The Discourse of Exile in Early Modern English Literature 9781351204057, 9781351204040, 9780815382072, 9781351204071

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The Discourse of Exile in Early Modern English Literature

This volume examines the literary works of English exiles seeking to navigate what Edward Said calls “the perilous territory of not-belonging.” The study opens by asking, “How did exile impact the way an early modern writer defined and constructed their personal and national identity?” In seeking an answer, the project traces the development of the “mind of exile,” a textual phenomenon that manifests as an exiled figure whose departure and return restructures a stable, traditional center of socio-political power; a narrative where a character, an author, a reader, or some combination of the three experiences a type of cognitive displacement resulting in an epiphany that helps define a sense of self or national identity; and narratives that write and rewrite historical narratives to reimagine boundaries of national identity either towards or away from exiled groups or individuals. The study includes case studies from a variety of authors and groups—­Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, the Wycliffites, the Marian Exiles, and their Elizabethan Catholic counterparts—to provide a clearer understanding of exile as an important part of the development of a modern English national identity. Reading exilic texts through this lens offers a fresh approach to early modern narratives of marginalization while examining and clarifying the importance of the individual experience of exile filtered through literary consciousness. J. Seth Lee teaches literature and composition as a lecturer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Routledge Research in Early Modern History For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

In the same series: Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850 Edited by Johanna Ilmakunnas, Marjatta Rahikainen, and Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen The Solemn League and Covenant of the Three Kingdoms and the Cromwellian Union, 1643–1663 Kirsteen M. MacKenzie London, Londoners and the Great Fire of 1666 Disaster and Recovery Jacob F. Field The Turks and Islam in Reformation Germany Gregory J. Miller Church and Censorship in Eighteenth-Century Italy Governing Reading in the Age of Enlightenment Patrizia Delpiano Individuality in Early Modern Japan Thinking for Oneself Peter Nosco Guilds, Labour and the Urban Body Politic Fabricating Community in the Southern Netherlands, 1300–1800 Bert De Munck An Unproclaimed Empire The Grand Duchy of Lithuania: From the Viewpoint of Comparative Historical Sociology of Empires Zenonas Norkus

The Discourse of Exile in Early Modern English Literature J. Seth Lee

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of J. Seth Lee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-8153-8207-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-20407-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my wife, whose patience, kindness, wit, and support keep me grounded in the present even as I rummage about in the past.

Contents

List of Figure Acknowledgments A Note on the Text Introduction

ix xi xiii 1

1 The Wretched Constance: Defining a Mens Exili

15

2 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distance: A Wycliffite Mind of Exile

35

3 Margins and Center: Protestant Exiles and National Identity

55

4 Making Better Times: A Catholic Discourse of Exile

81

5 Spenser’s Wretches: Irenius, Colin Clout, and the Exile In-Between Epilogue Index

105 123 127

Figure

2.1 “Exile” detail from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia: or, moral emblems. Illustrated by I. Fuller, by the care and at the charge of P. Tempest. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

50

Acknowledgments

No book appears without numerous professional and personal debts. I would like to thank my dissertation committee at the University of Kentucky: Drs. Joyce MacDonald, Lisa Zunshine, and Jane Phillips. Their guidance and support made the seed of this project possible, and their suggestions helped me carry the current project forward. To them I would like to add Max Novick and Jennifer Morrow at Routledge for helping me edit, prepare, and bring the manuscript to completion. I need also thank the anonymous reviewers at Studies in English Literature and Reformation who offered vital feedback on what would eventually become Chapters 3 and 5. I am indebted to my colleagues, Dr. Ann Marie Wranovix and Drew Heverin, for their willingness to read and comment on early drafts. Thanks to the photography department of the Folger Shakespeare Library for their generous image use policy and the Folger librarians for their help locating materials and providing an amazing space. I am also grateful to V. Heidi Hass and John McQuillen of the Morgan Library for their help with a particularly elusive and confusing reference that they tracked down. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Matthew Giancarlo, my dissertation chair, colleague, and friend, for encouraging me to believe in my ideas. He helped me find my scholarly voice, and for that I will always be grateful. Lastly, I would like to thank my wife, Dr. Julie Naviaux, for her support throughout the whole of this project. Her gentle prodding kept me on task, and her willingness to proofread undoubtedly helped me avoid more egregious errors.

A Note on the Text

Whenever possible, I retain the variant spellings found in primary materials with the following exceptions. I replace the long “s” with the modern one. The same is true for “i” used as a “j.” I silently expand contractions and add modern punctuation when necessary for ease of reading. For poetry, I footnote the edition in the initial citation. Subsequent in-line citations indicate the line numbers from that edition. Latin passages are followed by my own translation in square brackets unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

We are all exiles. At least according to the Judeo-Christian tradition that has shaped so much of the Western historical and literary traditions. Whether politically motivated or legally compelled, temporary or permanent, forced or voluntary, exile extends from the ancient world to our own, and acts as the source of inspiration for great art and historical change. Ovid’s Tristia explores the depths of his sorrows following expulsion from Rome. Meliboeus laments to Titryus in the first stanza of Virgil’s Eclogues “nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua; nos patriam fugimus. [We must leave our native place, our homes,/The fields we love, and go elsewhere].”1 Exile fundamentally organizes the history of the Jewish people. Dante experienced a lifetime of exile from his beloved Florence. Henry Bolingbroke’s exile in the late fourteenth century set the stage for the deposition of Richard II and established a new political dynasty. Throughout the Reformation, English and Continental religious exiles—Protestant and Catholic—were in almost constant motion and formed vibrant communities in London, Antwerp, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Zurich, and Geneva just to name a few. Some, however not all, of these exiles established insular communities of worship instead of gradually merging with the local faithful. Such groups were biding their time until a more favorable religious and political environment existed in their estranged homelands. Then, as now, exile was often preferable to political oppression and religious persecution. This short volume arose from my interest in the complicated intersections of exile with literature, history, culture, and national identity. As I read for my doctoral exams, I frequently encountered passing references to exiled figures that had lasting impacts on English history, particularly the English Reformation: William Tyndale, John Bale, John Ponet, William Allen, Robert Persons, and Edmund Campion to name only a handful. The Marian exiles, although relatively few in number, churned out a plethora of texts. Christopher Haigh writes that they “published larger numbers of controversial tracts in secrecy and exile than Catholics managed with the backing of the state.”2 On Elizabeth’s accession, the Catholic exiles who fled to the Continent eventually gave rise to William Allen’s Douai seminary whose

2 Introduction members would return to Protestant England, often in secret, in attempts to reconvert the nation to Catholicism. Simultaneously, the newly returned Marian exiles rapidly reintegrated themselves into positions of power. Nineteen became ministers of Parliament, whereas others played significant roles in commissions on “royal supremacy, the book of Common Prayer, and the Injunctions.”3 Given exile’s ubiquity at the time and its inherently rupturing nature, it is logical to assume that exile played an important role in the shaping the minds of these exiles and the texts that they produced just as it does today. Edward Said, himself an exile, famously wrote that “Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider. . . . Much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule.”4 That desire to compensate frequently takes the form of literature or other artistic means of imaginative expression. Mustapha Marrouchi notes that, “exile is at least in part a condition of the imagination, and that is the province of literature.”5 Exile, by definition is also closely linked to travel, movement, and writing, which George Tucker describes as, [A]n interpretative gesture, both spatial and intellectual, constituting an active reading and writing of the world as text (albeit not in isolation from the reading and writing of other forms of text), just as, conversely, the reading and writing of text is itself, necessarily, no less a form of spatial and intellectual displacement. . . . Indeed, travel and writing (or reading) may in the end be understood interchangeably: either as a literal equivalence . . . or else, with the one serving as the supreme metaphor of the other; or even as Georges Van Den Abbeele has suggested, with travel operating as the “metaphor of metaphor itself.”6 Exiles, in other words, write their own worlds to make sense of their current condition and to, perhaps, recreate that world to their advantage. In that vein, Robert Edwards has argued that “the medieval literature of exile remains centered on change” and he posits three distinct “modes of transformation” present in the medieval literature of exile that define, create, and transform its object of focus or criticism. Edwards also examines the individual’s place in relation to the whole while engaging in the process of cultural myth making (or de-myth making). The first mode is “the function of memory within the exile.”7 The second is “a creation of a parallel society from exile.”8 The third avoids the “determinism [between past and present, the memory of the lost and the alternate society] by projecting towards the future through the experience of imagination.”9 Medieval imaginative literature, he concludes, is the explicit tool in this tripartite process. Said argues much the same of modern exilic texts. Such observations suggest that the literature of exile is a complicated matrix from which exiles engage with and create narratives of identity both personal and national.

Introduction  3 In the short study that follows, I turn to examples of the literature of exile found in the late fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Using them as case studies, I argue for the presence of a phenomenon I have come to call the mens exili, the mind of exile, that manifests in several ways: 1) an exiled figure whose departure and return restructures a stable, traditional center of socio-political power; 2) a narrative where a character, an author, a reader, or some combination of the three experiences a type of cognitive displacement resulting in an epiphany that helps define a sense of self or national identity; and 3) narratives that write and rewrite historical narratives, past and present, to reimagine boundaries of national identity either towards or away from exiled groups or individuals. I trace the discourses of exile in a variety of authors, groups, and genres including Geoffrey Chaucer, the Wycliffites, and Edmund Spenser to provide a clearer understanding of exile as a vital part of the development of a modern English national identity, and to demonstrate how the experience of exile, filtered through literary consciousness, influences both the imaginative and the polemic literature of England. In its most basic form, exile is a political tool closely linked with one’s homeland, one’s citizenship, and one’s physical location in relation to the homeland, but exile is also a mental experience. The perception of being excluded can be just as powerful as actually being so. Pinning down a solid definition of “exile” is a challenge in itself. For this study, “exile” should be considered an individual or group whose exclusion from a community can be either real or imagined: “real” in the sense that he or she is physically displaced from their native place, “imagined” in the sense that they experience displacement and exclusion while remaining on native soil. In either case they conceive of themselves on the margins of a particular community and, equally important, they desire to return to their place of origin. History offers us numerous examples. The twelfth century monk Osbert of Clare fled Westminster around 1121 and a second time in late 1139. Neither time did Osbert leave the country, but his letters refer to his exilium, himself as proscriptus, and “a stranger and visitor in a foreign land.”10 Brian Briggs writes, “Even in the worst periods of his exile . . . Osbert still held onto hope and the belief that he, like the citizens of Jerusalem, would be brought out of Babylon.”11 Thomas Becon wrote twice from what Seymour Baker House calls “internal exile” during King Henry VIII’s reign. Becon fled from Cambridge to Kent in 1541 after drawing the ire of Bishop Edmund Bonner for preaching against elements of the Six Articles and then fled to Strasbourg in 1554 following Mary’s ascension.12 He was not alone. Tudor England saw large numbers of exiles flowing into its borders from the Continent, which saw in turn English faithful fleeing to Europe in the final years of King Henry VIII’s reign. Edward VI’s coronation brought many of these English exiles back across the English Channel, but drove a number of Catholics to Europe in their place. Similar movements occur with the coronations of both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor. Dutch Catholics fled the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt between 1566–1609.13

4 Introduction Regardless of their religio-political persuasion, exiled individuals inhabit the liminal regions of their native culture: physically, mentally, or both simultaneously. And from such liminality, exiles often develop an intense nationalism, an overcompensating desire to embody or idealize the culture from which they are excluded. They grow acutely conscious of geopolitical and ideological boundaries in what Said calls “the perilous territory of not-belonging” precisely because they find themselves outside the national culture in which they desire participation.14 Said observes in “Reflections on Exile” that, The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. . . . Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.15 Said’s comments could apply to exiles ranging from Dante and Bolingbroke just as they could to the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, and Said himself. And as Said notes, the borders and barriers the exile encounters need not be, in whole or in part, geographical. They occupy a geographical and rhetorical space from which they might define and idealize their nation and culture while exposing what they perceive to be problems in both. Lastly, early modern exiles, like their modern counterparts, share an additional trait, the belief that their banishment is temporary. Early modern exiles devote much of their time to activities designed to facilitate their return: writing and publishing political tracts and religious polemics; establishing communities of exiled faithful, complete with their own religious governance separate from their host country’s; and creating and fostering transnational means of communication between groups. Each of these activities helps to explain why exilic literature is so dedicated to influencing religious and cultural change. My academic background inevitably draws me towards the literature of English exiles, who, like so many others, wanted to return home. For that reason, this study will remain focused on those groups. Many of the most well-known exile communities of the sixteenth century were English, and very few sought integration into their host countries. Fredrick Norwood writes, In many respects the English Protestant refugees were more like the English Catholic refugees [than they were Continental refugees]. . . . Very few of the English even sought for citizenship in their lands of refuge—they did not intend to stay.16

Introduction  5 These were not a directionless or defeated people. They formed interlinked ideological communities of religious dissidents and expatriates who conceived of themselves as preservers of a true faith that must be returned to their ancestral homeland to bring about the restoration of its former glory. Their literature reflects this ideological perspective and gives it shape while simultaneously helping them articulate what it means to be English and members of an English nation. Indeed, exile helps them define Englishness itself. “Seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land,’ ” as Said writes of the exile’s unique positioning, makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.17 Continuing Said’s metaphor, this study hopes to add a minor but complementary note to the growing body of exile scholarship’s opus. An exhaustive summary of that scholarship, even one focusing exclusively on England, would rapidly extend beyond control. Nevertheless, a number of the more significant contributions to the field in general, and this project specifically, deserve recognition to orient the reader in the larger conversation and help place this study’s focus within it. The following selections fall into three broad categories: anthropological, historical, and literary. Arguably two of the most influential anthropological works on marginality and exile are Arnold van Gennop’s The Rites of Passage and Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. In the former, van Gennop presents his idea that during various cultures’ rites de passage, when an individual or group undergoes a significant transformation, the process consists of three stages: separation, marginalization, and aggregation. Building on van Gennop’s work, Turner develops his concepts of “liminality” and “communitas.” The former refers to a position “betwixt and between” the dominant culture that develops the latter, a temporary community where the “normal” social hierarchies are suspended.18 Turner’s initial study focused on these phenomena in the Ndembu tribe of the African Congo, but he and his wife, Edith, later explored similar liminal phenomena in Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. The Christian pilgrim, they write, “passes through a realm or dimension that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state, he is betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification.”19 The Turners refer here to the unique aspects of pilgrimage that temporarily disconnect the pilgrim from his or her community. Pilgrims could include members of the royal family down to the lowliest serf. For a time, at least in theory, they traveled as equals. The Turners’s work is not without its

6 Introduction critics, however. Most notable are Simon Coleman, John Eade, and Michael Sallnow. They have argued, at various times, that the Turners’s notion of communitas is idealized and that their work on pilgrimage contributed to it being neglected by anthropological studies.20 To my knowledge, the Turners’s concept of liminality remains germane and well accepted. Historical studies of exile include early twentieth-century contributions such as C. H. Garrett’s The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism, which approaches the topic from a political perspective, first arguing that the Protestants who left England in 1553 were doing so with exile in mind, not migration. Garrett proceeds to examine individual exile communities in France and Germany and provides a comprehensive census of exiles between 1553 and 1559. Her study offers compelling evidence for the number of Marian exiles who fled to the Continent and convincingly argues that carefully planned and organized exiled communities were the rule rather than the exception.21 Equally important are her claims regarding the fracturing of normal social stratifications necessitated by the exilic experience and the purposeful segregation that the English communities maintained. She writes, “the consequences of this segregation were important and twofold: one, incessant quarrels among themselves; the other, a breaking down of social barriers. Gentlemen, merchants, and craftsmen were sometimes obliged to live under the same roof.”22 Such proximity inevitably leads to questions about social barriers, power distribution, and assumptions about class and individual identity. A second important historical work is Fredrick Norwood’s two-volume Strangers and Exiles: A History of Religious Refugees. Norwood attempts a comprehensive history of religious exiles in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Beginning with the Jewish exile in the Old Testament, Norwood’s scholarship examines the history of exile to the 1960s. Although focused primarily on the Western tradition, his work briefly explores exile in the Near and Far East, the refugee church, and the development of modern organizations dedicated to aiding and relocating exiles and refugees of all types. Concluding his study, Norwood reflects on the exilic experience as a whole: The mere task of struggling to build a new life in different surroundings requires a continuing involvement in and concern with ‘the secular city’ which is inescapable. . . . A refugee can flee from the world as completely as a medieval monk, or he can immerse himself in the stream of life as completely as the most dedicated brother of the urban worker, servant of the poor migrant, or counselor to the confused mind. . . . He has already been through the sieve of life . . . Christianity of the true refugee community is ‘sieved Christianity.’23 Norwood’s conclusions encapsulate some of the key aspects of exile this study will engage. The English exiles may set themselves apart, but they also imagine themselves as the essence of Englishness and Christianity.

Introduction  7 They are indeed, from their point of view, “sieved” out from the larger population, the remnant which preserves the truth of an English Church and nation. Of equal importance in historical scholarship is Paul Tabori’s excellent Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study. Tabori, like Norwood, constructs a grand narrative of exile, albeit more condensed than Norwood’s. Tabori examines the semantics of exile and develops a comprehensive definition of the same. Aside from being forced to leave his or her homeland, Tabori adds that the exile is “both materially and psychologically . . . dynamic,” usually desires to return, “will always retain an often-subconscious interest in and affection for his homeland,” and “the contribution of his exile to his new country is always likely to be greater than his influence still sensible in the land of his birth.”24 Such a definition makes the complex nature of exile clear. The totalizing historical narrative approach of Norwood’s and Tabori’s scholarship has more recently given way to localized studies of individual exilic groups. Kathy Gibbons’s English Catholic Exiles in Late SixteenthCentury Paris, for example, examines that city’s reaction to the English exiles who sought refuge there after Queen Elizabeth’s ascension. Moving past contemporaneous stereotypes of Elizabethan exiles, Gibbons questions the motivations behind their departure from England and rejects the idea that these same Elizabethan exiles gathered themselves into insular communities to, in essence, wait out the Protestant English regime. She explores the various attempts by that same community to influence English politics from across the Channel. Similarly, Ronald Corthell’s edited collection, Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, gathers essays examining the complicated valences of exile as “a cause for lamentation and grief” as well as “a culturally enabling and productive condition.”25 This collection includes essays exploring the role of Catholic recusants and exiles on Catholic spaces, women, the cosmopolitan court, and the English colleges among other topics. Catholic Culture in Early Modern England is of special value for its focus on women and gender as it relates to the early modern English Catholic community. That focus is a relatively new, and welcome, one. Katherine Holden and Fiona Reid’s Women on the Move: Refugees, Migration, and Exile offers another excellent introduction to that area of inquiry.26 Holden and Reid’s collection discusses exiled women in early modern Europe, the Bridgettine Nuns of Syon Abbey, Catholic noblewomen under Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and contemporary women in exile. Finally, a growing body of scholarship exists regarding the selfimposed religious exile of Englishmen and women to the New World. Among the most recent is Nan Goodman’s Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England, which studies the phenomenon of banishment in the New World from communities that were “banished or in flight from persecution themselves.”27 Goodman’s monograph includes an excellent literature review of similar scholarship on exiles in the New World.

8 Introduction Literary studies of exilic texts include several edited collections including María-Inés Lagos-Pope’s Exile in Literature, which organizes seven essays chronologically examining exile in literature from its ancient roots to the modern works of Hernán Valdés and others. The collection also includes Robert Edwards’s “Exile, Self, and Society,” which continues to be cited in exile studies today. A second collection is Laura Napran and Elizabeth van Houts’s Exile in the Middle Ages, which brings together essays defining five broad categories of medieval exile beyond the comparatively narrow political meaning of the term in the modern world: forced or voluntary banishment for political reasons; pilgrimage or marriage abroad; the permanent spiritual exile of monasticism; excommunication; and exile as a mental state.28 The essays, from the 2002 International Medieval Congress in Leeds, explore the complicated political and ecclesiastical upheavals of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when exile became a way of life for thousands of people: Protestant and Catholic, English and European. A third study of note is Philip Major’s Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration. Major closely examines the writings of English royalists after 1600, particularly those of Edward Hyde, Thomas Howard, and Sir Ralph Verney. From these works, Major identifies an “exilic rhetoric of disengagement, withdrawal or retirement, and stoicism” that results in “a subtle casuistry of political activism.”29 He concludes, These composite literary responses . . . lend a fluidity and flexibility to exilic writings of this era which can . . . both reinforce and subvert notions of political polarization. . . . [E]xilic writing in this period inevitably confronts the perennial balance to be struck between passive and active reactions to disempowerment, between whether to draw on inner or external resources.30 Christopher D’Addario’s Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature further examines the impact of exile’s rupturing effect on English, French, and Anglo-American literature. He writes, Not only did the text written from a real or imagined exile register the distinct sense of loss, the profound uprootedness, and the novel set of social and political circumstances that attended the author’s exile; it also importantly negotiated and attempted to configure these consequences for both the author and his or her audience.31 Other literary scholars, applying post-modern approaches to history as a text have explored how early modern authors, some of them exiles, set out to “write” an English nation. David Baker’s Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Question of Britain contends that England’s national

Introduction  9 identity is fundamentally linked with its inability to define itself apart from its neighbors. As he astutely notes in his introduction, in writing the history of England as a nation-state today what we are writing is the textual history of the English rulers writing their own textual history, and doing so, quite often, by ‘unwriting’—suppressing, assimilating, ignoring—the textual histories of the other not yet or never-to-be nations that also existed . . . among the British Isles.32 Baker’s study includes critical readings of William Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell, and Edmund Spenser as evidence of the socio-political forces that shaped the early modern English sense of national identity. Christopher Highley’s Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland takes a similar approach to English national identity and engages the writings of Catholics who fled England and those “stay-at-home Catholics [who] were exiles in their own right.”33 Elizabeth Sauer’s study, Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood, offers a compelling and thoughtful look at a figure whose life included engagement with the very center of English political power and sometimes found itself decidedly, and dangerously, in its margins.34 Throughout these approaches, anthropological, historical, and literary exilic scholarship consistently highlights the significance of exiles as subversive groups capable of affecting significant change because they inhabit a position at the margins of power. How and why these groups seek to affect change is part of what I call the mens exili and why I examine the importance of physical and conceptual displacement in the formation of early modern English national identity. To this end, my approach engages questions about the formation of subjectivity and nationalism in the minds of English exiles ranging roughly from John Gower to Edmund Spenser. For some authors, like Gower and Chaucer, the mens exili manifests in imaginative literature about an exile whose flight and return reshapes centers of power, and stabilizes the very system it upsets. Exile authenticates a “national” faith via miraculous, Providential intervention and the blessing of a special kind of sight that allows the exile to see through the outward appearance to the inner man, or core self. In such texts, the mind of exile is both a textual phenomenon and a catalyst of social change. When the exile comes to rest, change happens, and that change also creates (or imagines) a long-lasting stability. By the sixteenth century, when imagined exile becomes physical exile for Protestants and Catholics alike, the mens exili evolves further in scope and complexity. Early modern exilic polemicists use texts to reinsert their exiled voices into discourses of power and speak transformative truth to power. Here, however, is also found something new and noticeably modern: exiles going to great lengths to establish their credibility as “true” Englishmen. In other words, the exilic experience contributes directly to a nationalistic

10 Introduction ethos. At the same time, exiles begin to engage in discussions about the origins and limits of sacred and secular power. Boundaries of all types—real and imagined—and an awareness of those boundaries appear frequently in these texts, as do allusions to personal and national transformations. A key part of this transformative narrative is the rewriting of national origin myths. In each case, these historical myths are reshaped to favor the currently exiled group. English Protestants tend to look towards the distant past, reframing England’s foundation as Christian before the True Faith gets “exiled” by the Catholics from a sovereign nation. English Catholics, on the other hand, imagine their faith as the one “exiled” by looking at more contemporaneous history and England’s place within the transnational Christendom. In early modern England, then, the mind of exile continues to transform and authenticate, but develops a new emphasis on establishing national boundaries, defining the criteria of nationhood, and codifying citizenship. I want to be clear at the beginning that this project does not hope to argue that the previous paragraphs constitute a single, grand narrative of exile extending from the late medieval through to the early modern period. Far more work will be required to confirm or reject such a narrative. Although this study will engage with texts from those periods, it does so by looking at them as a series of related case studies. By questioning how exile shapes the narratives of these selected texts, this project hopes to shed light on how marginalized voices found the means to speak truth to power when they were otherwise excluded and speculate on the larger, possible ramifications of those narratives. With the obvious exception of Chapter 1, I have kept my focus primarily on early modern printed works rather than exilic texts that exist in the manuscript tradition or surviving letters. That is largely due to resources and access. My focus also tends towards more classically canonical authors. Although I do not focus exclusively on canonical writers, the figures I engage with are educated men of average and above average means. This too is due in part to resources and access. I acknowledge, however, that exiled women are notably absent from this study as a result. There were certainly women throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who experienced exile either alone or with their families. Their narratives are waiting to be told, and I have in mind a future project examining several of those women, so I beg the reader’s forgiveness in omitting them here. Lastly, if it is not already clear, this study will engage with both Catholic and Protestant exiles. It would be entirely possible to write far longer studies on either group. By placing these two groups within the same study, however, it becomes possible to see the significance of each exilic group’s fundamental understanding of England as a “nation” in conversation with one another and how the Protestant understanding gradually rose to ascendency both as a reaction to and a rejection of crucial aspects of Catholic Christendom. As I will show, Protestant exile polemicists do not, at some level, reject the idea of Christendom as a unifying principle. Instead, they gradually come to think of Christendom as something akin to a body of independent Christian

Introduction  11 nations rather than as nations dependent upon the a priori existence of a unifying Christian faith and universal church. By examining this phenomenon through the texts of English Protestant and Catholic exiles, we can see not only how this understanding of national identity develops and changes, but also how the positioning of the exiles beyond the island’s borders functions as a crucial aspect of this socio-political and ideological development. Chapter 1 defines and demonstrates the mens exili evident in English literature of the late middle ages by examining its presence in the medieval story of Constance as it appears in the works of Nicholas Trivet, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Building on definitions of medieval exile posited by Laura Napron and Elizabeth van Houts, I argue that a mind of exile is at work in each of these texts, and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, in particular, recognizes and develops exile’s ability to influence and transform established centers of power. Constance’s exiles turn out to be culturally and religiously transformative for all of the characters in the story. Together, these texts help establish a baseline of sorts, a “standard” exilic narrative from which the evolution of the mind of exile in the remaining chapters will continue. Exile in the Constance tales is the catalyst for deep transformation, both personal and social specifically in the tale’s endlink reference to “lollers in the wynd.” This moment, I argue, reveals a culturally mimetic anxiety about Wycliffism’s influence on traditional religion. A similar phenomenon fundamentally structures the Wycliffite narratives known as The Testimony of William Thorpe and The Plowman’s Tale, which constitute the primary focus of Chapter 2. In the former, I show how William Thorpe’s narrative representation of a mind of exile rewrites a disempowering interrogation into an ideologically affirming testimony. In the latter, I demonstrate that symbols and allusions to exile are present in Wycliffite texts very early in their production. These observations suggest that liminality and exile came to be understood by Wycliffites (and ultimately later reformers) as a position of potential power for altering orthodox religious authority. The desire to write one’s self into and out of the margins thus enabled religious dissenters, such as the Wycliffites, to reshape centers of power in their literature, like an exiled Constance who then travels back to the center of her spiritual and political world. Chapter 3 traces similar desires in sixteenth-century Protestant polemicists and begins showing how these same polemicists begin to conceptualize a national identity due in part to their extra-national position. As I will show, the ability to “see” Truth that appears in earlier exilic literature reemerges in the sixteenth century with explicitly nationalistic valences. I examine in detail the polemics of William Turner including The Huntyng and Fyndyng Out of the Romishe Fox and A New Booke of Spiritual Physik. Turner’s polemics identify and limit political and religious centers of power through the concentration of authority in written texts and through metaphors of texts. These metaphors are a rhetorical means for disentangling sacred from secular authority and for declaring Turner’s own continued loyalty to the

12 Introduction nation. Placing Turner’s polemics alongside those of his contemporaries reveals a “rhetoric of exile” that defines and explores an English national identity formed extra-nationally. It accomplishes this definition by forcing readers and authors to takes sides and by creating an unambiguous ideological platform, codified in the authority of print, a self-fashioning declaration both spiritual and national. Chapter 4 examines a similar rhetorical phenomenon in Catholic exilic polemics of the Allen-Persons’s party from the later sixteenth century. More specifically I focus on the polemics written by William Cardinal Allen, Robert Persons, and Thomas Stapleton in order to define a Catholic rhetoric of exile distinct from the Protestant one but that nevertheless shares commonalities with it. Together, Chapters 3 and 4 show how the polemic culture represented by these exiles questions the relationship between exile and nation in a fundamentally textual debate concerned with writing national narratives or historical chronicles. The struggle over these foundational narratives results in a literary genre I call polemic chronicle, texts that repurpose and rewrite historical origin narratives in order to define and confess an English national identity informed by a mind of exile. Lastly, I turn to the imaginative work of Edmund Spenser, a national poet deeply motivated by a kind of exile that was both mental and physical. Chapter 5 acknowledges that much of Spenser’s work engages with the concept of nationhood and England’s growing importance on a world stage. Spenser was born, educated, and thrived in an Elizabethan culture shaped in part by Catholic and Protestant exiles. I place Spenser in the context of exile discourse as it developed before him and as it influenced his own nationalist and imaginative writing to shed some light on Spenser’s status as a nationless exile—a man in-between lands and cultures—and the effect that this in-betweenness had on his later works, particularly A View of the State of Ireland and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. The former relies heavily on the rewriting of an Irish origin narrative in order to justify English colonization. Colonizers, although not exiles in a traditional sense, are nevertheless concerned with transforming their foreign “not-home” into their native soil. I argue that Colin represents a proto-colonial figure, a different kind of exile whose relation to the nation is central to his religious identity and to his moral and ethical ambiguity. The simple life he enjoys is challenged and upset by his encounter with a more complex and sophisticated culture. That culture, he notes, is both appealing and perilous because he is aware that being a part of it will result in a loss of something in himself. Both A View and Colin Clout open up questions about Spenser’s ideas surrounding England’s attempts to bring a Catholic Ireland completely under the English (and Protestant) crown. These questions were possible because of his unique position between cultures, an exile in both lands and nations.

Notes 1 Publius Virgilius Maro, The Eclogues of Virgil, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 3.

Introduction  13 2 Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 223. 3 Ibid., 241–242. 4 Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 181. 5 Mustapha Marrouchi, “Exile Runes,” College Literature 28, no. 3 (2001): 93. 6 George H. Tucker, Homo Viator: Itineraries of Exile, Displacement, and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2003), 6, 15; Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxiii. 7 Robert Edwards, “Exile, Self, and Society,” in Exile in Literature, ed. María-Inés Lagos-Pope (Bucknell University Press, 1988), 24. 8 Ibid., 25. 9 Ibid., 29. 10 Brian Briggs, “Expulsio, Proscriptio, Exilium: Exile and Friendship in the Writings of Osbert of Clare,” in Exile in the Middle Ages, eds. Laura Napran and Elizabeth van Houts, vol. 13, International Medieval Research (Turnhout: Brepolis, 2002), 135. 11 Ibid., 144. 12 Seymour Baker House, “Becon, Thomas (1512/13–1567),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/1918?docPos=1. 13 Geert Janssen, “Quo Vadis? Catholic Perceptions of Flight and the Revolt of the Low Countries, 1566–1609,” Renaissance Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2011): 472–99. 14 Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 177. 15 Ibid., 185. 16 Frederick A. Norwood, Strangers and Exiles: A History of Religious Refugees, Vol. II, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969), 345. 17 Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 186. 18 Arnold van Gennep, Monika B. Vizedon and Gabrielle L. Caffee, The Rites of Passage, Reprint edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) and Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93–111. 19 Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Columbia University Press, 2011), 2. 20 Simon Coleman and John Eade, eds., Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (London; New York: Routledge, 2004); John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, eds., Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 21 Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 32, 9. 22 Ibid., 21. 23 Norwood, Strangers and Exiles, Vol. II, 477. 24 Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study (London: Harrap, 1972), 37–38. 25 Ronald Corthell et al., “Introduction,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 11. 26 Katherine Holden and Fiona Reid, eds., Women on the Move: Refugees, Migration and Exile (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). 27 Nan Goodman, Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 2. 28 Laura Napran, “Introduction: Exile in Context,” in Exile in the Middle Ages, eds. Laura Napran and Elizabeth van Houts (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepolis, 2002), 1–9.

