acts after Creon leaves the witches, he begrudgingly consults Tiresias. As in Sophocles’ play, Tiresias tells Creon that: the open’d beast no signes but sad and fatall did afford […] the blood was blacke, the burning entrailes gave no flame at all, but darkely did consume mouldring away to ashes, and with blacke unsavory smoake clouded the fearfull ayre. (E2r) This depiction of haruspicy is in many ways similar to that of necromancy. The practice involves dead bodies (now non-human animal bodies). And as with the human corpse, whose breast is cut open, here it is the ‘beast’ (not the ‘breast’) that is ‘open’d.’ Rather than speaking, as does the human corpse, however, the non-human animal remains grant prophetic knowledge only through their physicality: their black blood, their flameless smoldering, their black ‘unsavory’ smoke. These non-human animal remains ‘speak,’ thus, via their physical substance and matter, their bodily state acting as prophetic sign (their blood is black). Here, as earlier, the prophetic dead bodies in question are transformed, becoming smoke and ash. Indeed, the bodies disintegrate into the ‘fearful air,’ mixing with the matter of the environment much as the human corpse was earlier mixed with the non-human animal remains. This transformation gives them a sort of animism, a vitality different from that of the speaking corpse, to be sure, but they are nonetheless moving, acting, performing. And the emphasis on the prophetic body in parts also persists here, with a view to entrails, blood, and remains. The scene is different from the earlier one, however, in an important way: the non-human animal body parts are ventriloquized, interpreted by Tiresias. They are unable to speak directly and deliver their prophecy to Creon. The non-human animal entrails, while awarded a similar sort of vitality, are not given the same sort of agency as their human counterparts. They are read, and their signs and language are interpreted by Tiresias, but they do not interact directly and plainly with Creon himself as does the corpse. The non-

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12 A deeper analysis of the ways in which human and animal bodies speak (or fail to speak) to each other in the context of prophecy could usefully be the focus of future study, given the important critical work on the subject (Raber, 2013; Fudge, 2006; Steel and McCracken, 2011; and others).

13 See, inter alia, Thumiger (2013). 14 See Bushnell (1988) and Kamerbeek (1965).

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human animal remains are treated as objects rather than subjects. Perhaps nonhuman animal bodies, in this case, are unable to read and interact with human ones; perhaps there is a ‘body language’ divide between the worlds of human and non-human animal remains. In any case, while non-human animal bodies are violated and broken into parts much like those of humans, they seem to act differently in producing prophetic knowledge. Non-human animals are more instrumentalized. Recent scholarship in animal studies has revealed how the non-human agent is always signifying or performing a type of agency. May’s drama, however, maintains a critical distinction between the prophetic abilities of both human and non-humans to speak.12

Bodies, knowledge, and tragic form The scenes of somatomancy analyzed thus far all beg the question: why is it that prophecy in May’s Antigone (and, indeed, so often in tragedy) involves violence, dismantled bodies, and vital remains? It seems that there is something special, in prophetic terms, about bodies that have been subjected to violence. Bodies, when wounded or slaughtered, gain a privileged knowledge (in the case of necromancy, via the underworld; in haruspicy, via the gods above). The effectiveness of body prophecy thus hinges on violence; the bodies that prove to have the most agency are the ones that, paradoxically, have had their agency stripped from them by violent means. This is often the case with the prophetic (tragic) dead: we might think, for example, of the ghosts of the victims in Richard III that visit Richard to prophesy his downfall. The violently-killed dead have a particularly privileged relationship to prophetic knowledge. This connection of knowledge to violated bodies has strong classical roots. Even if we restrict our attention to the Theban plays, we find various examples: Oedipus’ knowledge comes at the price of the violent gouging of his eyes and the deaths of his family, and the seer Tiresias is likewise blind, possessing a whole-and-yetincomplete body. The prophetic knowledge associated with the tragic body is intimately tied to violence and physical injury. But why? The answer, I argue, has to do with knowledge-seeking and tragic form. May’s depiction of body prophecy comments on the precariousness of knowledge and on the inseparability of knowledge and violence in tragedy. Tragedy, particularly from an Aristotelian standpoint, is very much concerned with knowing and seeing, with gaining knowledge and seeking to know, with anagnorisis.13 This is nowhere better exemplified than in the figure of Oedipus, who opens May’s Antigone (in a scene that May lifts from Garnier’s Antigone), and who is at the heart of the violent fate and curse upon the house of Thebes (Verse´nyi, 1962). In its connection to knowledge-seeking, prophecy (and the difficulty of interpreting prophecy) are central to tragedy, especially the Theban plays, beginning with Oedipus’ misinterpretation of the riddle of the sphinx.14 In

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turning to the witches rather than to Tiresias, May’s Creon enacts, with a variation, the same sort of search for knowledge and truth, and the same misled and erroneous approach to doing so, that is a hallmark of Sophocles’ Theban plays. At the same time, May’s Creon attempts unsuccessfully to avoid the same prophetic mistakes that plagued his predecessor, Oedipus. When dismissing Ianthus’ urgings to consult Tiresias rather than the witches, Creon replies: Tut tut Ianthus, Astrolog’is uncertaine, and the gods In mystike riddles wrap their answers up. But he that dares with confidence to goe Enquire of deaths blacke oracles below In plainest terms the certaine truth shall know. (C7v–C8r) May’s Creon seeks to gain ‘certaine truth’ of the future in ‘plainest terms.’ He seeks to avoid ‘mystike riddles’ in which the gods ‘wrap their answers up.’ He aims, in other words, for an oracle that is clear, plain, and direct. Creon requires a prophetic corpse. Creon suggests that there is something more clear and immediate about the physical body (the corpse, ‘deaths blacke oracle’) in comparison to other prophetic media, for it is more reliable and easier to interpret. As Erictho puts it in May’s translation of the Pharsalia, ‘the gods, and Prophets answere doubtfully’ but he who consults with the dead ‘is plainly told the truth; [the corpse will:] spare not, but name / Plainely the things, and places all’ (Lucan, 1627, sig. L6v). Dead (human) bodies, in other words, speak the truth plainly, not in obscure terms. There are no complicated interpretative and exegetical skills needed in order to make sense of the prophecy that corpses deliver. Body prophecy is broken down into its most simple parts – there are no complicated riddles to decipher, no signs to debate, just plain and concise pieces of information clearly presented. In figurative terms, at least, the rending of the body seems to be tied to the rend(er)ing of prophetic meaning. Unfortunately for Creon, while mutilated bodies may be easy to decipher and to access, their prophetic knowledge wreaks, in turn, further bodily violence. Creon’s prophecy, spoken to him by the necromantic corpse, is that ‘[his] death is neare [… he] at last in death shalt have / (Though [he] denid’st it us [i.e. the Argives]) a grave’ (D2v–D3r). Like Richard III, when visited by the ghosts of his victims, Creon is more-or-less instructed to ‘despair and die.’ The dead body’s prophecy speaks directly to Creon’s own body and to its demise. Indeed, as it ‘fals’ in its closing stage-direction (Figure 2), the prophetic corpse performs the very death it casts upon Creon. The lesson: in tragedy, one can gain prophetic knowledge only when it is already too late. Creon has already ‘denied a grave’ to the dead body; in turn, he is assured, ironically, of his own grave. As is usually the case in tragedy, of course, the prophecy comes true; Creon’s body falls prey to the fate foreseen by the Argive corpse. Indeed, in contrast with Sophocles’ play, Creon does die at the end of May’s telling of Antigone. The vital corpse,

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thus, seems to have the power to intervene not just into Creon’s life, but also into the very shape of the myth itself. May’s speaking carcass experiments with the ‘what if’s’ of tragic knowledge: ‘what if’ Sophocles’ Creon had known what was coming? ‘what if’ he could have received an explicit prophecy to guide his actions? ‘what if’ the prophetic bodies guiding him could speak? The dead and mutilated bodies in May’s Antigone grant prophetic knowledge – a prophetic knowledge that is accessible, plain, and direct – but they also adhere to the forces of tragedy that blind protagonists and lead them to destruction. Though Creon understands the ‘plainest terms’ of the corpse’s prophecy, he is still unable to internalize or accept it. This is, perhaps, the tragic irony of the prophetic corpse. The violated body in May’s play takes on a new prophetic aspect, able to read and inform the lives of the living, but the living are unable to accept the prophecy that they receive, doomed to succumb to their own violent downfall. May’s tragedy, while not the only one in the early modern corpus to feature speaking corpses, is nonetheless unique in how, via its remixing and rewriting of classical sources, it sets out consciously to experiment with the body and the role it plays with respect to violence and knowledge. May’s Antigone demonstrates that the body – tragically, paradoxically – needs to be destroyed in order to gain the insight needed to avoid destruction. May shows the tragic body, thus, to be something of a Gordian Knot. As the witches prepare the Argive corpse for prophecy, shortly before it begins to speak, Creon exclaims, ‘my joynts beginne to tremble, and I fear / as much the meanes of knowledge, as th’event / of what I came to know’ (D2r). The body (both his own and the prophetic corpse) is equated with knowledge itself, and Creon here realizes and expresses the corporeal grounding of tragic knowledge. As his joints begin to tremble, Creon begins to feel the destabilization of his body, and the start of its own violent collapse. Creon’s body, as it begins to tremble, thus produces a prophecy of its own that preempts that of the corpse. This bodily knowledge is inescapable (Creon cannot control his trembling joints) but also impossible to face; indeed, Ianthus seems to speak for both of them when he responds, ‘let me hereafter / rather remaine in endlesse ignorance’ (D2r). This rejection of knowledge and embrace of ignorance, of course, comes too late – Creon’s tragic body has an agency of its own, mirroring that of the vital corpse, driving him towards the death and destruction prophesied. May’s tragedy demonstrates, thus, the power of the carcass that speaks, and the performative nature of its utterance. The body – prophetic, violent, inevitable – propels tragic action.