14 Introduction 29 Philip Major, Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 3. 30 Ibid., 172. 31 Christopher D’Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4. 32 David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4. 33 Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. 34 Elizabeth Sauer, Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

1 The Wretched Constance Defining a Mens Exili

When Chaucer gathers his famous pilgrims at the Tabard Inn in Southwark at the beginning of The Canterbury Tales, they are preparing to take part in the long tradition of travel for spiritual growth that was also seen as a type of exile. Pilgrimage is, of course, nothing distinctly English, Christian, or especially medieval. The healing spring in Bath has long been a site of special significance and a destination for people dating back to the Iron Age.1 For centuries, Rome has been a pilgrimage site for pagans and Christians. Jerusalem and Mecca draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year and have since ancient times. Despite this long tradition, and perhaps because of it, pilgrimage remained a special and important part of medieval lives. Pilgrimage was as much a matter of temporarily removing oneself from one’s community as it was about physical travel, and it should come as no surprise that pilgrims, outside their home communities, formed temporary ones as they traveled, benefiting from the companionship as much as the added security of traveling in numbers. Manuscript illustrations abound of pilgrims on the move, praying at shrines, and interacting with the divine. Stained glass windows memorialize pilgrims’s journeys across England and throughout Europe. A good deal of contemporary scholarship sheds light on pilgrimage, both in the ancient and medieval worlds.2 A frequent theme in such scholarship is the uniqueness of the pilgrim’s place in relation to other aspects of their “normal” society. Diana Webb writes of the medieval tradition, the radical dissimilarity of peregrinatio from all that normal people considered most comfortable and desirable gave it power not merely as a form of asceticism, a means to a greater spiritual perfection, but as a form of penance, a way of purging the soul of the dross of sin.3 Victor and Edith Turner have studied pilgrimage as a crucial part of religious experience and a “liminoid” phenomenon. “Pilgrimage,” Victor Turner writes, “may be thought of as extroverted mysticism, just as mysticism is introverted pilgrimage. The pilgrim physically traverses a mystical way; the mystic sets forth on an interior spiritual pilgrimage.”4 Edith Turner writes

16 The Wretched Constanc that for those occupying a liminal position, “the normal does not apply. It is a kind of crack between worlds, like the looking glass world of Alice, where animals and chessmen speak—and reprimand the visitor.”5 Similar subversions of normality appear in The Canterbury Tales. Craig Bertolet writes, for example, that Harry Bailey represents a “sovereign power” in the Tales who “as the governor of the Canterbury pilgrims, permits the Canon’s Yeoman’s separation from his master by sanctioning his public indictment of the Canon.”6 E. Talbot Donaldson’s seminal “Chaucer the Pilgrim” identifies Chaucer the man, the poet, and the pilgrim, but his difficulty separating those personas within the text highlights just how fluid the pilgrim-poet persona can be.7 Geoffrey Gust’s recent critique of Donaldson’s essay concludes, Donaldson appears to adhere to a view that perceives the poet himself behind the mask. Although he does not, in essence, read the Tales autobiographically, there is a hint that he may well be inclined to do just that (at least to an extent).8 In other words, pilgrimage (and pilgrims) operates within a particularly fluid and multivalent social space where, it stands to reason, the opportunity arises for interactions that reorganize and potentially subvert the status quo. Manuela Brito-Martins notes that “peregrinatio is a synonym of exile, which means that it expresses the actus peregrinandi of every man outside his own country.”9 Laura Napran makes a similar point in her introduction to Exile in the Middle Ages: “The notion of pilgrim as exile, both physically and spiritually, would have meshed well with the metaphorical use of the word ‘exile’ in Normandy, and would have been particularly appropriate during the crusading era.”10 Thus, pilgrimage is also a type of exile. Temporary exile in most cases, but an exile nonetheless both from one’s community and (theoretically) one’s worldly life. In the late fourteenth century, pilgrimage, place, and exile were already well-established, interrelated ideas. A second tradition, dating from ancient times like pilgrimage, is also closely linked to liminality: the voice of the prophet in the wilderness crying out to be heard, believing itself to bear the means of salvation—of the city, the kingdom, the individual, and the soul. It is a voice without a place, a voice that pushes back against the voices of the crowd. A voice that often gets ignored. Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower, adopts such as voice in his Anglo-Latin poem, Vox Clamantis. His title echoes the prophetic traditions in of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament, so it is fitting that one of the earliest references in Gower’s Vox is to John of Patmos, the exiled prophet of the Revelation, whom Gower invokes like a Muse to inspire his work: “Insula quem Pathmos suscepit in Apocalypsi,/ Hujus ergo nomen gesto, gubernet opus. [May the one whom the Isle of Patmos received in the Apocalypse, and whose name I bear, guide this work]” (Bk 1, Prologue, l. 57–58).11 Vox Clamantis is a revelation in its own right,

The Wretched Constanc  17 a wakeup call for an England in need of spiritual revival lest the kingdom fall into darkness and chaos. The poem dissects the multitude of moral failings the author believes are present in each of the three estates of medieval society. In a book about early modern English discourses of exile, it might seem odd to begin with one poet best known for French and Latin poems and a second who is arguably the greatest master of Middle English poetry. On top of that neither Chaucer, whom we will return to later, nor Gower were exiles. What little we know about the latter suggests that he lived his life in England more or less comfortably.12 Gower’s Anglo-Norman Mirour de l’Omme, Anglo-Latin Vox Clamantis, and Middle English Confessio Amantis speak to his merit as a multi-lingual poet, and, ever since Chaucer referred to him as “moral Gower” in the final lines of Troilus and Criseyde, he has acquired the reputation of “a moralist who tirelessly laments what has happened to traditional values in the England of Richard II.”13 Given that, Gower’s invocation of John of Patmos is apt given that he hoped to affect social change in the guise of a speaker originating from a liminal position. He is also a poet of place, which is of fundamental concern to the exile, but “place,” like “exile,” can be very difficult to define. In Gower’s texts, for example, place can refer to landscapes as it does in both the Vox Clamantis and the Confessio Amantis. Kurt Olsson’s examination of Vox Clamantis, for example, argues that, Gower develops three perspectives on place that will serve to free the age from the ‘comun drede’ that pervades it. In Book I, place means geographical location, England at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. . . . In Books III-VI, place is enlarged to mean man’s position in relation to his neighbor. . . . Each place is now defined by historical models, sometimes by past witnesses to the officium of an estate, and some times by exemplars who have fulfilled that office. . . . Book VII, finally, moves beyond place within the social order to man’s spiritual location, the relationship of body to soul, and of soul to God.14 These perspectives, Olsson continues, influences the whole of the Vox’s structure and represents a key aspect of its rhetorical ethos. Olsson concludes, At the outset of the work, that voice issues from a speaker who is trapped in a physical setting, specifically in deserto. But as he, the speaker, alters his prospect, as he ascends to a higher place, he gains a new perception into the condition of the wilderness. . . . The images, at first rather phantasmagoric, will become stable and meaningful.15 John Ganim has noted a similar interest in the perspectives of place in the Confessio Amantis. He points out, for example, that Gower’s use of “lond” in the Confessio can refer to a specific place, such as Rome, but

18 The Wretched Constanc often functions in a much more fluid sense to mean everything from one’s homeland to the soil beneath one’s feet. Ganim concludes that “ ‘Lond,’ or landing, is always in-between, always in danger of becoming the flux against which it should be a bulwark. That is, what most distinguishes Gower’s representation of space in the sense of landscape is its liminality.”16 Broadly speaking, then, it is possible to examine Gower’s Vox Clamantis and Confessio Amantis as works not by an exile, per se, but works influenced by exilic experiences and discourses of exile deeply concerned with the politics of place. Gower began work on the Vox Clamantis around 1378, writing what are now Books II through VII, a detailed critique of the medieval three estates’s failures to lead the moral and upright lives expected of them.17 The clergy in particular are singled out as the guiltiest of such failings, and Gower has little patience or sympathy for hypocrisy. Gower writes in Book III, “Alter et alterius cleri peccata favore/Excusat, quod in his stat sine lege reus./Non accusari vult a laicis, tamen illos/Accusat, que sibi libera frena petit. [And out of partiality, one cleric pardons the sins of another because he himself stands lawlessly guilty of them. It does not wish to be accused by laymen; nevertheless, it accuses them, and seeks a free reign for itself.]” (Bk III, l. 1675–78). None of the estates, however, are spared reprimand. Gower frames the poem’s original books following the long tradition of prophetic appeals for reform, justice, and warning. In the original version, Gower presents his critiques of the medieval estates as originating from the English people. He claims in Book III: “A me non ipso loquor haec, sed quae mihi plebis/Vox dedit, et sortem plangit ubique malam./Ut loquitur vulgus loquor” [I am not speaking of these things on my own part, rather the voice of the people has reported them to me and it complains of their adverse fate at every hand. I speak as the masses speak]” (Prologue, l. 11–13); at the beginning of Book IV he notes, “Est nihil ex sensu proprio quod scribo, sed ora,/Quae mihi vox populi contulit, illa loquar [Nothing that I write is my own opinion; rather, I shall speak what the voice of the people has reported to me]” (Bk IV, l. 19–20); and again in Book VI, “Hoc ego, quod plebis vox clamat, clamo [I cry out what the voice of the people cries out]” (Bk VI, l. 15–16). This appeal to a vox populi gives the poem an ethos akin to a public complaint. The narrator speaks with a collective voice, or at least as the mouthpiece of England as a whole. Had it remained in that form, the Vox would likely be remembered as an Anglo-Latin elegy of merit, but the additions Gower included following the 1381 Peasants’s Revolt arguably solidified its place in Gower’s oeuvre as one of his greatest works. Aside from its memorable and imaginative description of the Revolt, Gower’s additions dramatically reshape the poem’s underlying ethos in part through the addition of an exiled figure that becomes the source of the poem’s narrative. In its original form, the poem frames its social critiques from a centralized position; the speaker is not in deserto so much as in turba, amplifying and

The Wretched Constanc  19 codifying the complaints of the people rather than acting as an independent authority. Book I alters that dynamic via the creation of a dreamer/narrator whose experiences become the impetus for the critiques that follow. Book I reframes the Vox in the medieval dream vision tradition and presents a vivid description of the participants in the Revolt allegorized as a variety of wild animals. Gower begins with an idealized England, “alter paradisus [a second Paradise]” (Bk I, l. 79). The pastoral setting invokes images of fertile fields, fragrant flowers, and vibrant birdsong. Like a second Adam, the dreamer is at home in this Paradise. “Ecce,” he remembers, “dies talis fuit, in qua tempus amoenum/Me dabat in lusum gyrovagare meum [Lo, such was the day in which the pleasant season caused me to wander round in my joy]” (Bk I, l. 123–24). This England is stable and secure, but the narrator’s contentment is short-lived. As the dream vision begins, men become beasts—asses, oxen, swine, dogs, cats, foxes, birds of prey, flies and frogs— all intent on razing Paradise into oblivion. Lead by Wat Tyler, allegorized as a jackdaw, the beast-peasants lay waste to the countryside, attack London, and murder priest and noble alike. The narrator cries at one point, “Cumque duces Erebi sic vidi ducere mundum,/Caelica nullius jura valoris erant./Cum magis hos vidi, magis hos reor esse timendos,/Ignorans qualis finis habendus erit [I saw the leaders of hell ruling the world, the rights of heaven were worth nothing. The more I saw them, the more I judged I ought to be afraid of them, not knowing what sort of end would be bound to come]” (Bk I, l. 743–46). Gower sums up the sense of a world gone mad: “Bella movet cum fraude fides, cum crimine virtus,/Cum pietate scelus, cum ratione furor./Affectus de corde pios non suscipit hospes/Impietas, mentem deserit exul amor [Faith warred with Fraud, Virtue with Villainy, Wickedness with Piety, and Madness with Reason. The Host, Impiety, entertained no pious affections in the heart, and Love, an exile, deserted the spirit]” (Bk I, l. 1013–16). Such disruption will eventually lead to the moralizing message of the later books, but here the experience serves to unsettle the dreamer’s sense of security, radically alters the social order, and necessitates apocalyptic language to properly describe. As Gower notes in Book II’s prologue, “Hic dicit quod ipse jam vigilans secundum, vocem quam in somnis acceperat, intendit scribere ea quae de mundo vidit et audivit, et vocat libellum istum Vox Clamantis, quia de voce et clamore quasi omnium conceptus est [Here he says that now that he [the dreamer] is awake he intends to write, in accordance with the voice which he understood in his dreams, of the things which he saw and heard concerning the world. And he calls this book The Voice of One Crying, since it was conceived as it were, by a voice crying over all things].” A voice, rather than many voices, now shapes the poem that follows and, notably, this new voice emerges from exile. Exile becomes an essential part of the dreamer’s experience sixteen chapters into Book I. The dreamer, to this point primarily an observer of the chaos enacted by the beast-peasants, finds himself directly threatened by the

20 The Wretched Constanc events unfolding around him. His home under attack, the dreamer narrates what happens next. The passage is worth citing at length: Tuncque domum propriam linquens aliena per arva Transcurri, que feris saltibus hospes eram. Morsus ego linguis a dorso saepe ruebar, Et reus absque meo crimine saepe fui: Sic reus infelix agor absens, et mea cum sit Optima non ullo causa tuente perit. Inde ferens lassos adverso tramite passus, Quaesivi tutam solus habere viam: Attamen ad tantam rabiem pedibus timor alas Reddidit, et volucris in fugiendo fui. Sic vagus hic et ibi, quo sors ducebat euntem, Temptavi varia cum gravitate loca. Pes vagat osque silet, oculus stupet et dolet auris, Cor timet et rigidae diriguere comae. [Then abandoning my own home, I ran away across alien fields and became a stranger in the wild woodlands. Lashed from behind by peoples’ tongues, I often fell to the ground, and without any crime on my part I was often like a criminal. Thus wretched, I was arraigned in my absence, and although my cause was excellent, it perished since no one defended me. Tracing my weary steps along the upward path alone, I sought to find a safe road. Nevertheless, fear of this great madness added wings to my feet, and I was like a bird in my swift flight. So, wandering here and there where chance led me as I went, I made a serious attempt for several places. My steps wandered, and my lips were silent; my eye was struck with amazement and my ear was in pain; my heart trembled and my hair stood stiffly on end]. (Bk I, l. 1381–94) This moment begins the dreamer’s exile from his home, his patrimony, community, and sense of place. As his flight continues, the experience grows worse. The dreamer writes, “Fert tamen, ut possum maestos deprimere vultus/Solus in exilio gaudia magna dolor [In my exile, however, my grief brought me no inconsiderable pleasure in the fact that I was able to wear my gloomy expressions while by myself.]” (Bk I, l. 1461–62). These lines compound his feeling of exclusion nearly to the point of over determination in their use of “abandoning,” “alien fields,” “stranger,” “wandering,” “wayfarer,” and of course “exile.” Displacement, however, leads the dreamer to insight. At his lowest point, Wisdom appears to offer the dreamer comfort and redemption, reminding him that his exile comes from God “te reparando vocat [calling him to redemption]” (Bk I, l. 1548) and ensuring him

The Wretched Constanc  21 that “finem nam dolor omnis habet [every sorrow has an end]” (Bk I, l. 1550). His wandering path finally brings him to the Tower of London, allegorized as a ship, in which he takes refuge. Thus embarked, the dreamer and the ship ride out the storm of the Revolt, suffering severe damage. When the storm abates, the ship wanders “sine gubernaculo [rudderless]” (Bk I, Prologue, Ch. 20) before coming to rest on the shores of England. The dreamer, thankful for his Providential deliverance, exits the battered ship and encounters an old man who introduces him to this “new” land: “Exulis haec dici nuper solet insula Bruti . . . Hujus enim terrae gens haec est incola [This once used to be called the Island of Brut, an exile . . . The people of this land are wild]” (Bk. I, l. 1963, 1965). Fearful and overwhelmed, the dreamer suddenly finds himself completely alone and hears a heavenly voice command him to write both what he has just seen and seen in the past. The exiled dreamer, in other words, comes to rest with work to be done and a calling to act in order to affect change. The dreamer’s experiences in Book I work well to establish a baseline or “standard” discourse of exile that goes something like this. A figure comfortable and stable within a center of power finds himself for one reason or another in exile as a means of self-preservation. Alone and afraid, the exile eventually reaches a low point only to gain a vision or way of seeing from which insight arises. It might be a vision, as is the Vox, or a glimpse into the “truth” of a situation as we will see below. Either way, the exile’s experiences are perilous but filled with possibility. Enlightened, the exile “returns” either in person or by some other means, carrying with him that insight as a message to those who need to hear it. In the case of the Vox, Gower’s England, the “Insula te cepit, pax ubi raro manet [quarrelsome island where peace seldom lasts long]” (Bk I, l. 2024). This series of events is the root of what I call the mens exili, cognitive steps undertaken by an exiled group or individual that manifests in the narratives they produce. Those narratives may not proceed in lockstep with the aforementioned formula, and some deviate from it in fascinating ways, but the mens exili overall helps us understand how the experience of exile influences imaginative and the polemic literature, marginalization, and the importance of a very significant category of national formation and nationalist subjectivity— the individual experience of national exile as filtered through literary consciousness. Gower’s image of the rudderless ship amongst the waves invokes another well-known medieval exile story, that of Constance. Although we cannot be sure, Gower may have had the Constance story in mind while writing Book I of the Vox Clamantis. He certainly knew it. His Confessor narrates her story in Book II of the Confessio Amantis, and it predates that telling. It appeared first in Nicholas Trivet’s Anglo-Norman Les Chronicles, and Chaucer famously drew on both versions as the basis for the Man of Law’s story in The Canterbury Tales. A few details of Constance’s story vary depending on the version, but the overall narrative is consistent.

22 The Wretched Constanc Constance, daughter of the Roman emperor, is an exceptionally beautiful, moral, and Christian woman. She attracts the attention of a Syrian sultan who negotiates marriage with her. His mother plots against the relationship, arranging for the murder of her son and his household at the wedding feast. Constance is spared, but exiled on a rudderless ship where she miraculously survives for years until alighting on the shores of Northumberland. There she instigates the conversion of another pagan people, witnesses a blind man’s miraculous healing, is falsely accused of murder, divinely exonerated, marries the Northumberland king, bears his son, and again finds herself exiled through the machinations of her new mother-in-law. Constance and her young son, sustained by Providence, eventually return to Rome where they live for some time before reuniting with the Northumberland king during his penitential pilgrimage. In the end, Constance’s son becomes the heir to Rome’s imperial throne and she dies in peace. In addition to this basic narrative, each version of Constance’s story is one of social and cultural disruption and reformation. Her exile and return function as catalysts for fundamental changes to the centers of power and social institutions with which she comes into contact. In Trivet’s Chronicles, for example, the Saracen sultan offers a “good and entire peace between all Christians and all Saracens, and free passage to freely go and trade, and to visit the holy places.” He hands over control to Jerusalem and allows Christian priests to freely preach and baptize.18 Gower’s Constance is equally disruptive to the status quo. Winthrop Wetherbee writes that she represents “the threat or promise of radical transformation” and, continues, “her influence is mediated by the attraction her human presence exerts on others, and by the institutions of the different cultures with which she comes in contact.”19 Chaucer’s Constance/Custance continues the theme of disruption, which I will examine in detail below. All three versions recount Constance marrying Northumberland’s king after he and his people convert to Christianity, displacing their pagan faith, and conclude with Constance’s son assuming the role of Roman emperor, ensuring the continuance of a Christian dynasty and leaving the northernmost parts of the Roman empire firmly under the Christian faith. Constance is unquestionably an exile in each version of her story, but an examination of each version of Constance’s story, particularly Chaucer’s, offers an intriguing look into the evolution of a character who is increasingly marginalized and “othered”. Despite that, the more she moves towards the margins of power, the more fantastic and miraculous her successes become. To put it another way, the more of an exiled stranger Constance becomes, the more transformational a figure she becomes. Of the three, Trivet’s account endows Constance with the most agency, education, and means to influence her experiences. From the outset, his Constance is well-prepared and capable, receiving substantial education and linguistic training. Her father, Emperor Tiberius, “caused her to be taught

The Wretched Constanc  23 the Christian faith and [she was] instructed by learned masters in the seven sciences . . . and he had her instructed in various tongues.”20 The latter is of special importance. When she arrives in Northumberland it allows her to speak the native Saxon, declare her faith, and her lineage to an astonished Elda, warden of the area and vassal of Northumberland’s King Alle. That in turn allows her to more easily win Elda’s trust who “hoped she was the daughter of some king of Saxons beyond the sea.”21 Additionally, Trivet presents Constance’s relationship with and conversion of Hermangyld as driven by the former’s active guidance, and Hermangyld expresses a desire to do whatever Constance wishes of her. Constance responds, “[S]ince there is nothing . . . that you will not do at my wish, then you yourself shall be such as I am.”22 This friendship and Constance’s marriage to Alle follows naturally from the initial encounter with Elda in which she communicates with him fluently. Her integration into Saxon society, in other words, is directly related to her knowledge of Saxon. To be clear, Trivet’s Constance still experiences divine assistance. During both her exiles at sea, Trivet recounts how “God was her mariner,” “guided her ship,” and eventually brought her to safety.23 God miraculously saves her from a lustful knight in Elda’s castle and sustains her physical wellbeing for the impossibly long duration of her exiles at sea. Trivet’s Constance experiences exile, but when she returns from it her learning and linguistic acumen, supported by divine providence, allows her rapid assimilation into the center of Northumberland’s power structure and facilitates the kingdom’s Christian conversion. Her assimilation is so complete that, when she’s exiled the second time, her absence threatens the stability of the kingdom.24 We see Constance’s shaping of her own destiny during her second exile as well. At one point, she arrives in Spain and encounters Thelous, who attempts to rape her. After convincing him to wait until they are out of her son’s sight, “Constance, to save her chastity, came privily behind his back, and thrust him into the sea,” the only version where she explicitly acts in this moment.25 She acts when she learns Alle is coming to Rome seeking penance for killing his traitorous mother and instructs her son, Maurice, to place himself in his father’s presence to be recognized.26 Finally, she herself leads Alle and Maurice before Tiberius to be reunited with him and be acknowledged as his daughter.27 As a whole, exile in Trivet’s version of Constance’s story is something done to her rather than something that makes up a key part of her identity. Gower treats her rather differently. His Constance is immediately set apart from Trivet’s by the omission of her substantial learning. She still teaches the faith to the Sultan’s emissaries, and retains some agency by arguing for her marriage to the Syrian Sultan as a means of converting his people. When she reaches Northumberland, she is able to communicate in some way with Elda and his wife, but Gower does not explicitly mention her ability to speak their language. Gower also chooses to make her more mysterious to the Northumberland natives. Constance does not tell them anything about herself or her origins. Elizabeth Allen calls her “a fair unknown, which

24 The Wretched Constanc suggests that she may not yet know herself, that she has no stable social role, and further, that she may not belong to any country or institution.”28 Nevertheless, Elda welcomes her into his home and Hermangyld follows her example and becomes a Christian, but the omission of her past recasts Constance as much more of a stranger. Gower’s version of the story has Elda play the matchmaker between Constance and King Alle based on “the pleine cas” of her story rather than suspecting her of being a Saxon queen (l. 786). The text “others” her in additional ways. Domilde, Constance’s mother-in-law, calls her “of faierie” and then “faie” in the forged letter that leads to Constance’s second exile, highlighting her seeming strangeness (l. 964, 1019). Trivet’s Domilde acted against Constance for being “a strange woman whose lineage was unknown,” but Gower’s terms carry the additional connotation of the supernatural, something not of this world.29 Constance’s “othering,” in other words, is much more explicit in Gower’s version. Omitting her ability to speak Saxon and emphasizing her strangeness moves her further to the margins of the social order by highlighting her status as an outsider. As a result, when Constance converts first Hermangyld, then Elda, and latter marries King Alle, her movement from the margins to the center is more explicitly the result of divine providence and less the product of her own agency. We see a similar downplaying of agency during her second exile and the attempted rape in Spain. In Gower’s version, “She preide God, and He hire herde,/And sodeinliche [the Spainard] was out throwe/And dreynt” (l. 1120–1122). Divine intervention rather than Constance’s agency, protects her body in this case. More striking than these episodes are Gower’s changes to Constance’s speeches. I mean here the moments where she speaks directly rather than via the authorial paraphrase that Trivet and Gower frequently employ. Despite it being her story, Constance speaks directly very little in either Les Chronicles or the Confessio Amantis, and what each author has her say is worth unpacking. Trivet’s Constance exhibits a confidence in her speeches that are notably lacking in Gower. Trivet recounts the aforementioned personal guidance Constance gives to Hermangyld as the latter desires to be more like her friend, and shortly afterwards Constance guides Hermangyld’s healing of the old blind man with the imperative, “Hide not, lady, the virtue which God has given thee.”30 Gower’s version, in contrast, gives Constance no direct words at all persuading Hermangyld to seek redemption. Instead, the “grace of Goddes pourveance” (l. 753) and Constance’s unrecorded words lead to the conversion; when the blind man calls for his sight, Constance says nothing at all. The differences are subtle, but her silence in these crucial narrative moments stand in contrast to the more assertive Constance Trivet presents. A similar phenomenon occurs just before her exile from Northumberland. Trivet records her words in Les Chronicles: Never may the day come that the land should be destroyed for me, and that ye, my dear friends, should have death or trouble for me! But since

The Wretched Constanc  25 my banishment pleases God and my lord the king, I must take it in good will, in hope that God will bring a hard beginning to a good end, and that He will be able to save me on the sea, who, by sea and land, is almighty.31 Constance frames her lament around a sense of duty, to country and king, acknowledging that the stability of the kingdom outweighs her individual interests. Just or not, she continues, God will provide. Gower, on the other hand, has her say nothing at all before she’s committed to the ocean, and then adds one of his most substantive changes from Trivet’s narrative. Adrift at sea, Constance begins to weep for her condition: Sche seide, ‘O hihe mageste, Which sest the point of every trowthe, Tak of thi wofull womman rowthe And of this child that I schal kepe.’ . . . Sche loketh and hire yhen caste Upon hire child and seide this: ‘Of me no maner charge it is What sorwe I soffre, but of thee Me thenkth it is a gret pité, For if I sterve thou shalt deie. So mot I nedes be that weie For moderhed and for tendresse With al myn hole besinesse Ordeigne me for thilke office, As sche which schal be thi norrice. (l. 1057–1061, 1066–1076) The melancholy in this Constance is absent from Trivet’s version. Gone are Constance’s sense of duty to king, country, and her faith that it is all part of God’s larger plan. Gower’s version makes her condition more hopelessly pathetic, having her cry and give up hope, only to commit to living for the sake of her newborn son. Trivet’s heroine suffers exile as a recognition of her duty and faith. Gower’s because she has no choice. Allen writes of this moment in the poem, Constance prays to God and then swoons. . . . The agency here begins with God, who comforts her, but the passage moves from her passive submission to his will to the recognition and assumption of her proper social role [as a mother].32 I would add that this moment, and those previously mentioned, also shift Constance to the margins of power and the narrative. Gower’s Constance is

26 The Wretched Constanc displaced from Northumberland and herself. By divesting her of agency, she transforms into a stranger and an exile in Gower’s version in a way that she does not in Trivet’s Chronicles. This brings us back, at last, to Chaucer, who carries Gower’s marginalization of Constance still further by pushing her to the margins of her own story while systematically divesting her of remaining agency. Several scholars have noted this aspect of Chaucer’s version. Wetherbee writes, “Chaucer’s heroine flees the world without transcending it and ends by becoming simply invisible.”33 He concludes, “she is excluded from ordinary social intercourse and relegated to the status . . . of an essentially ‘strange’ being who moves through the world as if under a curse, generating social conflict in spite of herself.”34 Allen is more succinct: “In effect, the Man of Law tells an absolutely exemplary tale in which he renders Constance static, emblematic, and essentially, absent.”35 Allen’s and Wetherbee’s comments refer specifically to the wretchedness of Chaucer’s Custance, by far the most helpless and passive woman. The Man of Law, for example, begins the tale noting that the Syrians visiting Rome first heard of Custance and then, “whan they han this blisful mayden sayn,” return home to tell their Sultan about her (l. 172).36 Rather than teaching and converting these men, Custance begins the story as an object of desire and the passive recipient of a male gaze. Furthermore, the initial marriage arrangements stipulate the Syrian’s conversion as a condition of marrying Custance rather than a result of her instruction. One of the defining aspects of Chaucer’s Custance is her initial positioning in the margins of her narrative. Her tale begins with an exogamy, itself a type exile, and she remains a “stranger” who acts as a catalyst of change whenever she comes into contact with a center of cultural, religious, or social power. Ironically, Chaucer has Custance speak directly more than she does in Trivet and Gower combined, but in nearly every instance Custance’s words further locate her in a subservient, powerless position. Her first words lament her leaving Rome, but acknowledge that such is her lot as “Wommen are born to thraldom and penance” (l. 286), and before both her exiles at sea and her trial for Hermangyld’s murder she acknowledges her helplessness and prays for God’s deliverance (l. 451–462, 639–644, and 826–833). Custance’s exiles thus become a crucial part of her identity and a central theme of the tale. Moreover, the tale acts as a complex meditation and explication of exile’s affect on centers of political power and religious identity. Chaucer examines the effect of a transformative outsider’s appearance within structures of power both gradually and abruptly. Custance’s gradual integration into Northumberland, for example, is much more transformative than her marriage to Syria’s Sultan. Custance’s experiences introduce an additional idea that will become a familiar aspect of the mind of exile throughout this study, the exile’s privileged access to a special type of vision—an inner eye or specialized sight—that allows the exile to see through outward appearances and glimpse the “real” person within. Lastly,

The Wretched Constanc  27 the Tale presents exile, exiles, and liminality as authenticators of religious Truth, the “evidence” as it were of God’s special favor. The exile, in short, is both the catalyst of transformation and the insurance of a return to stability at the transformation’s conclusion. The Man of Law’s Tale explores each of these aspects in a discourse of exile centered on Custance, Chaucer’s wretch. Custance’s multiple exiles and life experiences should rightly be called wretched ones. Indeed, Chaucer calls her a wretch at least three times. She is her father’s “wrecched child,” a self-described “wrecche womman,” and the narrator calls her a “wrecched womman” (l. 274, 285, and 918). “Wretch” is also a term that Chaucer reserves only for her, which is not without significance. “Wretch,” as Susan Hoffman notes “comes from the Anglo-Saxon wrecca: an exile, or one cast out.”37 Custance’s wretchedness and multiple exiles define her spiritual life and the “constancy” that her name suggests. David Raybin posits that marginality signifies each of those and her ability to transform the world to which she returns: “Wandering among the waves, Custance is exiled from human contact. . . . When she rests, she reintegrates herself into the historical frame, often playing an important, if generally passive, role in the directing of human events.”38 Francis McGregor reads Custance’s exiles as a crucial part of her self-identity right up to the tale’s conclusion, writing In completing the passage of exile and return, in reunion with the father who has outlived her husband, Custance returns to her origins and the identity implied by lineage, as though this is the one sure means of identifying the self in all its particularity.39 Raybin and McGregor each note a special concern in the tale, the exile’s relationship to nations and boundaries, as well as its ability to disrupt and transform the same. Just prior to Custance’s departure from Rome, Chaucer becomes fixated on references to nations and broken boundaries. Custance “shal be sent to strange nacioun,” which is shortly afterwards named “the Barbre nacioun” (l. 268, 281). The narrator compares the sadness caused by her departure to Troy “whan Pirrus brak the wal,” when Ilion burned, Thebes fell, and Hannibal thrice sacked Rome (l. 288–290). Each historical example alludes to the penetration of a boundary and the destruction of a center of power by a person or persons coming from outside. These allusions foreshadow the disruptive influence Custance will have upon her arrival in Syria, and such references are complicated by the explicit mention of “nacioun,” itself an unusual term in the Tales that appears just four times.40 Custance, exiled by marriage from her native country, first comes to direct human events in the center of power in Syria where her presence immediately becomes a threat to the established order. The Sultan has already declared his willingness to abandon his faith for Custance’s in exchange for marrying her, and expressed a willingness to bring his people with him into the new faith (l. 225–43). That drives the Sultan’s mother to