About the Author Penelope Meyers Usher is a doctoral candidate in English at NYU. Her dissertation, ‘The Indeterminate Body: Tragic Corporeality in Early Modern

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England,’ examines ways in which acts of violence in early modern English tragedy disrupt the integrity of the human body, complicating its status. She has published articles in JMEMS, MaRDiE, and Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Routledge, 2018) (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Agricola, G. 1556. De Re Metallica, trans. H. C. Hoover and L. H. Hoover. New York: Dover. Agrippa von Nettesheim, H. C. 1650. Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. J. French. London: R.W. for Gregory Moule. Bartsch, S. 2001. Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan’s Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Britland, K. 2006. Buried Alive: Thomas May’s 1631 Antigone. In The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era, eds. I. Atherton and J. Sanders. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Bushnell, R. 1988. Prophesying Tragedy: Sign and Voice in Sophocles’ Theban Plays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Floyd-Wilson, M. 2010. Arden of Faversham: Tragic Action at a Distance. In The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy, eds. E. Smith and G. A. Sullivan Jr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Friesen, R. C. 2010. Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press. Fudge, E. 2006. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hillman, D. and C. Mazzio, eds. 1997. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early-Modern Europe. New York: Routledge. Hoffman, T. 2014. Coriolanus’s Blush. In Embodied Cognition and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Early Modern Body-Mind, eds. L. Johnson, J. Sutton, and E. Tribble. New York: Routledge. Kamerbeek, J. C. 1965. Prophecy and Tragedy. Mnemosyne 18(1): 29–40. Lucan. 1928. The Civil War, trans. J. Duff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lucan. 1627. Lucan’s Pharsalia, trans. T. May. London: Thomas Jones. May, T. 1631. The Tragedy of Antigone, the Theban Princess. London: Thomas Harper for Beniamin Fisher. Miola, R. S. 2014. Early Modern Antigones: Receptions, Refractions, Replays. Classical Receptions Journal 6(2): 221–44. Rabelais, F. 1997. Le Tiers-Livre, ed. G. Demerson. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Raber, K. 2013. Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Renehan, R. 1979. The Meaning of RXLA in Homer: A Study in Methodology. California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12: 269–82.

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Santangelo, F. 2015. Testing the Boundaries: Divination and Prophecy in Lucan. Greece & Rome 62(2): 177–88. Sawday, J. 1995. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge. Schoenfeldt, M. 2004. ‘Commotion Strange’: Passion in Paradise Lost. In Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, eds. G. K. Paster, K. Rowe, and M. Floyd-Wilson. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Steel, K. and P. McCracken, eds. 2011. Special issue: The Animal Turn. postmedieval 2(1). Thumiger, C. 2013. Vision and Knowledge in Greek Tragedy. Helios 40(1–2): 223–45. Traister, B. H. 1984. Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Verse´nyi, L. 1962. Oedipus: Tragedy of Self-Knowledge. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 1(3): 20–30. Waite, G. K. 2003. Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Original Article

Prophecy and poetry: The Second World War and the turn to biblical typolog y in George Herber t’s The Temple

Martin Elsky Department of English and Comparative Literature, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA.

Abstract Rosemond Tuve’s Chapel Talks reveal that her demonstration of the connection between Herbert’s imagery and biblical typology is related to events of the Second World War. Her argument for Herbert’s use of typology is widely regarded as a reaction to William Empson’s ahistorical New Critical reading of Herbert. Her Chapel Talks indicate that her interest in typological imagery predated her dispute with Empson and are connected to her experience with mostly Jewish refugees at Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC. These talks illustrate the moral commitment behind her groundbreaking historical research and its relationship to theological movements leading to the Second Vatican Council and to a changed relationship between Christians and Jews following the war. As Tuve’s typological criticism was widely regarded as an influential vehicle for larger arguments for the value of historicism, her Chapel Talks suggest a connection of historical criticism to world historical events. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 95–110. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0112-4

Seventeenth-century literary studies rose to a new phase of maturity and richness when, in the early 1950s, Rosemond Tuve demonstrated that George Herbert’s symbolism was based on biblical typology, or the traditional Christian

Chapter 8 was originally published as Elsky, M. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 95–110. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41280-018-0112-4.

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interpretation of Jewish scripture as a prophecy of Christ and a foreshadowing of Christian scripture. It is well known that Tuve’s dramatic unveiling of Herbert’s reliance on biblical typology was propelled by a passion for historicizing. The historical scholarship that revealed Herbert’s typological symbolism quickly made Tuve stand out as one of the avatars of the historical method, one who opened the way for several generations of impressive, innovative historical research that had an impact on seventeenth-century studies well beyond Herbert; the results of Tuve’s research on typology gave seventeenth-century studies a predominantly historical cast and a preeminent prestige in literary studies at large. However, it is barely, if ever, noticed that Tuve’s historical discovery of the central importance of typological imagery is connected to her sensitivity to the suffering caused by the Second World War. Tuve left behind a hitherto unrecognized record of the personal moral motivation that drove her to fundamental and far-reaching historical insights. That record stands as a powerful example of how personal moral response to contemporary world events led to a literary movement that claims an objectivity resulting from precisely a sense of historical distance. Tuve’s careful work on Herbert offers a case study illustrating how a branch of literary studies noted for its assertion of fidelity to the past is rooted in its obligation to the present; it demonstrates that moral investment in a contemporary cause leaves traces and gives force to its treatment of the past. The link Tuve makes between typological reading and the war invites us to read her profound empathy with Herbert’s verse not only in conjunction with rival literary approaches but also alongside other formulations about typology that arose in response to the war. Tuve’s typological approach to Herbert bears much in common with the concerns of the French Nouvelle The´ologie, whose method of ressourcement was also aimed at recovering historical sources that highlighted biblical typology and was used to justify a protective and embracing attitude towards the living community descended from the prophetic biblical types, namely, the Jews, during the period of horrendous wartime persecution. The post-war scholarship that followed from the war-time activities of the nouvelle the´ologiens was written at same time as Tuve’s work on Herbert. Together, their work on typology highlights a quest for the proper posture that modifies or reverses the living effects of the traditional claims of one civilization to adopt, absorb, and supplant another as part of the divine, providential historical – or typological – scheme. The nouvelle the´ologiens influenced typological literary criticism in a manner that emphasized the inclusiveness and continuity of Jewish and Christian scripture in a manner that alleviates rather than promotes traditional hostility between the communities of those scriptures. Tuve sought something similar. Looking at the emergence of typological criticism from the perspective of its origins in the war and alongside the nouvelle the´ologiens takes the reading of

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Herbert – and other figures, such as Donne and Milton – beyond literary movements alone to momentous world historical events of the twentieth century. There is a path from the dire moral considerations connected with typological thinking during the war to the historical literary scholarship that followed in the years after the war, a connection that was only enhanced by the Second Vatican Council. Just as early modern typological exegesis has a history, so too does twentieth-century typological thought also have a history that parallels its impact on literary historicism. The history of twentieth-century typological exegesis has yet to be written; yet that history has played a shaping, and perhaps enabling, role in the way we approach seventeenth-century poets like Herbert and his contemporaries.

Tu v e ’ s C h a p e l Ta l k s Tuve demonstrated that much of Herbert’s imagery was built on the scaffold of biblical typology in her groundbreaking article ‘On Herbert’s Sacrifice,’ published in 1950, in which she takes William Empson to task for missing the historical basis of Herbert’s symbolism. Tuve was already known as an historical scholar, but she had only fleetingly looked askance at Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) and only remarked on it in a footnote in her 1943 survey of Renaissance literary scholarship as an example of ‘conjectural explorations [. . .] into spiritual biography, [and] emotional attitudes’ (Tuve, 1943, 227 n. 37). She does not bring up his name when she complains of the ‘inadequate technical knowledge’ of theology as a ‘correlative field’ of literature (Tuve, 1943, 246). Nor does she think it important to refer to him in her observation about ‘the increase of interest taken by free-lance non-academic critics in problems of late-Renaissance scholarship and criticism’ as ‘one of the healthiest and most exasperating of recent developments in work on the period’ (Tuve, 1943, 249). However, in her 1950 article, she famously frames her explication of Herbert’s typological imagery around an extended historicist rejoinder to Empson’s New Critical reading of Herbert and offers a sharply worded corrective to his claims about the originality of Herbert’s use of ‘metaphysical’ imagery, referring this time to the 1947 edition of Seven Types. Significantly, Tuve’s papers indicate that between 1943 and 1950, her fervor about typology was roused by her concern about the depredations and persecutions of the Second World War. Her papers raise the possibility that her turn to typology may have originated with her response to the war rather than with opposition to Empson. Her papers make no mention of rival critical movements, suggesting that her feeling for wartime affliction, to borrow a term from Herbert, motivated her interest in typology. Tuve’s own explanation for her turn to typological exegesis to explain the power of Herbert’s poetry

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establishes that, in the background of the literary history of typology, there is a more freighted human history for which the war is a touchstone. The papers I refer to are a series of talks she gave at her college, Connecticut College for Women, to students on Chapel Day (Evans, 2004, 141–9). In these talks, we can witness the emergence of her thoughts about Herbert’s typological symbolism before she expressed them in scholarly form. In her Chapel Talk of 1944 (her typescripts here and elsewhere indicate no other specific date), she enunciates an ethical theme in connection with the war that she will later attach to Herbert’s poetry, namely, personal responsibility for the suffering of others. She recounts her experience as a volunteer at the Quaker-run Black Mountain College in the summer of 1943, where she tutored English to ‘18 highly trained adult minds,’ including the son of Sigmund Freud, who escaped Nazi Europe. She gives graphic but brief sketches of the persecutions endured by several of her Jewish tutees in ‘the Nazi pyramid of racist oppression’ (Tuve, 1944, 3). She searingly points to parallel acts of persecutions against African-Americans in the US, and she admonishes her students for their own prejudice against Jews and African-Americans (Tuve, 1944, 3). She ends by summarizing the ‘old lesson of Christian doctrine’ that she learned at Black Mountain: ‘I am responsible for sins we have NOT committed’ if they were committed ‘in the spirit I myself show in other minor or lesser ways’ (Tuve, 1944, 4). We must therefore all have a ‘consciousness of sin,’ she implores. ‘I think we must begin to see the suffering in the world is our fault, or it will never be lightened’ (Tuve, 1944, 4). We cannot know if these sentiments were already excited by reading Herbert, but they are the sentiments she will attach to ‘The Sacrifice’ and to Herbert’s poetry in general; as such, they form the beginning of her thinking about Herbert and enunciate what she considers to be the theme that makes our reading of Herbert worthwhile in the first place. In her talk the following year (1945), Tuve begins a pattern of connecting seventeenth-century writing with the war. She comments that a sermon of Donne written in 1622 could just as easily have been written about the Nazis in 1943 or 1945. But it was in her Chapel Talk of March 1946 that Tuve makes an explicit connection between George Herbert and moral sentiments about guilt and responsibility associated with the war. She opens the talk with reference to ‘a certain convention in medieval lyrical writings,’ which she calls ‘The Accusing Christ’ (Tuve, 1946, 1). The genre has a pointed moral message: it uses ‘symbolic representation’ as ‘a way of dramatizing’ a fundamental human sin: ‘the terrible and shocking contrast between the price that is paid for man’s redemption, and the return man makes to those who make sacrifices for him’ (Tuve, 1946, 1). She goes on to say that this convention is ‘the basis of a poem by the 17c. PROTestant [sic] poet, now preetty [sic] generally acclaimed as a poet of some greatness, Geo. Herbert’ (Tuve, 1946, 1). The poem she refers to is ‘The Sacrifice,’ in which Herbert ‘speaks of a sacrifice which recurs whenever man blindly turns away from those who have given their lives that good may

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prevail’ (Tuve, 1946, 2). In this sense, Tuve speaks of the Passion as if it takes place in recurrently reenacted liturgical time. ‘Christ does not speak in historical time,’ she comments; the poem does not represent the Passion as a ‘single occasion [. . .] conceived as an historical event’ (Tuve, 1946, 1–2). Accordingly, the lesson of the recurring sacrifice of Herbert’s poem, she points accusingly to her students, is that people need to ‘see with their own eyes the wild irresponsibility and thoughtlessness with which they have accepted the sacrifices of others’ (Tuve, 1946, 3). She refers specifically to the ‘men and women who WILL DIE of starvation or neglect, this winter, in Europe, who gave their health and strength in resistance movements that helped to stop the forces which might otherwise have meant OUR destruction’ (Tuve, 1946, 2). She now includes the peoples of several nations of Europe in this catalogue of suffering but goes out of her way to mention again the victims of the Nazi death camps, ‘Austrians released from the concentration camp at Dachau’ (Tuve, 1946, 2). She compares this ‘blindness’ to ‘a re-enactment of the blindness shown at Calvary’ (Tuve, 1946, 3) by those who tormented Christ on the cross. This thoughtlessness is the point of the Middle English poetic genre, she argues, upon which Herbert drew for ‘The Sacrifice.’ As an example, she quotes from the fourteenth-century ‘Accusing Christ’ lyric, ‘Mi folk, now answer me.’ Jewish victims of the war and all who have become post-war sufferers converge in the voice of Christ sacrificed on the cross. She calls attention to what she expects to appear unusual to her students, that the suffering voice on the cross speaks in the (Jewish) voice of Moses, as she explains that Moses was ‘thought of during the Middle Ages a type of Xt [Christ]’ (Tuve, 1946, 1). This typological identification is the feature of the lyric that will later become the centerpiece of her most important innovation in her historicizing treatment of ‘The Sacrifice.’ In Tuve’s sermonizing here, the typologically combined voices of Jewish OT (Moses) and Christian NT (Jesus) speak out for human responsibility for the suffering of others who have sacrificed themselves for us. This is the message of Herbert’s ‘Sacrifice’ that she articulates in this Chapel Talk. This is what she calls the ‘consciousness of sin,’ sounded by a voice from Jewish scripture in which the voice of Christ is embedded. The ‘consciousness of sin’ and the ethical obligations that originated with reflection on those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis become universalized in Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice’ and its medieval forerunners, whose universal moral imperative is brought to bear on the present – the immediate aftermath of the war – by a typological symbolism in which a Christian NT voice embodies its Jewish prophecy. The moral dimension of Herbert’s hold on Tuve, we see in her Chapel Talks, suggests that her impulse towards typology, whatever it had to do with offering an historicist alternative to the New Criticism, had also to do with finding a symbolism, in light of the war, that represents a Christian ethics through which the Christian antitype includes rather than supplants the Jewish type and the Jews themselves, or an ethics according to which one civilization does not negate or abolish

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another. Indeed, the sequence of statements – critique of ahistorical criticism with scant mention of Empson (Tuve, 1943), ardor about consciousness of sin and typology in ‘Accusing Christ’ poems (Tuve, 1944, 1946), historicist critique of Empson for failing to recognize typological criticism (Tuve, 1950) – suggests that she may have been drawn to typology by morally inflected, war-related considerations before she formulated her scholarly, historicist argument.

W a r t i m e t y p o l o g y a n d N o u v e l l e T h e´ o l o g i e The link between the war and biblical typology that Tuve found in poems dramatizing the ‘Accusing Christ’ is part of a larger pattern of European interest in typological exegesis connected to the war that is not generally recognized. The National Socialist takeover in Germany in the 1930s and the installation of the Vichy regime in France posed a special challenge to typological interpretation. The persecutions of Jews under these regimes created a kind of Christian exegetical crisis regarding how to explain the connection between Jewish and Christian scripture or indeed the connection of Christians to Jewish scripture and to Jews themselves. Theologians who placed enormous, nearly existential faith in the scripture of the Jews as the promise of and witness to Christ were forced to confront the severe attack on the Jewish populations who lived among them. In the grim period of the Second World War, typological scriptural exegesis and its related theology were the nexus through which Christians tried to fathom the horrific persecution of the Jews, their typological counterparts, as it were. How Christians understood what it meant for the antitype to prophetically fulfill the type was more than a matter of biblical interpretation; it had serious consequences for how to treat the living, contemporary community that had been relegated to the status of a type. The French nouvelle the´ologiens responded to the challenge posed to typological interpretation in these circumstances with special urgency. Their approach may be better appreciated when compared to the fraught discussion of typology in National Socialist Germany during the 1930s. The National Socialist-sponsored church advocated abolishing typology by de-canonizing the OT as Jewish and even expunging Paul from the NT precisely because he created the conceptual framework of ‘Judaizing’ typology (Steigmann-Gall, 2003, 1-12). At great peril to themselves, orthodox Lutheran theologians, with different degrees of defiance, defended the typological connection between the two scriptures. Nevertheless, historians point out that they did not openly object to the regime’s treatment of Jews, and, indeed, while rejecting racial antisemitism, ‘nearly all [. . .] German theologians of this time,’ the historian Matthew Becker observes, ‘held a theologically grounded polemical position over against Judaism that contained German-vo¨lkisch elements’ (Becker, 2013, 111). Many either supported or passively accepted the anti-Jewish edicts during

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the Jewish boycott and book burning; they affirmed that Jews remained within the typological schema under a curse until they accepted that schema and their place in it. It is often remarked that the figure most associated with identifying literary typology, Erich Auerbach, highlighted, in the 1930s, the preservation of the OT, and therefore the Jewish origins of Europeans civilization, in NT antitypes, but he too formulated typology in Hegelian form as an Aufhebung (Auerbach, 1938, 456), or the sublation of a dying Jewish civilization by the newly born Christian civilization (Auerbach, 2014, 99). All that is left is a legacy of polemic against the Jews’ refusal to accept typology (Auerbach, 2014, 87). Proponents of the French Catholic Nouvelle The´ologie took a markedly different approach. Those associated with this movement in the late 1930s and then in the 1940s gave typology a set of values quite different from those of its German defenders – and even from Auerbach. For this movement, the affirmation of the essential connection between the typological prophecies of the OT and their fulfillment in the NT was more explicitly a thesis about the Jewish origins of Christianity, and as such became the basis of Catholic resistance to the anti-Jewish policies of Vichy. The theological position underlying the political position was supported by the recovery, or historical ressourcement, of Patristic sources in search of a biblical theology that challenged the Church’s dominant neo-Scholasticism (Mettepenningen, 2010, 3-38; Crane and Moore, 2013). This approach had the impact of placing typology at the center of the Nouvelle The´ologie and led nouvelle the´ologiens to seek the moral implications of the attribution of Judaism as the origin of Christianity (Daley, 2005). That these tenets were articulated during the Vichy regime had enormous consequences. One of the main proponents of ressourcement and a principal figure in The Nouvelle The´ologie (although his relationship to the movement is complex), Henri de Lubac, detailed the connection between typology and resistance to Vichy (de Lubac, 1988).1 De Lubac does not refer to typology specifically, but he treats the typological relationship between Jewish and Christian scripture as the historical forebearer of Christianity in Judaism. Moreover, de Lubac illustrates how this notion of Jewish historical roots created fraternal relations and ultimately solidarity with Jews against Vichy’s antisemitism as anti-Christian (de Lubac, 1990, 17). Sensing antisemitism within the Church elite, de Lubac himself wrote a memorandum to his superiors condemning antisemitism as ‘hatred against the people who were once the chosen people of God’, and recalled Pius XI’s statement that ‘we are all Semites,’ as well as Pius XII’s ‘famous speech on Catholics as the spiritual heirs of the Jews’ (de Lubac, 1990, 26, 31). This fundamental sense of the relationship of the NT to the OT in fact became the theological basis of opposition to Vichy’s treatment of the Jews in so far as their protection was demanded by the Christian belief that Christ and the Church were descended from the people of Abraham and that the Church was connected to the Jews through Jewish

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1 See Mettepenningen (2010, 95-113).

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scripture. Perhaps the best known example of the resistance that resulted from these views is the Chaine Declaration, composed by the Abbe´ Joseph Chaine on behalf of the theological faculty of the University of Lyons, the center of the Nouvelle The´ologie; the declaration protested the 1941 Vichy statute against the Jews and called for ‘a more just appreciation in their [the Jews’] regard with respect to both their present and their past’ (de Lubac, 1990, 59; my emphasis). The statement is an implicit recognition that Catholic ressourcement scholarship about the Jewish origins of the NT was connected to the moral imperative of resistance to Vichy in 1941 and then to opposition to the 1942 deportations. More recently this connection between scholarship and religious practice has been enunciated as the desirable norm (Crane and Moore, 2013). After the war, the wartime legacy of typological thinking through ressourcement materialized most notably in the scholarship of de Lubac’s close colleague, the Jesuit Jean Danie´lou. Though he began writing about typology earlier, he wrote two influential book-length studies in the early 1950s (Danie´lou, 1950, 1951), almost exactly contemporary with Tuve’s 1950 article and her 1952 monograph. Both these works became important typology source books for literary scholars, who have not generally recognized their connection to the anti-Vichy activities of the Nouvelle The´ologie. Danie´lou extracts from the early Fathers the origins of the sacraments in ancient Jewish religious practice, which is in turn based on the scriptures of the Jews. He attributes to Jewish scripture a meaningful symbolism of its own. He concludes that ‘the mentality of the Jews and of Christ was formed by the Old Testament,’ which in turn shaped the Jewish liturgy and formed the basis of the Christian liturgy (Danie´lou, 1956, 6). The best way to understand the meaning of the sacraments for Christ and the Apostles, therefore, is to study Jewish scripture. Danie´lou typically moves from the OT text to Christian ritual or even from the text of Jewish ritual to that of Christian ritual as between connected civilizations. Even while recognizing that the Fathers who identified typological connections between the OT and the NT used typology to argue against Judaism, Danie´lou continues the wartime legacy of typology of the Nouvelle The´ologie by granting Jewish scripture and liturgy a sense of its own value as the sources of Christianity and what Chaine called ‘a more just appreciation’ of contemporary as well as biblical Jews. That is not to say that Danie´lou eschewed the belief that the Christian antitype ‘surpassed’ the Jewish type; he could also speak of the type as an insubstantial ‘shadow’ in relation to the ‘reality’ that fulfills it (Danie´lou,1956, 85 and 1960, 12). Danie´lou indeed faced much criticism and disappointment because of his ‘supersessionism,’ or the notion that Christianity has replaced Judaism (Danie´lou and Chouraqui, 1966; Agus, 1968). Nevertheless, Danie´lou balanced this supersessionism with a rejection of the negative attitudes associated with typology, and with an emphasis on the typological continuity between OT and NT in The Bible and the Liturgy ultimately

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advanced the nouvelle the´ologiens’ wartime attitude of recognizing spiritual significance in the living community representing biblical types.