28 The Wretched Constanc plot against her son and Custance, vowing “The lyf shal rather out of my body sterte/Or Makometes lawe out of myn herte!” (l. 335–36). The Sowdanesse follows through, murdering her son and his followers at the wedding dinner, sparing only Custance and banishing her into exile. From the outset of her journey, then, Custance is associated with disruption to centers of power, and her experiences in Syria, although brief compared to the other episodes in the tale, establishes the exiled Custance as a subversive force that Chaucer will continue to build upon when she arrives in Northumberland, and it is here that Raybin’s observation about Custance directing human events is most clear. Custance’s arrival on the shores of Northumberland marks the second time that she finds herself entering into a foreign territory from exile. Like she was in Syria, Custance is a stranger in a strange land whom Chaucer strips of her linguistic acumen. Rather than Saxon, she speaks “A maner Latyn corrupt” (l. 519). Although she can be understood, this linguistic marker makes it impossible for her to be, or even be mistaken for, a Saxon queen. It marks her unquestionably as an outsider and stranger. Just after this moment, the narrator inserts a somewhat odd historical aside: “Alle Cristen folk been fled fro that contree [Northumberland]. . . . To Walys fledde the Cristyanytee/Of olde Britons dwellynge in this ile;/Ther was hir refut for the meene while” (l. 540, 544–46). He reminds the reader of Christianity’s complicated past in England and the eventual need for an exile of the faithful as a means of self-preservation. He is equally attentive to establishing that exile’s temporary nature. The final qualifier, “for the meene while,” recalls that this exile will come to an end, as the reader soon learns, by Custance’s own return from exile and the reintegration of the Christian faith into the kingdom. Custance’s conversion of Hermengyld begins the transformation of the land back into the Christian one into which the exiled English will return. This seemingly passing reference to exile highlights its transformative effect on an English “historical” narrative and its link to national identity. Susan Nakley writes of these historical references, The Man of Law’s Tale uses the British past to address two sets of contemporary national concerns: anxieties about the future of English institutions in crisis, and questions about England’s place in the world (given its insular pagan history, similarly limited vernacular language, and claimed continental inheritances).41 She further claims the tale “imagines English ‘national sovereignty’ through anachronism and internationalism.”42 Chaucer’s contemporaries are themselves the descendants of these restored exiles in so much as fourteenth-century England was a securely Christian nation. After this brief historical aside, the narrator returns to Custance’s present, introducing several additional

The Wretched Constanc  29 Christians who remain in Northumberland: a blind old man and his companions, the remnant of the Christian faithful: But yet nere Cristene Britons so exiled That ther nere somme that in hir privetee Honoured Crist and hethen folk bigiled, And ny the castel switche ther dwelten three. That onn of hem was blynd and myghte nat see, But it were with thilke eyen of his mynde With whiche men seen, after they ben blynde. (l. 547–53) The stanza’s first lines draw a distinction between the English exiles in Wales and these Christians who hold themselves apart, honoring the exiled faith in “privetee” despite the pagan faith controlling the land (l. 548). These three are “exiles” in their own right, but ones of a different sort, more internal exiles. They dwell at the margins of the pagan community “ny the castel,” symbolically close to, but removed from, a locus of power. All these exiles are about to have an impact on the pagan community. The blind man encounters Custance, Hermengyld, and her husband as the trio enjoys an outing. Invoking Christ’s name, the old man beseeches Hermengyld to return his sight. The call for this miracle is doubly significant. Ideologically it confirms Hermengyld’s new faith by manifesting the power of her new God and it authenticates Custance as the carrier of that faith. Simultaneously it transforms the old man by restoring his vision, and it authenticates his ability to see “with thilke eyen of his mynde;” this internal sight grants the exiled figure the ability to “see” what others cannot. The old man’s inward sight, his mind of exile, adds to the authenticity of Custance’s faith because it reveals to him what has not been made openly known. He “sees” the faith present in both Hermengyld and Custance despite their faith being internal. Hermengyld, after all, has yet to tell even her husband about her conversion. She is, in a way, a member of the Christian exiled community and the community of internal exiles like the old man. His ability to “see” her faith links them together as members of the same community. As a result, the constable converts to his wife’s new faith and the narrative moves Custance into King Alla’s court, completing her transition from the margins of Northumberland’s social order to the center of its power. It is possible, then, to trace Custance’s transformative affect both literally and figuratively to this point. She arrives at the literal edge of Northumberland, “a furlong wey or two” from the sea (l. 557). Her faith disrupts and transforms that place before she moves to Alla’s court where he, too, eventually accepts Christianity as his faith. The conversions of Hermengyld, her husband, and Alla likewise represent the gradual transformation of Northumberland’s loci of power. Unlike Syria, where she immediately

30 The Wretched Constanc finds herself at the center of power, in Northumberland the movement is more gradual. Change begins in the margins and moves towards the center, a steady transformation instead of a radical one. Yet as is almost always true, even gradual changes are not without resistance. The old order, symbolized by a malfeasant knight, murders Hermangyld in an attempt to cast suspicion on Custance and encourage her removal. Although framed as retaliation for a spurned love interest, the knight’s actions further establish the authenticity of Custance’s faith and, ironically, complete Northumberland’s Christian conversion. After lying about Custance’s culpability, the knight falls victim to a very specific divine punishment: “his eyen broste out of his face” (l. 671). The symbolism is not subtle. The failure to “see” the truth of Custance’s faith removes an impediment to the transforming status quo. The knight’s sight, literally and symbolically, is taken from him. This miracle, in turn, acts as evidence of Custance’s faith and the final catalyst for King Alla’s conversion. Alla and Custance’s marriage solidifies her place in a newly Christian center of power. Transformation, authentication, and exile thus become intimately related in the poem. A figure from the margins encounters a once stable center of power and the former transforms the latter, which in turn transforms much of the kingdom. Custance’s final exile at the hands of Donegild further reinforces the theme of exile and return that, to that point, has focused largely on disruption. In the tale’s final act, however, Chaucer pivots to another aspect of exile’s impact, the potential for stability and continuity after disruption and transformation. That possibility exists in Maurice. Like Custance, Maurice suffers exile on Donegild’s order. Maurice’s eventual return to Rome, from a lifetime of exile, sets up a peaceful and lawful transition of power from one emperor to another with the blessing of the Pope. The exile’s return, in other words, ensures the continued stability of the Christian empire. Alla and Custance return to their home in Northern England “Wher as they lyve in joye and in quiete,” even if it is only for a short time (l. 1131). Her lifetime of exiles and returns have converted a pagan kingdom to the True faith and insured the continued stability of the Christian empire. From Northumberland to Rome, the northern and southern ends of the empire, Christendom owes its faith and “constancy” to the wandering Custance. The Man of Law’s Tale thus represents a case study for the interaction between the margins and the center of medieval loci of power and reflects how a liminal figure might radically alter them. The text also links exile to a religious constancy that is personally and culturally capable of remaining hidden in plain sight. The exiled faithful, represented by Custance, the old man and his companions, demonstrate their devotion to the faith by retaining and practicing it in the margins of the dominant culture. Culturally they evidence the “constancy” of Christianity even in a pagan England where they are seemingly powerless. The Man of Law’s Tale thus reflects the baseline narrative of exile we saw in Gower’s work quite closely with a

The Wretched Constanc  31 crucial difference. Whereas Custance openly practices her faith, the exiled faithful such as the old man practice their faith while appearing outwardly to conform. That detail echoes some of the anti-Wycliffite rhetoric of the late fourteenth century. John Gower, for instance, laments that they, “In the act of usurping the faith, feigns a virtuous appearance, more cautiously so as to disguise its own deceit.”43 To be clear, I am not arguing that The Man of Law’s Tale offers definitive evidence that Chaucer held Wycliffite beliefs, although there is compelling circumstantial evidence to suggest he was at least sympathetic to their cause.44 However, reading The Man of Law’s Tale as exploring exile’s impact on stable centers of power may aid in understanding the tale’s endlink, which famously contains a passing reference to the Wycliffites. Harry Bailey responds to criticism from the Parson: “I smelle a lollere in the wynd” (l. 1173). Speculation regarding what prompts this odd response remains inconclusive. Frances McCormack acknowledges that the Parson’s portrait resembles a Lollard Poor Priest, but concludes that most scholars “do not generally perceive Chaucer to be taking a pro- or anti-Lollard stance, but rather to be exploiting the discourse and ideology of the movement for aesthetic, didactic or literary reasons.”45 The Parson is certainly a pious man according to the General Prologue, and his Tale seems entirely orthodox on the surface. Wycliffites, however, are clearly on the Host’s mind at the conclusion of Custance’s story. He calls the Parson a “Lollere” a second time just four lines later (l. 1177). Norman Harrington says of the endlink, “we glimpse faintly here the outlines of a great national debate which the pilgrims, together with Chaucer’s immediate audience were obliged to face from day to day, form opinions upon, and cope with as best they could.”46 Yet the question remains, what precisely about the Tale puts that debate in the Host’s mind? Why mention Lollards here at all? Chaucer’s mind of exile offers a possible explanation. The Host has Wycliffites on his mind because, as Chaucer writes The Canterbury Tales, England has begun to feel the influence of Wycliffism in the margins of public debate on traditional religion. The Church’s anxiety about their influence will result in the passage of the De Heretico Comburendo in 1401 and its attempts to limit religious debate in academia and the suppression of religious texts by the 1408 Constitutions of Oxford. These statutes are still to come, but their seeds are well planted by the time Chaucer’s pilgrims set out for Canterbury. Anne Hudson has made a compelling case that concerns about Wycliffite influence were already in place by the 1380s.47 The Host may be jesting when he calls the Parson a “lollere,” but the Shipman’s objection reveals the intense anxiety that Wycliffism caused within the faithful. In a culturally mimetic moment, the Shipman objects to the Parson’s preaching because “He wolde sowen som difficulte,/Or springen cokkel in our clene corn” (l. 1182–83). The Shipman fears that the Parson’s preaching will insert something transformative into the pilgrimage, something that might alter the faith of the pilgrims. Ironically a tale about religious constancy

32 The Wretched Constanc concludes with anxiety concerning religious change that comes from the margins instigated by the just concluded life of the exiled Custance. Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale highlights the transformative and authenticating power of exile on religious orthodoxy and even the suggestion of Wycliffite sympathies in the Parson causes an intense and immediate anxiety in the Shipman regarding religious transformation. Perhaps Chaucer is hinting at the Wycliffites’s marginality as a crucial aspect of their ability to affect change. A mind of exile can be found in Wycliffite literature as well, and it is to them that we will now turn.

Notes 1 Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), 1. 2 Additional work on ancient pilgrimage includes Matthew Dillon, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece (Oxon: Psychology Press, 1997); Jas Elsner and Ian Rutherford, Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Recent studies of Christian pilgrimage include Paul Oldfield, Sanctity and Pilgrimage in Medieval Southern Italy, 1000–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Elka Weber, Traveling Through Text: Message and Method in Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2014). 3 Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, xiv. 4 Turner and Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 33–34. 5 Edith L. B. Turner, Heart of Lightness: The Life Story of an Anthropologist, 1st edition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 264. 6 Craig Bertolet, “The Anxiety of Exclusion: Speech, Power, and Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 33 (2011): 190. 7 E. Talbot Donaldson, “Chaucer the Pilgrim,” in Chaucer Criticism: The Canterbury Tales, eds. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor, vol. 1 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 1–13. 8 Geoffrey W. Gust, “Revaluating ‘Chaucer the Pilgrim’ and Donaldson’s Enduring Persona,” The Chaucer Review 41, no. 3 (February 19, 2007): 317. 9 Manuela Brito-Martins, “The Concept of Peregrinatio in Saint Augustine and Its Influences,” in Exile in the Middle Ages, eds. Laura Napran and Elizabeth van Houts, vol. 13, International Medieval Research (Belgium: Brepols, 2004), 83. 10 Laura Napran, “Introduction: Exile in Context,” in Exile in the Middle Ages, eds. Laura Napran and Elizabeth van Houts (Brepols, 2002), 6. 11 John Gower, Poema Quod Dicitur Vox Clamantis: Necnon Chronica Tripartita (G. Nicol, 1850). Translations in this chapter are from John Gower, The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying, and The Tripartite Chronicle, trans. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962). 12 Gray, Douglas. “Gower, John (d. 1408),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11176. 13 Kurt Olsson, “John Gower’s ‘Vox Clamantis’ and the Medieval Idea of Place,” Studies in Philology 84, no. 2 (1987): 134. 14 Ibid., 135. 15 Ibid., 148.

The Wretched Constanc  33 16 John M. Ganim, “Gower, Liminality, and the Politics of Space,” Exemplaria 19, no. 1 (2007): 95. 17 Stockton’s introduction offers a detailed textual history of the Vox as well as an extensive summary of its contents. See further Gower, The Major Latin Works of John Gower, 11–32. 18 Nicholas Trivet, “The Life of Constance,” in Originals and Analogues of Some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, eds. Frederick James Furnivall, Edmund Brock and W.A. Clouston (London: N. Trübner and Co., 1872), 6. 19 Winthrop Wetherbee, “Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower,” in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R.F. Yeager (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1989), 70. 20 Trivet, “The Life of Constance,” 4. 21 Ibid., 14. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 12, 32. 24 Ibid., 32. 25 Ibid., 36. 26 Ibid., 46. 27 Ibid., 50. 28 Elizabeth Allen, “Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble With Reading,” ELH 64, no. 3 (1997): 642. 29 Trivet, “The Life of Constance,” 24. 30 Ibid., 18. 31 Ibid., 32. 32 Allen, “Chaucer Answers Gower,” 643–44. 33 Wetherbee, “Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower,” 81. 34 Ibid., 85. 35 Allen, “Chaucer Answers Gower,” 629. 36 Geoffrey Chaucer. “The Man of Law’s Tale.” in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987), 89–104. 37 Nancy Hoffman, Spenser’s Pastorals: The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clout (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 121, note 5. 38 David Raybin, “Custance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 80. 39 Francine McGregor, “Abstraction and Particularity in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 46, no. 1–2 (2011): 71. 40 Susan Nakley, “Sovereignty Matters: Anachronism, Chaucer’s Britain, and ­England’s Future’s Past,” The Chaucer Review 44, no. 4 (2010): 368. 41 Ibid., 369. 42 Ibid. 43 Quoted in Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 21. Cole’s translation. 44 See further Carol Martin, “Alys as Allegory: The Ambivalent Heretic,” Comitatus 21 (1990): 52–71; Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Lollard Joke,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 23–42; Frances McCormack, Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent (Dublin and Portland, Oregon: Four Courts Press, 2007); and Frances McCormack, “Chaucer and Lollardy,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), 35–40. 45 McCormack, “Chaucer and Lollardy,” 37. 46 Norman T. Harrington, “Experience, Art, and the Framing of the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ ” The Chaucer Review 10, no. 3 (1976): 192. 47 Anne Hudson, “Lollardy: The English Heresy?” in Religion and National Identity, ed. Stuart Mews, vol. 18 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1982), 261–83.

2 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distance A Wycliffite Mind of Exile

When John Wyclif died in 1384, he could not have known or imagined the seismic impact his theological arguments would have on the Christian church, first in the form of Jan Huss’s revolution in Bohemia and the rise of Wycliffism and “lollardy” in England. Echoes of his influence, which Anne Hudson and Anthony Kennedy consider “constantly underestimated,” resonated throughout the sixteenth century despite the Church’s efforts to suppress them.1 The indebtedness of lollardy to Wycliffism is well documented, so much so that the two terms were used synonymously for quite some time. Yet, as Andrew Cole has recently argued, “The term ‘lollard’ is a curse word generated by persons . . . intent on marshaling the greatest resources of secular and ecclesiastical institutions against individuals at Oxford and elsewhere.”2 Wycliffite3 studies have long been a fertile and contentious field in late medieval and Reformation scholarship. Since Anne Hudson argued that they represented a premature and ultimately unsuccessful Protestant reformation, no small amount of ink has been spilt in response to her provocative thesis.4 Much attention has also focused on the Wycliffite influence on several late medieval figures: among them the so-called Lollard Knights, William Langland, and, of course, Geoffrey Chaucer. Wycliffite texts, ranging from the well-known to the newly discovered have enjoyed something of a revival in recent years, and from those texts, it is readily apparent that to write about them at all requires careful framing and an acknowledgement that “lollardy” consists of a diverse system of beliefs stemming from the Wycliffite heresy.5 Wyclif and his followers challenged a number of orthodox religious positions, but two criticisms were especially persistent, the Church’s temporal wealth and the worldliness of the monastic orders. Ecclesiastical wealth was hardly a new target for critics of the Church, but from their earliest days the Wycliffites argued against ecclesiastical wealth using liminal allusions. The Twelve Conclusions of 1395 identifies “Qwan þe chirche of Yngelond began to dote in temporalte” as the point when “hope and charite begunne for to fle out of oure chirche.”6 Early in the fifteenth century William Taylor claims “aftir þe fal of þe clergie into þis wondirful wordlynesse, ben wrecchid cristen men as we seen for to gete hem goodis constreyned for to grope aboute

36 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc from dore to dore and crye and begge”7 (19). The underlying thread in these criticisms is the idea that the Church, particularly the clergy, should exist as separate from the world—in it but not of it. The failure of the clergy to live in such a way has driven the greatest virtues—hope and charity—as well as the faithful who maintain them, to the margins. Liminality, in other words, defines the true faith and faithful alike. The Wycliffite insistence on being separate from the world implies an understanding of true faith based in part on one’s exclusion from the majority. Given these convictions, it is little surprise that a mind of exile extends into the structure of some Wycliffite literature in the form of liminal allusions, references to Biblical exile, and the adoption of the prophetic voice speaking truth to power. Wycliffites are, as Frances McCormack notes, “exiled from the political realm and thus cannot participate in its operation. Their use of a distinctive and ordered language is an attempt to restore a sanctioned discourse-type in which they can maintain their political agenda.”8 Their texts show a self-conscious positioning of their ideology as set apart from the beliefs of the world, including the Roman Church. Wycliffite sermons, propaganda, and poetry rely upon a mind of exile to both transform the centers of religious power they strive against and authenticate the truth of their own closely held beliefs. It is not difficult to find historical evidence supporting how identifying as a Wycliffite could lead to a sense of being always already marginalized from the larger religious community. Wycliffism begins with an exile in 1382, when the Blackfriars Council formally declared Wyclif, and his followers, heretics. Cole notes that in that same year the academic disciples of Wyclif who were identified in these ecclesiastical publications either recanted or fled [Oxford University] . . . some time after 13 July 1382, when a royal patent ordered [Robert] Rygge to expel Wycliffites from the university.9 The beginning of the Wycliffite transformation from academic inquiry into popular heresy thus begins with a flight of the faithful from their home community, the latest in a long tradition of Christian communities finding it necessary to relocate to preserve their faith. Additionally, much of the semantic baggage associated with “lollard” implies exclusion. Of the many possible etymologies for “lollard,” one in particular underlines its association with liminal communities. The Middle English noun “loller(e)” can denote such marginalized figures as a vagabond, an idler, or a beggar.10 “Lollare” as vagabond perhaps results from the fact that many preachers took to the road as wandering evangelists teaching, among other things, the poverty of Christ and his Church. Literary examples of this usage include the “lollare” found in the C-text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Cole argues that Langland may employ “lollare” in this way as synonymous with the Italian gyrovagi or wandering religious without the negative connotations of heresy the Church later applies.11 The Church’s use of “lollare” as roughly

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  37 synonymous with “heretic,” adds another etymological wrinkle, and “heretic” always already implies a position excluded from the faith community. Indeed, as Cole notes in Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, “No matter the ideological origin, nearly all usages of ‘lollard’ point to sociosymbolic problems—specifically, to the problems of audience and the ways in which persons see, hear, and name ‘lollards’ in a sympathetic or hostile fashion.”12 The unifying thread in all this philological evidence is that “lollare” implies exclusion of one type of another: exclusion from the traditional faith community or the embracing of a self-marginalization apart from that community. Although we cannot know for certain, such complex connotations may help explain why some of Wyclif’s followers embraced “lollard” as a term of self-identification. They recognized themselves as “lollares,” temporary exiles from the kingdom of God, and exiles driven out from the worldly Church, a remnant of the true faithful. Instead of rejecting the name as a pejorative, the Wycliffites appropriated it to represent their separation from the Roman Church and the rightness of their beliefs. As exiles then, if only in their imaginations, some Wycliffites leveraged their exilic experiences to structure and inform their polemics and literature. Following Cole’s conclusions that Wycliffism is “an emergent fund of ideas, forms, and rhetorics,” I will show in this chapter how some Wycliffite authors embraced a mind of exile to further their religious ideologies and utilized exile’s ability to transform centers of power to their advantage through a process of cognitive proximity and ideological difference, an act of looking inward in order to “place” an individual, usually suffering a form of persecution, at a distance from a persecutor.13 This is an imaginative act, but one with notable consequences to the expression of that individual’s religious ideology. To put it another way, some Wycliffites embraced a mind of exile from which they constructed a sense of self and which they leveraged into a means of articulating their religious convictions seemingly without fear of repercussion. The Wycliffite embrace of exclusion appears often in their sermons on persecution. A favorite passage for explication is Matthew 10:23, Jesus’s advice to his disciples to avoid persecution by fleeing from one city to another.14 One such sermon, known today as “Plurimorum Martirum. Sermo 12,” begins with a simple gloss: “Crist byddeþ hise disciplis to fle fro þer enemyes; for vertewous pacience, and such maner cowardyse, ben armes to cristone men to overcome þer enemyes”15 (60). The sermon argues that fleeing persecution is a type of power and acts as a justification for and a sign of God’s favor and election. Exile for one’s faith comes from God, the preacher argues, and flight acts as a way of proving God’s favor for one’s beliefs. “Sermo 12” insists that fleeing from persecution should, first and foremost, be looked upon as a means of empowering the faithful. It acts as the “armes of cristone men,” a weapon in the face of opposition (60). Christ, the sermon insists, will reveal when to flee and where, and provide the words necessary to defend one’s self if and when the time comes

38 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc to stand before one’s enemies. The preacher encourages those who flee to “drede ȝe hem not,” who would seek to destroy them because “owre help is spiritual, hyd to þis world, and for þe toþur” (63). The preacher encourages the self-exiled faithful to adopt a mental state contrary to the worldly, traditional faith community from which they might come to a better understanding of Christ’s own flight from his enemies. This suggests a few possibilities concerning how this mental state actually functions, in part, like an exile in “Sermo 12.” Like physical exile, fleeing persecution serves as a sign of one’s election into the true Church because “Crist hymself [was] purseweyd, and þis forme kepte Crist in fleyng and in answerynge; and it is ynow to [þe] disciple þat he be as his maystur, and to servaunt þat he be as hys lord.” It is also a privileged position that “makeþ Christus men hardye aȝenus þe feend and alle hise lymes” (63). Both points encourage a sense of self-justification and originate from a position at the margins of traditional religious discourse. Beyond these theological points are structural moments in the sermon echoing the potential for transformation and authentication similar to what we have seen in The Man of Law’s Tale that can occur as a result of an exile’s return. As the preacher attempts to navigate the theologically hazardous waters of flight from persecution and suffering for one’s faith through martyrdom, he claims: And here I can not grownde of God þat we schulde fle owre enemyes ryht wan þei folwom vs, and sen vs in mennys presence, for þis were yuel cowardyse, to fere men þat sawon þis flyȝt. But Crist spekuþ here, as me þinkuþ, of hyd remouyng byfore. And þus Crist fledde ofte-tymes, and hydde hym among þe puple. (61–62) The author concedes that physical flight from persecution may well be considered cowardice in some instances, but qualifies that admission by reminding his listeners that Jesus himself sometimes hides in plain sight “among þe puple.” The sermon also addresses what those who flee should do if they eventually find themselves unable to flee any longer or are “constreynede to come and to answere for Crist.” These are the “exiles” who return to face persecution, and perhaps death. Rather than fearing that contingency, “Sermo 12” argues that their witness will ultimately transform England when “þis lordschip schal be take fro preestis and so þe staf þat makeþ hem hardye aȝenys Crist and his lawe” (64). Although the preacher does not explicitly say so, the sermon implies that this moment of transformation carries with it authentication of their beliefs. The triumph over those who persecute them authenticates their righteousness. Just as Custance, the old man, and his companions emerge from the margins to bring about cultural change, so will the true faithful come to understand themselves as potential agents for religious change. By embracing their marginality as a sign of authenticate faith, should they be called back from exile (either by choice

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  39 or coercion) it will become part of a larger transformative narrative ending with England’s salvation. Admittedly, “Sermo 12” alone does not stand as sufficient evidence for a mind of exile in Wycliffite literature. It is neither particularly well known, nor is it clear just how widely it was heard. A Wycliffite work of much greater significance and scholarly recognition is The Testimony of William Thorpe (1407), which gives an account of the titular preacher’s arrest and trial before the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel. Thorpe is an interesting figure for a number of reasons, not least of which are questions surrounding whether or not he actually existed. Anne Hudson notes in Two Wycliffite Texts that no evidence of Thorpe appears in Arundel’s surviving archiepiscopal records, but many of the historical events alluded to in the text and its presentation of Wycliffite ideology are consistent with an early fifteenth-century composition.16 More recently, Maureen Jurkowski found evidence in the Public Records Office of Thorpe’s existence and arrest in accordance with the details he gives in The Testimony, meaning that Thorpe may indeed have written the text as indicated in its prologue.17 Thorpe begins by recounting his arrest and how his compatriots urged him to write about his experience in prison. This is followed by a first-person account of his “trial.” Arundel begins by accusing Thorpe of preaching without license and “sowynge aboute fals doctryne” (29). Thorpe recoils at the suggestion that he was preaching falsehood and requests a chance to declare his beliefs, which are “with a few exceptions . . . entirely orthodox.”18 Arundel, unsatisfied with Thorpe’s professed creed, calls for him to submit to the Church’s authority. When Thorpe refuses, Arundel begins a series of accusations regarding Thorpe’s beliefs about the Eucharist, clerical authority, and pilgrimages. At each turn Thorpe responds to the accusations by claiming his positions are representative of the Truth according to Scripture. The two exchange verbal blows until Arundel, frustrated and tired, orders Thorpe’s remission to Saltwood Castle at which point The Testimony ends and Thorpe is led back to prison. Testimony enjoys a healthy body of scholarship, historical and literary. Hudson argues that Thorpe’s arrest for preaching without license highlights the “obligation” of the early fifteenth-century Wycliffites to preach, despite knowing condemnation from the traditional Church would follow.19 Rita Copeland contends The Testimony affords Thorpe the chance to conscript his “historicized identity as a paradigm for constructing a dissenting subject.” She writes, “As a life, Thorpe barely exists beyond the page. Thorpe’s historical identity, his (auto)biographical subjectivity, comes into being only through such textual representation of an adversarial and indeed violent encounter.” Thorpe constructs a version of himself that is seemingly “historical” but is, of course, literary.20 To Copeland’s claims, I would add that Thorpe’s “dissenting subject” is an exiled subject, both physically as a prisoner and mentally as a Wycliffite. Thorpe uses cognitive proximity and ideological distance to create a “dissenter” who attempts a transformation of the orthodox center represented in this case by Archbishop Arundel utilizing

40 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc a mind of exile that the author assumes in the process of the interrogation and that shapes the whole of the text that follows. Testimony is notable for its candor and its characterization of Thorpe, who consistently if unsurprisingly comes across as the suffering servant who nevertheless holds his own against the powerful Archbishop. More remarkable is how Testimony reflects Thorpe’s mind of exile on a structural and rhetorical level. It is an essential part of the text’s rhetorical power and the locus from which he justifies his claim of a “true” understanding of Christian orthodoxy. The moment that Thorpe enters into a mind of exile occurs early in the text, just after a heated discussion in which he refuses to swear submission to Arundel’s authority. Thorpe claims that doing so would make him a traitor to God and to his fellow believers. Arundel threatens him with imprisonment in Smithfield and the painful death by burning that threat implies. This gives the recalcitrant Thorpe pause and he “stood stille and spak not” for a time (35). Then something remarkable happens. Thorpe experiences an epiphany: And I lokinge biheeld inwardli þe Archebischop. . . . And anoon herfore I was moved in alle my wittis for to holde þe Archebischop neiþir prelate ne preest of God; and, forþi þat myn inner man was altogidre þus departid from þe Archebischop, me þowȝte I schulde not have ony drede of him. (36) This moment requires substantial unpacking, as it represents an essential narrative moment and demonstrates the mind of exile at work within the text. Let us begin with the description of the epiphany. First, Thorpe claims a revelation into the inward character of the Archbishop, a special insight that reveals the “truth” of Arundel’s inward self to the interrogated Thorpe. Next comes Thorpe’s recognition of his spiritual self “altogidre þus departid from þe Archebischop” and his authority to a liminal position. He claims an awareness, a vision, of Arundel’s mind. He is subject to the Archbishop’s authority in so much as he is physically present with him and subject to punishment, but that threat holds no concern for Thorpe because the more essential part of himself, his cognitive awareness of his spiritual exile, exists in a place apart that is not subject to Arundel’s threats in any meaningful way. We gain a better understanding of this moment by referring back to the ideas presented in “Sermo 12.” Thorpe becomes in this moment one of those “exiled” persons the preacher insists “ben constreynede to come and to answere for Crist.” We know that Thorpe has, for some time, been wandering throughout England preaching. Arundel’s first words in Testimony alludes to Thorpe’s movements: William, I knowe wel þat þou hast þis twenti wyntir and more traveilid aboute bisili in þe norþ lond and in oþir diverse contrees of Ynglond,

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  41 sowynge aboute fals doctrine . . . for to enfecte and poysoune al þis lond if þou mȝtist wiþ þin untrwe techynge. (29) Arundel highlights Thorpe’s travels and implies the ostensible reason for his arrest, namely preaching without license. To the sympathetic reader they define Thorpe as something akin to the Italian gyrovagi. The wandering Thorpe moved from place to place in order to preach “truth.” From Arundel’s point of view, he caught a rogue preacher and can “sequestre þee from þin yvel purpos” (29). Arundel’s allusions to illness and poison emphasize how Thorpe’s doctrine introduces contagion from “outside” the “healthy” body of England and links liminality with falsehood. The exile, from Arundel’s perspective, must be called to account and isolated to prevent the “infection” of Wycliffism from spreading. Thorpe’s assumption of his mind of exile, however, transforms him from the “lewid losel” in Arundel’s terminology into a man in whom “whatever þing þat I schulde speke . . . miȝte have þerto trewe autorite of scripture or open resoun” (36–37). This recalls an earlier moment in Testimony’s prologue when Thorpe addresses his reasons for writing: “for þe fervent desir and þe greet love þat þese men and wymmen [his fellow Wycliffites] han to stonden hemsilf in truþe and to witnessen it, þough þei ben sodeynli and unwarned brouȝt forþ to ben apposid of adversaries” (28). Being brought forth is precisely what Arundel has done to Thorpe, calling him from the margins of religious discourse (and England) to answer before, quite literally, the English seat of traditional religion. As Thorpe ultimately shows, assuming a mind of exile in which his “inner man was altogidre þus departid” allows for the transformation of his interrogation into testimony. Having assumed this mind of exile, Thorpe’s initial decision to remain silent evaporates and his engagement with Arundel’s accusations grows increasingly forceful and more clearly “heretical” from the orthodox creed he originally espoused. Thorpe’s assumption of a mind of exile moves him into a rhetorical space from which he feels secure in voicing his dissenting theology, and his text undergoes a notable shift in its language. Thorpe departs from careful conciliation to active dissent, all tinged with liminal allusions: “I purposide herfore to have laft [the Church’s] companye;” “I repentide me ony tyme, turnynge aȝen into þe wei which ȝe bisien ȝou now to make me forsake.” He learns “to hate and to fleen al sich sclaundre” as his enemies have spoken of him, and he defends his position with specific mention to Christ being cast out of Nazareth for preaching. He advises a penitent man “to absente ȝou fro al yvel companye,” and finally claims that “þis sect . . . hate and fleeþ” the sinfulness of the orthodox faithful in hopes of eventually restoring peace within it (37–39, 81, and 85). Thorpe’s assertions demonstrate his sense of existing at the margins of the faithful, but as the text continues it also becomes clear that such marginality, as “Sermo 12” notes, serves to indicate the rightness of his beliefs. His mind of exile

42 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc thus sets Thorpe against Arundel in both cognitive proximity and ideological distance. Thorpe becomes a representative of true Christianity recalled from the margins whereas Arundel becomes the representative of the corrupted Church. Declaring Arundel “neiþir prelate ne preest of God” transforms Thorpe from interrogated prisoner into an intellectual equal engaging Arundel in a series of academic debates, a shift that finds reflection in the text itself. Just like the old man in The Man of Law’s Tale, Thorpe “sees” Arundel with an inner vision that reveals the “truth” of the individual. From that point of view, Thorpe imagines a transformed body of faithful reflecting the original purity of the early Church. The rhetorical and ideological shifting in the previous discussion is also accompanied by a textual shift, which Elizabeth Schrimer defines as a general thematic movement from accusation to narrative storytelling to academic debate. Schrimer argues that Thorpe consistently transforms Arundel’s attempts to accuse him of heresy into an opportunity to engage in academic debate by first telling a story that defuses the threat of the original accusation. She writes, Stripping both exemplary genres—hagiography and exemplum—of the miraculous and fictional elements most offensive to Lollard sensibilities, he transforms them into vehicles of a Wycliffite vernacular theology grounded in the principle of exemplarity.21 Schrimer believes that the source of this transformation results from “persecution becom[ing] for Thorpe a site for rethinking the nature of true theological discourse.”22 Her argument is compelling, but the persecution Thorpe undergoes is remarkably mild. Aside from imprisonment, there is no indication of physical punishment before his interrogation. Contrary to the later image of Arundel manufactured by Protestant historians, Thorpe’s account depicts Arundel as a rather long-suffering and patient interrogator. Several times in the Testimony Arundel’s clerks encourage their superior to break off the debate and give over Thorpe as a hopeless cause; Arundel refuses. Arundel does threaten Thorpe with execution, but that looming threat is stripped of its power to dissuade the dissenting subject because the inward journey into a mental exile precedes and mitigates the threat of physical torture or death. As a result, I submit that the textual transformation Schrimer notes is instigated not by persecution, but by Thorpe’s assumption of a mind of exile. It is only after the moment when Thorpe’s “inner man was altogidre þus departid” that Schrimer’s observations about the text’s transformations begin in earnest. In other words, Thorpe’s mental exile creates the rhetorical moment in which this textual transformation becomes possible, and appears most clearly in a debate begun by Thorpe discussing the members of the true Church, which he associates with the pilgrim, the well-known medieval character cum exile. These faithful “pilgrymes of Crist wanderynge towards hevene bi stable feiþ . . . þese hevenli pilgrims,”

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  43 stand in accord with the part of the Church already dwelling in Heaven as God’s saints (51).23 Just like those assured of God’s favor in Sermo 12, Thorpe’s pilgrim church locates its defining characteristics not in physical persecution but in the margins of religious belief. These spiritual pilgrims, like Thorpe, are God’s faithful. When Arundel raises the subject of physical pilgrimages, Thorpe implies that a mind of exile constitutes the essence of true pilgrimage by calling attention to how many who go on pilgrimages do so “more for þe helþe of her bodies þan for þe helþe of her soulis” (63). True pilgrimage, on the other hand, requires introspection and grace “þat [the pilgrim] ioien gretli to wiþdrawen her iȝen, her eeren and all her oþer wittis and membris fro al wordli delite and fro al fleischli solace” (66). It is truly an exile of the mind when the other senses are excluded from concern, a radically altered cognitive proximity, a mind of exile to itself most of all. Towards the conclusion of Thorpe’s Testimony, Arundel and his clerks seem to recognize that some of Thorpe’s recalcitrance stems from his assumption of an imagined liminal position. One of the clerks, for example, yells in frustration: “þe moore, sere, þat ȝe bisien for to drawe [him] towardis ȝou, þe more contumax [he] is maade and þe ferþer fro ȝou” (86).24 Undaunted, Thorpe asks the Archbishop a series of doctrinal questions to which Arundel answers with a simple affirmation bereft of the complicated academic answers earlier in the text: And [Thorpe] saide, ‘Sere, owen we to beleue þat al Cristis lyuynge and his teachyne was true in euery point . . . and þe teachyng of þe apostlis of Crist and of alle the prophetis ben trewe, whiche ben writun in þe bible for þe healþe and saluacioun of alle Goddis peple?. . . . owiþ þe doctrine, þe heestis eiþer þe counseil of ony liif to be accept . . . no but þis doctrine . . .?’. . . . And þe Archebischop seide, ‘ȝhis. (86–87) This is followed by a curious reference to Arundel’s exile after the Lord’s Appellant Crisis in 1397. Arundel claims that Thorpe spoke out in approval of the archbishop’s being banished by Richard II. Thorpe somewhat cheekily responds that no one can prove he was glad of Arundel’s departure beyond the fact that the departure secured Thorpe’s release from prison.25 Arundel, perhaps sensing a means of establishing his own authority by an appeal to exile, responds: “God, as I woot well, haþ clepid me aȝen and brouȝt me into þis londe, for to distrie þe and þe fals sect þat þou art of” (91). This appeal attempts to leverage Arundel’s exile as both transformative and authenticating, just as Thorpe has done. The attempt is short-lived. Thorpe cites in response the prophet Jeremiah: “Whanne þe word, þat is þe prophecie of a profet, is knowen or fulfilled, þanne it shal be knowen þat þe Lord sente þat prophete in trueþe” (91). The textual shift begun by Thorpe’s assumption of mind of exile reaches its climax. Thorpe has beaten Arundel, the symbol of the traditional Church in England, and had him admit the

44 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc rightness of Thorpe’s beliefs with simple affirmations. The ideological and theological distance between Thorpe and Arundel is substantially more distinct from the former’s initial creed. In short, the more Thorpe sets himself apart from Arundel, the bolder he becomes in his responses, in stark contrast to the man who once resolved to stand silent. Unsurprisingly, the implication that Arundel is a false prophet ends any further discussion, let alone reconciliation. Thorpe’s arguments grow increasingly “heretical” from Arundel’s point of view. Structurally, however, we can trace the shift from defensive to offensive rhetoric and interrogation to debate from the moment when Thorpe assumes a mind of exile. As each challenge from Arundel comes, Thorpe positions himself further in opposition to Arundel’s understanding of the Church until the latter quite literally casts Thorpe “forþ þens anoon” (93). The narrative ends with Thorpe being led out from the Archbishop’s presence to the cell where he will write The Testimony, a text that will itself depart from that cell and make its way into the hands of men and women supportive of Thorpe’s positions. Significantly, Thorpe acknowledges leaving the Archbishop’s presence, both physically and spiritually, as a token of God’s special grace. “I gladid in þe Lord,” he closes The Testimony, “forþi þoruȝ his grace he kepte me . . . amonge þe manassingis of myn adversaries [þat] wiþouten hevynesse and agrigginge of my conscience I passid awei fro hem” (93, my emphasis). Thorpe’s exile is complete and synonymous with his doctrinal, psychological, and textual triumph over Arundel. Doctrinally, Thorpe “wins” the debate. Paradoxically, it is in the moment of closest cognitive proximity—when Thorpe is most inside Arundel’s head—that the two men are most ideologically distinct. Thorpe’s mind of exile repositions him from interrogated to interrogator, in a complete reversal of the initial proceedings of the trial; the text becomes testimonial. The Testimony of William Thorpe, in some way, acts as Thorpe’s inner man that is now altogether thus departed from Arundel, or at least a representation of that inner man; its existence indicates to its readers that Thorpe was triumphant. No matter what happens to Thorpe, his mind of exile preserved in The Testimony remains free to teach, transform, and authenticate his message. It will eventually come to rest and bring with it a tale of transformation and constancy. In some ways, The Testimony underlines the Shipman’s concerns about what might happen if a Wycliffite sows “cokkel” in clean corn. It illustrates quite dramatically what can happen when an exile speaks truth to power. As Arundel’s own frustration shows, Thorpe’s position becomes unassailable. The text teaches those who read it the power of mental dislocation. Thorpe’s arguments and the care with which he distinguishes his faith from Arundel’s serve a polemical function, drawing lines in the ideological sand to identify a friend from a foe. Thorpe’s readers who recognize their own beliefs in this text thus recognize their own positioning in the margins of religious discourse. Can we find similar phenomena at work in other Wycliffite texts? In short, yes. The textual history and content

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  45 of the Wycliffite Plowman’s Tale demonstrates the same actions of cognitive proximity and ideological distance in action as it passes through the increasingly porous boundary (if we can even call it that anymore) between the medieval and the early modern periods. It also serves as a means of witnessing the continued development of the mind of exile as it moves into the sixteenth century because additions to the poem indicate that its underlying exilic theme became increasingly apparent to its editors who, in turn, sought to make it increasingly explicit. Lastly, the text itself assumes the role of an exile when it finds its way into Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and this marginalized text comes to rest in Chaucer’s masterpiece. Before going further, the textual history of The Plowman’s Tale requires some preliminary attention. Andrew Wawn dates the poem in its modern form to the sixteenth century. His analysis of the poem’s vocabulary, rhyme scheme, and content, however, suggests an ur-text dating to the beginning of the fifteenth century. Using the poem’s modern linear notation, the “original” poem consists of lines 53–205 (the beginning of the tale proper and the pelican’s diatribe against papal authority’s encroachments on secular authority); lines 229–716 (a continuation of the previous theme and polemic against the church’s riches); lines 717–1268 (a polemic against secular canons and monks which was likely much shorter originally); and lines 1269–1380 (the avian battle and the plowman’s retraction).26 On the surface, this “original” text has little to suggest that it deals with exile of any sort, mental or otherwise, apart from the wandering man who serves as its narrator. This man encounters a Griffon and a Pelican engaged in a debate concerning which of two religious groups—the Church or the “lollers”— have more spiritual merit. The Pelican dominates the poem with a sustained attack on the materiality of the church, arguing that poverty truly reflects Christ’s teachings. The Griffon, who speaks very little, finally makes a passionate but unconvincing speech for the Church’s temporal wealth before flying away in anger to gather an army of carrion fowl to destroy the Pelican. A conflict ensues, with the Pelican’s rescue coming via the appearance of a Phoenix who swiftly dispatches his enemies. The wanderer/narrator then reappears and offers a retraction that distances himself from the Pelican’s opinions and reaffirms his allegiance to the Church. The original poem becomes more clearly the product of a mind of exile when viewed in relation to Robert Edwards’s three modes of transformation for the literature of exile, the first of which is “the function of memory within the exile.”27 The core of the Pelican’s argument consists of a comparison between the present practices of the medieval Church and the past poverty and humility of the apostolic Church. He relies heavily on an idealized Christian past contrasted with the Christian present. In a particularly acerbic moment the Pelican claims: There was more mercy in Maximyen And in Nero that never was good

46 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc Than is nowe in some of them Whan he hath on his furred hoode. Theye folowe Christ that shedde his blode To heven as buckette in to the wall Suche wreches ben worse than wode And all such faytours foule hem fall. (l. 293–300) This juxtaposition of past and present, however tongue in cheek it might be, reflects a thematic trend throughout the poem’s middle section where the deeds of the present reflect poorly on the either the teachings of Jesus or the example of the early Church. This strategy echoes Edwards’s second mode of transformation, “a creation of a parallel society from exile.”28 Such rhetorical strategies are not limited to either exilic or Wycliffite literature, but in this case the intersection of past and present precedes the creation of an imagined social order implied by the Pelican’s attacks on the wealth of the Church. The imagined order is, not surprisingly, a poor and simple Church devoid of secular power: Kynges and lordes shulde lordshyp hane And rule the people with mylde mode Christ for us that shedde his blode Badde his preestes no maystershypp have. . . . (l. 1119–23) The Pelican imagines the Church as a primarily spiritual force whose “lordshype shalbe unyte” and whose defense will be neither wealth, armies, nor political might, but “humylyte” (l. 1128, 1131). Thus far The Plowman’s Tale contains two of the three modes of transformation. All that remains to establish the poem as exilic literature is Edwards’s final mode, an imagined future constructed from the exile’s point of view. As we have just seen, an imagined future is offered by the Pelican, but can it be considered an exile? The author does a great deal to emphasize the creature’s marginality. The Pelican speaks for the “poore and pale . . . Iclepeth lollers and londlese” (l. 69, 73), which connotes disenfranchisement and displacement. A lack of property, coupled with the author’s calling the lollers “caytyffes” ends with the group’s being “out of prease,” literally “out of the crowd” (l. 70–71). The Pelican’s sermonizing targets wealth and worldliness as a moral failing of the Church and utilizes liminal allusions. The true faithful, for example, “worldly worshyppe defye and flee” (l. 115). Lastly, the choice of the Pelican as the symbolic voice of the Wycliffite position implies isolation and marginalization in medieval iconography. The Aberdeen Bestiary recounts: Est autem solitudo pellicani, quod immunis est a peccato sic et vita Christi . . . Moraliter autem per pellicanum intelligere possumus non

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  47 quemlibet iustum, sed a carnali voluptate longe remotum. . . . Sic et iustus in civitate solitudinem facit, dum immunem se in quantum humana fragilitas patitur a peccato custodit. . . . Huic siquidem pellicano heremite vita fit similis qui pane pascitur, nec querit replecionem ventris, qui non vivit ut comedat, sed comedit ut vivat. [The pelican is solitary because it is free from sin, as also is the life of Christ. . . . In a moral sense, we can understand by the pelican not the righteous man, but anyone who distances himself from carnal desire . . . Thus the righteous man creates solitude for himself in the city, when he keeps himself free from sin, as far as human frailty allows. . . . Indeed, the life of a hermit is modeled on the pelican, in that he lives on bread but does not seek to fill his stomach; he does not live to eat, but eats to live.]29 The Pelican, already symbolic of Christ, further symbolizes solitude and hermitage. The use of a pelican thus locates the arguments of the marginalized into a creature of the margins. The Pelican, like Thorpe, also experiences an epiphany instigated by a moment of cognitive displacement. Just prior to the climactic avian “battle,” and enraged by the call for a poor church, the Griffon threatens to have the Pelican “dissevered from holy churche,” an obvious reference to the physical and spiritual exile of excommunication (l. 1243). The Pelican dismisses the threat as “of lytell value” (l. 1246) and responds, “I drede nat all thy mayntenaunce/For if I drede the worldes hate/Me thynketh I were lytell to prayse” (l. 1256–58). Equating the Griffon’s threat with the world’s hate demonstrates the Pelican’s self-positioning apart from it. This carries over into the poem’s climactic encounter. The two birds never engage in direct conflict because the Pelican “flew forth” from the site of the debate before the Griffon returns with all manner of carrion fowl (l. 1325). The poet then writes: Long the Pellycane was out, But at last he cometh agayne And brought with hym the Phenixe stoute The Gryffon wolde have flowe full fayne His foules that flewen as thycke as rayne The Phenixe tho began hem chace, To flye from hym it was in vayne For he dyd vengenaunce and no grace (l. 1341–48) A flight, not a fight, and a subsequent return bring the poem to its conclusion. Mental exile becomes physical flight, and the exile’s return—as with Custance, the blind old man, the Christian audience of “Sermo 12,” and Thorpe—brings with it the overthrow of a corrupted center that originates from the margins. The recognition of being already departed from the interrogator’s authority transforms the narrative just as it did for Thorpe.

48 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc Thorpe’s assumption of a mind of exile began a series of academic debates, but the Pelican’s mind of exile ends the debate with the Griffon’s departure and begins a new narrative between the Pelican and speaker whom the text identifies as a plowman.30 The Pelican wishes the debate might have been heard by others and the Plowman promises to retell the tale. All together, these allusions to marginality in the original poem confirm the presence of Edwards’s modes of transformation and indicate that The Plowman’s Tale qualifies as exilic literature. The subtle references to liminality suggest that the exilic nature of the text stems not from the physical location of the poet, but from an internal awareness of his position at the social and religious margins. As was the case with the texts already discussed, transformation and authentication are explicitly linked to marginalization. The narrator had wished to know which religious group reflects God’s truth and sought an answer not in the mouths of priests or monks or theologians, but in “many a countrey” where “ever my travayle was for nought,/All so ferre as I have go” (l. 77). He seeks the truth, in other words, outside the centers of religious authority and finds them at the margins “as I wandred in a wro” (l. 81). We arrive finally at the sixteenth-century additions that transform the ur-text into “Chaucer’s” Plowman’s Tale. There is evidence of the Tale’s circulation prior to becoming part of The Canterbury Tales. A stand-alone printed edition of The Plowman’s Tale appeared in 1533, nine years before it found a new home (and author) as the final episode in The Canterbury Tales.31 After it appeared in Thomas Godfrey’s 1542 Works, it remained there for over two centuries where it established Chaucer’s credentials as a proto-Protestant for years to come, inspiring authors including John Foxe, Antony Wotton, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton.32 The sixteenth-century editors of The Plowman’s Tale were increasingly and explicitly aware of the liminal position its narrator holds as evidenced by their substantive additions to the original text. Through them, they heightened the exilic themes in the poem with their addition of the plowman character, his clothing, and his place in The Canterbury Tales. Take, for example, the poem’s fiftythree-line Prologue, introducing the titular plowman and establishing why he resolves to go on a pilgrimage. Gathering up his meager possessions, a hat and a walking stick, the plowman joins the Canterbury pilgrims and the Host invites him to tell a tale. The plowman opts to recount “a good prechyng,” which in turn is the beast fable of the original poem (l. 48). Little needs to be said here about the importance of the plowman figure in the later Middle Ages. Langland’s Piers Plowman firmly established in the popular imagination the association of that figure with honorable poverty, hard work, and piety. Of greater interest to me is how The Plowman’s Tale demonstrates a textual link between fifteenth-century Wycliffites and the early modern reformers of the following century mediated through a mind of exile. The most overt is the choice of the plowman figure, whose description in the prologue associates him with symbols of exile known at the time. The prologue describes the Plowman’s outfit in its second stanza:

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  49 He toke his tabarde and his staffe eke And on his hedde he sett his hat And said he wolde sainct Thomas seke On pilgrimage he goeth forth plat In scrip he bare both bred & lekes. . . . (l. 9–13) His hat, staff, and scrip recall Cesare Ripa’s icon of an exile in Iconologia as well as that of the pilgrim (See Figure 2.1). Ripa describes an exile as “A man in the Habit of a Pilgrim, with his Palmer’s Staff in in his Hand, and a Hawk on his fist.” He further explains: “there are two sorts of exile; one, when a Man is banish’d for some Misdemeanor, which the Hawk denotes; The other is when a Man voluntarily chuses to live abroad, which the Pilgrim’s Staff shews.”33 A similar image appears in the engravings of the Italian Enea Vico in the mid-sixteenth century, suggesting that the association of these particular items, pilgrimage, and exile was a widespread motif.34 A more tenuous connection is the presence of birds in the Tale. Because neither is a hawk, the association of exiles with birds may be a happy coincidence. Nevertheless, the prologue’s plowman/pilgrim is linked with exile several times over by his physical description. The added prologue thus transforms the fifteenth-century poem into a text in the Piers Plowman tradition and into a tale narrated by a figure clothed in the symbols of exile. The exilic themes of The Plowman’s Tale extend beyond the symbolic into the fabric of the textual transmission and reception of Chaucer’s works as well. If we think about The Plowman’s Tale as, in a sense a textual exile, we see the process of exilic transformation and authentication as it finds a place within The Canterbury Tales. The plowman tells a tale that’s not a tale. It is a sermon cum beast fable cum polemic, brought into The Canterbury Tales by an exilic figure from outside the original text. The Tale’s plowman and the plowman of the General Prologue are clearly not the same person. Chaucer’s plowman is with his brother the Parson at the Tabard Inn when The Canterbury Tales begins. But it is “Midsomer Moone” when the Tale’s plowman encounters the pilgrims (l. 2). His otherness from the Canterbury pilgrims is heightened by his skeletal appearance: “Men might have seen through both his chekes/And every wang toth & where it sat” (l. 15–16). Inserting this new plowman and his narrative into The Canterbury Tales allows the transformative power of exile to work on both The Plowman’s Tale and Chaucer’s text. Mary McCarl argues that John Foxe “placed The Plowman’s Tale squarely in the center for the proper Protestant appreciation of Chaucer.”35 The 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments reads: I meruell to cōsider this, how that the Bishoppes condemnyng and abolishyng all maner of Englishe bookes and treatises . . . did yet authorise the woorkes of Chaucer . . . Who (no doubt) saw in Religion as

50 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc

Figure 2.1 “Exile” detail from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia: or, moral emblems. Illustrated by I. Fuller, by the care and at the charge of P. Tempest. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

much almost, as euen we do now, and vttereth in his workes no lesse, and semeth to bee a right Wicleuian. . . . [W]hat finger can pointe out more directly the Pope with his Prelates to be Antichrist, then doth the poore pellycan reasonyng agaynst the gredy Griffon? Vnder whiche

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  51 Hypotyposis or Poesie, who is so blind that seeth not by the Pellicane, the doctrine of Christ, and of the Lollardes to bee defended agaynst the Churche of Rome? (1004)36 Its “discovery” and inclusion by Thomas Godfrey turns out to be a catalyst in Chaucer’s transformation into a proto-Protestant figure. The Tale, on the other hand, benefits from the authentication of Chaucer’s name. In other words, when the “exiled” plowman and his tale returns to the “orthodox” center of The Canterbury Tales, it transforms Chaucer into a “Protestant” author while granting the Tale itself the rhetorical and literary gravitas of Chaucer’s name. This process is admittedly circular, but powerful and designed with posterity in mind. In 1606 The Plowman’s Tale was republished as a stand-alone text complete with a title page announcing it was “written by Sir Geffrey Chaucer, Knight, amongst his Canterburie tales: and now set out apart from the rest, with a short exposition.”37 The exposition appears in the form of marginal glosses that Paul Patterson argues “transformed the new poem into a new entity and vehicle for propaganda. . . . [I]t is clear that the 1606 edition of The Plowman’s Tale is a mediated text that appropriates the rich cultural legacy of the Middle Ages in order to tear it apart and reconstitute it in the maelstrom of post-Reformation print.”38 These new marginalia gloss “lollers” as “true Christians which either severed themselves from popish idolatry and abhomination, or were knowne to mislike of them.”39 The marginalia represents still another link to marginality, for what are marginalia in this case if not a voice in the margins that transforms the central text? As William Slights points out, “Alternative voices from the margins of society and the text were never more contentious in early modern England than in . . . religious polemics.”40 As we will see in the next chapter, those alternative voices will continue to speak from the margins of society in new exciting ways as the “premature reformation” of the Wycliffites gives rise to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. At the close of the fifteenth century, then, it is possible to see a mind of exile at work in Wycliffite texts that emphasizes the ability of the exile to transform centers of power and authenticate one’s faith. The 1606 Plowman’s Tale demonstrates how, of the many means early modern reformers chose from to present their arguments, one was a text intimately related to exile. If Wycliffism was a type of internal exile, an exile of the mind, it makes sense that later reformers who also found themselves at the margins of religious orthodoxy recognized a kindred literary spirit in “lollard” texts. Wycliffites imagined themselves as a purer form of the Church defined in part by a self-imposed exile. Nevertheless, they worked frequently to find a place within a reformed faith community, insisting that they were excluded because of worldly corruption. The encouraging faith of “Sermo 12’s” preacher in Christ’s care for those fleeing persecution will appear in the letters and pamphlets of exiled reformers a century later. Thorpe’s boldness

52 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc in the face of Arundel’s threats will seem tame compared with some of the Protestant polemic of the next century. The importance of exile to Wycliffite literature cannot be ignored, nor can the way that mental “exile” will extend into the early modern period. The Wycliffite mind of exile does not vanish with the attempted suppression of their teachings. It survives in the literature of reform begun by Wyclif, continued by Huss, Luther, and others, and finds new purposes in the minds of those reformers who come after them. Exile becomes a central theme of many of these authors as well when they become exiles in truth and who bring to exile (and faith) a new ­complication—the beginnings of the early modern nation.

Notes 1 Anne Hudson and Anthony Kenny, “Wyclif, John (d. 1384),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/30122. 2 Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 72. 3 Following Cole’s recommendation, I chose to use “Wycliffite” rather than “Lollard” for the sake of historical accuracy and to avoid some of the inevitable baggage associated with “lollard.” 4 Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Other notable studies include: Rita Copeland, “William Thorpe and His Lollard Community: Intellectual Labor and the Representation of Dissent,” in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth Century England, eds. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 199–221; Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); James Gairdner and William Hunt, Lollardy and the Reformation in England: An Historical Survey (New York: B. Franklin, 1965); J. Patrick Hornbeck, What Is a Lollard?: Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Rob Lutton, “Lollardy, Orthodoxy, and Cognitive Psychology,” in Wycliffite Controversies, eds. Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck, vol. 23, Medieval Church Studies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepolis, 2011), 97–119. 5 See especially Fiona Somerset, ed., Four Wycliffite Dialogues, Early English Texts Society 333 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Anne Hudson, Selections From English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Anne Hudson, Two Wycliffite Texts, Early English Texts Society 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and John Wyclif, English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. Pamela Gradon, vol. 2, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 6 H. S. Cronin, “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards,” The English Historical Review 22, no. 86 (1907): 296. 7 William Taylor. “The Sermon of William Taylor.” Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–23. 8 Frances McCormack, Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent (Dublin and Portland, Oregon: Four Courts Press, 2007), 53. 9 Cole, Literature and Heresy, 19. 10 “Loller(e),” in The Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan, 2014), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED25968.

Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc  53 11 Cole, Literature and Heresy, 27. 12 Ibid., 75. 13 Ibid., 186. 14 Anne Hudson notes that this particular text is frequently cited by Wycliffites whenever issues of persecution arise in their sermons. Cf. Hudson, Two Wycliffite Texts, 105. 15 Anne Hudson, “Plurimorum Martirum: Sermo 12,” in English Wycliffite Sermons, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 16 Hudson, Two Wycliffite Texts, xlv–liii. 17 Maureen Jurkowski, “The Arrest of William Thorpe in Shrewsbury and the Anti-Lollard Statute of 1406,” Historical Research 75, no. 189 (2002): 273–95. 18 Hudson, Two Wycliffite Texts, 107. See note for lines 198ff. 19 Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History, 354. 20 Copeland, “William Thorpe and His Lollard Community,” 201–203. 21 Elizabeth Schirmer, “William Thorpe’s Narrative Theology,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 272. 22 Ibid., 298. 23 It is not clear whether Thorpe alludes to Wyclif’s congregatio omnium predestinatorum, assured of heaven, or simply those who believe themselves members of the elect. 24 Hudson, Two Wycliffite Texts. 25 Why Thorpe was imprisoned is not clear. According to Thorpe, the Bishop of London released him after Arundel’s departure. Although not named, the date indicates this would have been Robert Braybrooke. 26 Andrew N. Wawn, “The Genesis of The Plowman’s Tale,” in The Yearbook of English Studies, eds. T. J. B. Spencer and R. L. Smallwood (Leeds: W.S. Maney and Son, 1972), 21–40. 27 Robert Edwards, “Exile, Self, and Society,” in Exile in Literature, ed. María-Inés Lagos-Pope (Bucknell University Press, 1988), 24. 28 Ibid., 25. 29 The Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen University Library MS 24), fol. 35r—v. Translation by Morton Gaud and Colin McLaren. 30 The second speaker’s identification as the plowman, although labeled as such in both the 1533 and 1606 versions of The Plowman’s Tale, makes little sense given that the Plowman telling the tale explicitly says in the prologue that he relates a sermon that he once heard given by a priest. The second speaker here should be that priest or still another plowman distinct from the Tale’s narrator. This inconsistency likely arises from the sixteenth-century addition of the prologue. In the original poem, the “I” at this point is presumably the poet. 31 I find it unlikely that the addition of the prologue grew solely out of a desire to link The Plowman’s Tale with Chaucer. There are numerous irreconcilable conflicts between the General Prologue and the prologue of The Plowman’s Tale to suggest that the latter’s addition was meant as a purposeful attempt to write the poem into The Canterbury Tales. For a summary of these inconsistencies, see Mary McCarl, The Plowman’s Tale (New York and London: Garland), 33–34. 32 Ibid., 52–64. 33 Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (London: Benjamin Motte, 1709), 28. Ripa’s emphasis. Iconologia was first published in 1593, and again in 1603 with 151 woodcuts. 34 Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), Fig. 1 following p. 44.

54 Cognitive Proximity and Ideological Distanc 35 McCarl, The Plowman’s Tale, 53. 36 John Foxe, The Actes and Monuments, vol. 1 (London: John Daye, 1570) 37 McCarl, The Plowman’s Tale, 121. 38 Paul J. Patterson, “Reforming Chaucer: Margins and Religion in an Apocryphal ‘Canterbury Tale,’ ” Book History 8 (2005): 30–31. 39 McCarl, The Plowman’s Tale, 131. 40 William W. E. Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 15.

3 Margins and Center Protestant Exiles and National Identity1

Sometime in the final weeks of July 1540, William Turner found himself in prison. One of his students records the event in Turner’s commonplace book: Captus fuit crumwellus 19 julii e julii 28 decapitatus. Eodem tempore turnerus praeceptor meus in carcerem bis conjectus. Semel in fletem, semel in marshale absque respono condemnatus. Eodem tempore Barnus, geradus, e heironimus . . . combusti ullam causam mortis suae noverunt absentes enim condemnabatur. Powel fethersten abel suspensi quod regem esse supremum caput negavunt. (249v) [Cromwell was arrested 19 July and beheaded on 28 July. At the same time my teacher Turner was twice thrown in prison. Once in the Fleet, once in the Marshalsea, without an answer to the charge. At the same time Bernard, Gerald, and Jerome . . . were burned without cause; that is to say they were condemned to their deaths without knowing the cause. Powel, Fethersten, and Abel were hanged because they denied the king was the supreme head.]2 The entry does not mention the specific charge resulting in Turner’s imprisonment, but it was probably preaching without license, an infraction he was wont to practice.3 Soon afterwards Turner either escaped or was released and fled to the Continent where he would remain for the next seven years. It would be his first of two exiles to the Continent. The second would come during the reign of Queen Mary. Throughout his life, Turner would be many things: teacher, chaplain, naturalist, polemicist, Dean of Wells, physician to the Duke of Somerset, reformer, and exile. He had a flair for the dramatic, especially when it came to matters that he considered indicative of ecclesiastical pomp. Anecdotes survive of Turner training his dog to snatch the caps off of priests at his dinner table, and he once required a parishioner to do penance for adultery by wearing a sign proclaiming his sin while dressed in a priest’s robes.4 His religious polemics are often fiery, even crude, in tone.