Tu v e ’ s s c h o l a r l y t r e a t m e n t o f t y p o l o g y The ressourcement of the nouvelle the´ologiens sheds light on Tuve’s intention to reformulate typology in a manner that does not denigrate the people whose religion was understood to be the adopted source of their own. In her article on Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice,’ Tuve’s historicizing ressourcement, as it were, is brandished in full view. She demonstrates in one example after another that the poetic effects that Empson attributes to metaphysical poetry derive from the juxtaposition of type and antitype, as she reveals a variety of sources related to the Good Friday liturgy (the ‘Accusing Christ’ of her 1946 talk) from which Herbert’s imagery stems. She waves the victory of ‘knowledge’ over (New Critical) ‘ignorance’ achieved by strict historical method, indeed the very method of interpretation used in the historical period of the poem itself. However, readers of Tuve have been less aware that the scholarly article was motivated by the same moral and religious convictions she enunciated in her Chapel Talks about the poem, and which link her historical imagination with her moral imagination about the war. Historical restoration of meaning will give the poem’s ‘sacrificial idea’ (she takes the term from Empson) emotional intensity, she avers, adopting the sermonizing tone of the Chapel Talks, only if we see human beings ‘as guilty of wrong-doing,’ only if we care about ‘retribution’ and ‘Atonement,’ only if we have what she called in her Chapel Talks a ‘consciousness of sin’ (Tuve, 1950, 7 and 60). Historical ‘knowledge’ of the poem’s symbolism gives such ‘good poems a chance for continued life’ (Tuve, 1950, 61) more than any of Empson’s explanations could, but only if we take Herbert’s ‘sacrificial idea’ seriously. She comes close to paraphrasing her 1946 Chapel Talk when she emphasizes that the poem’s typological imagery is a response to ‘the shocking contrast between man’s actions toward God and God’s actions toward man’ (Tuve, 1950, 64). As in her Chapel Talk, here too she treats the ‘sacrificial idea’ of ‘The Sacrifice’ as if it addresses human guilt and responsibility, the human condition above the interests of confessional denomination. Jewish types of the Passion together with the Church and its Christian antitypes assume parity in so far as both have universal human significance in what she terms ‘Judaic-Christian ethics.’ The poem’s aesthetic and moral impact derives from the dependence of its Christian imagery on Jewish scripture, on Christian symbolism reaching back to Jewish symbolism; as such, it conveys little, if any, sense of Danie´lou’s supersessionism or Auerbach’s Hegelian Aufhebung, any sense of one civilization replacing another. In this regard, Tuve parallels that part of Danie´lou’s treatment of typology that emphasizes continuity between OT and NT, and that part of Danie´lou’s view that grants

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importance to the Jewish type within a set of Jewish symbolism. To the extent that this reading is connected with the war, Tuve achieved Chaine’s ‘more just appreciation’ of the Jews’ present as well as their past. As in her illustration of the ‘Accusing Christ’ in her Chapel Talk, type and antitype converge as two parts of a symbol whose historically regained vitality proclaims the need for atonement for our iniquitous human proclivities. From a literary point of view, Tuve’s treatment of type as metaphor raises rather than lowers the status of the type, contrary to biblical exegesis per se. As such, she shares some of the impulses of the Nouvelle The´ologie, but exceeds them by treating type and antitype as two equal members of the images that give the poem its powerful effect. Tuve and Danie´lou revived and incorporated in their scholarly work a form of symbolism traditionally associated with hostility to Jews, and they transvalued the typological dependence of Christian symbolism on Jewish prophecy into Chaine’s ‘more just appreciation,’ though to different degrees and in different ways. In the monograph that followed her article on ‘The Sacrifice,’ A Reading of George Herbert (1952), Tuve addressed more directly those issues presented by supersessionism that were not consistent with her moral vision. In this fuller treatment of The Temple, she articulates the centrality of typology in the volume as a whole: the volume is ‘pre-occupied with the relation between the Old Dispensation and the New,’ with ‘Ecclesia, and her great Type, Synagogue’ (my emphasis), which provides ‘a unity in the whole body of his poetry’ (Tuve, 1952, 123). She famously analyzes the typological imagery of ‘The Bunch of Grapes,’ identifying the traditional supersessionist progress from ‘God as Law or rigorous Justice’ to ‘God as Love,’ as (only?) ‘one part of his subject’ in the poem, and attributes the supersessionist typology to symbolism found in Isidore and Rabanus Maurus (Tuve, 1952, 123 n. 8). Perhaps more pointedly, after ‘The Bunch of Grapes,’ she moves directly to ‘The Jewes,’ a poem that addresses implications of the Jewish rejection of typological prophecy for Herbert’s contemporary rather than biblical Jews. With notable exceptions (Matar, 1990; Leimberg, 1993; Hodgkins, 2014–2015), the poem has received surprisingly scant attention since Tuve’s treatment. The poem submits, conventionally, that the Jews have been left a desiccated ‘Poore nation,’ who have lost the letter of its scripture because they did not accept its true typological meaning; the poem ends with a prayer for the Jews to return to the true Christian sense of their scripture. However, Tuve mitigates the supersessionism she pointed to in ‘The Bunch of Grapes.’ She has no doubt, of course, that ‘Herbert believes’ that ‘Ecclesia’s eyes were opened to a [superior] revelation of Heavenly Love, and that it was a true revelation’ (Tuve, 1952, 124). Nevertheless, she confronts typological appropriation by engaging Herbert’s remarkable view that typology is a form of thievery: Christians ‘purloin’d’ their scripture from the Jews, Herbert says in the opening line, a remarkable gesture that concedes, at least for the moment, that

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typology is a dubious voiding of one ‘nation’ by another, a kind of postcolonial confiscation. For Tuve, this unseemly seizure becomes the main import of the poem: Herbert’s typological symbolism, far from being triumphalist, illustrates that the Jews’ ‘sweet sap and juice’ which ‘the Gentiles got’ by this theft was ‘all underserving’ (Tuve, 1952, 124). The principal emotion of the poem is an ‘unassertive caritas’ that outweighs the theme of the displacement of one nationreligion by another: the poem’s typological images ‘make the poem primarily an expression of penitent humility in the possession of unmerited gains got by others’ loss’ (Tuve, 1952, 123–4). Whatever Herbert’s belief in the superiority of Christianity, the poem is an act of humility that highlights his own ‘unworthiness,’ an echo of Tuve’s concern with the ‘consciousness of sin’ that carried over from her Chapel Talks into her scholarly treatment of the poetry. As in her 1946 Chapel Talk, she removes the poem from any ‘single historical situation’ of the Crucifixion to declare that in it ‘we read about an attitude of mind’ that applies universally, that is, to ‘what is this moment taking place,’ in a world that ‘still faces the problem of guilt and redemption which [Herbert’s] symbols deal with’ (Tuve, 1952, 124, 129 and 1946, 2). In 1952, Tuve is still drawn by sentiments developed in response to the war and its aftermath, even to the extent of ‘falsification,’ a term she uses for presentist distortions of Renaissance scholarship (Tuve, 1943, 232-33). Specifically, she appears to be unwilling to acknowledge that, however recurrent are the accusations of Christ against our universalized moral blindness, the moment that is recurring is the accusation against the treachery and faithlessness of the Jews who are tormenting Christ on the cross in ‘The Sacrifice.’ Tuve’s incisive historicist approach may have been directed against the ‘ignorance’ of ahistorical, pyschologistic New Critical readings, but it was also spurred on by her own presentist distresses, and those distresses drove her, with one otherwise rare but telling lapse of insight, to a theme not much recognized in criticism at the time, namely the enervating appropriation of one culture by another. The ‘enduring sweetness’ of the humility that keeps Herbert from exulting in the ‘purloin’d’ unmerited gain makes it impossible ‘to read the poet without loving the man’ (Tuve, 1952, 124). We do not know if Tuve knew anything about the Chaine Declaration or any of the activities or ideas of the nouvelle the´ologiens. She was fluent in French (Evans, 2004, 73) and refers to Danie´lou in the original, though not before 1966 (Tuve, 1966, 46, n. 20). In any event, Tuve and Danie´lou come to be quoted together in scholarly articles about typology, and together they set much of the tone in typological criticism that followed from its wartime legacy as interest in typological symbolism spread to Donne and Milton among others, even while that legacy was no longer visible.2

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2 See Lewalski (1973) on Donne and Frye (1956) and Tayler (1979) on Milton.

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Ty p o l o g i c a l c r i t i c i s m a f t e r Tu v e The implications of the nouvelle the´ologiens’ wartime and immediate post-war treatment of typology received broad public attention with the Second Vatican Council and the resulting encyclical on the Jews, Nostra Aetate, which adopted many of the positions of the Nouvelle The´ologie. Not only was John XXIII’s own interest in Church and Synagogue shaped by the war, as Frank Coppa points out, but he also appointed de Lubac and Danie´lou as theological advisors to the Council; indeed, some regard the Council as the continuation of the work of de Lubac and Danie´lou (Coppa, 2006, 220-34; Crane and Moore, 2013). While the encyclical affirms supersessionism, it treats the typological relationship of the two testaments by way of the Psalmic image of horticultural grafting rather than Auerbach’s Hegelian Aufhebung: the Jews and the OT are ‘the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles’ and the NT (Paul VI, 1965, sect. 4). This relationship, it proclaims, must lead to a ‘mutual understanding and respect,’ whose ‘fruit, above all,’ will be ‘biblical and theological studies’ (Paul VI, 1965, Section 4); this active communal practice of historicizing ressourcement will also harvest ‘fraternal dialogues’ as its fruit, though some in the Church have expressed dissatisfaction that the Council did not go far enough in ‘acknowledging and honoring the Jewish Tradition, including its scriptures, in its own right’ (Crane and Moore, 2013, 28). While it may not be possible to know if there is a direct connection between Nostra Aetate and seventeenth-century studies, the direction of at least some streams of historical criticism is consistent with the public atmosphere generated by the Council. Perhaps it is no accident that an article by John David Walker, for example, on the typological relationship between Herbert’s Temple and Solomon’s Temple mostly treats Jewish type and Christian antitype with parity as analogies and parallels rather than as shadow and reality, or the completion of a lesser by a truer civilization (Walker, 1962). We are now celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earl Miner’s edited collection, The Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present (Miner, 1977), which marked the success and institutionalization of typological criticism. The volume implicitly pays tribute to Auerbach as the originator of typological criticism, but the actual practice of many of the essays is closer to Tuve’s and Danie´lou’s. Of particular importance is Karlfried Froehlich’s article, which praises, among others, the Oxford historian Beryl Smalley for her wartime Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (1941), in which she discovered among the fourteenth-century Victorines an ‘honest’ biblical scholarship that took ‘the Jewishness of the Old Testament seriously’ and recognized a historical basis of the full legitimacy of Jewish scripture within Christian typology and the legitimacy of the Jews as people within the typological schema (Froehlich, 1977, 24).