56 Margins and Cente In A New Booke of Spiritual Physik (1555), for example, Turner claims that Bishop Stephen Gardiner’s failed spiritual leadership “made the kynge [Henry VIII] an hore master, our Quenes mother an hore, and oure Quene Mary a bastard” (F5v).5 As a vocal reformer, he was never satisfied with the Church of England’s unwillingness to sever ties with the Roman Church’s pageantry and practice. He attended school and formed lifelong relationships with prominent Protestant reformers, many of whom would later take on major roles in the nascent Church of England including Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, and William Cecil. Apart from his religious polemics, Turner translated notable religious works from Continental sources, including Urbanus Rhegius’s Novae Doctrinae et Veterem Collatio (1526) and the Lutheran Unio Dissidentium.6 Despite these accomplishments, he never achieved the status of a man at the center of the Reformation. Turner most often appears in scholarship connected with botany, ornithology, and his Herbal (1568), a tome of botanical lore compiled from his meticulous observations of plants at home and abroad.7 As an exile he earned his medical degree at the University of Ferrara or Bologna and spent time in nearly all the centers of religious reform then on the Continent: Bonn, Strasbourg, Speyer, Worms, Frankfurt, Chur, and Basle.8 He most often appears in passing references, in footnotes, and in the margins of Reformation ­scholarship—a career bookended by exile.9 Turner also lived and wrote during what is arguably one of the most important centuries of the early modern era for the development of nationhood as we understand it. Substantial questions remain in the historical and literary academic communities regarding the existence of an “English nation” in the sixteenth century, but in recent years the consensus seems to accept the existence of something “nation-like” in early modern England.10 David J. Baker’s Between Nations offers the following helpful definition of the nation problem in the sixteenth century: [T]he term ‘nation’ should be understood equally . . . both as a distinct geopolitical entity and, variously, as one among the ‘peoples,’ ‘ethnic cultures,’ and/or ‘locally defining communities’ that such an entity may have displaced, subsumed, or integrated in the early modern period.11 One of Baker’s central areas of inquiry is the distinction between England (meaning the territory of the British Isles held by native Britons, the AngloSaxons, and later, the Normans) and Britain (the collection of territories occupied by the English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish), “a zone where nations were written between the lines and across them.”12 Others, such as Stewart Mottram, have gone further, looking at sixteenth-century England as a nascent “empire” without the later connotations of imperial expansion synonymous with that term. Instead, Mottram posits, empire means “independent,” “an English imperial idea that is imperial without being expansionist, and English without being British.”13 For an exile, this complex and

Margins and Cente  57 nascent idea of a “nation” inevitably raises vexing questions about their experience—about borders, faith, self-identity, and English nationalism.14 Turner and others like him address many of these issues in their writings. The presses of the English exile refugee cities of Antwerp, Strasbourg, Zurich, and Basil churned out a prolific number of texts throughout the sixteenth century. Texts written by exiled authors were frequently smuggled into England with enough regularity to warrant specific bans on their import, although the ban did little to stop them.15 In addition to those, hundreds of letters survive and attest to the constant interaction between the English in exile and those who remained behind.16 In them, exile is a frequent topic: as a divine favor, spiritual test, and temporary condition preceding the restoration of what many English exiles saw as a fallen and corrupt homeland. Thomas Lever, for example, describes himself as “an exile from my native land for the sake of religion,” bearing his cross with “cheerfulness.”17 John Banks writes to Heinrich Bullinger that he and his fellow exiles will continue in their condition till “it should please God to restore us to our country, [that] we may be able to refute the doctrines of the papists.”18 Modern scholarship has examined early modern exilic texts for their impact on transnational spirituality. Mary C. Erler examines William Peryn’s Spirituall Exercyses and traces the effect of exile on both Peryn’s text and its intended readership as a transnational conduit of Continental spirituality (particularly Ignatian spirituality and that of the Low Countries). She argues that Peryn’s text is “the fruit of religious exile with its consequent exposure to Continental writing and thought” and an “opportunity to make such ideas available in English, for English nuns.”19 Erler’s focus on the ideological synthesis of Spirituall Exercyses hints at the transformative nature of exile on an ­English monastic spiritual ideology. In a correlative way, this chapter examines exile’s influence on the formation of an English national identity codified in the religious polemics of Protestant exiles. This dialectic dynamic of exile and identity is certainly visible in the life and polemics of William Turner. Polemic, a genre so inherently focused on drawing clear ideological lines, would have obvious appeal to an exile whose life revolved around spaces where inclusion was no longer perceived as possible and enemies were clearly established. Polemics create arguments with little room for interpretative difference. As Jesse Lander succinctly puts it, “polemic seeks to divide its readers into friends and enemies.”20 Turner wrote no fewer than seven in his lifetime.21 Such productivity deserves attention, especially given the widely accepted link between print and the Reformation.22 “Though the relationship between print and Reformation cannot be reduced to a one-way causality,” writes Lander, “together they created a culture that formed not homogeneously but continually in debate, a culture that can itself be seen as polemical.”23 Polemic culture relies on texts to draw clear lines of allegiance between groups through the texts themselves, and it results in a genre that “emerges out of the failure of consensus and the institutions of adjudication—it acts as a powerful social solvent at the very

58 Margins and Cente same time that it constitutes new communities.”24 Polemic is simultaneously divisive and uniting because it creates seemingly binary positions of inclusion and exclusion: Protestant/Catholic; English/Non-English; citizen/traitor. Yet within each half of those dichotomies it creates the illusion of unity. Placing Turner’s polemics alongside those of his contemporaries reveals what Philip Major calls a “rhetoric of exile” that defines and explores an English national identity formed extra-nationally.25 It is most evident in two of Turner’s polemics that will be the primary focus of attention here: The Huntyng and Fyndyng Out of the Romishe Fox (1543) and the aforementioned New Booke of Spiritual Physik. Both texts are products of the commonwealth tradition that developed in the late Henrican period and continued well into the Edwardian period. They also serve to demonstrate a discourse of exile that continued to reflect what had come before and evolved to take into account nascent ideas of nationhood and national identity. As well will see, boundaries, particularly the boundaries of religious and secular authority, are of primary concern to Turner. The Romishe Fox identifies and limits political and religious centers of power through the concentration of authority in written texts and employs metaphors of texts as a means for disentangling sacred from secular authority, and for declaring Turner’s own continued loyalty to the nation. Spiritual Physik uses the well-known somatic metaphor of the body politic common in the sixteenth century and going back at least to Livy and St. Paul. Turner’s use of the metaphor includes the Romish pox, a disease that transforms Catholicism into an invading pathogen and an imperial power threatening English national sovereignty. In Physik too are acts of ideological recovery and the rewriting of both national and ecclesiastical histories deriving influence from a position of national exteriority. Alongside these two polemics I examine John Bale’s Yet a Course at the Romeysh Fox (1543) and John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politike Power (1556). These polemics share a discourse of exile that force their readers and authors to takes sides, and they allow for the creation of an unambiguous ideological platform, codified in the authority of print, a textual profession both spiritual and national. The Huntyng and Fynding Out of the Romishe Fox has been discussed elsewhere as an important early text for its use of “what might broadly be called ‘history’ ” in its attacks on the Roman church.26 It prompted Stephen Gardiner’s now lost Examination of a Prowd Praesumptuous Hunter, and inspired Bale’s Yet a Course at the Romeysh Fox (1543). The Romishe Fox opens with an address to King Henry but primarily targets English bishops, whom Turner alleges maintain aspects of Roman Catholic worship, and English nobles, whom he hopes to inspire to action against these same practices. The polemic argues that a Catholic fox, the Pope supported by his “son” Bishop Gardiner, remains in England despite King Henry’s explicit decree that all elements of Catholic worship be expunged from the realm. In making this argument, Turner tries to define and stabilize the boundaries of multiple authorities—secular, sacred, and textual—to create an idealized

Margins and Cente  59 English identity originating from an extra-national position. The centrality of texts in Turner’s argument appears on The Romishe Fox’s title page when he encourages the reader to give King Henry the book before Catholic bishops suppress it. The text’s preface turns into an address by the pseudonymous William Wraghton, who directly addresses the King. Wraghton pleads, “if ye will of your Kyngly liberalite grant me licens. . . . I shall so hunt out thys best et [sic] discover hym that all your hole realme may spy hym and se hym and know hym what he is.” (Aiiiv). From its outset, Turner uses his textual address as a highly “present” moment. Turner, as Wraghton, speaks like one granted an audience with the king, and at first glance the direct address and the pseudonym are hardly unusual. Of greater significance is the preface’s conclusion. Making his own exile explicitly clear, Turner closes, “From Basil, the first day of May. Anno domini 1543” (Aiiir). The illusion of Wraghton/Turner directly addressing Henry abruptly shatters. The voice, so present in the court begging license moments before, abruptly recedes to the European continent. Turner’s voice for the remainder of the text becomes one spoken from afar. Whether or not Turner actually expected King Henry to receive and read the book cannot now be known with any certainty, but the text speaks for Turner and Turner speaks to the king through the text. Turner’s address marks a sort of textual “return” from exile that underlines his absence as The Romishe Fox crosses the boundary that he cannot. Much of what Turner says in The Romishe Fox involves a re-conception of sacred and secular authority into what eventually become three distinct textual sources. At the apex is the absolute authority of God recorded in the Scriptures. Fully half of The Romishe Fox is a point-by-point refutation of Catholic practices in the English Church. The remaining two textual sources are the authority of the King, established by royal proclamations that are sovereign within England, save when they conflict with God’s law, and the authority of the Pope, inscribed in canon law. The “hunt” itself stems from the passage of the 1536 See of Rome Act that established a legal precedent denying any papal authority, or support for papal authority, within the realm of England. Turner claims that a long list of Catholic liturgical practices continue after its passage, and what he sees as the act’s failure fuels his polemic. As he begins writing, sacred and secular authority within England is in a constant state of flux or transference. Turner notes, for example, that the fox found sanctuary in the church where “the clergi set up streght way on the chirche dore a letter wher in was contend that from hence furth no man shuld . . . call that romish fox, a fox, but the kynges beste.” (Aiiiiv). Henry’s proclamations seemingly carry divine sanction and papal authority assumes the same privilege. Such porous boundaries are unacceptable to Turner. Turner is, of course, entering into the centuries old debate concerning the origin and limits of sacred and secular authority. Much of the Romishe Foxe is an example of the church/state debate, specifically what Brian Tierney refers to as external and internal sovereignty. The

60 Margins and Cente former refers to “the jurisdiction of any lord outside his own kingdom” whereas the latter defines “whether the king was really master in his own kingdom or whether the clergy formed a people apart.”27 The Romishe Foxe argues from the perspective of the latter position with the added stipulation that the English clergy cannot be a people apart from the king’s authority. Turner suggests that once the King became the supreme head of the English Church, the English clergy attempted an ecclesiastical sleight of hand, maintaining Catholic practices under the auspices of regnal obedience. The fox, these clergymen claim, is now the king’s beast. Turner refuses to allow this conflation. He counters the conflation with several hypothetical analogies that associate a person with that person’s oeuvre. He writes, If the kyng of Portugale shuld command in a proclamation, that Aristotel and Platoes workes should no mor be called Aristoteles workes and Platoes, but hys works; shuld Aristotel and Platoes workes by thes meanes be cum hys workes? I thynk nay. For if the kyng of Portugagal [sic] myght take Aristotoles workes from Aritstotel, then myght Maevius become Maro, and the most unlerned in a countre might have as noble workes as the best leaned [sic] man in the world. ([Bviii]r) Turner rejects the notion that a king—or any authority, sacred or secular— can assume the authorship and authority of another by a simple declaration, which undermines the argument that papal traditions can be made Henry’s by decree—implicitly or explicitly. What Henry enacts must be his alone; else he might “take” any number of works, deeds, or traditions. This would amount to the usurping of his authority and infringe upon the sovereignty necessary for the deeds of others to remain sovereign in and of themselves. His choice of comparisons—Plato and Aristotle, Maevius and Maro— further solidifies this notion of sovereignty as located in texts.28 Assigning the works of the former to the latter would be an injustice and it would elevate a lesser author over the greater as well as violating the clear authorial distinction between them. Turner then extends this critique to the textual cornerstone of the Roman Church, canon law. Turner contends that those same bishops, seeking to protect the Romish fox in their midst manipulated the political situation so that: [T]he ceremonies whiche the pope made shuld no more be called the popes ceremonies, but the kynges ceremonies. . . . [Y]e made the kynge pope. For if the popes actes and the kynges be all on, then is the kyng the pope or ellis partner with the pope. . . . Call ye theyr for no more the popes canon law the law of the chirch of England; call no more from henceforward the popes ordinances the kynges ordinances for fere of it that foloweth. (C[i]v—r)

Margins and Cente  61 His underlying metaphor is textual: royal acts, canon law, and the law of the Church of England are all textually codified. Henry’s law cannot be equated with the Pope’s canon law, which he ordered removed from the realm, lest he be culpable of paradoxically banishing himself by association. The “fere of it that foloweth” is that the bishops are at the very least guilty of ignoring the king’s commands and, at worst, of attempting to circumvent Henry’s authority by grafting a foreign power’s authority onto the king. The King and the Pope thus become two individual wielders of power who cannot both function within the same geopolitical space. This results in a complex reinterpretation of the relationship between sacred and secular authority. First, it denies the idea of external sovereignty. King Henry, Turner reasons, has no obligation to acknowledge papal authority within England. Within England, however, Henry’s authority over matters sacred and secular is absolute, with the important exception that Henry acts in accordance with God’s law. Turner provides a position for distinctly “reading” the nation’s regnal “authorship” with a more accurate understanding of its real source of authority. This authority, discussed as it is by texts and metaphors of texts, is stripped of its imagined transferability from one person to another and “written” as it were by distinct “authors” inseparable from their work. Similar phenomena occur in the exilic polemic of other Protestant authors, including John Bale’s Yet a Course at the Romeysh Fox. Bale’s polemic is a response to the public recantation of William Tolwin, a Protestant preacher who publicly recanted his beliefs in December of 1541. Bale engages in a line-by-line glossing of Tolwin’s printed recantation to attack the London Bishop Edmund Bonner, an attack that relies, in part, on an overt refusal to conflate two distinct “authors.” Although Tolwin speaks the words, Bale calls “thys open promes to the devyls obedience most tyrannouslye coacted by the verye satellyte of Sathan” and reiterates later, “For though the voyce be Tolwyns, the wordes of the voyce are [Bonner’s].”29 ([Bvii]v, Fvv). Bale critiques the author of the words, not their speaker. Bonner’s words cannot and should not be assigned to Tolwin because one cannot assume the voice of the other within the text. As does Turner, Bale uses texts to institute a clear division between authorities. Crossing that divide cannot be tolerated. Bale’s careful distinction between who “spoke” the words and who “wrote” the words reveals an anxiety that might be understood as an anxiety of authorship. If the contents of a text could be transferred from one sovereign authority to another, the exiles’s works too might become another’s. Where then does that leave an exile reliant upon texts? The assurance of having a voice at home would fade to silence or be lost in a confused babble. For Bale this anxiety appears in one of Yet a Course’s longest glosses on a bag purportedly shown to the audience at St. Paul’s Cross containing “erronyouse, heretycall, and noughtye bokes” (Fiiiir). Bale imaginatively describes how Tolwin supposedly identified a book, described it, and then dismissed it back into the bag. Bale assigns this performance to Bonner’s fear that the books’ content might result in the bishop “be[ing] judged both

62 Margins and Cente an heretyque and a traytour, and also a cruell persecuter of Christ in hys faythfull members” ([Fv]r). Bale makes the books themselves the primary focus. Revealing these books, even if just their names, places them on trial alongside Tolwin. Their “authors” appear as if in person—seen but not heard—and then vanish back into the depths of the bag, an elision of text and subject. The strangest example of this occurs when Tolwin mentions a book “called Thorpe and oldecastell”30 ([Fvii]v). Bale writes, Thorpe and oldecastell are the names of ii dyverse menne, and not of one severall boke. . . . For a monstrouse thynge yt were ii menne to be one boke, unlesse he coude brynge yt in by some straunge fygure of the canon lawe whych now adyaes worketh manye newe myracles. ([Fviii]v) Setting aside his sarcastic and deliberately literal misreading of Tolwin’s intent, Bale’s “montrouse thynge” involves the conflation of “two diverse men” into a single text. Bale separates Thorpe and Oldcastle’s beliefs in order to imbue these two narratives, which have been left unread, with their individual, distinct voices. Text and man merge into one and the same, but each textual voice remains unique. The bag of books transforms into a collection of individuals, each with their own voice whom Bonner left silenced and condemned. It is only through Bale’s careful glossing that these “exiled” subjects, removed from the public view and relegated to a bag, present but absent, do not simply fade into silence. For Turner and Bale, the text is the creation of an individual and “belongs” to that person, like an early modern metaphorical copyright, and a situation more familiar in imaginative literature—Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and others—but strikingly different in the political sphere.31 Both Turner and Bale apply textual metaphors to create a boundary between one authority and another and thus to establish a more modern conceptualization of the authorial relationship between text and writer. At work is a polemical example of the shifting authorial role from compilator to auctor finding purchase and application in critiques of regnal authority. Textual sovereignty, or authorial designation, prevents one authority from claiming the power of another and excludes the possibility of two secular authorities coexisting within the same geopolitical space. Authority, tradition, and law thus undergo codification in texts and textual metaphors and away from longstanding religious consensus. The struggle with a universal Church becomes a struggle between national, secular, and textual centers of power. The anxiety of authorship present in both Bale’s and Turner’s polemics underlines what Lander calls “a world in which religious identity is perceived as shifting and unstable, and a world in which language is used to conceal as well as reveal.” Such polemics are confessional texts, declaring citizenship, declaring religious creeds, and declaring codified voices for both themselves and others who they feel represent voices “in defense of

Margins and Cente  63 unambiguous truth.”32 Each of these confessional moments sets boundaries and each eventually extend into meditations on the divisions between sacred and secular authority. The king’s law is absolute but subject to God’s law. That Turner holds this belief, at least in print, is evident in The Romishe Fox’s inscription “To the Most excellent Prince, King Henry the Eighth, King of England, France, and of Ireland, Supreme Governor in earth of thes hys Realms” (Aiir). As W.R.D. Jones notes, “This must be one of the earliest appearances in print of a title which was ultimately to be adopted in religious context by Elizabeth I.”33 Turner’s understanding of “supreme governor” is clarified in a later work, The Rescuynge of the Romishe Fox (1545). There he writes that supreme governoure in earth under god betokeneth as myche as supreme hede dothe, and is as honorable a terme for the majesti of a kyng as the other is . . . I gave hym so myche honor as is lawful to gyve unto any erthly man by the worde of god. (Ciir—Ciiiv) This is a very narrow and very dangerous path to tread for a Henrican Englishman. Turner acknowledges that the king of England has the right and the power to dictate religious reform via secular decrees, but only if those decrees fall in line with the Word of God. Turner will not grant any secular ruler additional authority because of God’s sovereignty codified in Scripture. God’s laws are His alone and He is their author. Henry might follow, implement, or enforce them, but they cannot be made or unmade by him. He concludes, I hold that the kyng our master is the suprem polytike hede under god both of all the spiritualti and also of the temperalty of England and Irelande and that there is nether spirituall nor politike hede in earthe above hym nether bisshop kyng nor emperor. (Ciiiiv) As supreme governor, Henry holds secular authority, holds eminence within the geopolitical boundaries of his territories, and governs the people in following God’s laws. As spiritual governor Henry’s power is substantial but still limited. Although he does not explicitly make this distinction while writing the earlier Romishe Fox, the same ideas are present there when Turner places Henry’s decrees in opposition to papal traditions, arguing that the two cannot occupy the same geopolitically defined space. What results is an exposure of the loci of power operating in Tudor England and a continued separation of sacred and secular authority accomplished via textual metaphor. The argument’s driving force revolves around a list of religious practices Turner observed in England. Each practice—creeping to the cross,

64 Margins and Cente banishing demons with holy water, and others—is assigned to a historically specific period and to a clearly named “author” not to be conflated with the English sovereign. The men he names—Gregory, Alexander, Felix, Pelagius—underline the point that neither Henry nor God instituted these practices ([Avii]v—r). Turner’s insistence on referring to the Church of England reinforces its separateness from the Church of Rome and Roman authority, and both’s inclusion within distinct geopolitical boundaries. This line of argument leads to a long syllogism in which Turner concludes that such practices prove canon law still governs the Church of England and “the popis chirch and the English chirch ar all on . . . [and] therfor the Pope by your saying is the hede of the chirche of Englond” ([Bvi]r). Thus, England remains under the dominion of a foreign authority. Bale makes a similar argument. He references Bonner’s careful linking of the king’s proclamations with papal proclamations to justify Bonner’s authority, and Bale points out how in doing this Bonner reveals his “owne Antichristiane decre and inhybycon” (Ciiir). Here is another invocation of sovereignty, without which an external papal authority might be (falsely) grafted onto an internal English sovereignty. Both arguments secularize papal authority by divesting it of any divine sanction and placing its authority in the works of men. They recast the Pope in a gubernatorial role similar to Henry’s, one whose decrees must be checked by God’s Word. England’s reformation changes from a struggle between sacred and secular authorities, Pope and Monarch, into a struggle between two sovereign, secular political nations, England and Rome. Rome becomes a political threat to English national identity in addition to being a religious one, a claim that opens a rhetorical space where Turner can argue that the Pope’s secular authority has invaded England. Turner continues his line of argument by criticizing the Latin mass and pivoting from texts to language. In matters of the church, especially in forms of worship, Turner viewed Latin as a marker of papal authority. He charges that: [T]he pop willeth and commandeth in all places where he hath dominacion, that all Psalmes and all messes shall be sayd and song in hys old mother latin tong thoge the peple understand never on word of the latin tong; yit thys doth he, in a token, that the peple . . . shuld knowledge them selves to be under the se of Rome. ([Dvii]v). By contrast, Turner continues, the Greeks and Germans have long since taken to reciting their services in their vernacular and thereby “forsake the popes ordinances and the popes romish tong” ([Dvii]r). Nationalistic implications of language hover just beneath the surface. Language, more specifically the language of liturgy, becomes a marker of national identity. The Romishe Fox links both an English liturgy and an English Bible with a distinctly English (in the national sense) form of Christianity and proceeds to

Margins and Cente  65 add an additional level of complexity by referring to Latin, not as something liturgical, but as something nationalistic. Turner underlines that nationalistic impulse by calling Latin the Pope’s “mother tongue,” a term he uses multiple times. One’s mother tongue refers to the language of one’s youth and the language of one’s native culture. Turner’s argument ignores that the Italian Paul III was Bishop of Rome in 1543. Italian, not Latin, was the Pope’s mother tongue. Turner’s glossing over that fact by substituting Latin associates Pope Paul with the older Roman culture while simultaneously evoking the connotations of secular imperial power that the Roman Empire represented. Language plays a similar role in Turner’s Huntyng of the Romishe Wuolfe (1555). The text, written during his second exile, takes the form of a dialogue between a Hunter, a Forester, and a Dean who chance to meet on the road to London. The three men travel together, debating whether or not the Roman Church continues to maintain a disruptive presence in England. One of the text’s most frequent metaphors is the figure of a watchman on the walls of a city. This liminal figure, literally on the margins of the community, looks outward to protect what is behind him. “For as if an Englishman,” the Hunter argues, which were made the watchman of Barwick, if he saw the Scotes come toward Barwick, and spake to the citezins and souldiers of the citie, ether only ερχονται σκότοι in Greke, or veniunt Scoti in latin and would not saye in Englyshe, the Scotes come, and the people woste not what the watchman said, and so were sodenly taken of the Scottes, and were for the more part killed, were he not a murderer. ([Cvi]v) The Hunter’s point critiques priests speaking Latin during the Mass, but the metaphor also invites an additional reading related to the security of the city the watchman guards. Whereas the critique might be spiritual, the metaphor is domestic. The English watchman, Turner argues, is culpable of allowing the city to fall if he fails to speak in the vernacular, a failure explicitly linked with foreign invasion. Turner then pivots from this example back to the presence of papal authority: [T]he latine Pope requireth that al they that are members of his Latine and Romish churche with him, and namely al the prestes after his order, shoulde onely reade Latine in the churche, in a remembrance that he is head of al them that reade latine in the churche, and that he was the inbringer of latine into all this parte of Europa. ([Cvii]r) The Pope requires Latin so that all who speak it in the English Church will know who rules above them and whose authority extends outward

66 Margins and Cente from Rome even into England. Latin thus represents the presence of a papal authority dictating a competing tongue within England and threatening the integrity of the English, Christian commonwealth. These observations reveal potentially larger, cultural implications related to the discourse of exile in these texts. From a liminal position Turner and his fellow exiles write from what they view as a privileged vantage point, an aspect of exilic literature we have seen before. They are both Englishmen and outsiders, offering at least the appearance of objective observation and Turner, at least, recognizes the influence exiled voices can have at home and abroad. He makes this point directly in The Huntyng of the Romishe Wuolfe warning, “they, that will not parte frome their wolvishnesse, should ether be banished out of the realme . . . put out of office, and casten into the tower, lest they shculd do any more harme abrode” ([Eviiv]). To be clear, I am not claiming that Turner, or exiles exclusively, were alone in seeing these Catholic influences. William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, to name just one example, recognizes and attacks Catholicism in England even though Baldwin never became an exile. The 1584 reprint of Baldwin’s text, however, explicitly links exile with the exposure of falsehood: This little boke Beware the Cat moste pleasantly compiled: In time obscured was and so, since that hath been exiled. Exiled, because perchaunce at first, it shewed the toyes and drifts: Of such as them by wiles and willes, Maintained Popish shifts.34 (Aiir) This address to the reader by “T.K.” positions the text as a voice speaking from the margins as Turner did in his Preface to The Romishe Fox. Just as Turner the hunter can follow the fox because he observes the trail from above it, so too does Baldwin’s text reveal the traces of Catholicism in part because it speaks from the margins. Turner’s view of reformation is more than a spiritual goal; it is also a national and cultural one. The overthrow of Catholic tradition establishes a “true” English nation. He casts himself in the role of the hunter as a means of commenting on and reimagining authority in England, but he can act only indirectly and at a distance to affect change. Turner imagines England as a clearly defined geopolitical realm within which he establishes two primary secular centers of power: a corrupt, secular papal tradition, not a unified Holy Church, and Henry’s self-proclaimed embodiment of both sacred and secular authority, which must be carefully kept in check to avoid remaking the king into an English Pope. Creating a defensible separation between sacred and secular authority—between Henry as an English

Margins and Cente  67 spiritual governor and Christ as the Head of the Church—helps Turner to accomplish his goal of religious critique without attacking Henry’s secular authority and internal sovereignty. He envisions these separate authorities as closely associated with texts and reduces the complications of reformation by reimagining them not as doctrinal disagreements, but as the infringement of one secular authority on another. Turner transfers the authority of the temporal Church onto the person of the Pope so as to highlight the human origins of its teachings and relocates God’s authority in the Scriptures. This allows Turner to reimagine the Church of England as a return to the purity of the Apostolic Church with King Henry as its governor. And whereas Turner continues to refer to a king in his polemics, he fairly evenly divides that title with the use of “governor,” particularly when his criticisms of the monarch are sharpest. He carefully maintains an outward appearance of loyalty to the crown but hesitates whenever royal power approaches divine associations. We see hints that loyalty for Turner appears much more closely associated with England the nation than with the person of its ruler, especially once Mary comes to power. Indeed, Mary introduces a number of complications. The arguments Turner made, for example, regarding internal sovereignty are more problematic when a Catholic queen is on the throne. The use of “governor” as opposed to “king” signals a possible attempt to deploy a functional understanding of the commonwealth in response to early modern discourses of regnal superiority in general and Queen Mary specifically. The distinction finds a notable application in John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politike Power. Ponet’s polemic, written in the final years of his life and exile in Strasbourg, wrestles throughout with the problem of tyranny and a Catholic monarch. Barrett Beer notes of Ponet’s work, “The death of one sovereign and the ascension of another had destroyed the Protestant church and forced its leaders into exile; thus it was logical for Ponet to consider the merits of monarchy as a form of government.”35 Ponet’s text emphasizes the superior position of the commonwealth over the monarch: Next unto God men ought to love their countrey, and the hole common wealthe before any membre of it: as kinges and princes (be they never so great) are but membres: and common wealthes mai stande well ynough and flourishe, albeit ther be no kinges, but contrary wise without a common wealthe ther can be no king. Common wealthes and realmes may live, whan the head is cut of, and may put on a newe head, that is, make them a new governour, whan they see their olde head seke too muche his owne will and not the wealthe of the whole body, for the which he was only ordained.36 ([Dvii]r) Ponet’s words are startlingly direct. The idea of a political commonwealth extends well back into the medieval period and beyond, but here it is

68 Margins and Cente reimagined along with the body politic as something far more malleable than traditionally understood. The decapitated “head” is a “king” but the entity replacing it is “a new governor.” Here is the careful separation of powers we’ve seen in Turner’s argument carried to a natural conclusion. If one power is not working, remove and replace it because that power is secular, not sacred. Turner and his contemporaries largely shrank from open rebellion in their writing even as they reimagined England as a nation.37 For all its saber-rattling, Ponet’s Short Treatise ends with a prayer for E ­ ngland’s spiritual healing instead of a call to arms. The ideas preserved in these polemics remained in the national consciousness until the Civil War when many of them resurfaced with powerful effect. It would be just over a century until Charles I’s execution. Sacred authority is overseen by a Protestant governor/ king informed and guided by the Word of God, which in turn translates into a secular authority guided by the same principles. At this point, we can see in Turner, Bale, and Ponet the idea of the voice from the margins returning to the center. Turner and Bale see a truth that others cannot. To those is added something new: marginality results in a preoccupation with authoritarian boundaries and an anxiety of authorship. The boundaries that Turner establishes to separate sacred and secular authority manifest in some additional ways to which we now turn. First is an effort on the exile’s part to self-define as an Englishman, a true Christian, or both and label key players in the Catholic/Protestant divide as either English or other, even if the “other” is in fact English. Second is a noticeable reliance upon an interior/exterior dichotomy manifested in images of foreign contamination prompting an active rewriting of English origin narratives into narratives of invasion and infection. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, this dichotomy reveals a paradoxical belief in exile polemic that both damnation and salvation lay outside the native country. Only a few pages into Yet a Course at the Romeysh Foxe, John Bale claims: “I know certenlye I schall for thys be called a thousaunde tymes heretique, but I waye it nothynge at all, for it is the olde name of true christianes” (B[i]r). The claim carries a doubled sense of Bale’s faith and conviction. He recalls that Christianity began as a Jewish heresy and acknowledges that his convictions will elicit scorn and derision from the Catholic faithful. It is also a reflection of one exile’s sense of self. Exiled Protestants worked tirelessly to maintain the appearance of citizenship in England and worked equally hard to cast their enemies as foreign insurgents of both Satan and the Pope. Turner’s prologue to The Romish Fox claims, for example, that the “love that [he] bears unto [hys] natural cuntrey” leads to the book’s creation (Aii). Ponet’s Short Treatise includes in its full title “an Exhortacion to all true naturall Englishe men” and includes in his preface to the reader “the autor for his countrey he is pleased to put forthe the Worke to th[e] intent the travaile of the doer be not lost neither true Englishe hartes frustrate of so worthie an instruction” (Aiiv). Bale criticizes Bishop Bonner by explicitly “other-ing” him. Bonner is a native-born Englishman, but Bale insists, “I in

Margins and Cente  69 the quarell of thys poore Israelyte [Tolwin], thys naturall cuntre manne of myne, and fellawe servaunt of Jesus Christ, with Moyses invade thys proude stranger and cruell Egypcyane [Bonner]” ([Avi]v). In a single sentence, he denaturalizes Bonner; declares his own citizenship with Tolwin, whom he further associates with Israel, Christ, and Moses; and promises to engage with Bonner, not as a man, but as a foreign power doing battle with an enemy. “Invading” Bonner conjures an image of penetration into a sovereign territory. The metaphor continues for the remainder of the paragraph: Non other weapon wyll I take here, but the swerde of the sprete (whych ys the worde of the eternall lyvynge God) with the most auctorysed hystoryes and cronyckes, and with them wyll I stryke hym to the grounde, so leavynge hym there in the sande. ([Avi]v—r) Texts again play a crucial role in Bale’s argument, although now to God’s Word are added histories and chronicles, the preservers of an English national mythology. Bale speaks of papal traditions as something akin to an imperial force. He accuses the papacy of being the downfall of two hundred “lawfull kynges” including Frederick Barbarossa, Desidarius, and John of England. Bale recounts how, “By the vertu of confessyon was the plesaunt kyngdome of Italye destroyed, and became saynt peter’s patrimonye,” leaving the the Lombard King Desidarius and his family to die in exile. King John fell victim to the “hate of hys nobylyte and commons and [was] compelled to give upp hys crowne and tyttle for hym and hys heyres to the apostolyck seate” ([Cvii]v—r). Historical inaccuracies aside, these allusions all refer to a foreign influence invading and toppling a sovereign power. The Papal See does not come with the sword but with subterfuge, with ideological contamination of the people through the Church. There are hints of this underlying contamination rhetoric in Bale’s reference to these examples being traceable back to “the most pestylant counsell of laterane” ([Cvii]v). The Church acts like an infectious disease invading a healthy body which results in the body’s eventual death. Bale’s Yet a Course hints at Catholic influence as pestilent infection, but Turner’s A New Booke of Spiritual Physik removes any doubt regarding the power of the “foreign” Roman church to invade the English body politic like a disease. Somatic political metaphors were hardly new in early modern England. It was, however, especially frequent during the period and applied to the Church, commonwealth, and Christendom. Susanne Scholz links the rise of somatic metaphors with the development of national identity in Body Narratives: In the historical context of the separation of European Christendom into single states which defined themselves by their difference from and their competition with the respective others, emphasis was put on the

70 Margins and Cente control of individual body margins because the margins of one’s own society or national territory were believed threatened.38 She alludes to “diasporic communities and threatened political entities” being particularly engaged with body metaphors as a means of articulating a perceived threat to national identity.39 Jonathan Gil Harris makes a similar point in Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: [W]hat generated the fear of infiltration that is registered so powerfully in late Elizabethan organic political metaphor? There can be no doubt that the persistent threat of Catholic invasion in the last decades of the sixteenth century was in large part responsible.40 It is therefore not surprising that Turner and his fellow exiles embraced body metaphors to voice fears of Catholic contamination. As Catherine Davies has noted, “The fact that the body analogy applied to both church and commonwealth allowed the boundaries between them to be blurred or overridden.”41 Turner uses this elision to his advantage. A narrative of infection requires a physical body, and Spiritual Physik employs the metaphor of the English nation as a diseased human body, drawing on Turner’s medical training and interest in natural science. Substantively, the text resembles a medical self-help book written by a doctor who diagnoses an illness, writes a purgative prescription, and issues a cautionary note to prevent reinfection. The interior English body requires external treatment from a physician to heal. The problems England suffers become more easily visible in this metaphor; complex theological debates become symptoms of disease. Spiritual Physik concentrates its attention on the effect of the diseases Turner believes have penetrated those boundaries to contaminate and hobble the entire national body. Writing to the English nobility, Turner “diagnoses” England’s maladies to motivate and empower the nobility to retake their true roles as advisors and administrators of justice to the commonwealth, thus “curing” it. The somatic metaphor allows Turner to comment on, and reinforce, a traditional, hierarchical social structure while still criticizing the Queen’s Catholicism. It makes possible the conversion of Catholic practices into diseases with identifiable effects on the nation for which Turner can offer an effective treacle, and it reconceives Catholic tradition as an infectious and invading pathogen within an otherwise enclosed and independent body. Spiritual Physik administers its cure to the nobles for a pragmatic reason, the obvious problem in a Catholic queen. Turner sidesteps this inconvenience by making his address to the nobles whom he calls, “the principall partes, and the hede of the common wealth” (A4v). Lest this seem too treasonous a statement, he immediately clarifies himself although not entirely convincingly; “I make you the heade of all the nobilitie in Englade under the Quene” (A4r). If we carry through his metaphor, he effectively names the nobility the body’s neck, on which the head rests and by which the

Margins and Cente  71 head gains both its vitality and communicates its intentions. He places a great deal of power in the nobility from the outset while subordinating the queen’s role. He appeals on the behalf of England’s subjects whose wellbeing depends upon the actions of those same nobles he seeks to diagnosis and spur into action. Turner makes this clear by tracing the etymology of “gentlemen:” “A gentleman hath hys name of thys worde gens-gentis, whych may be called in Englyshe, a folk, a nacion, or a family.” (B3r). It is the duty of these English nobles to rise up and act on behalf of the nation and work to return the land to a “true” faith. Thus, the “gentle” vocation of a noble is simple, “to set forth and defende the true religion of almyghty God, to defende the innocentes and to ponishe the evel doers, and to shewe justice and judgement unto all men, that are under hys goverment” (C2r). Such a definition raises the question, what role does the Queen have if not these same duties? On this Turner is largely silent. Most of his references to a monarch are to a king, not a queen. And in case the nobility questions their appropriate role from a Biblical standpoint, Turner puts them at ease with Scriptural authority by “conveniently ‘sliding’ from the term ‘king’ to ‘noble’ or ‘gentlemen’ ” in his exposition.42 Similar slippage occurs in the anachronistic rendering of God’s servant as “Duke Moses” (Dr). He encourages the nobility to embrace their role as rulers in their own right who function as governors and judges, and he does so without mention of subservience to the queen, who is noticeably excluded from this conceptualization of the ruling class. Turner also places the nobles in direct opposition to Queen Mary’s faith, for the “true religion” Turner advocates is certainly not Roman Catholicism. The nobles assume all the traditional roles of the monarch assigned to Henry VIII in The Romishe Fox: defender of the true faith, enforcer and protector of the law, and governor of the people. In this way Turner restructures the metaphor of the body politic so that the queen either falls under the direction and control of the nobles themselves or need not be present at all. Physik’s rewriting of the body politic externalizes secular power by making it transferable from one “head” to another, or, in this case, from the head to another part of the body. Whereas Romishe Fox works to define and limit Henry’s authority, Spiritual Physik redraws those boundaries while still leaving them to appear traditionally intact. The appearance of stability was essential: True religion depended on right order if it was to flourish, and the godly prince was ultimately responsible for that order. Only he could wield the sword of temporal power against sin and popery, as directed by the preaching ministry.43 The body is not beheaded, only reimagined to place emphasis (and power) where Turner wishes it. His most creative use of the somatic metaphor appears when he diagnoses four diseases dependent upon an interior/exterior dichotomy: the palsy,

72 Margins and Cente dropsy, the Romish pox, and leprosy. He diagnoses each through its external signs of infection, provides a “prescription” for a spiritual treatment, and concludes with advice for avoiding reinfection. Physical palsy manifests outwardly as a bodily numbness or paralysis whose spiritual equivalent is a lack of Scriptural knowledge. The treatment indicates strict physical and mental discipline whenever someone shows a tendency toward idleness or a disdain for learning. Turner amusingly and grimly writes, “they must be let bloude oft times in the buttocks” ([G7]r). Next, spiritual dropsy is described as a swelling or a puffing up of the body resulting from a noble’s discontent with his material wealth, holdings, and selfish ambition. The figurative disease is widespread and, interestingly enough, infected Henry VIII who “dranke up all the monkries, freries, and nunries in Englande . . . [and a] tenthe parte of all spirituall mennes lyvynges in all the hole realme” ([H8]r). The cure is simple but hard to swallow: sermons against covetousness twice a day for two weeks along with a daily dose of the water of repentance. Turner adds Christ’s advice to the rich man in Luke 19—give half of what you own to the poor—if the other remedies are too difficult to acquire (Iv—[I6]v). Turner’s third disease is the Romish pox, a spiritual syphilis. Rounding out the list is leprosy, which manifests as the “defamation and shame that cometh to you by receyvynge . . . suche persones as shame you,” namely “proud stertuppes, or selfe-made gentlemen, and lordely byshoppes” (M3r—M4v). The cure here is harsh, but effective: hold accountable all who claim a noble title and shame those who do not belong. Turner conceptualizes each of these diseases from the inside out. The nobility’s internal failures manifest outwardly, causing damage to the larger national body. This dynamic undergoes a noteworthy shift when Turner addresses the third malady, the Romish pox. The pox, like the crafty fox he hunted years earlier, severely threatens the health of the nobility and the nation. The other diseases are caused by actions from within the body or by members of the society themselves, but the Romish pox originates outside of England. It infects and invades. The Romish pox is “a disease of the mynde whych maketh a man worship God not accordynge unto hys wrytten worde but after the tradicion and ordinance of the bishop of Rome” (Lv). It manifests outwardly more visually than the others and more closely resembles the physical disease it mirrors. Look first, Turner warns, for the loss of “spirituall noses” and those infected who “snevel alwayes of wyl werkes, of pylgrimages, of ymages, of purgatory, of Messes, and of Diriges and such lyke stuffe” (Lr). And beware of tonsured heads, “For there is not one gentleman of the clergie, that hath the Romyshe pokkes, in the hole realme of Englande, that hath his hole heade covered wyth heere, but one part is bare” (L2v). An amusing image, but it represents one of the most direct assaults on Catholic traditions found in Turner’s diseases and a clever metaphorical linkage of the body physical to the body spiritual. The metaphor of the Romish pox combines with Turner’s medical training to reimagine Catholicism not just as a disease, but an invading, even colonial

Margins and Cente  73 contagion. He explains the Romish pox by comparison with the French pox, which he claims originated during the Italian War of 1494–98. The allusion to the Italian War gestures towards one nation invading another only to fall victim to contamination. French soldiers contracted the physical pox from prostitutes, carried it home, and exposed their own nation to its effects. The motivations for this invasion were largely political, with France hoping to extend her imperial territory into Italy. In Turner’s mind, Roman Catholicism acts in a similar manner. Over time, as Turner narrates events, the Whore of Babylon gradually “thrust into all kyngdomes of Europa” but England remained uninfected (L3r—L4v). He looks back through the chronicles of English history to corroborate his diagnosis and insist on England’s initial purity. In this historiographical argument, Turner describes the contraction of Romish pox explicitly as a foreign infection: We read in olde histories that the Britanes receyved the true and unlevened religion in the tyme of Kynge Lucius, the kynge of the Britannes, and that it continued undefiled, unto the tyme of Gregory the great, who sente into Englande a monkyshe apostle of his which brought with him the Romyshe pox in to thys lande . . . [and] the hole churche of the Britanes at length was infected and poysoned, and the true worde of God choked, or at the least shamefully mynished. . . . The truth is (which can be safely proved by the churche story of Bedes wrytynge) that the Brytannes had the fayth many yeares, even 400 years and more before that Austen came into England. (L4v—r) Here, in a remarkable moment of revisionism and nationalism, Turner recreates a familiar national myth. He glosses over the Germanic invasions of England, maintaining that a pure, “disease-free” faith was only lost due to an unsolicited and contaminated source from outside it. He imagines his fellow English Protestants as the inheritors of the true faith, although he neglects to specify from whence it came. It was simply “received” and continued to thrive in this English national body until Pope Gregory the Great sent into England Augustine of Canterbury, the carrier of spiritual plague, whose influence “dyd not only infecte the Englyshe, but also the Brytannes” (L4r). Part of England’s foundational myth, that it was reclaimed for Christ by Augustine following years of pagan rule, transforms into an infection story where a Protestant nation continued unsullied from the days of Lucius until the advent of the colonizing infection. The Catholic presence in England as a unifying force morphs into a festering infection that has gradually undermined ­English national sovereignty and brought it under the authority of Rome, as if for the first time. Such historical revisionism, what Felicity Heal calls the “plasticity” of the Lucius narrative, underscores the fact that control over conversion narratives is essential to sixteenth-century polemics

74 Margins and Cente because it offers a form of ideological legitimacy. Turner’s use of King Lucius places him firmly in a tradition replete with nationalist sentiments. Heal argues that, “The British story of origins long seemed more attractive than the Anglo-Saxon, because early conversion was less contaminated by Rome—­Augustine having unquestionably been a missionary for and from the papacy.”44 Turner’s reference to King Lucius thus carries with it at least two crucial meanings. It asserts that the “olde histories” of England function to preserve what Turner believes is a thoroughly “English” (read Protestant) religion. His use of Lucius indicates a desire to preserve, or restore, a valuable aspect of “English” culture threatened by infection, invasion, or dissolution. Similar revisionism occurs in Bale’s Yet a Course focused on the Norman Conquest. Drawing on a narrative that those “expert in the cronycles knoweth full wele,” he lays blame for the collapse of Anglo-Saxon England on the perfidious duplicity of the Norman Archbishop Robert Chambert who within a whyle after hys othe of allegeaunce to kynge Herolde, brought into thys realme Duke Wyllyam of Normadye a bastarde, with a baner from pope Alexander the second, and cleane remyssyon of synne to subdue both hym and yt. (Miiir) Although Bale lacks the overt metaphor of infection, Chambert’s duplicity resides in the record of his admitting a foreign influence into England. The Archbishop carries the papal banner, itself symbolic of another’s authority, whose entry into England signals a loss of its sovereignty. At play in both Bale and Turner are narratives of a threat to England from both within and without. Both rewrite English history to support an enclosed and healthy geopolitical space into which came a destructive foreign influence. This intense polemical focus on external contaminating forces is balanced by an equally powerful recognition of the exile’s own exteriority as a vehicle for national salvation. Both polemics reflect on how each author sees the ultimate “cure” for England’s ills as coming from outside. Bale’s bag of books includes English and non-English authors, although all are Protestant. These texts are exiled in the sense that they are hidden within the confines of the bag—present and not present like the exiles themselves. Their words, which Bale contends are salvific and good, go unheard by the masses despite their importance.45 In Spiritual Physik the treatment for an external contagion comes from a liminal position too. Turner imagines Physik as a medicine in and of itself, encouraging the nobles to “take it unto you, and into you, and dispose it, and send it to suche partes of the bodye as have most nede of it” ([A5]v). The polemic functions as an extension of Turner himself as England’s national physician and the diseases’s antidote. He argues that texts from outside of England were the original source of England’s recovery from the Romish pox. These included “Luters bokes, and other new wryters, and partly by preachynge, and by the translacion of the newe

Margins and Cente  75 Testament, and the readyng of the same” (L4r). These functioned as spiritual physicians in their own right just as Turner now hopes to do because the contagion has again infected the English national body. Salvation from this infection entails nothing less than complete severance from everything associated with Roman Catholicism: a total, self-imposed quarantine from tonsured priests; from partaking of the Eucharist from “pokky marchuntes” who “breath upon hym in theyr confession boothes” and from those who “put . . . theyr pokky spattell into theyr chylders mouthes” (L[5]r). Those already infected must daily drink the “water of lyfe” flavored with numerous “herbs” of scripture heated on the ashes of “popyshe bookes” (Mv). Those very same external forces, guided by the advice of the exile, become the curative to be taken internally. England, enclosed and self-contained like a physical body and infected by the contagion of Catholicism, must take in the sources of contamination that have been recognized as contagions and render them harmless by burning them to ash (M2v). The source of disease, properly rendered, becomes the cure—a spiritual pharmakon. The nobles, once cured, can then become what they are called to be, the healers of the English body politic and body spiritual. They become the bearers of a cure originating from outside the body. That cure comes in part from the exiles themselves. The key ingredient is a growing sense of English nationalism present within these pages of polemic, what Philip Schwyzer calls “not the nation per se so much as the nation in potentia.”46 This potential English nation imagined in exile suggests several provocative conclusions, not the least of which is that nation building and the development of an English national consciousness is partly a textual phenomenon, a thing conceived and developed in exilic texts and more specifically polemic texts. Polemic’s attempts to define clear lines, to lay unambiguous claim to the certainty of one’s position, also partially accounts for the early modern movement from what James Simpson has called “complicated accretion” to “cleanness of line” in doctrine, art, and culture.47 The mind of exile at work in these texts attempts to disentangle authority and to insist upon clear, unambiguous loci of power, which cannot overlap without conflict and stand in direct contrast to the complicated intersection of sacred and secular authority running throughout the Middle Ages. Yet as Simpson points out, the appearance of that sharp divide is itself a fiction created by the revolutionary moment. Like polemic, a discourse of exile justifies itself by its assumption of being a voice that imparts the correct interpretation or represents the winning side. The intimate relationship between reformation and an emerging national consciousness codified in polemic helps to account for the success of the Reformation’s creation of the seemingly sharp divide between medieval and early modern. The writings of Turner, Bale, and Ponet demonstrate that the contribution of exilic texts to the formation of an English national consciousness should not and cannot be overlooked. Their mind of exile influences the development of the polemic as a type of ideological profession. Exile polemics

76 Margins and Cente declare the beliefs of the authors and establish allegiance among like-minded believers in England. They are a means of self-validation that consistently and repeatedly affirm their authors as active English citizens who see themselves as such and whose status as exiles has diminished neither their citizenship nor their desire to return. Polemics do not persuade; they proclaim. They create an ideological and nationalistic solidarity between those at home and abroad, an Andersonian imagined community. These imagined communities extended not just over a hill but across an ocean to a collection of citizens in exile. Just how widely these exiles where recognized as citizens by the general English population is less clear, but among elite circles or among individuals who eventually became powerful figures in Elizabeth’s England, the “place” of exiles as citizens was not in question. Turner and Bale in particular display a preoccupation with borders and boundaries: national, ideological, and cultural. Both recognize the king of England’s secular authority, but place on it careful limits via the commandments of God, transforming the monarch from king to governor. The exiles’s position outside the nation creates a complex point of view that imagines how outside forces have entered into the idealized culture constructed by the exiles themselves and “infected” it. Models of infection and contamination “others” Catholicism as an imperial threat to English national sovereignty while simultaneously claiming that the cure—in the form of continental reformation doctrine and its polemics—comes from outside and from another “other,” the community of exiles themselves. The exiles become, to extend Turner’s medical metaphor from Spiritual Physik, a spiritual vaccine and textual catalyst whose words inject into England a Protestant ideology that will heal and enlighten the nation and allow for their eventual return. The exiles who outlived Mary’s reign and returned home, including Turner, returned to a nation that they actively shaped in spite of and because of their absence. One wonders if Turner’s student, who recounted his teacher’s incarceration, would have recognized his teacher after years in exile. That student’s name is lost to history. What can be said with certainty is that the England that student died in was a very different place from the one into which he was born due in part to the writings and efforts of exiles like Turner. His teacher and like-minded believers went into exile to escape political and religious persecution, but their time abroad ultimately shaped their identities and the identity of the nation they left behind. As his student records, the men executed while Turner was in prison lost their lives for denying the king’s self-appointed status as the head of the Church. As I have shown, Turner and other Protestant exiles were equally uncomfortable with that designation and actively sought to disentangle sacred and secular realms of authority. It is perhaps fitting that this anonymous student “speaks” through Turner’s commonplace book, lost as he is now from history. His brief entry records a moment in his teacher’s life just before Turner’s departure from a changing England. His voice, like Turner’s works in exile, speaks to us

Margins and Cente  77 now from a distance and asks us to recall those who are absent from our ­presence—but still speak.

Notes 1 A version of this chapter appeared as “ ‘To the Glory of God and the Profit of the Commonwealth:’ ” William Turner’s Rhetoric of Exile and English National Identity.” Reprinted with permission from Reformation 19, 2 (2014). 2 William Turner, “The Commonplace Book of William Turner” (Bath, n.d.), No. 4877, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. 3 The Athenae Oxonienses records that Turner “following his old trade of preaching without a call was imprison’d and kept in close durance for a considerable time.” Anthony A. Wood and Philip Bliss, Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford, vol. 1 (London: T. Bensley, 1813), 361. 4 Whitney R.D. Jones, William Turner: Tudor Naturalist, Physician, and Divine (New York: Routledge, 1988), 41. 5 William Turner, A New Booke of Spiritual Physik (Emden: Egidius van der Erve, 1555). 6 Urbanus Rhegius, Novae Doctrinae Ad Veterem Collatio (Augsburg, 1526). Turner’s translation is The Olde Learnyng and the New, Compared Together Wherby It May Easely Be Knowen Which of Them Is Better and More Agreyng Wyth the Euerlasting Word of God Newly Corrected and Augmented by Wyllyam Turner (Ludgate, London: Robert Stoughton, 1548). Unfortunately, no copy of the Unio Dissidentium translation has survived. 7 William Turner, The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal of William Turner Doctor in Phisick (Collen: Arnold Birkman, 1568). 8 Christina Hallowell Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 314–15. 9 For Turner’s life and legacy c.f. Jones, William Turner. Turner appears briefly in a variety of studies including Garrett, The Marian Exiles; Frederick A. Norwood, Strangers and Exiles: A History of Religious Refugees (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969); Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For Turner’s politics and polemics c.f. Rainer Pineas, “William Turner’s Spiritual Physik,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14, no. 4 (1983): 387–98; Rainer Pineas, “William Turner’s Polemical Use of Ecclesiastical History and His Controversy With Stephen Gardiner,” Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1980): 599– 608; Rainer Pineas, “William Turner and Reformation Politics,” Bibliothéque D’Humanisme et Renaissance 37 (1975): 199–200. For his contribution to the natural sciences c.f. Leah Knight, Of Books of Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009). 10 Among the most important works on the rise of nations and nationalism are Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (London; New York: Verso, 2006) and J. G. A. Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” The American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (1982): 311–36. See also R.M. Lumiansky, “Beginnings of English Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 2 (1941): 248–49; Eva D. Marcu, Sixteenth Century Nationalism (New York: Abaris Books, 1976); Stuart Mews, ed., Religion and

78 Margins and Cente National Identity, vol. 18 (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1982); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Hilary Larkin, The Making of Englishmen: Debates on National Identity 1550–1650 (Boston: Brill, 2014); and Elizabeth Sauer, Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11 David J. Baker, Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 5–6. 12 Ibid., 9. 13 Stewart Mottram, “Empire, Exile, and England’s ‘British Problem’: Recent Approaches to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender as a Colonial and Postcolonial Text,” Literature Compass, no. 4 (2007): 1061. 14 John Breuilly is less comfortable talking about a sixteenth-century English nation, and J.G.A Pocock famously claimed that the discussion of a nation-state “produces some unexpected results when applied to Britain” (316). See further: Breuilly, Nationalism and the State and Pocock, “The Limits and Divisions of British History,” 311–36. 15 John Foxe’s 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments specifically mentions Turner (and other Marian exiles) whose works were explicitly banned. Foxe writes in Book V, “The kyng and Queene our soueraigne Lord and Lady therefore most entierly, and earnestly tenderyng the preseruation, and safetye, as well of the soules, as of the bodies, lands, and substaunce of all their good and louyng subiectes, and others, and minding to roote out, & extinguish all false doctrine and heresies, and other occasions of Schismes, diuisions, & sects that come by the same heresies, and false doctrine, straytly charge and commaund, that no person or persons, of what estate, degree, or cōdition so euer he or they be, from hencefoorth presume to bryng, or conuey, or cause to bee brought, or conueyed into this Realme, anye bokes, writinges, or workes, hereafter mentioned: that is to say, any booke, or bookes, wrytinges, or woorkes, made or set forth by, or in the name of Martin Luther, or anye booke, or bokes, writinges, or workes, made or set forth by, or in the name of Oecolampadius, Zwinglius, Iohn Caluine, Pomerane, Iohn Alasco, Bullinger, Bucer, Melanthō, Bernardinus, Ochinus, Erasmus Sarcerius, Peter Martir, Hugh Latimer, Robert Barnes, otherwise called Frier Barnes, Iohn Bale, otherwise called freer Bale, Iustus Ionas, Iohn Hoper, Myles Couerdale, Williā Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Turner, Theodore Basill, otherwise called Thomas Beacon, Iohn Fryth, Roy, and the boke commonly called Halles Chronicles, or any of them, in the Latin tong, Dutch tong, English tong, Italian tong, or Frenche tong, or any other like boke, paper, writing, or work, made, printed, or set forth, by any other person or persones, conteynyng false doctrine, contrary, and against the Catholike fayth, & the doctrine of the Catholike church” (1216). 16 I have been unable to acquire copies of these letters from archival sources and relied on the Hasting Robertson’s nineteenth-century Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation: Written During the Reigns of King Henry VIII., King Edward VI., and Queen Mary: Chiefly From the Archives of Zurich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846) for transcriptions. To my knowledge no updated collection of these letters exists. 17 Thomas Lever, “Thomas Lever to Henry Bullinger,” June 28, 1554 Ibid., 156. 18 John Banks, “John Banks to Henry Bullinger,” December 9, 1554 Ibid., 306. 19 Mary C. Erler, “The Effects of Exile on English Monastic Spirituality: William Peryn’s Spirituall Exercyses,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 3 (2012): 520. 20 Lander, Inventing Polemic, 16. 21 These include: The Huntyng and Fynding Out of the Romishe Fox Whiche More than Seven Yeares Hath Beene Hyd Among the Byshoppes of England, After That the Kynges Hyghnes, Henry VIII, Had Commanded Hym to Be Dryven

Margins and Cente  79 out of Hys Realme (Basil, 1543); The Rescuynge of the Romishe Fox Other Wyse Called the Examination of the Hunter Devised by Stephen Gardiner (Winchester: Laurenz von der Meulen, 1545); A New Dialogue Wherein Is Conteyned the Examinatio[n] of the Messe and of That Kind of Priesthode, Whiche Is Ordeyned so Saye Messe: And to Offer Up for Remission of Synne, the Body and Bloud of Christe Againe (London: W. Hill, 1548); A Perseruatiue, or Triacle, Agaynst the Poyson of Pelagius (London: S. Meirdman, 1551); The Huntyng of the Romyshe Wuolfe (Emden: Egidius van der Erve, 1555); A New Booke of Spiritual Physik; The Hunting of the Fox and the Wolfe, Because They Make Havocke of the Sheepe of Christ Jesus (London, 1565). 22 See further James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 23 Lander, Inventing Polemic, 10–11. 24 Ibid., 19. 25 Philip Major, Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 3. 26 Pineas, “William Turner and Reformation Politics,” 193. 27 Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300: With Selected Documents, Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 21 (Toronto; Buffalo: Published by University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1988), 184–185. 28 Maevius refers to the ancient Roman critic whom both Virgil and Horace mocked as an inferior writer. Maro is Virgil’s surname. 29 John Bale, Yet a Course at the Romeysh Foxe (Antwerp: A. Goinus, 1543). 30 These are William Thorpe (c.1407) and Sir John Oldcastle (d.1417). The reference is almost certainly to The Examinacion of Master William Thorpe Preste Accused of Heresye before Thomas Arundell, Archebishop of Ca[n]terbury, the Yere of Ower Lord. MCCCC. and Seuen. The Examinacion of the Honorable Knight Syr Jhon Oldcastell Lorde Cobham, Burnt Bi the Said Archebisshop, in the Fyrste Yere of Kynge Henry the Fyfth, ed. George Constantine (Antwerp: J. Van Hoochstraten, 1530). 31 The beginnings of this transition are explored in A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 32 Lander, Inventing Polemic, 37. 33 Jones, William Turner, 151. 34 William Baldwin, A Maruelous Hystory Intitulede, Beware the Cat (London: Edward Allde, 1584). 35 Barrett L. Beer, “John Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politike Power Reassessed,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 21, no. 3 (1990): 380. 36 John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of Politike Pouuer and of the True Obedience Which Subiectes Owe to Kynges and Other Ciuile Gouernours, With an Exhortacion to All True Naturall Englishe Men (Strasbourg: The heirs of W. Köpfel, 1556). 37 Jennifer Loach, “Pamphlets and Politics 1553–8,” Institute of Historical Research 48, no. 117 (1975): 44. 38 Susanne Scholz, Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 82. 39 Ibid. 40 Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 45. 41 Catherine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defense of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 141.

80 Margins and Cente 2 Pineas, “William Turner’s Spiritual Physik,” 389. 4 43 Davies, A Religion of the Word, 127. 44 Felicity Heal, “What Can King Lucius Do for You? The Reformation and the Early British Church,” The English Historical Review 120, no. 487 (2005): 597. 45 There may be an obscure cultural image here that Bale hints at by associating a bag of books with hidden truths. The medieval Mum and the Sothsegger includes a similar moment where a bag containing documents is opened to reveal texts detailing corruption in the clergy. 46 Phillip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern ­England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9. 47 James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2.

4 Making Better Times A Catholic Discourse of Exile

Queen Elizabeth’s ascension must have seemed to many Protestants, at home and abroad, the realization of a long-held dream. England was never again Catholic after 1558 and the impetus for reform, even radical reform, shaped the Anglican Church throughout Elizabeth’s long reign, the English Commonwealth, and beyond. The exiles’s efforts to reimagine England as a Protestant nation whose original purity became corrupted bore at least some fruit as early as 1589. In that year Timothy Bright published An Abridgement of the Booke of Acts and Monuments, which makes it clear that revisionist history and concerns about English sovereignty and national identity had found purchase. At its outset Bright includes “A special note of England,” which warrants reproduction in full: England, the first kingdome that universallie embraced the Gospel. Constantine, the first Christian Emperor (who utterlie destroyed the idolatrie of the Gentiles, and planted the Gospel through out the world) an Englishman. John Wycliff, that first manifestly discovered the Pope, and maintayned open disputation against him, an Englishman. The most noble Prince, king Henrie viii, the first king that renounced the Pope. The worthie Prince, king Edward vi, the first king, that utterlie abolished all popish superstition. Her Royall Maiestie, our most gracious Soverainge, the verie Maul of the Pope, and Mother of Christian princes: whome the Almightie long preserve over us. Englande, the first that embraced the Gospel: the onely establisher of it throughout the world: and the first reformed.1 The short note is designed to set the tone for the Protestant narrative that follows. Bright was not an exile, but like them he clearly saw the value of an historical narrative that advanced the notion of England being restored to the “true” faith of its past. He reproduces, consciously or not, many of the tropes that dominated Protestant exilic literature of the previous generation,

82 Making Better Time including that Protestant England represented a return to an original faith long since lost. The note is a chronicle in miniature, a history that creates a new “Protestant vision” of the nation.2 Bright’s England is pure and healthy, a guiding light, a nation whose role is to assume the mantle of God’s chosen. He codifies an E ­ nglish history that is decidedly Protestant, including in its ranks Constantine, who has English connections3 but is most certainly not an Englishman, and purposefully omits the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. He gives Elizabeth the hopeful title of Mother of Christian princes despite her being unmarried and heirless. Jesse Lander writes of Bright’s note that “the keyword ‘uniuersallie,’ asserts that the kingdom was united in faith in antiquity, and, by a certain vagueness in the language . . . it implies that the kingdom is united in faith now.”4 The note foreshadows England’s new role in a now rapidly expanding world as an “establisher” of faith, a small body of faithful whose “united” citizens will change the world; yet as any sixteenth-century history confirms, Elizabethan England was anything but united in faith. Queen Mary’s abdication was only the latest political and religious upheaval that triggered still another movement of Christian faithful to the Continent. The return of the Marian exiles created a new group of Catholic ones who found themselves looking at England from outside its borders. There had been English Catholic exiles before 1558, of course. A substantial group left during Edward VI’s short reign and returned after Mary’s ascension, and they were not alone. The Low Countries saw increasing numbers of Catholic exiles leaving for the sake of religious conscience, and popular opinion about these exiles grew more positive after 1580. Geert Janssen notes that some Catholics even begin annotating their books with the year of their exile and signing their letters “exules.”5 As it had for the Marian exiles, leaving for one’s faith expanded exile’s relevance throughout Elizabeth’s reign, and ultimately continued to affect change well after her death. This chapter, though, focuses on English Catholic exiles from Elizabeth’s coronation until just past the turn of the seventeenth century because it is in these years that distinct groups of Catholic exiles emerge to challenge the legitimacy of Protestant England in both actions and texts, as well as the time when it seemed most likely that their challenges could succeed. An English Catholic discourse of exile shares a number of similarities with its Protestant counterpart: exile signifies faithfulness, both to God and sovereign; salvation from religious error comes from outside the nation; and exilic polemic acts as a “voice” returning home when the speaker cannot. In many ways, the similarities end there. Demographically, there are distinct class differences between Protestant and Catholic exiles. By and large, Protestant exiles were students, lay clerics, and merchants comprised of roughly equal parts of men and women. Elizabethan Catholic exiles, on the other hand, were almost exclusively male aristocrats, ecclesiastics, or manorial, non-urban dwellers,6 and they were decidedly more numerous. Kathy Gibbons offers the potentially underestimated figure of 3,000 E ­ nglish Catholics

Making Better Time  83 abroad as opposed to the estimated 800 to 1,000 Marian exiles.7 Catholic exiles were numerous enough to warrant additional classification. The historian Thomas Clancy divides them into three distinct subgroups: “the Louvainists, the Allen-Persons party and the Appellants. The latter two parties had branches both at home and abroad, but all three depended a good deal on their exile contingent, especially for their literary productions.”8 Of those, as I will show, several of the Allen-Persons party developed their own discourse of exile defining a national identity distinctly different from the Protestant authors of the previous chapter in three distinct ways: by challenging the Protestant understanding of national identity, linking papal authority to an older patrimonial ideal, and refocusing their historical revision on contemporaneous history. The Allen-Persons party consisted of like-minded Catholics following William Cardinal Allen (1532–94) and the Jesuit Robert Persons (1546– 1610). Allen was particularly influential among Catholic exiles, a proponent of their repatriation, and their de facto leader in Douai, France where he established a seminary geared towards exiled priests and students.9 Robert Kingdon writes of its mission, The great practical purpose for which William Allen created the Douai seminary was to launch a Mission to England. Hundreds of the eager young exiles from England were to be fully educated as priests. The ablest among them were to be sent to Rome for more advanced training, and many of these were to be inducted into the Society of Jesus. When training was complete they were to be smuggled back into ­England, where their very presence was illegal.10 Of Allen’s life, there is little information before he matriculated to Oxford in 1547, but even there he was resistant to Edwardian Protestantism. When Elizabeth took the throne, he fled to France and died in exile at Rome.11 Alongside Allen was Persons, educating a generation of secular clergy in order to send them back as spokesmen rallying the religious faithful around the Catholic recovery of the English crown that both Allen and Persons was sure would come to pass. Persons enjoyed a distinguished career as a scholar and tutor at Balliol College. By 1574 he was studying in Louvain and joined the Jesuits the following year. Meeting Cardinal Allen led to his appointment as leader of the English mission to rally the Catholic faithful still in England. Although he successfully managed to reenter England with Edmund Campion, Persons went back to France after Campion’s arrest and execution in 1581. He never returned to England again.12 Allen and Persons thus found themselves in the same position of exteriority that inspired both the Marian polemicists, and it was only a short time after Elizabeth’s reign began that presses on both sides of the Channel began to define a new group of religious exiles and their ideas about England’s national identity in earnest.