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Most important for Herbert and seventeenth-century studies is Barbara Lewalski’s essay, which echoes Tuve’s historicizing affirmation of the scholar’s ‘responsibility,’ a salvo directed perhaps at emerging critical theory (Lewalski, 1977, 80). She offers Calvinist ‘correlative types’ as a corrective to Tuve’s Catholic sources; these Protestant sources reveal spiritual struggles in which OT figures ‘undergo [. . .] much the same kind and quality of spiritual experience’ as Christians so that OT and NT ‘are related, not as shadow and substance, but as less and more perfect embodiments of the same salvation history’ (Lewalski, 1977, 83). With her subsequent full-length treatment of the subject (1979), Lewalski began a current in typological studies whose thrust is summed up two decades later by Achsah Guibbory’s research on the use of Hebrew scripture and the Israelite nation in seventeenth-century England to articulate a Calvinist Christian identity which treats OT figures as models for Christians (Guibbory, 2010). The typological criticism that followed Tuve reveals how the effects of its moral force, inspired by war, that came with its wartime origins persisted in the scholarship even as those origins lost visibility. By the time Guibbory was writing about typology, the lacerations of the war were no longer raw; they all but disappeared from scholarly view. Nevertheless, the war’s impact – and that of Tuve and Vatican II – may still come through in Guibbory’s argument, for example, that the Early Modern literary uses of typology go significantly beyond hostility to even the Jews of Herbert’s day, although Guibbory brings a new discourse, the language of postcolonialism, to the typological exegesis of OT texts and peoples as an ‘appropriation’ (Guibbory, 2010, 10-13). The advent of the more recent critical language of cultural appropriation renders explicit the issue that, in many ways, was at the heart of Tuve’s approach and was implied in the nouvelle the´ologiens’ reaction to Vichy, namely, the troubling parallel between the exegetical absorption, annulment, and displacement of the biblical type and its underlying civilization, on the one hand, and the real annihilation of the Jews in the war, on the other. Tuve, Walker, Lewalski, and Guibbory represent a trend in typological criticism whose underlying desire, one can surmise, is rapprochement between text and peoples resulting from the terrors of the war. For Tuve, finding typology embedded in early modern literary language defined a moment when historicism became enshrined in literary criticism. The generation that followed Tuve possessed an increasing awareness of the historical nature of the typological, or prophetic, relationship of Jewish to Christian scripture in the partisan-confessional conflicts in early modern history. Tuve’s Chapel Talks allow us to see how the window on that history was opened by the pressure of the present, by a momentous conflict in our own history.

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Ac knowledgem ents I thank Rebecca Parmer, College Archivist, Connecticut College (New London, CT) for access to Rosemond Tuve’s Chapel Talks and for her gracious and generous help. Special thanks also to Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Greg Miller, Andrew Johnston, and Yaakov-akiva Mascetti.

About the Author Martin Elsky is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. His current interest centers around the memorialization of Dante in Germany after World War I and typological criticism in the shadow of National Socialism. He has served as articles editor of Renaissance Quarterly and on the Board of the Renaissance Society of America (Email: [email protected]).

References Auerbach, E. 1938. Figura. Archivum Romanicum 17: 320-41. Auerbach, E . 2014. Figura. In Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, trans. J.O. Newman, 65-113. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Agus, J. 1968. Response. In Jean Danie´lou, Dialogue with Israel, trans. J.M. Roth, 107-28. Baltimore, MD and Dublin, Ireland: Helicon Press. Becker, M. 2013. Werner Elert (1885–1954). In Twentieth-Century Lutheran Theologians, ed. M.C. Mattes, 93-135. Go¨ttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Coppa, F.J. 2006. The Papacy, the Jews, and the Holocaust. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. Crane, R.F., and B. Moore. 2013. Cracks in the Theology of Contempt: The French Roots of Nostra Aetate. Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 8: 1-28. Daley, B. 2005. The Nouvelle The´ologie and the Patristic Revival: Sources, Symbols and the Science of Theology. International Journal of Systematic Theology 7(4): 362-82. Danie´lou, J. 1950. Sacramentum futuri: e´tudes sur les origines de la typologie biblique. Paris, France: Beauchesne. Danie´lou, J. 1951. Bible et liturgie: la the´ologie biblique des sacraments et des feˆtes d’apre`s les Pe`res de l’E´glise. Paris, France: E´ditions du Cerf. Danie´lou, J. 1956. The Bible and the Liturgy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Danie´lou, J., and A. Chouraqui. 1966. Les juifs: Dialogue entre Jean Danie´lou et Andre´ Chouraqui. Paris, France: Beauchesne. de Lubac, H. 1988. Re´sistance chre´tienne a` l’antise´mitisme: souvenirs 1940–1944. Paris, France: Fayard.

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de Lubac, H. 1990. Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism: Memories from 1940–1944, trans. E. Englund. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. Empson, W. 1930. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and Windus. Evans, M.C. 2004. Rosemond Tuve: A Life of the Mind. Portsmouth, NH: P.E. Randall. Froehlich, K. 1977. ‘Always to Keep the Literal Sense in Scripture Means to Kill One’s Soul’: The State of Biblical Hermeneutics at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Century. In Literary Uses of Typology: From the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. E. Miner, 20-48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frye, Northrop. 1956. The Typology of Paradise Regained. Modern Philology 53(4): 227-38 Guibbory, A. 2010. Christian Identity: Jews and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hodgkins, C. 2014–2015. George Herbert and the Jews: Purloin’d Blessings and Self Condemnations. George Herbert Journal 38(1-2): 31-40. Leimberg, I. 1993. The Letter Lost in George Herbert’s ‘The Jews.’ Studies in Philology 90(3): 298-321. Lewalski, B.K. 1973. Donne’s ‘Anniversaries’ and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewalski, B.K. 1977. Typological Symbolism and ‘The Progress of the Soul’ in Seventeenth Century Literature. In Literary Uses of Typology: From the Late Middle Ages to the Present, ed. E. Miner, 79-114. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewalski, B.K. 1979. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miner, E., ed. 1977. Literary Uses of Typology: From the Late Middle Ages to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Matar, N.I. 1990. George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Conversion of the Jews. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 30(1): 79-92. Mettepenningen, J. 2010. Nouvelle The´ologie/New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II. New York: T & T Clark. Paul VI. 1965. Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. Nostra Aetate, 28 October. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_ council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html. Smalley, B. 1941. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Steigmann-Gall, R. 2003. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tayler, E.W. 1979. Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Tuve, R. 1943. A Critical Survey of Scholarship in the Field of English Literature of the Renaissance. Studies in Philology 40(2): 204-55. Tuve, R. 1944. Chapel Talk. Rosemond Tuve Papers, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College. Tuve, R. 1945. 21 March. Chapel Talk. Rosemond Tuve Papers, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College. Tuve, R. 1946. March. Chapel Talk. Rosemond Tuve Papers, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College. Tuve, R. 1950. On Herbert’s ‘Sacrifice.’ The Kenyon Review 12(1): 51-75.

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Tuve, R. 1952. A Reading of George Herbert. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tuve, R. 1966. Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and their Posterity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walker, J.D. 1962. The Architectonics of George Herbert’s The Temple. ELH 29(3): 289-305.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Book Review Essay

Histories and temporalities past, present, and future Dennis Austin Britton Department of English, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10, 111–126. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0118-y

Robin B. Barnes Astrology and Reformation. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 408, $82.00. ISBN: 9780199736058 J. K. Barret Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2016, pp. 264, $55.00. ISBN: 9781501702365 Matthew S. Champion The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017, pp. 304, $55.00. ISBN: 9780226514796 Susan Nakley Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in the Canterbury Tales. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2017, pp. 282, $75.00. ISBN: 9780472130443 Jon Whitman, ed. Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 329, $29.00. ISBN: 9781107665255

Chapter 9 was originally published as Britton, D. A. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019) 10: 111–126. https:// doi.org/10.1057/s41280-018-0118-y.

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Book Review Essay

Recent scholarship continues to teach us that time is a strange thing. It defies regimes of partitioning (When is the present? When did the past end? When does the future begin?), and it seems to be measured more by desire than by mathematical calculation. In How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw asks us to think about medieval time in relation to queerness, with a particular attention to ‘asynchrony: different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now’ (Dinshaw, 2012, 5). For Dinshaw, the queerness of asynchrony pertains not only to the workings of time in the Middle Ages – with its overlays of agrarian, genealogical, historical, and sacred temporalities – but also to encounters with the Middle Ages in later periods by both amateurs and experts, or the affection that ‘moderns’ have for the premodern (and early modern, I would add). To identify with the past, to desire to commune with it, is a queer orientation. Dinshaw’s analysis and other recent turns toward earlier temporalities also seek to free the past from certain configurations of ‘modernity.’ Such approaches variously caution scholars not to impose modern assumptions about time onto the past, not to read the past within the telos of what followed from it, and not to rely on types of periodization defined by disruption and discontinuity. Preand early modern temporalities can belie the strictures of certain conceptualizations of modernity and modes of historicism and periodization. Ania Loomba observes, for example, that even the postcolonial critique that offers the concept of

1 In an earlier essay, Loomba argues for the need of a criticism that crosses temporal and geographical boundaries (Loomba, 2007).

multiple modernities often leaves the binaries and hierarchies posited by Eurocentric developmental models untouched. Thus it is suggested that whereas Euro-American modernity is characterized by clock time, historical consciousness, science, and rationality, the ‘modernities’ of the rest of the world (and, indeed, the medieval past) are characterized by multiple temporalities, religiosity, and emotion. Such binary thinking is challenged by scholarship on ‘connected’ histories that offers an alternative conceptualization of modernity itself. (Loomba, 2014, 144)1 In a similar vein, Geraldine Heng has recently argued in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages that ‘In the grand re´cit of Western temporality, modernity is positioned simultaneously as a spectacular conclusion and a beginning: a teleological culmination that emerges from the ooze of a murkily long chronology by means of a temporal rupture – a big bang, if we like – that issues in a new historical instant’ (Heng, 2018, 20). A consequence of this mode of thinking, Heng goes on to note, is that at present the discussion of premodern race continues to be handicapped by the invocation of axioms that reproduce a familiar story in which mature forms of race and racisms, arriving in modern political time, are

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heralded by a shadowplay of inauthentic rehearsals characterizing the prepolitical, premodern past. For discussions of race, the terms and conditions set by this narrative of bifurcated polarities vested in modernityas-origin have meant that the tenacity, duration, and malleability of race, racial practices, and racial institutions have failed to be adequately understood or recognized. (Heng, 2018, 23)2 In their critiques of modern temporalities, Loomba and Heng underscore just what is at stake. The narratives we scholars tell about time matter. Opening time allows a more inclusive critical practice. For the most part, the studies considered in this review are not as forthright as Dinshaw, Loomba, and Heng in foregrounding the critical and political stakes of how we construct temporality and historical periods, nor are the studies I consider here primarily focused on issues of queerness or race – though Susan Nakely’s monograph does cite Dinshaw, is informed by post-colonial critique, and attends to race in the final chapter. My drawing attention to the relative absence of race in recent book-length studies in which history, time, and temporality are a primary concern is not to criticize the books I discuss below – indeed, I learned a lot from each of them and found them to be engaging, original studies that uncover numerous ways medievals and early moderns lived with and employed histories and temporalities; each evinces the need to continue to grapple with time and asynchrony. Rather, I simply wish to offer up a road for the future. Studies of race in the medieval and early modern period have been forced to confront time, periodization, and historicity as problems. But for me, that is not the same as thinking about how the racial formation of medieval and early modern peoples – and their formations as gendered, sexual, and classed subjects – is bound up with the constitution of temporality itself. As our medieval and early modern periods are becoming increasing multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-racial, what types of futures are now becoming possible? How do we reconcile eternity with the human perception of time? This is a primary question that Matthew S. Champion explores in The Fullness of Time: Temporalities in the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries, a thoroughly engaging account of the ways various temporal systems – the everyday rhythms of workers, political history, and devotio moderna’s innovations in liturgical and devotional practices – overlay each other in fifteenth-century Leuven, Ghent, and Cambrai. (Leuven, however, takes center stage in the book.) Both the time and the place on which the book focuses are important to Champion’s understanding of time in the medieval and early modern period. The fifteenthcentury Low Countries have often been seen as not quite medieval and not quite early modern, and thus have been rendered as beholden to a ‘disturbingly naı¨ve sense of time, where a kind of static or cyclical liturgical time colonizes the past, making it inhabit an eternal present (2). As Champion shows, attention to this

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2 For a similar critique, see Peter Erickson and Kim Hall’s introduction to a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly devoted to race: ‘But after more than twenty years of scholarship in early modern studies, we can only conclude that these acts of refusal [to acknowledge race] are also due to a pathological averseness to thinking about race under the guise of protecting historical difference’ (Erikson and Hall, 2016, 2).

Book Review Essay

particular era in this specific place disrupts the divide between the medieval and early modern, in which medieval time is often understood as framed by the sacred and early modern time by the secular. Chapter 1 examines civic time in Leuven and provides an overview of why Champion reads fifteenth-century Low Country time as so full. Different temporal systems co-existed at the same time: for example, new additions to old buildings were made and thoughtfully managed, bells signaled the beginning and ending of the workday, guilds operated both within the liturgical cycle and within the seasons of the market, calendars and almanacs noted times for planting and harvest and made predictions about the future, and, of course, the body marked the passing of time, through pregnancy and through aging, for instance. Chapter 2 focuses on Dirk Bouts’s altarpiece at St. Peter’s Church in Leuven. Involved in the commissioning of the altarpiece were two professors of theology who debated Aristotle’s claims about the truthfulness of statements about the future: ‘The controversy […] centered on how to interpret Aristotle’s claim that propositions relating to future events with predetermined causes could not be categorized as truth or false’ (69). One on side of the debate was Jan Varenacker, who upheld this Aristotelian principle as a way of rejecting fatalist views of the future that were linked to John Wyclif. On the other side was Henri de Zomeron and his student Peter de Rivo, who believed that it was problematic to argue that the futures described in the creeds and biblical prophecy are not true in the same way that past events are also true. The altarpiece, Champion suggests, incorporates the complexities of temporality that emerged from the debate. Champion then argues that polyphonic music sung in St. Peter’s Church, cantus firmus, similarly demonstrates temporal complexity. Music at the Cambrai Cathedral is the central focus of Chapter 3. Champion examines a musical treatise written by the Dean of Cambri Cathedral, Giles Carlier, alongside the cathedral’s liturgical practices; doing so reveals both ‘how temporal perceptions were shaped by emotional expectations, and how emotional expectations were shaped by time’ (90). Champion highlights Carlier’s use of emotional language in Tracatus de duplici ritu cantus ecclesiastici in divinis officiis; Carlier believed that music should lead believers on an emotional journey through the liturgical year in the same way that the scriptures tell stories that inspire both joy and sorrow. Champion uses Carlier’s treatise and an analysis of a Marian antiphon and Guillaume Du Fay’s Missa ecce ancilla Domini to demonstrate how liturgical music elicits different emotional responses depending on the time when they are sung. Chapter 4 moves to Ghent and considers uses of time in Philip the Good’s entry into the city on St George’s day, 1458. Drawing from arguments developed in the previous chapters, Champion shows ‘how broader temporalities of sacred history and liturgy, with their particular and varied affective structures, help in interpreting representations of the entry’ (108). Contemporary accounts of the duke’s entry demonstrate how ‘the time of the ruler is symbolically aligned with

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an intuitive synchronic vision of time from eternity’ (109). In contemporary accounts, the Duke’s entry into the defeated city is rendered as a type of repetition of biblical stories of God’s grace being given to sinful people. The significance of time in the duke’s entry is also evidenced by the clock face of the town belfry, which was decorated with an image of the four evangelists depicted as the four beasts of the apocalypse, and by a tableau vivant derived from Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, ‘The Adoration of the Mystical Lamb.’ Champion returns to Leuven in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5, on calendar reform in Leuven, examines de Rivo’s writings on this topic, including his Reformatio kalendarii, which was thought lost until Champion rediscovered it. Champion demonstrates that for de Rivo and others, calendar reform was significantly linked to religious devotion. The chapter also suggests that de Rivo’s work influenced devotional practices at the Priory of Bethlehem at Herent, which copied and owned De Rivo’s works. In the various works, de Rivo grapples with, attempts to overlay, and reconciles different temporalities: discrepancies in time between the gospels, historical and liturgical time, the Julian and Jewish calendar, and when to celebrate Easter. Ultimately, Champion suggests, for de Rivo, understanding time was inseparable from the Church’s salvific mission. The final chapter considers Fasciculus temporum omnes antiquorum cronicas complectens¸ the first ever horizontal timeline, which was published in Leuven and read throughout Europe. Fasciculus covers the creation of the world through the six ages of man, bringing together sacred history and medieval chronicles and chronology, and encouraged readers to reflect upon the relationship between human time and eternity; the very layout of pages and images of Christ, who proclaims himself ‘Alpha and Omega,’ in Fasciculus required readers to think about both synchronic and diachronic time. The Fullness of Time provides its readers with a fascinating overview of myriad ways time operates in a particular region at a particular time. Part of what makes this book so engaging and informative is its transdisciplinary approach. Champion brings together material culture, political history, and utterly esoteric debates among theologians; he draws as well from the history of art, music, civic entry, and calendar reform. Champion is also an exceptionally good reader of poetry (in song lyrics) and of painting. The book’s arguments often emerge from detailed examinations of words and images. Ultimately, The Fullness of Time shows how communities organize, measure, and experience time visually, aurally, and textually. What might the natural world be able to tell the pious Protestant about the plan of God? To what extent are celestial events indicators of God’s displeasure with sinful humanity and a coming judgement – and is that coming judgement inevitable? Such questions are at the heart of Robin B. Barnes’s Astrology and Reformation. Despite scant attention scholars of the Reformation have paid to astrology (a negligence Barnes blames on modern assumptions about differences

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between pre- and early modern epistemologies), Barnes argues that the study of the stars and Christian piety were linked in numerous ways in Reformation Germany. The reformation of astrology and of Christianity went side by side. Barnes shows that star gazing was a widespread and everyday practice among the faithful: it entered into the practices of professors, theologians, pastors, physicians, barbers, midwifes, calendar-makers, prognosticators, and many others. In addition to numerous treatises specifically written about astrology during the ‘long-sixteenth century,’ Barnes’s primary archive is more than 300 calendars, or ‘almanacs,’ and prognostications, or ‘practica,’ printed in Germany between 1480 and 1620. The sheer number of these cheaply printed texts demonstrates the immense interest in studying the stars in Reformation Germany, and they allow Barnes to trace developments in the theory and practice of astrology. Chapter 1 provides an overview of various types of astrological printed materials that became available to a wide readership. The ‘planet books’ of the fourteenth century were based on a much simplified version of Ptolemaic cosmology and other Greek and Arabic sources, and provided basic calendar information (e.g., saints’ days), rules for health and hygiene, an understanding of Zodiac signs, and a list of unlucky, or ‘Egyptian,’ days. These works made astrology accessible to a wide readership and set the foundation for the more pervasive interest in astrology to come. Chapter 1 also describes the emergence of the ‘humanist astrologers’ at German universities, and the spread of astrological knowledge through the printing of almanacs and practica. Barnes notes the importance of such works’ being produced in German; these works were for city burghers, to help them navigate everyday concerns like when to sow, reap, travel, and so on. Chapter 2 engages temporality most directly and delves into the types of astrological knowledge that emerged in the late fifteenth century, especially how such knowledge reflected ‘the early modern mathematizing and naturalization of time and space, a gradual and highly uneven process that came into conflict with the sacramental culture of the medieval church’ (49). Barnes argues that this mathematically-based astrology, based on calculations of the movements of the planets, provided the burghers who purchased almanacs and practica alternatives to liturgical time. Here one wonders to what extent Barnes and Champion would disagree about the nature of relations between different temporalities. Whereas Champion’s study argues that people in the fifteenthcentury Low Countries lived within multiple temporalities, Barnes suggests that a new mode of temporality began to replace an older religious one in late fifteenth-century Germany. Both Barnes and Champion assert, however, that the temporalities they discuss are distinctive to the contexts treated in their respective studies. Still, we may wonder to what extent their arguments differ because of their subject matter, and to what extent because of the ideologies of time that have informed their analyses.

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For Barnes, things really begin to change in the years before the great planetary conjunction that was expected to occur in 1524 – a time that also coincided with the appearance of Martin Luther on the scene. Astrological forecasting presented an alternative to medieval prophetic traditions. Astrologers predicted that a second deluge and maybe the end of the world would follow the conjunction, and in Chapter 3 Barnes argues that we should read the ways in which the evangelical message calling for repentance both drew from and influenced astrological prediction. Alongside fears about the great conjunction and flood, a more general doom and gloom arose from reading the stars, leading to numerous other dire predictions – of violent weather, famine, and war with the Turks. Within this context, figures whom Barnes calls ‘evangelical astrologers’ emerged: they used the forecasting of disaster to critique the abuses of Rome and implore people toward repentance and acceptance of Protestantism. Chapter 4 turns to the surprising coalescence of Lutheranism and astrology in Philip Melanchthon, who did much to legitimize astrology and was responsible for its spread at German universities. In addition, most writers of almanacs and practica adopted Melanchthon’s views. Melanchthon believed that true astrology, like Christianity, had been corrupted by superstition; both needed reforming. Barnes argues that Melanchthonian astrologers believed that ‘God revealed and exercised his sovereignty through the stars’ (139). It was a science of causes and effects, and humans were no less subject to the influence of the stars than other parts of the natural world. Yet Melanchthonian astrologers maintained that while the stars may influence human action, they do not force humans to behave in specific ways. God’s sovereignty and his grace redeemed astrology from charges of fatalism, even as it raised questions about how God worked within his creation. In Chapter 5 Barnes provides a wealth of examples that this particular religious orientation toward astrology was unique to Lutheranism: ‘Lutheranism proved by far the most hospitable to the perpetuation and intensification of a popular astrological worldview’ (173). Moreover, Barnes shows, specific approaches to the study of the stars were connected to particular confessional identities. Barnes identifies the emergence of the ‘pastor-astrologers,’ who wrote practica and cast horoscopes, as well as an increased number of educated burghers who themselves began to produce calendars and practica. In contrast, both Roman Catholics and Calvinists became increasingly critical of astrology. Barnes also discusses controversies about astrology that begin to erupt within Lutheranism; some Lutherans claimed that Christians were living their lives more by almanacs than by the Bible. It seems that for Lutherans, the stars always predicted a coming doom. Yet, as Barnes argues in Chapter 6, it is difficult to know to what extent astrological readings of the stars produced a general sense of apocalyptic foreboding, or if an already circulating dread of the end-times influenced the reading of the stars.