84 Making Better Time A focus on Allen and Persons develops naturally from their respective positions of importance. Allen in particular is representative of a divided loyalty between England and Rome. His writings show a complex sense of national identity and allegiance, but especially clear is his desire to return to England, which for him would require transforming his homeland back into a Catholic nation. The active role that Allen believed all Catholics at home and abroad should embrace to facilitate that transformation is summed up by a phrase attributed to him: “Oportet meliora tempora non expectare sed facere [One must not look forward to better times, but make them].”13 Two of Allen’s polemics in particular stand out as representative of this motto: A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics (1584) and An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (1588). These texts aggressively argue for a change in political course within ­England, through radical foreign intervention if necessary. More significantly to this case study is how both embrace exile to understand what it means to be English and how each function as what I call “polemic chronicles,” which rewrite narratives of national identity into a pro-Catholic position with nationalistic undertones. A Catholic discourse of exile, although distinct from the Protestant one, nevertheless concerns itself with many of the same issues. As we have seen in the preceeding chapter, the latter might be painted in broad strokes as: deploying texts and metaphors of texts to disentangle sacred from secular authority; reaffirming the exiles’s status as English citizens despite their absence from the country; implementing a complex metaphor of the body politic with Catholicism as a foreign invader; and attempting to rewrite national foundational myths in support of a Protestant faith. In equally broad strokes, the Catholic discourse of exile examined here could be rendered as: legalistic and historical appeals to disentangle sacred from secular authority; a national identity that believes Catholicism is a prerequisite for national integrity; a body politic in a state of dissolution; and the use of chronicle dedicated to rewriting contemporaneous history. The polemic culture represented by Catholic exiles discussed here is a battle over a fundamental question of national identity and a calculated argument about what constitutes treason. From a literary standpoint, it is also a question about the relationship between exile and nation in a fundamentally textual debate concerned with writing national narratives in historical modes. Little needs to be said about the frequency and scale that pamphlets and polemics crossed and recrossed the English Channel between Catholic and Protestant supporters over the course of the sixteenth century. One such Protestant polemic, William Cecil’s The Execution of Justice in England (1583), attempts a legal justification for the persecution of English Catholics on grounds of treason. Cecil’s preface vilifies “naturally borne subjectes in the Realme of England and Irelande” who have become “stirred up and seduced by wicked spirites . . . to enter into open rebellion” against the Queen (Aiir).14 Unsurprisingly these persons are all Catholic, but Cecil is

Making Better Time  85 careful to argue that their faith is unrelated to their current plight. What prompts their arrest and persecution, he claims, is their desire to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and to “invade her realme with foreine forces, to pursue al her good subjects and their native countries with fire and sworde” (Aiiir). Nationalism then, not faith, ostensibly dominates his argument. Native-born Englishmen stand ready to overrun England’s borders with foreign powers, aiding their progress into the kingdom and threatening the queen’s sovereignty. The remainder of the text excuses the Elizabethan court’s treatment of Catholics by carefully sidestepping the religious differences between the two parties.15 Allen, rather predictably, objects because Cecil’s central argument is entirely disingenuous as Allen points out in his rebuttal A True, Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholics. He calls Cecil’s book an “infamous Libel . . . to be contemned” and refutes The Execution of Justice point by point at length (*2r).16 English Catholics, he rightly argues, were clearly being persecuted for their faith. Allen’s response received much attention, so much so that it came to represent “in an important way, the official view of [the exiled Catholic] community.”17 As their de facto spokesman, Allen believed that he spoke in unison with the Roman Church, and his Defence soundly undermines Cecil’s insistence that English Catholics suffered persecution for treason alone. Citing then recent executions, show trials, and Cecil’s own words, Allen rapidly dispenses with The Execution of Justice’s primary claims in just two chapters before proceeding to defend English Catholics both at home and abroad. But in dispensing with Cecil, Allen’s Defence reveals one aspect of the Catholic discourse of exile, the privileging of the body spiritual over the body politic, which manifests in Allen’s dislike of the conflation of sacred and secular authority in the person of the Queen. It forms a crucial part of his argument and helps us understand how Allen conceptualized England’s nationhood. Allen, like William Turner and John Ponet, worried about the confluence of sacred and secular authority within the English monarchy and continued the long debate “between, on the one hand, a church and international society presided over by the Bishop of Rome . . . and, on the other hand, a church and national society presided over by the Queen.”18 Allen cites one of Elizabeth’s first Parliaments, which sought to grant her the title of Supreme Head of the English Church, a title initially rejected in favor of “Cheef governor.” The distinction, Allen contends, “was thought to be a qualification of the former tearme of Headship. But in truth it is al one with thother, or rather worse,” because it mak[es] indeed a King and a Priest al one: no difference betwixt the state of the Church and a temporal common wealth: giving no lesse right to heathen Princes to be governours of the Church in causes spiritual, then to a christian king. (8)

86 Making Better Time Without additional context, Allen’s objection could just have easily come from Turner or Ponet. Allen’s reasoning, however, inverts the Protestant position by citing the fracturing effect the merger of prince and priest will have on Church, nation, and transnational Christendom: it maketh one parte of the Church in different teritories to be independent and several from an other according to the distinction of realmes and kingdomes in the world. And finallie it maketh everie man that is not borne in the kingdome to be a forreiner also in respect of the Church. (8–9) This fracturing of Christendom is the crux of Allen’s Defence. The distinction between Allen’s argument and those in the previous chapter rests on a national identity grounded on the a priori existence of Christendom, a transnational mystical body whose unity precedes and predicates the integrity of an individual nation. National identity, for Allen, is fundamentally dependent upon inclusion in a universal Church, a corpus mysticum, and not a national one. Allen’s argument shifts the focus off of the integrity of the body politic to that of the body spiritual, privileging the integrity of the latter. Allen claims: [W]here the lawes of Christ are received, and the bodies politique and mistical, the Church and Civil state, the Magistrate Ecclesiastical and temporal, concurre in their kindes together . . . ther is such a concurrence and subalternation betwixt both, that the inferior of the two (which is the Civil state) must needes (in matters perteining anie way ether directlie or indirectlie to the honor of God and benefit of the soule) be subject to the spiritual, and take direction from the same. (98) Allen’s comments here about the supereminence of the mystical body in Defence appear in one fashion or another throughout other Catholic exilic literatures from the Allen-Persons party. Thomas Stapleton, whom one scholar has called “probably the most erudite of the Elizabethan exiles,”19 writes in 1565 that the Scripture does not teach of the “church of some certaine place . . . of Geneva, of England, and of some part of Suicerland.” It teaches instead of a universal church “whiche I see to be in many places where protestants are nott, and yet in all suche places where protestants are. . . . [N]o heretike can pretend: Communicare omnibus gentibus. To be joyned in communion with all nations” (27r-28v).20 Like Allen, Stapleton’s argument relies on the transnational idea of the Church’s mystical body, whose constituent members consist of realms and kingdoms whose presence defines the integrity of the same. Stapleton writes: A disease disquieteth the uniforme constitution of the body. Evill wedes let the groweth of good corne. A rebellion disturbeth the common assent and

Making Better Time  87 allegaunce of subjectes. A disordinat pasion dissolveth the settled iuguement off the minde and troubleth the swete uniformite of the contemplation. Right so heresy breaketh the well ordered aray of Christes church, disquiteth the universall agrement of true belevers, disturbeth their settled consciouses, troubleth the quiet possesion off our faith and hope in Christ Jesus. Iff the desease be universall the body dieth. If all be wedes it is no field of corne. If all rebell, it is no state of allegeaunce. Iff al pasions be disordered, the mind is franticke and beside itselfe. . . . [I]f bothe the shepeheards and the shepe runne astraie and leave the fold, there is no church at al, no folde at all, no army at all. . . . [I]ff al fall from the faith, this is no heresy but a what shal I cal it: a thing that is not a thing of nothinge. (82r-83v) What at first appears a random assortment of metaphors is in fact representative of total societal collapse: physical, agricultural, political, emotional, and spiritual. They all point to the same conclusion: chaos and dissolution. Stapleton’s syllogism results from his argument against the Protestant claim that England had always been embroiled in heresy. In other words, he argues that the nation cannot have been cut off from the body of the true Church because without it, England would have been no nation at all. This resultant shift in which “body” is more important has three notable outcomes for the Catholic discourse of exile: it likens England to a forcefully (and wrongfully) seized property from which the true faith has been cast out. It links the exiled faith’s return much more closely with patrimony than with “nation” in the modern sense, yet the two are intimately related. Finally, by privileging inclusion in the body spiritual as a prerequisite for national integrity, it defines English national allegiance and declarations of loyalty in direct relation to Catholic identity. England depends upon the body of Christ and the spiritual leadership of Rome in order to join the communion of Christian nations before exercising its internal sovereignty. Stapleton claims that it is Catholicism by which “the Imperiall crowne of Englande hath vanquished the forrain, maintained honorable peace at home, dilated her dominions, [and] enriched her royall title” (76v). He prays: We have o Lorde forsaken the obedience of thy spirituall Vicar, to whom thou gavest the kayes of thy church, to whom thy blessed apostle bad us to submit ourselves, and have made a kinge over us in spiritual causes, and enduced our Soverain not desyring, to unlawful govvernement. (151v-r) The appeal to the keys was, of course, an appeal with a long history in Catholic apologetics, but here it reiterates the Pope’s right to England as the Church’s spiritual patrimony. The people have “made a king over us” of their own will, and against the laws of God. They have taken that right from one lawful Sovereign, and given it to another while rejecting the relationship between them.

88 Making Better Time In the previous chapter, I argued that William Turner, John Bale, and John Ponet maintained something of a radical conservatism with their appeals to the nobility and God’s divine law that ultimately embraced the formation of a national church and recognized an essentially sovereign England. In contrast, Allen takes a much more openly “treasonous” stance that recognizes an internal English sovereignty that is spiritually subservient to the external sovereignty of the Papal See and dependent upon the same. Allen constructs an English national identity formed transnationally as a part of Christ’s mystical body, under Christ’s spiritual authority, and that of the Pope. England in this way acts as the spiritual patrimony of Rome, and Catholicism is reimagined as an exile from England in its own right. Its restoration, and that of exiles such as Allen, thus more closely resembles a return to one’s patrimony and not, as it was in Protestant exilic polemic, a return to a nation in the more modern understanding of the term. Allen and Persons seem much more interested in portraying Protestant England as a nation in cultural and civil collapse than as a nation under foreign rule. Catholicism, rather than something invasive and foreign as Turner argued, was England’s natural state. Thomas Clancy writes that Catholic authors, tended to consider the ‘fluddes of foreigners’ [after Elizabeth’s coronation] a menace to England, chiefly because of the wilder sorts of heresy which they brought with them. This was their reply to the reformers’ taunt that papistry was something foreign.21 Allen voices the same opinion in his Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (1588) by accusing Queen Elizabeth of harboring “strangers,” rebels, and heretics of all nations who have caused “great impoverishinge of the inhabitantes an no small perill of the whole realme” (16).22 Or as he had written more succinctly just four years earlier in his Defence, “Protestants folowe faction and populer mutinie, we [Catholics] reduce al, to lawe, order, and judgement” (88). In essence, England’s spiritual wellbeing, overseen by Rome, made England capable of having an independent, ordered national identity. The necessity of the transnational body spiritual in these texts gives way to allusions to unjust seizure and usurpation consistent with an understanding of nation-as-patrimony. Protestant control, from the Catholic exile’s point of view, amounts to the unlawful possession of England’s spiritual allegiance. Allen writes in Defence, [B]y evident rape and violence, against the lawes of God and man, [strife between the bodies spiritual and politic] bereaveth Christes Vicar of his whole Soveraintie . . . and the Catholique Church of al the rightes and douries, which our Master her spouse endowed her withal. (154)

Making Better Time  89 The Protestant transference of spiritual power to Queen Elizabeth, or anyone else, wrongfully usurped the Pope’s patrimonial claim. Persons makes the same claim more bluntly in A Brief Discourse Contayning Certayne Reasons Why Catholiques Refuse to Goe to Church (1580): “[Protestants] entered into possession, without tryall or title: they thrust us out, before sentence or proufe” ([#v]v).23 Allen’s use of “rightes and doweries” reinforces the England-as-property metaphor, whereas Persons’s notion that Catholics have been forcefully thrust out invokes the image of evicted property owners. Such metaphors stand in sharp contrast to Protestant images of an England contaminated by foreign rule. In essence, Allen is proving their point. The Church, based in Rome, does indeed exercise a “sovereign” right to English soil. Yet Allen’s, Persons’s, and Stapleton’s understanding of the body spiritual’s importance influences both their conceptualization of the nation-as-patrimony, and the very metaphors of their polemic. The Church’s “sovereign” right to England runs parallel to Allen’s initial objection in Defence: Elizabeth’s role as supreme head of the church. The conflation of priest and prince was deemed in her Father a lay man, and her Brother a childe very ridiculous: so now in herself, being a woman, is it accompted a thing most monstruous and unnatural, and the verie gappe to bring anie Realme to the thraldome of al sects. (7) Elizabeth’s usurped spiritual authority has opened a “verie gappe” in the sovereign boundaries of the nation and allowed inside a fracturing and disunifying force.24 A similar image appears later when Allen markets his text as a, [W]arning to al Princes and Provinces, that yet happilie enjoye the Catholique religion and the onlie true libertie of conscience in the same, to take heed by our miseries how they let this pernicious sect [i.e. Protestants] put foote into ther states: which by promis of libertie and sweetnes at the beginning, entereth deceiptfullie, but when she is once in an getteth mastery . . . she bringeth al to most cruel and barbarous thraldome. . . . (16) Liberty and national identity become intimately linked with Catholicism, but “national” identity here is imagined differently from the “national” identity of Protestant exilic polemic. Protestantism represents a loss of national identity for the Catholic exiles because it separates England from the universal faith of the Church. Allen writes in his preface that his polemic came into being “for the honour of our nation, which otherwise . . . would be thought wholie and generallie to have revoluted from the Catholique faith,

90 Making Better Time and consented to al the absurdities and iniquities of this new regiment and religion.” To this concern he holds out hope that “the whole state (excepting the authoritie of the Prince) may yet be rather counted Catholique, then heretical; this is the honour of our nation in al places” (*3r—[*4]v). The bodies mystical and national reinforce one another, and without the former, England loses something fundamental to its identity. Without a specifically Catholic body mystical, England loses its place amongst other Christian nations. It loses its ability to claim nationhood at all. Another way of thinking about Allen’s point here is that the boundary between England’s national identity and its dissolution is directly related to the right of the Pope to oversee the nation’s spiritual health. Robert Persons articulates this idea directly in The Judgment of a Catholike English-man (1608). The text appears as a response to James I’s An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (1606). Persons argues that Catholics cannot swear allegiance to James, and his faith by proxy, because it goes against “their rule of Subordination” that places the Pope’s authority above that of secular princes in matters of spiritual allegiance, an argument harkening back to Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, but he is careful to avoid denying James’s secular authority (10).25 In fact James’s right to rule England is clearly noted as the parts of the oath that “were lawfull.” It is only when “other thinges, being interlaced and mixt threwith, which do detract from the spiritual Authoritie of their said highest Pastour (at leastwise indirectly) [that] the whole Oath, as it lieth, was made therby unlawfull” (10). Following almost immediately after this point, Persons corrects “an error” in James’s Apologie claiming that the Pope “mittere falcem in alienam messem” [put a sickle into another’s harvest] (12). England, Spain, France, Flanders, Italy, Germany and “other states and Kingdomes” cannot be messis aliena because they are always already under the spiritual authority of Rome. “Neyther,” Persons continues, doth the materiall separation of our Iland, separate us from the union of one body, nor of one Obedience to one and the selfe same general Head and Pastour, no more, than it doth from the union of one beliefe . . . belonging to the internall and externall unitie of Catholicke Religion. (13) Like Allen, Persons defines national identity as a relationship between faith and place, Rome and England. When Persons refers to the “internall and externall unitie of Catholicke Religion,” he refers to a variety of different dichotomies: soul/body, church/state, and spiritual/sociopolitical unity. Allen’s and Persons’s polemics are functioning as the codifiers of an English national identity that reinforce vertical structures of power and establish a rigid boundary between pope and prince. In this way, they argue precisely as Protestant exiles do; however, presupposing

Making Better Time  91 and privileging a transnational mystical body causes Allen and Persons to resist the nationalizing forces present in Protestant polemic. They retain the pre-early modern idea of “nation” as a type of patrimony granted to the care of a select person or group of people, in this case the Pope, monarch, and nobility—in that order. Catholic exilic polemic thus does not “profess” a national identity, as did Protestant ones, so much as “declare” a socio-political reality. To adapt Allen’s phrase, it makes better times by recalling the national health and wholeness of Catholic England rather than expecting a Protestant change of heart that will bring them back into the Catholic fold. How, then, do these observations relate to exile? Allen’s desire to make better times grows far more overt as his exile grows longer, as does his understanding of England as Rome’s patrimony, culminating with the publication of An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland. Here, he makes an astonishing case for what will become the attack of the Spanish Armada. The short text, some five dozen pages, assumes the unenviable task of encouraging the English people—commoner and ­gentry—to engage in open rebellion. For Protestant readers, the text is overtly treasonous, and seemingly confirms Cecil’s accusations in The Execution of Justice that Allen had so carefully refuted just four years earlier. An Admonition’s central image is the return of an exiled faith to a dissolving national body, and it employs a gendered metaphor of a body politic open to contamination. Elizabeth’s body and the nation elide into one another whenever necessary to demonstrate the gradual dissolution of England’s national integrity and justify invasion “for the restitution and preservation of the Catholike religion . . . [and the] godly purpose of restoringe” the same (50–51). For Catholic exiles, An Admonition must have read like the long-promised end to their time abroad and a final vindication of their efforts to restore a Catholic England. It promises an end to Elizabeth’s rule by the collective might of God, the Pope, and the Spanish army. Exile and return continues to anticipate and affect change to the centers of power in An Admonition, as it has in previous exilic literature. So too does a mind of exile at work in this polemic affect the reception and transmission of historical narratives. An Admonition opens with a reminder of how England came to be in its current state. “[T]his great miserie,” Allen notes, “and mutation of state and Religion in this our realme of England by which our Churche (Alas) ys already overthrowne” began in the days of Henry VIII “and afterwarde till this daie, hathe bene specially pursued, by our princes pretensed lawes, and usurped soverainty over our soules” (3–4). The picture is rather bleak, but already the relationship between Catholicism and England is clear. By using the verbs “overthrown” and later “usurped,” Allen again speaks of the Church like an ousted property owner. As he promises soon after, forces are in motion “to pursue the actuall deprivation of Elizabethe the pretensed Queene, eftsones declared and judicially

92 Making Better Time sentensed . . . for an heretike and usurper” (6–7). He begins a caricature of an Elizabeth that has stolen the English throne. Allen writes, “by force she intruded, and constreyned many men to give theire consentes, deposinge unjustly the Lords of the clergy.” At another point he insists, “She hathe by unjust tyrannicall statutes injuriously invaded the landes and goodes of Catholike Nobles and gentlemen, that for conscience sake have passed the seas: and molested, disgraced, imprisoned, and spoiled, many at home of all degrees.” By guile and accident of birth, she unseated the Church from its rightful place of spiritual authority and “did breake, violate, and deride, the sollemne othe and promise made in her coronation, for defence of the Ecclesiastical liberties and priveleges graunted by the auncient Christian kinges of our realme.” Queen Mary I, in contrast, is named “by lawe and righte the true owner of the crowne of England” (9, 14, 11, 28). Allusions to separation by violence precipitate allusions to unjust property seizure, as does the explicit mention of the crown as Mary’s property. These references to usurpation recall, but invert, the Protestant fears of infection from outside the national body. Violent seizure gives way to the dissolution of England’s national identity entirely. It begins with Elizabeth’s “Luciferian pride” in assuming the ecclesiastical headship of ­ England’s church, but quickly escalates to the profanation of the sacraments, churches, and holy men and women; divesture of the gentry and seizure of manorial properties; and finally, the gathering to herself all manner of reprobate people (11–16). The list of charges continues over several more pages, but a unifying thread connects them all: Elizabeth is an unrepentant tyrant who stole the throne from Queen Mary and the Roman Church. Allen writes, “she pasingly hath indaungered the kingdom and cuntrie by this great alteracion of religion, which thinge ys never without inevitable perille, or rather ruine of the commonwealthe.” The dissolution of national integrity begins in the court with the appointments to high office of “infamous amorous Apostats and heretikes” and ends only when Elizabeth “hathe laid the cuntrie wide open to . . . all Atheystes, Anabaptistes, heretikes, and rebellious of all nations . . . to the great impoverishinge of the inhabitantes, and no small perill of the whole realme” (15–17). Her first act was to “abolish the whole Catholike Religion, and faithe . . . [which] severed herself and subjects violently from the societie of all Catholike cuntries” (12). In short, Allen narrates the progressive collapse of national boundaries as traceable back to the initial “exile” of Catholicism. Severing England from the Church pushes the nation into an exile from the body mystical and exiles the Catholic faithful from the body politic. Without both, the nation begins to fall apart. Allen then turns to the Queen herself, who he argues is consumed by lust and self-indulgence which modesty suffereth not to be remembred neyther were it to chaste eares to be uttered how shamefully she hath defiled and infamed her person

Making Better Time  93 and cuntry, and made her Courte as a trappe . . . to intangle in sinne and overthrowe the yonger sorte of the nobilitye and gentlemen of the lande. (19) The entire world, furthermore, bears witness to England’s “effeminate dastardie” and national dissolution resultant from the Queen’s usurpation of Rome’s spiritual patrimony “to the extinguishinge not onely of religion but of all chaste livinge and honesty” (19). The queen’s body and the national body blur into one another and much of what Elizabeth does with her body (or what Allen imagines she does with her body) manifests as happening to the nation. Her refusal to marry, for example, denies “lawfull heires of her bodie to inherite her dominions after her” (20). Allen reports in a particularly vivid passage that, [S]he hath bene heard to wishe that the day after her death, she might stand in sum high place betwene heaven and earthe, to behold the scamblinge that she conceyved wold be for the croune; sporting herselfe in the conceyte and foresight of our future miseries, by her onlie unhappines procured: not unlike to Nero. . . . (22) Allen crafts an imaginative scene to underline England’s collapse into chaos. Elizabeth’s purported “wish” mimics similar scenes such as the one at the conclusion of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, but Elizabeth’s sport watching England tear itself apart is a far cry from Troilus’s laughter at the world’s vanity. Elizabeth’s ascent, unlike Troilus’s, is incomplete; she does not reach heaven. Instead of gaining insight, Elizabeth becomes a petty god, laughing at the power vacuum her death left behind while remaining in her own personal Limbo. Interestingly, this blurring of body and nation never develops into the obvious metaphor of the nation as a body with a corrupt head; however, that lack makes sense if Allen is imagining England as severed from the transnational body of the Church and its transnational head. There is no sustained body metaphor because there is no national body without a spiritual allegiance to Rome. What does appear is allusion to a spreading spiritual corruption spilling out of England in the form of “intelligensers spies, and practisers” who find their way into foreign nations “to deale with the discontented of everie state for the attemptinge of sumwhat against their lordes and superiors” (23–24). As the national body dissolves, it releases these contagions that purposefully cause similar unrest abroad. Stapleton employs similar language in his Fortresse of the Faith (1565). He writes, “the poisonned blastes of their pestiferous heresies . . . blowen abrod” and he translates a small portion of an epistle claiming, “All these were heretikes sent of their Archeretike John Calvin to infecte this part of the world” (77v, 78r).

94 Making Better Time Likewise, Persons contends in A Brief Discourse that Catholics refuse to attend Anglican services despite the law due to “perill of infection” (59v). Allen adds a final barb to this rhetoric of infection in his Admonition, returning to the threat that Elizabeth poses to other nations by explicitly linking her actions with national collapse: [H]ow didest thow fall Lucifer from heaven, that wast so orient in the morninge? How wast thow brought doune to the grounde that woundest nations and subvertedst kingdoms, and saidst in thy hart, I will be like the highest? (25) The reference to Isaiah is explicit in a marginal note, and transforming Queen Elizabeth into Lucifer brings Allen’s argument full circle by recalling Satan’s desire to usurp God’s place on Heaven’s throne. In essence, Elizabeth’s exile of Catholicism recreates that event with similar results. Her actions began a chain reaction that was tearing England apart and its contamination began to move outward just as Satan’s fall ultimately led to the exile of Adam and Eve from Paradise. Having laid that groundwork, Allen pivots his argument from blaming Elizabeth to proposing a solution. To restore England, Catholicism must return from exile and Rome must reclaim the spiritual patrimony it lost, even if that means foreign invasion. Allen argues for the Roman Church’s right to do so by making clear that “the commonweale of the Catholike Churche formed by Christe, [is] more excellent then any secular societie ordeined by man.” And then questioning, “Where were then these disordered lawes and statutes, that make the Apostles, yea Christe himself, and all his preistes that be borne out of England to be forren powers?” (37). “Borne out of England” carries a twin valence, meaning both non-English spiritual leaders like the Pope and also, I believe, referring to exiled Catholics such as Allen. This is supported by Allen’s acknowledgement of the exiles’s affect on Pope Sixtus V, who was moved not a litle by my humble and continuall sute together with the afflicted and banished Catholikes of our nation, of all and every degree, who have bene by his speciall compasion and Regall munificence principally supported in this their longe exile. (49) It is Allen’s plea, and that of Catholic exiles, that motivates the Church to begin England’s “deliverie . . . from the yoke of heresie and thraldom of your enemies, and for restitution of those realmes and the subjects of the same to their auncient liberty of lawes and conscience” (49–50). He mocks the idea that he and others are ‘forren powers.” If anything, the exiles retain the essence of England’s national identity. Salvation comes from the exiled

Making Better Time  95 Englishmen and women currently on the Continent. Supporting the coming invasion, Allen assures his fellow (English) Catholics that Spain does not seek to impose its own control over the nation save to restore Catholicism to its rightful place: “to deliver yourselves, your cuntrie, and posteritie, from that miserable servitude of body and soule which you have longe bene in” (52). This England belongs to Catholicism, and those of the faith belong to it, a point he reiterates later: “If you winne, you save your whole realme from subversion, and innumerable soules, present and to cum, from damnation” (55). By Allen’s own admission, foreign invasion stands preferable to a continued Protestant court, but whereas Cecil’s accusations of treason were true, so too were Allen’s own cries of innocence. The solution to this paradox becomes clear when viewed through Allen’s and his fellow exiles’s understanding of national identity, and more specifically English citizenship. An Admonition claims “all true Englishmen have to embrace and set forward” the Queen’s removal in open rebellion (8). To be English, one must remove the usurper and replace her with one whose faith will restore the realm’s legitimacy. Of course, Allen’s hopes were destroyed with the Spanish Armada’s failure. We might be tempted to read Allen’s arguments about “Englishness,” national identity, and Catholicism as so much argument of convenience. Even after the Armada’s failure, though, “Englishness” and Catholicism remain linked. Persons writes in Judgement that a good Catholic will swear gladly to King James, [A]s much loyalty, as ever any Catholike Subject of England, did unto their lawfull King in former tymes, and ages, before the change of king Henry the eyght . . . [but] for the preservation of any Countrey, and for the universall good of Gods Church, is a matter belonging to doctrine and Religion, he cannot with safety of his Conscience sweare unto the Articles and branches of the Oath touching that poynt. (16–17) Persons’s careful qualification of English loyalty associates inclusion in the national body with the monarch’s relationship to the spiritual body. Both authors, before and after the attempt to “restore” England, continue the pre-modern association of nation with patrimony. Each remained convinced that England was indeed their home and that within its borders a true monarch might reign secure, provided Rome and the Papal See maintained a divinely mandated right to English spirituality. In that sense ­England belonged to the Catholic Church, which by Elizabeth’s command had become an exile in its own right. By returning Catholicism to England, Allen believed he and his fellow exiles were restoring health and spiritual vitality to their native land. These observations demonstrate that the mind of exile manifests in these members of the Allen-Persons party by recasting Catholicism as the marginalized faith and in a reimagining of England in collapse because of its

96 Making Better Time separation from the corpus mysticum, which in turn stimulated the use of the metaphors of social collapse and usurped property. So too, Allen and Persons link citizenship and faith, which in turn manifests in arguments that appear openly treasonous while simultaneously declaring loyalty, yet these metaphors and the careful distinction between the bodies mystical and politic are only part of their discourse of exile. The success of the aforementioned Catholic arguments implicitly rests on the belief that England was indeed part of Christendom (read a Catholic country) prior to the rise of Protestantism. England’s spiritual past is thus essential, and these authors, like Turner and other Protestant exiles, recall and retell English foundational myths. The third chapter of Allen’s Defence begins by returning to the past to outline the distinction between Protestant persecution under Queen Mary and the current Elizabethan persecution of Catholics. Allen insists, [W]e complaine justly of persecution; for that our cause for which we suffer, is the faith of al our Forefathers; the faith of our persecutors owne auncestors; the faith into which our countrie was converted and by which we ar called Christian . . . [we] can not be forced from it, nor punished for it, by any lawe of God, Nature, or Nations. (36) Allen invokes the same national memory Turner recalls in Spiritual Physik, England’s transformation from paganism to Christianity in the sixth century. Here though is the established narrative without alteration or exposition. The narrative is secure enough that Allen launches off it into an uncompromising declaration that because of England’s conversion “no lawe of God or man can force us to be protestantes” (although by the same logic Protestants can be forced into Catholic unity) (37). His argument essentially relies on a religious version of primogeniture. Turner retells the foundational narrative with a Protestant spin; Allen leaves the same narrative immediately with little or no exposition. The distant past, it seems, is fixed and stable. The more recent historical narratives are what need attention. The use of historical narratives in Elizabethan literature has been noted before now. Susanne Scholz demonstrates that these historical narratives, “organize their subject matter as a chain of causally connected events teleologically moving towards the goal of full realization of national autonomy within a linear time scale.”26 Controlling the narrative chain of causality thus constitutes a powerful form of cultural control, and for a displaced group, Protestant or Catholic, seeking to recreate an idealized English culture meant actively controlling a narrative best suited to their respective positions. Allen and his fellows “make better times” by asserting textual control over an English historical “chronicle,” which, as Richard Helgerson argues in his watershed study of nascent English nationalism, “was the Ur-genre of national selfrepresentation. More than any other discursive form, chronicle gave Tudor Englishmen a sense of their national identity.”27 Helgerson concludes that

Making Better Time  97 these authors “were what students of more recent nationalist movements have called ‘transitional men,’ men uprooted by education and ambition from familiar associations and local structures, men who were free—and compelled by their freedom—to imagine a new identity based on the kingdom or nation.”28 Exiles are nothing if not a significant part of these “transitional men.” They are defined by their transitions: spatial and cultural. Allen writes Elizabeth’s origin narrative rather than looking to the distant past. From his point of view, all that Elizabeth has accomplished is tied to the elimination of that past. In Defence, he claims that laws made in the past dealing with heresy were repealed in Elizabeth’s first year of rule, a change Allen amusingly claims “smelleth of something I need not here express.” Queen Mary, on the other hand, embraced the past and executed only laws long established (35). Elizabethan England’s faith, was not extant in England above five or six years before in the short reigne of K. Edward the sixt, or rather of his protectour; for before that, in K. Henries dayes the same profession was accompted heresie, and the professours therof were burned for Heretiques. . . . (37) His revisionism is both abrupt and highly selective. John Wyclif’s challenges to the Church in the fourteenth century are completely ignored, as are the Wycliffites. Allen omits Henry’s complicated ecclesiology, the Acts of Supremacy, and the execution of Thomas More. Elizabethan Protestantism’s origin becomes something entirely new in Allen’s argument, suggesting that the narrative of the recent past is far more malleable (and useful) for him than a narrative of the distant past. Past or present though, Allen’s polemic is concerned with controlling a foundational narrative. Persons makes the same historical gesture in A Brief Discourse Contayngne Certayne Reasons Why Catholiques Refuse to Go to Church. He contends, the Catholiks are the first, the auncientest, the more in number, and the most beneficial to al the rest (having begotten and bred up the other, and delivered to them this Realme, conserved by Catholike religion, these thowsand yeares and more). (‡ iiir—iiiiv) Allen and Persons’s appeals to this seemingly unquestionable Catholic past extends to other exiled polemicists. It is the primary focus of Thomas Stapleton’s A Fortresse of Faith, which rests firmly on the established historical narrative of the Church preserved in Bede’s Historia eccelesiastica. Again and again, Stapleton recalls Bede’s narrative: “What can then move you [Protestants] to reject this history of Venerable Bede, to departe from the faith first planted among us englishmen and so many hundred yeares continued”; “yt pleased God off hys goodnes by the meanes of his servaunt