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Regardless, astrological predictions of the mid-sixteenth century were especially apocalyptic in nature. The coming judgment was seen, for example, in the particularly spectacular comet of 1531, which convinced many that they were living in last days. Lutheran astrologers maintained that people should recognize the doom forecasted in the stars as a call to repentance and should implore of God’s mercy. In Chapter 7, Barnes considers the eventual decline of Lutheran astrology at the end of the sixteenth century. He argues that some people likely just grew tired of all the doom and gloom; they began to find both sermonic and astrological discourse too pessimistic. Others became increasingly uneasy about the financial profitability of practica as well as the possibility that they would inspire heresy. In addition, the rise of orthodox biblicists undermined the validity of astrological prediction. Finally, disillusionment caused by the Thirty Years War increased skepticism about astrological predictions. How early modern Germans studied and understood the stars, as well as Barnes’s claims about them, have important implications for how we understand early modern temporality more generally. As Astrology and Reformantion shows, looking at the stars raises question about the cyclicality of time, about how such cyclicality relates to notions of past, present, and future, and what the significance might be of apparent degeneration within time’s cycles. If there is one literary genre that is profoundly shaped by its relation to time and history, it is romance. Indeed, romances play a significant role in the literary scholarship reviewed below. Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period is likely to leave readers convinced that romance was a significant – if not the primary – genre by which medieval and early modern readers negotiated temporality. In his introduction, John Whitman challenges Erich Auerbach’s assertion in Mimesis that romances tend to eschew history constituted as reality. The essays in the volume do not subscribe to a singular theory of history or time, but they do share an interest in the various ways in which romances engage in the narrativizing of events and thus shape these events’ import for the present and future. The collection also makes evident the benefits of comparativist, transhistorical analysis in its examination of romances from England, France, Italy, and Spain, from the twelfth to the early seventeenth century. Together, the essays provide readers with an appreciation of both continuity and difference; they show why and how romances redeploy storylines, characters, motifs, and narrative strategies variously, across time, language, and geographic boundaries. The volume is divided into five parts: Part 1 is Whitman’s introduction, Part 2 examines the matter of Rome (and realms to the east), Part 3 considers the matter of Britain, Part 4 looks at the matters of France and Italy, Part 5 reflects upon early modern romances’ self-conscious examinations of their relationship to truth and historical accuracy, and in Part 6 Whitman provides an afterword that makes connections between these ‘matters’ and then briefly considers the

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revival of romance in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries, in which the workings of the imagination are mapped onto romance motifs. In his contribution to Part 2’s discussion of the matter of Rome, Christopher Baswell examines how twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century Alexander romances – the Roman d’E´ne´as, the Roman de The`bes, the Roman de Troie, the Roman d’Alexandre, and the Roman de Toute Chevalerie – attempt to contain fears about history and its contingencies within architectural features such as tombs and walls. Catherine Croizy-Naquet turns to the rise of ancient historiography and prose at the beginning of the thirteenth century. She argues that the thirteenth-century Roman de Troie employs a plain prose style in order to situate the Troy legend within emergent French notions of universal history, while the thirteenth-century Faits des Romains incorporates poetic language and conventions of romance and epic to make the past intelligible to the present. The form and style of these works blur distinctions between romance and history. Part 3, on the matter of Britain, begins with Robert W. Hanning’s examination of young men, or juvenes – the younger sons and disinherited first sons who had to make their own way by ambition and military prowess. These appear in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regnum Britanniae and are transformed into chevaleries in twelfth- and thirteenth-century romances like Chre´tien de Troyes’s Cliges, Guillaume Le Clerc’s Fergus of Galloway, and the Mort le roi Artu. Adrian Steven’s essay provides historical context for reading Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival; he argues that Angevin political interests manifest themselves in how the romances’ genealogies legitimize present rulers by linking them to the fabled warriors of the past. Friedrich Wolfzettel’s essay suggests that different versions of the Grail legend amount to ‘a new aristocratic gospel’ (90) that potentially places class interests over spiritual interests. Woflzettel then turns to the fourteen-century Perceforest and contends that it questions the relationship between secular and sacred history. Edward Donald Kennedy attends to differences in the endings of the prose Brut, Hardying’s Chronical, and the alliterative Morte Arthure in order to show how they reflect medieval attitudes toward causality and fate. Concluding Part 3, Helen Cooper argues that Malory’s Morte Darthur, rather than the countless other medieval tales of Arthur, became so influential because the ‘very opaqueness [of the tale] makes it uniquely open to appropriation [….] Malory does not bring any interpretation with him’ (124). Taking up the matters of France and Italy, Part 4 begins with Jean-Pierre Martin’s argument that chansons de geste establish genealogies as a mechanism to differentiate social groups through the use of the past. Ricacardo Bruscagli, too, considers the importance of genealogy. Discussing Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso, Bruscagli demonstrates that Ruggiero, who boasts of having Trojan origins, presents a genealogia incredibile for the Estes and

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3 The absence is all the more noticeable in the context of work on race and romance, such as Heng (2003) and Spiller (2011).

Ferrara. Marco Praloran surveys how the narrative structures of Italian and Spanish romances, especially in their use of interlacement, stage the varied forms of temporality within the genre. The essays in Part 5 examine late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century romances and epics that demonstrate self-consciousness about their engagements with romance motifs and forms. Daniel Javitch argues that as the sixteenth century progresses, Italian narrative poetry moves away from the fanciful and becomes more firmly grounded in historical events, exemplified most poignantly in Gerusaleme liberata and in Torquato Tasso’s disparaging views of the Furioso. David Quint also considers Tasso’s disparagement of romance and narrative poetry’s responsibility to historical truth, although Quint argues that Tasso is primarily concerned with producing good poetry and so is willing to use elements of romance as long as doing so does not falsify historical causes or outcomes. Gordon Teskey’s essay anticipates many of the issues J. K. Barret discusses in greater detail in Untold Futures. According to Teskey, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene recognizes its own history-making and blurs the line between history and the present. Part 5 concludes with Marina S. Brownlee’s discussion of la Cava, the Christian woman who becomes responsible for the Moorish conquest of Spain, in Pedro del Corral’s Cro´nica sarracina as well as Zoraida, the white Muslim woman who converts to Christianity, in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Brownlee demonstrates that these romances, in recalling histories of Christian and Muslim conflict, reveal conflicting ideas about the distinctness of racial, religious, and cultural identities. Brownlee’s essay is the only one in the volume that seriously considers race and gender. After reading Brownlee’s essay and considering the importance of genealogy – which so often enfolds concerns about gender, sex, and lineage – in various essays in the volume (chapters 5, 6, and 9, for example), the relative inattention to race presents itself as a missed opportunity.3 Nonetheless, as a whole the collection provides a useful overview of the historical mutations of romance, and varied ways in which romances engage the past and present. While the essays in Romance and History primarily concern romance’s engagements with the past and present, Susan Nakley’s Living in the Future: Sovereignty and Internationalism in the Canterbury Tales reads the romances told by Chaucer’s pilgrims as efforts to imagine a future English nation. Nakley’s book is not about romance per se (nor is J. K. Barret’s, which I discuss below), but given how invested romances are in history and temporality, it is not surprising that romances feature prominently in Nakley’s study. Three of the six tales that Nakley focuses on are romances. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s formulation of the nation as an imagined community, on postcolonial theory (especially Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), and on recent studies of English vernacular in the fourteenth century, Nakley reads the Canterbury Tales as conceptualizing English national sovereignty in relation to

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domesticity and internationalism. For Nakley, the domestic, the national, and the international are not so much contrasting spheres as they are mutually constitutive. One of the ways that Chaucer imagines a future English nation, according to Nakley, is by writing a fictional present and fictional past laden with anachronism. One of Nakley’s most striking observations is that meditations on sovereignty appear most frequently in tales about love, marriage, and family, such as The Man of Law’s Tale and The Wife of Bath’s Tale. ‘The household,’ Nakley argues, ‘provides the model for the nation, as sovereignty mediates relationships between free adults who hold uneven power yet share emotional bonds’ (34). Yet, the household is not the only locus of Chaucer’s conception of the nation and sovereignty. Nakley suggests that the frame narrative itself provides a model, creating as it does a community of diverse pilgrims with diverse experiences and opinions who consent to the rule and judgment of the host. In this way, the Canterbury Tales suggests that the nation is inclusive of divergent voices and deliberation. Nakley’s analysis is attuned to the limits of this inclusivity in relation to racial and religious difference; nevertheless, the inclusivity of the Chaucerian nation is one of Nakley’s most provocative points. The book is divided into four sections. ‘Political and Critical Backgrounds’ contains Chapter 1, the book’s introduction, and Chapter 2, which surveys medieval discussions of sovereignty in relation to the nation, the Church, and empire; it also examines the role of Latin and the vernacular in community formation. Considering writers such as Dante, Marsilgio of Padua, Jean of Paris, and Nicole Oresme, Nakley shows the various ways medieval thinkers attempted to distinguish secular and spiritual sovereignty. Dante and Marsilgio were nostalgic for a Roman empire independent from papal political sovereignty, while Jean and Oresme defined political sovereignty along lines of geography and culture but did not limit the sovereignty of the Church over all. In each of these cases, it is important to note that these writers’ theories are aspirational, looking toward a hoped-for future. Chancer’s sovereignty draws from the theories espoused by each of these authors: ‘Chaucer imagines a sovereign English community limited by the linguistic and cultural borders that the French nationalists prioritized, funded by the historical and emotional narratives that propel Dante’s universal ideal, and fueled by the productive diversity and contention that distinguish Marsilian communal functionalism’ (65–6). Part 1, ‘Home and Away,’ contains Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3, Nakley turns to the General Prologue’s frame narrative and argues that the fellowship of diverse pilgrims itself models Chaucer’s idea of the nation. Religion may bring them together, but their interactions on the way to Canterbury and the social and political concerns of their tales suggest that the community they form is ultimately more secular than religious. Nakley provides a sustained reading of the role of Harry the host, who serves as sovereign in establishing order and

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judgment among the pilgrims, a sovereignty to which nearly all of the pilgrims consent (in a state of drunkenness, the Miller disobeys Harry’s rules). For Nakley, it is important that Chaucer’s ‘nation’ includes divergent voices, social positions, genders, and ideologies that nevertheless contend with and exist alongside each other. Whereas Chapter 3 presents Chaucer’s picture of the future of the English nation, Chapter 4 presents what it is not. For instance, Theseus’s absolutism and his empire dissolve national sovereignty based on shared culture, affective bonds, and geography. He defeats Amazonian rule, and the anachronistic medieval tournament he orders disrupts the affective bonds between the Thebans Arcite and Palamon. Part 2, ‘Sovereignty and Anachronism,’ examines Chaucer’s writing of impossible pasts in order to envision an English future. Chapter 5 argues that in the Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer writes a redemptive national sovereignty into both the Syrian and British past. Nakely fuses observations made about marital sovereignty in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale to highlight the importance of Custance’s marriages in the Man of Law’s Tale. The Sultaness must destroy the marriage between Custance and her son because her devotion to the Quran – which anachronistically exists in the tale’s sixth-century setting – justifies her actions and resistance to Christian imperialism; she thereby asserts Syrian national and religious sovereignty. At the same time, after Custance arrives in Britain and marries Alla, ‘England emerges as a sovereign Christian nation, interdependent yet district from the Roman Empire’ (166). Nakely’s analysis suggests that national sovereignty proves to be more important than demonizing the Sultaness on racial and religious grounds. Focusing on the Wife of Bath’s Tale in Chapter 6, Nakley argues that Chaucer’s sole Arthurian romance is, perhaps not surprisingly, the most engaged with national ideals, even as the sovereignty advocated in the Arthurian tale depends on references to Dante. The rapist knight in the tale eventually grants sovereignty to the old woman – herself a figure of anachronism in her ability to become young after being old – and affirms her arguments about Christian gentillesse, which she states derive from Dante. The spiritual entwines with the domestic, and the old woman presents a model of the nation that allows for female authority and cross-class relations. Although Parts 2 and 3 of the book portray a Chaucerian vision of the nation that is more inclusive than we might expect, Part 4, ‘Fear and Form,’ turns to the limits of that inclusivity. Chapter 7 argues that the English vernacular is used to define racial identity and that the Man of Law’s Tale, the Squire’s Tale, and the Monk’s Tale work to racialize Donegild, Canacee, and Zenobia, respectively. The several narrators’ use of the inexpressibility topos, especially as they note the inability of the English language to describe these women, effectively excludes them from Englishness. As such, the Canterbury Tales stages the importance of the vernacular in the development of race. In the Epilogue, Nakley asks why so much of Chaucer’s national sovereignty should be worked

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out through romances. She proposes that it is precisely because romance, as so many of the authors in Romance and History similarly observed, exists somewhere between history and wish-fulfilment. Nakley’s Living in the Future is an ambitious study. It fearlessly treads into complex historical and theoretical debates surrounding sovereignty and the emergence of nation as a conceptual category. It draws from a wealth of contemporary and historical theories, while attending to issues of temporality, history, domesticity, internationalism, vernacularism, affective bonds, gender, and race. To be sure, an attempt to understand the ‘nation’ requires such a multi-faceted and inclusive approach. It makes clear that what we know now as the English nation was in no way inevitable; Chaucer imagined the nation and the future differently. In Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England, J. K. Barret attends to the different ways authors employ literary and linguistic structures to think about the future. This book privileges what literature, especially its ‘microstructures’ and ‘formal resources’ (11), can contribute to philosophies of time. Barret refers to historical analogues at times, but she rejects the notion that historical context dictates what literature does. Her analysis is also largely removed from the context of Reformation theology – which she characterizes as primarily concerned with salvation and the apocalypse – in order to consider the ‘earthly future shaped by the activity of human beings rather than classical precedent or divine providence’ (8). Although I disagree with this simplistic characterization of theology’s interests in time – as would Champion and Barnes – Barret’s stunning close readings do succeed in uncovering the ways early modern English writers entertained multiple futures. Chapter 1 begins with the tension in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia between romance’s open-endedness (the dilation that Patricia Parker has identified as an important feature of the genre) and the supposed fixity of the future announced by the oracle. Throughout the romance, characters and readers confront present moments and future possibilities that conflict with what is expected. Barret pays particular attention to the role of promises in order to consider ‘the capacity of language and linguistic structures to secure or verify future outcomes’ (26). The Old Arcadia’s temporal complexity is made clear through Barret’s meticulous and dazzling interpretations of Philoclea’s verse promises; Barret shows how Philoclea’s poetic language destabilizes the assurance of a fixed future. Barret also suggests that legal questions surrounding debt, credit, promises, and contracts that arose during Sidney’s lifetime provide useful analogies for understanding the cultural import of the romance’s temporal and narrative concerns. Legal contracts and credit networks attempted to assure future obligations and actions. Such issues reach their culmination in the romance’s trial scene, at which point the law presents itself as having the power to narrate the past and determine the future in a manner that threatens the future prescribed by genre exceptions.

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Chapter 2 turns to three moments of history in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. These are the simultaneous reading of Briton moniments and Antiquitee of Faery lond in Book 2, Merlin’s prophetic history to Britomart in Book 3, and Paridell’s genealogy that links him to the Trojan Paris, also in Book 3. Barret reads these historical episodes – and the different modes of ancient and early modern historiography that they engage – through the recurrent action of characters moving forward while looking back. She does so to argue that Spenser’s repetition of this action demonstrates the poem’s larger interest in moving temporally forward with an eye on the past. For Barret, ‘looking to the past unlocks the future’ (64), and Spenser seeks to give his poetry the authority to shape history. Each of the historical episodes discussed in this chapter depends on genealogy, a fact that Barret mentions only in passing. Spenser’s interest in genealogical descent may not be surprising when read in light of the essays in Romance and History, which discuss the prevalence of blood-lines and familial legacy in romances, but Barret does not take the opportunity to examine why Spenser’s engagement with history should be primarily through genealogies. Nonetheless, she provocatively suggests that Spenser’s epic romance is keenly aware that writing in the future will have the power to shape the past. The remaining chapters turn toward Shakespeare’s staging of ancient history. The Spenserian image of looking backward to look forward remains important to Barret’s exploration of how Shakespeare represents theater’s ability to shape the past, and his plays’ various considerations of the purchase the past has on the future and vice versa. In Chapter 3, Barret argues that in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare explores the impact of literary history on the future. The play is set in a present in which the great works of classical Rome – Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example – have already been written, and characters use them to understand what happens around them and to govern their actions: ‘As a result, Titus’s conception of the future ends before it begins – the future is inherently foreclosed because prewritten plots prescribe its outcomes’ (107). The problem lies not so much in the Roman authors that the Goths and Andronici use as in their Christian-style hermeneutical engagements with ‘pagan’ texts. The tradition of Ovide moralise´ serves a prime example, in which the moralizing of Ovid requires reading his tales too literally and flattens their complexities. It is the way that characters interpret literary history that makes tragedy inevitable. Chapter 4 examines ‘anticipatory nostalgia’ in Cymbeline. Controversies and developments in early modern English grammar provide analogies for reading the play’s meditations on the relationship between past, present, and future. English grammars emerged in the sixteenth-century, and their discussions of the ‘second future,’ what we now call the future perfect, reveal complex engagements with temporality and a future that has already been completed. Barret then argues that the bored, kidnapped princes Guiderius and Arviragus worry about a future that, because of their inactivity in the present, will be devoid of

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narratives of adventure. The princes demonstrate anticipatory nostalgia; they are less concerned with the present than they are with a future that might allow them to tell great stories about their present. The final chapter, on Antony and Cleopatra, focuses on Cleopatra’s articulation of an unwanted future and her attempts to avoid it. Barret revisits Cleopatra’s oft-discussed disgust at how she will be represented in Roman popular entertainment. While scholars have primarily focused on the metatheatricality of the actor ‘boying [Cleopatra’s] greatness’ (5.2.219), Barret argues that the Egyptian queen is most concerned that representations of her will be done extemporaneously: ‘The quick comedians / Extemporally will stage us and present / Our Alexandrian revels’ (5.2.215–7). Drawing attention to temporality in the speech, Barret shows that Cleopatra reviles future impromptu performances that take her out of time, out of myth, and make her forever present. Barret then returns to Cymbeline and argues that Shakespeare gives Cleopatra what she desires in the tapestry hanging in Imogen’s chamber. In an afterword, Barret briefly considers temporality in Paradise Lost, namely, how the fallen angels in Book 2 spend too much time thinking about the past, time, and the inevitability of the future. Doing so gets you nowhere, Milton implies, and the poem connects these wasted temporal reflections to romance cyclicality. Barret also suggests that it is Adam’s inability to imagine future possibilities that merits his expulsion from Eden. For Milton, and for the other early modern writers whom Barret discusses, versions of the present that foreclose the possibility of multiple futures are what need to be thwarted. Barret’s afterword also briefly flags methodological concerns for literary studies – about what is to be gained by treating the literary as sufficient in itself to provide theories of time and temporality. What are the futures of medieval and early modern studies? Asking this question seems almost too obvious, nearly inevitable given the topics of the works reviewed in this essay. It is also a question scholars are accustomed to asking: the phrase ‘the future of’ has appeared in the titles of many conference panels and academic articles. Contemplating the future seems to be a fundamental part of humanist inquiry – though, for some, looking into the future of the humanities only reveals that the end is near. What might it mean, however, to think about our scholarly futures with medieval and early modern temporalities? The artists, theologians, astrologers, literary authors, and others examined in the works I have reviewed all lived within multiple temporalities. They found anachronism useful and often rejected the notion of a singular, unavoidable future. Perhaps we should follow their lead. We might consider looking toward futures that are inclusive in terms of methodologies and theoretical paradigms, in terms of the people being studied and those producing the scholarship. We can ask: in the end, who benefits from maintaining or reanimating past versions of the past?

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About the Author Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and, with Melissa Walter, the co-editor of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (2018). He is currently working on a monograph, tentatively entitled ‘Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Human Difference on the Early Modern Stage’ (E-mail: [email protected]).

References Dinshaw, C. 2012. How Soon is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Erickson, P. and Hall, K. 2016. ‘A New Scholarly Song’ : Rereading Early Modern Race. Shakespeare Quarterly 67(1): 1–13. Heng, G. 2003. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press. Heng, G. 2018. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Loomba, A. 2007. Periodization, Race, and Global Contact. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37(3): 595–620. Loomba, A. 2014. Early Modern or Early Colonial? Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 14(1): 143–8. Spiller. E. 2011. Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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