98 Making Better Time blessed S. Gregory then bishop off Rome, to sende the worde of lyfe, and the joyfull tydings of his holy ghospell to our forefathers the english men”; “the faith, planted first amonge us englishmen by our blessed S. Augustin and his company”; “it is evident the faith of England planted by S. Augustin . . . hath continewed these 900 yeares and upwarde” (3r, 70r, 81r, 103v). These are only a handful of such references, yet all share commonalities. Each assumes the unquestionable certainty of this foundational narrative: “for to Catholikes and right believers the historye itself is sufficient” (7r). Stapleton, Allen, and Persons demonstrate a consistent rhetorical appeal to the unity and stability of the distant past and the importance of origin narratives. Such control, as I noted in the previous chapter, also appears in the discourse of Protestant exiles. Allen’s Defence alludes to it by undermining Protestant appeals to the past, claiming that “because we Catholique Christian men doe justly ground our selves upon the former profession of our faith . . . thes [Protestant] men apishlie would imitate our phrase and argument in a thing as far differing as heaven and hel” (37). Take heed, in other words, because Protestants will seem to argue the same way we do in order to further their cause. Persons’s Judgment argues that Catholic authority extends to Protestants as her due Subjects, for that by their Baptisme, they were made her Subjects . . . the Protestant Church of England hath Nullum Ius acquisitum upon Catholickes that were in possession before them, for many hundred yeares, as is evident. (23) The final qualifier is self-justifying and absolute. Only a few pages later, he turns to Elizabeth’s reign and goes into great detail about her failings and unjust actions towards Catholics. This much more recent history is far less “evident,” it seems. Persons writes his own, short polemic chronicle of the Elizabethan legacy in Judgement casting doubt on the claims that she was tolerant to English Catholics (26–28). Stapleton’s Fortresse, as a final example, contrasts England’s “evident” past with what appears to be the disharmony and unstable historical narratives in Protestant works. Stapleton continues, citing numerous Protestant texts which present different (and often contradictory) views of ecclesiastical history before concluding, “[A]s ye can avouche no certain thinge of all protestants (so double and variable they are in their doctrine and doinges) so for any certain prescript time of papistry they are not agreed upon” (10r). Protestant texts cannot even agree on when the alleged “corruption” of papistry infected the primitive church (9v-r). Appeals to historical narratives are not exclusive to exilic literature, but they nevertheless form an integral part of them. Exile flits at the margins for much of Allen’s Defence, but it abruptly crashes into focus when he

Making Better Time  99 turns from rewriting England’s recent past to the subject of persecution. He begins with a lament concerning the Protestant seizure of Catholic homes, goods, and children before shifting to those imprisoned for their faith: “every dongeon and filthie prison in England [is] ful of our Priestes and brethen; al Provinces and Princes christianed witnesses of our banishment” (39). Allen forges a link between prison and banishment, those at home and abroad. The collective “our” blurs the line between the two groups that elide into a singular collective of persecuted exiles. Those imprisoned are no more at home than those in exile because England is severed from the unity of the church. English Catholics everywhere are exiles, regardless of their physical location. Those within England are exiles from the Church’s spiritual guidance and unity whereas those without are exiles from the place. All are positioned liminally. Exile becomes something of a litmus test for the veracity of England’s “true” religious faithful: “The poorest and worst that be in trouble at home, or in banishment for the same abrod . . . may be in al life and behaviour accounted Saints” (44–45). This claim precedes Allen’s final argument in this section, another revisionist narrative of recent history. Allen concludes with a tally of those executed during Queen Mary’s reign: Thomas Cranmer and several unnamed persons “of the basest (for the most part) worst, and contemptiblest of both sexes” (45). Set against this sum Allen counts “in banishment two worthie English Prelates” and “three whole Coventes put out of their possessions either into prison or out of the Realme . . . besides manie [a] one made in our banishment.” Students and doctors “for conscience sake fled the Realme, or were in the Realme imprisoned.” All “have passed their long banishment in honest povertie” (46). Allen acknowledges that some who fled did return and convert “for wearines of banishment,” but these are the exception rather than the rule. “[T]he world knoweth how exceding few you gayne or get from us,” Allen writes, “whilst we in the meane space (through Gods great grace) receive hundrethes of your Ministers, a nomber of your best wits, manie delicate yong gentlemen, and divers heires of al ages, voluntarily fleeing from your damnable condition, and seeking after God” (47). Allen ignores the hundreds of Protestants who fled under Queen Mary. The Marian exiles do not exist in Allen’s narrative, yet exile looms large in the persecution of Catholics; it is a persecution exclusively Catholic. Persons makes similar rhetorical moves in The Judgment, where the experience of exile appears front and center. The polemic’s full title, The Judgment of a Catholicke English-man Living in Banishment for His Religion, highlights its author’s condition and its the inscription ascribes the text to a letter “from my learned friend beyond the seas” (*3). A third liminal allusion comes in the first paragraph of the first chapter: “I have determyned with my selfe in this my banishment, to spend my tyme in other studyes, more profitable, then in contention about Controversies” (1). That said

100 Making Better Time though, he plunges into a variety of controversies. The clustering of such allusions transforms the text into an exile’s voice returning home bearing wisdom and salvation. Persons closes with the plea: Would God his Ma[jes]ties eares, and those of his wise Counsell could reach into these partes beyond the seas, and to all forrayne nations of Chistendome besydes, to heare what is said, what is written, what is discoursed by men of best judgment in this behalfe not only in regard of justice and piety, but in reason also of State and Policie. (124) This vivid image invokes a pilgrimage of sorts in the reader’s mind linking absence with a means of accessing truth. Exilic allusions abruptly become overt references when Persons closes: [T]here have not passed many moneths, since there were seene some threescore Priests more or less (to omit others) cast into banishment about one tyme, and wandring up and downe, throughout Christendome . . . naturall borne subjects of the Land . . . cast out of their native soyle, for professing that Religion only, wherby their said Countrey was first made Christian . . . from the beginning of their Conversion, unto this our age. (125–26) Persons here articulates the Catholic discourse of exile essentially in full. He and his fellow exiles were made so by and for their faith, which was ­England’s original faith as demonstrated by the appeal to the established and stable historical narrative of England’s origins. From these examples emerges a clearer picture of exile’s affect on Catholic polemic in the Allen-Person’s party and their ideas about national identity. For example, Stapleton writes in A Fortresse of the Faith, The church hath continued sound and uncorrupted in doctrine not only three hundred yeares after Christ, as Melanchthon thought, or 500 yeares as Luther preached and Calvin somtimes confessed . . . or at last a thousand yeares as Fox in his Actes determineth, but even this fiftene hundred yeares and upwarde, and so shall continew to the worldes ende. (28v) Such contradictions, to Stapleton and his fellow exiles, clearly demonstrated the contemporaneous polemic struggle for the control of England’s spiritual, national, and historical narratives. In their own way Stapleton, Allen, and Persons write their own English national chronicle, just as Timothy Bright did in his “Special note of England” where this chapter began. The polemics

Making Better Time  101 discussed here all appear between 1565 and 1608, roughly at the beginning, middle, and end of Elizabethan England, a time marked by exile both spiritual and physical for many of England’s Catholic faithful. Looking at them in succession reveals a markedly stable Catholic discourse of exile concerned with many of the same issues regarding national identity that troubled Protestant exiles, because the experience of exile fractures established national narratives. That is an essential point, I think, to the literary significance of exile on polemics (and perhaps more imaginative works as well). The cognitive dissonance that exists between the Catholic and Protestant understanding of “nation” at this time is directly related to the belief (or not) in a transnational church under the authority of Rome or a more national church governed by a body of believers existing in a relatively narrow geopolitical space. The dissonance intensifies each group’s struggle to contain and interpret English history, distant and contemporaneous. Polemics gain in popularity as a genre at precisely this point in history because they are essential to conducting a transnational debate between two competing nationalizing ideologies whose most prominent members are very often exiles from the very nation they are trying to define. Allen, Persons, and Stapleton thus engage in a type of polemical-historical nation building, writing that identity extra-nationally, transnationally, and textually. The Protestant exiles from the previous chapter engaged in something similar, writing extra-nationally and textually, but privileged the internal sovereignty of the (Protestant) monarch. We might call both these Catholic and Protestant efforts “polemic chronicles,” and even define their characteristics. Polemic chronicles highlight, as polemics do, a religious or national identity that draws unambiguous lines in the idealogical sand. They find their “evidence” in the past, distant or recent, and create the illusion of ideological purity and teleological continuity while simultaneously attacking the alternate narratives as revisionist or corrupted. That this genre appears precisely at the moment when so many religious dissidents are in exile suggests that polemic chronicle is, at least in part, a product of liminality. The experience of exile created a fracturing effect by displacing an established cultural narrative valued by the exiled group. As a result, controlling one narrative while deconstructing the opposing narrative became a means of retaining and restoring narrative control. Perhaps that explains why Protestant exile polemic rewrote the distant past whereas Catholic ones focused on the recent past. Each was the other’s dominant narrative.

Notes 1 John Foxe, An Abridgement of the Booke of Acts and Monuments of the Church, ed. Theodore Bright (London: I. Windet, 1589), leaf [paraph]8v. 2 Marcia Lee Metzgar, “Controversy and ‘Correctness’: English Chronicles and Chroniclers, 1553–1568,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 27, no. 2 (1996): 451. 3 Constantius I, Constantine’s father, served for a time as a Roman governor of England. Constantine’s mother was Flavia Julia Helena, long claimed to be an

102 Making Better Time Englishwoman. Modern scholarship identifies her as coming from Drepanum in modern Turkey. P. J. Casey, “Constantius I (250?-306),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/48284. Marios Costambeys, “Helena (c.248–328/9),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2006), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/54436. 4 Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 74. 5 Geert Janssen, “Quo Vadis? Catholic Perceptions of Flight and the Revolt of the Low Countries, 1566–1609,” Renaissance Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2011): 489. 6 Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (Suffolk: Royal Historical Society, 2011), 35. 7 Ibid., 16. 8 Thomas H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1964), 2–3. 9 Ibid., 6. 10 Robert M. Kingdon, “Introduction,” in The Execution of Justice in England and a True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholics (New York: Cornell University Press, 1965), xvi. 11 Eamon Duffy, “Allen, William (1532–1594),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/391. 12 Victor Houliston, “Persons [Parsons], Robert (1546–1610),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/21474. 13 The phrase appears in the funeral discourse given in Rome following Cardinal Allen’s death in 1594. William Allen, The Letters and Memorials of William, Cardinal Allen: (1532–1594) (London: Nutt, 1882), 367. Additionally, Francis Tregain the Younger attributed the message to Allen’s teachings. See further Pamela Willetts, “Oportet Meliora Tempora Non Expectare Sed Facere: The Arduous Life of Francis Tregian, the Younger,” British Catholic History 28, no. 3 (May 2007): 378–96. 14 William Cecil, The Execution of Justice in England (London: Christopher Barker, 1583). 15 Robert Kingdon discusses Cecil’s numerous reasons for avoiding charges of religious persecution. See further Kingdon, “Introduction,” xiii–xxxvii. 16 William Allen, A True, Sincere and Modest Defence, of English Catholiques (Rouen: Fr. Parsons’ Press, 1584). 17 Kingdon, “Introduction,” xxiii. 18 Ibid., xiii. 19 Victor Houliston, “The Lord Treasurer and the Jesuit: Robert Person’s Satirical Responsio to the 1591 Proclamation,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 2 (2001): 385–386. Stapleton’s exile, like many others, came as the result of refusing to acknowledge Elizabeth as head of the English church. Marvin R. O’Connell, “Stapleton, Thomas (1535–1598),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 20 Thomas Stapleton, A Fortresse of the Faith First Planted Amonge Us Englishmen (Antwerp: Ihon Laet, 1565). 21 Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers, 29. 22 William Allen, An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (Antwerp: A. Coninncx, 1588). 23 Robert Persons, A Brief Discourse Contayning Certayne Reasons Why Catholiques Refuse to Goe to Church (Doway, 1580).

Making Better Time  103 24 It is tempting to read these comments as a misogynistic assault. I have no doubt that misogyny is at work, but that appears ancillary. He refers on several occasions to Queen Mary’s rule without sexist undertones (or overtones) and on more than one occasion, both here and in An Admonition to the Nobility, he goes out of his way to legitimize Queen Mary’s rule. 25 Robert Persons, The Judgment of a Catholicke Englishman, Living in Banishment for His Religion ([Saint-Omer: English College Press], 1608). 26 Susanne Scholz, Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 7. 27 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11. 28 Ibid., 13.

5 Spenser’s Wretches Irenius, Colin Clout, and the Exile In-Between1

Edmund Spenser purportedly writes to Queen Elizabeth in 1592, “I am a stranger in mine owne countrye, and almost vnknowen to my best frends, onely remembered by her Maiestie. . . . I should account my ten years absense a flatt banishment, were I not honoured in her Majesties seruice In all humility, I desire this Dart2 to be deliuered, an Irish weapon, and this with an English hearte, that in whose heart faith is not fastened, a Darte may.”3 It is tempting to read sarcasm or a woe-is-me appeal to the queen into Spenser’s letter, but there is also an acute melancholy and a heartfelt sense of longing for his native England and a place at Court for the exiled poet. Spenser was no stranger to exile and the complicated identity that comes with it, so the potential dual valence in Spenser’s dart warrants attention.4 His image encourages the reader to see past the gift’s outward appearance. What seems Irish is actually English; what hails from the margins of the empire belongs in the heart of the Court. Clear too is Spenser’s sense of himself as an exile with a complex national identity developed in between nations and lands. What happens to a mind of exile when it finds itself in such a situation, seemingly at home nowhere? Spenser represents the exile in-between, and his imaginative literature offers a possible answer. In the previous chapters, the mind of exile manifested in a variety of ways. For Chaucer, it was a story about an exile, one in which the process of exile and return reshaped centers of power and ultimately stabilized the very systems it upset. Simultaneously, Custance’s exilic experiences authenticated her faith via miraculous, Providential intervention in human history. The mind of exile was both a textual phenomenon and a catalyst of social change. Thorpe’s cognitive displacement allowed him to see “the inner self” of Arundel, and as a result he was able to transform his interrogation into a confirmation of his faith. A century later William Turner and Cardinal Allen showed the mind of exile continued to evolve alongside the developing idea of an English nation as they went to great lengths to establish their credibility as “true” Englishmen and rewrote national origin myths to favor the currently exiled group. Finally, both Protestant and Catholic exiles viewed their conditions as temporary ones whose eventual return would restore their home to its former glory. Thus, in the Reformation

106 Spenser’s Wretche proper, the mind of exile continued to transform and authenticate, but with a new emphasis on establishing national boundaries, limitations on power, nationhood and citizenship. We come at last, then, to Spenser. Numerous scholars call attention to the deeply rooted influence of exile in Spenser’s literary creations. Harold Stein, for example, detected the influence of William Turner in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and Mother Hubberd’s Tale (1591) in the early nineteenth century.5 Richard A. McCabe’s Chatterton Lecture on Poetry defined Spenser’s life as one fundamentally shaped by exile.6 He describes Spenser’s writings as “the product of an Irish environment, the product of mortal conflict between two irreconcilable cultures.”7 McCabe’s “mortal conflict” is consistent with Jesse Lander’s “polemical culture” and, provocatively, may suggest a relationship between Spenser’s mind of exile and early modern colonial apologetics. Using the mind of exile as a critical lens makes it possible to explore Spenser as a proto-colonial author struggling and ultimately failing to defend English colonial expansion. Spenser’s mind of exile heavily influences two of his works in particular, A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1596). In the former, Spenser uses the dialogue between Irenius and Eudoxus to attempt a revision of Ireland’s past in order to prepare it for an English future. This dialogue results in a crucial moment of cognitive displacement from which grows a new narrative of Ireland’s present that conceptualizes exile as a multivalent aspect of colonization and the construction of national identity. In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, the titular Colin represents a precolonial figure, a type of exile whose relation to the nation-state is central to his national identity and to his moral and ethical ambiguity. The simple life he enjoys is challenged by his encounter with a more sophisticated culture that is, at the same time, his own culture. Like the dart given with Spenser’s letter, Colin is a product of the margins and the center—a reflection of both. In this reading, Colin Clout becomes an extended meditation on national and cultural displacement and seeks to transform what it means to be an exile and a true citizen. Yet neither View nor Colin Clout resolve the sociopolitical tensions they explore. Instead, they expose a complex and hybrid understanding of national identity as it changes and adapts to the tensions that occur when a colonial power intersects with and attempts to supplant another culture. Both View and Colin Clout thus open up questions about Spenser’s ideas surrounding England’s attempts to bring a Catholic Ireland completely under the English, Protestant crown. These questions were possible because of Spenser’s unique position between cultures, an exile between lands and nations. View is well known in Spenser scholarship.8 The text introduces two speakers, Irenius and Eudoxus, respectively representing the margins and the center of English political life. Irenius, having lately returned from Ireland, meets Eudoxus in England. There Irenius adopts the voice of an authority with firsthand knowledge, a point almost overdetermined in the

Spenser’s Wretche  107 text. Eudoxus speaks “of Ireland, whence you [Irenius] lately came” and asks for information gleaned from “your late continuance there” (11–12).9 Irenius speaks of Ireland’s problems “as I observed them,” and even the name Irenius might be rendered as “man of Ireland” (12).10 View begins in medias res, omitting the specific reasons for Irenius’s Irish sojourn; however, the text hints that at least some of his experiences come from Spenser’s own, including references to the land around his house in Kilcolman and his time with Lord Grey (23, 28). Irenius calls for the conquest and colonization of Ireland by the English crown, issues that directly impacted Spenser’s life. Spenser, as a member of the New English11 in Ireland, had firsthand knowledge of what one stood to gain and lose from being part of a continued English presence. Spenser’s house in Kilcolman certainly spoke to the success one could have abroad, but, as for his desire to become a national poet, banishment from Court proved a difficult problem.12 He faced the classic conundrum of any exile: How do I get home? Or, if that is not possible, how do I make where I am now into a place that is home? Such questions are arguably more complicated for Spenser than they were for the exiles we have previously examined. Numerous Marian Exiles, including John Bale and William Turner, ultimately returned to, settled in, and perished in England. Others such as John Ponet and Thomas Stapleton died while in exile but nevertheless made a virtue of marginality and wrote about their own sense of English national identity. Allen and Persons fled to Douai during Elizabeth’s reign. The latter returned to England as a member of the Jesuit English mission before settling in Rome. The former never returned home. Unlike those figures, Spenser rarely comes to rest either at home or abroad. Spenser biographies have depicted him “as a man who, exiled from court, really wanted to be there.”13 The motivations behind his move to Ireland are unclear. Andrew Hadfield comments, “We will probably never know whether this [following Lord Grey to Ireland] was a great opportunity . . . or an effective banishment as a result of offending too many people in his early work.”14 Spenser’s Irish exile was followed by at least two voyages back and forth to England before his ultimate return to London in 1598.15 This final trip was out of necessity. James Ware, the seventeenthcentury editor of View, acknowledges Spenser’s final displacement from Ireland and loss of place and property during the Nine Years’ War, calling him “a rebellibus (as Camdens words are) e laribus ejectus & bonis spoliatus” [Ejected from his home and deprived of his property] (5).16 Given such personal experiences, it is no surprise that “ambivalence, hybridity, and the role of the diaspora, are central motifs in Spenser’s Irish treatise.”17 View has been interpreted as a call for a militant Protestant expansion into Ireland or a call for implementing martial law on rebellious Irishmen.18 Bruce Avery writes that Spenser, in View, was both a poet and a part of the political administration of the British colonial government; he was an Englishman, yet he spent most of his

108 Spenser’s Wretche life in Ireland: hence the View seems to waver between Irenius’s eyewitness accounts, which might square with Spenser’s interpretation of his experience of the place, and accounts which would be acceptable to the home authority represented by Eudoxus.19 Avery’s reading of View highlights its dialogic hybridity. Two p ­ ersonalities— Spenser’s English identity (in Eudoxus) and Spenser’s Irish identity (in Irenius)—meet to discuss Ireland’s re-formation into English soil. When both personalities speak of “reformation,” a ubiquitous term in View, they refer not to religious reform per se but rather to a fundamental reshaping of the Irish commonwealth’s national identity. Hadfield’s and Avery’s arguments are both valuable and insightful, but neither focuses at length upon the dialogue’s historical revisionism and how it relies upon displacement and exile as the means of reforming an Irish national identity. For a text ostensibly about Ireland’s present state, a remarkable portion of it focuses on Ireland’s past. The dialogue begins with an examination of Ireland’s purported barbarity and whether “it proceed[s] from the very genius of the soyle, or influence of the starres,” or God himself (11). The use of “genius” calls to mind its Latin origin gen or “root,” as does the text’s insistence that in order to understand the roots one must first understand that the causes of Ireland’s problems are “most auncient and long growne” (13). Such rhetoric locates the text in a quasi-historical, chronicle-like mode that we have seen in the previous chapters. Irenius probes the roots of Irish national identity by narrating the events leading to the present. Eudoxus encourages a pursuit of origins when he asks why a newly elected Irish captain takes his oath upon a stone: Have you ever heard what was the occasion and first beginning of this custome? for it is good to know the same, and may perhaps discover some secret meaning and intent therein, very materiall to the state of that government. (17) Eudoxus seeks to chronicle a seemingly trivial cultural tradition only to extrapolate from it the possibility of knowing something hidden, fundamental, and “materiall” to Ireland’s national constitution. The elision of the custom and its historical origin is reinforced by the vagueness of “the same,” which could refer either to “first beginning” or the custom. The request to know a beginning prompts a lengthy discussion of Ireland’s cultural origins written from a decidedly English point of view, and Irenius does indeed seem desirous of finding not only the root of the custom but also the root of Irish national identity. Approximately one-third of the way through the text, Irenius turns his attention specifically to the origins of Irish culture. Eudoxus calls the historical narrative that Irenius expounds “sweete remembrances of antiquities,

Spenser’s Wretche  109 from whence it seemeth that the customes of that nation proceeded,” whereas Irenius names it the “ample discourse of the originall of them, and the antiquity of that people” (43). Irenius theorizes that Irish culture evolved from Scottish culture, which in turn grew from Scythian culture. The narrative casts as barbarian both Ireland and Scotland by connecting both to one of the barbarian cultures of the ancient world. Like a good scholar, Irenius is never far from his sources, referring to the “Chronicles of Spaine” and the “Bardes or Irish Chroniclers” as the foundation of his historical narrative (44 and 46). Eudoxus challenges the claim of Scythian lineage, arguing that Irishmen claim a Spanish descent. Irenius’s response deserves quoting at length: They doe indeed, but (I conceive) without any good ground. For if there were any such notable transmission of a colony hether out of Spaine, . . . the very Chronicles of Spaine . . . would not have omitted so memorable a thing, as the subduing of so noble a realme to the Spaniard, no more then they doe now neglect to memorize their conquest of the Indians. . . . But the Irish doe heerein no otherwise, then our vaine English-men doe in the Tale of Brutus, whom they devise to have first conquered and inhabited this land, it being as impossible to proove, that there was ever any such Brutus of Albion or England, as it is, that there was any such Gathelus of Spaine. But surely the Scythians (of whom I earst spoke) at such time as the Northern Nations overflowed all Christendome, came downe to the sea coast . . . and arrived in the North-part thereof, which is now called Ulster, which first inhabiting, and afterwards stretching themselves forth into the land as their numbers increased, named it all of themselves Scuttenland, which more briefly is called Scutland, or Scotland. (44) This argument exposes the polemic nature of Irenius’s history by erasing any ambiguity in the past that Eudoxus’s objection might introduce. His initial argumentum ex silentio dismisses the Irish claim to a Spanish, Catholic heritage in order to establish a new English, Protestant one. Notably, Irenius attempts to link both Irish and English origin stories. Citing Brutus and Gathelus ties each culture to a notable ancient culture: the Trojans and the Spanish, respectively. Yet Irenius transmutes both from history to myth, denying both as “impossible to proove.” Brutus and Gathelus are made mythic, but Irenius insists that “surely” the Scythians peopled both Scotland and Ireland. He concludes that “Scotland and Ireland are all one and the same. . . . Ireland is called Scotia-major, and that which is now called Scotland, Scotia-minor” (45).20 This geographic renaming further severs Irish claims to a Spanish lineage. By setting England apart, Spenser emphasizes the cultural otherness of both Ireland and Scotland, writing the history of the former so as to better prepare it for the cultivation of an English culture.

110 Spenser’s Wretche He is attempting, in other words, to write a nationalizing historical narrative by stressing the need for a right reading of history. The polemic nature of such a right reading appears during Irenius’s long exposition of the evidence linking Irish and Scythian culture. Weapons of war and religious ceremonies, to name only two examples, allow him to conclude a Scythian connection. Yet it is Eudoxus’s response that is most noteworthy: Surely Iren . . . in these few words, that from you which I would have thought had bin impossible to have bin spoken of times so remote, and customes so ancient: with delight whereof I was all that while as it were intranced, and carried so farre from my selfe, as that I am now right sorry that you ended so soone. (64) Eudoxus experiences a moment of personal and mental displacement, instigated by this right reading, one that “intrance[s]” and convinces him of the truth of Irenius’s narrative. At other times in the dialogue, Eudoxus follows Irenius’s claims with additional questions or outright disputation. Here, however, the right reading overcomes his objections. From this point in the dialogue, Eudoxus’s objections become fewer, ultimately disappearing altogether. Structurally, it is the moment when Eudoxus is “carried so farre from [himself]” that the dialogue shifts from demonstrating the need for an Irish solution to a discussion about how to solve the problem. Mapping the text around this rhetorical moment yields the following structure: Irenius proposes the need for an Irish reformation; Eudoxus is skeptical and wants to know why Irenius thinks so; Irenius obliges and crafts an Irish national narrative; Eudoxus, carried away by that narrative, abandons his skepticism; and, together, both men then discuss the means of making Ireland English. To put it another way, it is the moment of mental displacement that allows Eudoxus to see the truth of Irenius’s narrative and affirms the chronicle’s accuracy as a historical narrative. Irenius’s reading of Irish history underscores the plasticity of the historical narrative by calling into question its textuality and attempting to codify the correct interpretation. Prior to Eudoxus’s mental displacement, he demonstrates this interpretive need in skeptical comments about Irish chronicles, which he calls “most fabulous and forged” (46). Irenius counters: unto them besides I adde mine owne reading. . . . I doe gather a likelihood of truth, not certainly affirming any thing, but by conferring of times, languages, monuments, and such like, I doe hunt out a probability of things, which I leave to your judgement to believe or refuse. (46) This sounds very much like a modern historian or literary critic. History is a text—collated fragments of the past in need of interpretation that end

Spenser’s Wretche  111 with “a probability of things.” But Irenius’s dissembling is disingenuous. His history is clearly intended to be the true one, and his interpretation is privileged above any made by the Irish themselves, as is clear in his subsequent comments that “there appears among them some reliques of the true antiquitie, though disguised, which a well eyed man may happily discover and finde out,” to which he sets in opposition the “many forged histories of their owne antiquity, which they deliver to fooles, and make them believe for true” (47 and 49). The scholar/poet sets himself against the Irish “Bardes” whom “the Irish themselves . . . doe most constantly beleeve and avouch” (46). The “well eyed man”—scholars and poets such as Irenius and Spenser—is required in order to interpret Ireland’s history correctly. Writing a true historical narrative is thus, from Irenius’s point of view, synonymous with constructing a national identity by one who is neither wholly English nor Irish. Irenius, like Spenser, is both a man of Ireland and an Englishman. His in-betweenness uniquely places him to prepare and to present this right historical reading that defines what makes an Irishman Irish. His narrative also tries to define an English identity, broadly summarized as all that the Irish are not. The dialogue lays the groundwork and articulates the justification for the continued English colonial expansion on the island. Despite his efforts, however, Irenius’s rewriting of Irish history into colonial apologetics starts to break down nearly as soon as he begins. Irenius concedes that he can only narrate “a likelihood of truth” and “a probability of things.” His historical narrative exists somewhere in between the real events of the past and the “likelihood” of his version of events. By narrating these events, Irenius also demonstrates that Irish cultural identity is neither simple nor easily displaced. Eudoxus says as much early in the dialogue, noting that Irenius has “brought [the Irish] from very great and ancient nations, as any were in the world” (51). Irenius admits that the first English colonies settled within the Irish Pale by King Henry II, despite being “a strong colonie,” eventually adopted Irish culture and became “almost mere Irish” (53–54). These early colonists, Irenius later insists, “are degenerate, yea, and some of them have quite shaken off their English names, and put on Irish that they might bee altogether Irish” (68). Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and his kinsmen “did quite cast off both their English name and alleagiance . . . and termed themselves very Irish, taking on them Irish habits and customes” (69). Thus, in writing his history to show the superiority of an English national identity, Irenius reveals instead the inherent malleability of national identity and its links to history, place, and language. He tells Eudoxus, for the minde followeth much the temperature of the body: and also the words are the image of the minde, so as they proceeding from the minde, the minde must needs be affected with the words. So that the speach being Irish, the heart must needes bee Irish. (71)

112 Spenser’s Wretche Neither English nor Irish identity is self-evident. They must both be codified by a right reading of history that either resolves or suppresses the tensions introduced by the intersection of cultures. View might thus be called an attempted polemic chronicle. The narrative purports to be self-justifying, casting alternate historical narratives as corrupt or in need of proper interpretation. Spenser tries to form a stable national identity by linking together the writing and the reading of history as a text from a hybrid position, the Anglo-Irish Irenius. Spenser’s attempt fails, however, due in part to the hybrid nature of his own national identity. The Irenius persona that Spenser adopts is himself a character in between nations, neither wholly English nor wholly Irish. His hybrid identity undergirds Irenius’s rhetorical ethos. For Spenser, whose experiences mirror those of Irenius, a similar sense of hybrid national identity is at play whose conflicts cannot be fully resolved. Irenius, for example, fears for England’s soundness if Ireland is not reformed; he speaks of the Irish “stepp[ing] into the very rooms of our English” and lauds the English as paragons of virtue by setting them implicitly against the “evill” Irish (30 and 93). Irenius/ Spenser, therefore, tries to affect his own separation from the Irish vis-à-vis a total denial of Ireland’s cultural redemption outside of a transplantation of an English national culture. Irenius argues that “evill people [that is, the Irish], by good ordinances and government, may be made good; but the evill that is of it selfe evill, will never become good” (93). Careful readers will of course be aware that in making these arguments Irenius has caught himself in a paradox. If Irish culture is “of it selfe evill,” then no amount of English colonial expansion will result in bringing the English and Irish together as one people. What remains is a more dramatic approach that finally and violently plants English culture into Irish soil. I use “plants” deliberately here because husbandry metaphors abound in View, and Spenser’s use of soil—specifically, one’s relationship to that soil— further demonstrates the mind of exile within the text. Spenser writes of the English “planting . . . some good forme or policy” (26); he recalls the reign of Henry II, “when Ireland was planted with English” (70); he references the success of Rome’s conquest of England by “plant[ing] some of their legions in all places convenient” (120); and he refers to England’s “planting of religion” in Ireland (153). The transformation of Irish soil into English soil must occur to transform Spenser’s dwelling place in Ireland into his home vis-à-vis an extension of England. This process might be called imperial agriculture, wherein the exile creates native soil. The exile returns to his nation via the conversion of his exiled house into his native home. Given that goal, View’s use of planting metaphors becomes clear. Land and place, inscribed within national borders, grow closely related to personal and national identity.21 Irenius speaks very much like many later colonists when he says, I eftsoones bring in my reformation, and thereupon establish such a forme of government, as I may thinke meetest for the good of that

Spenser’s Wretche  113 realme . . . the Irish will better be drawne to the English then the English to the Irish government. (134–35) A religious subtext is clearly indicated by Irenius’s use of the word “reformation.” The extension of the English crown will bring with it the extension of the Anglican Church. When Ireland assumes English law and Protestantism, it becomes in essence English. The comment embraces the sense of cultural superiority found in many colonial endeavors, assuming that English culture is inherently good and destined to be embraced by the colonized. Moreover, if English culture is not embraced, I­ renius’s claim also justifies the oppression or elimination of the colonized. His argument along these lines includes the (in)famous description of the starving Irish rebels emerging from the Munster woods looking like “anatomies of death . . . like ghosts crying out of their graves” (101). Driven from their land, they emerge as empty husks or they perish, leaving the land “voyde of man and beast” and therefore open to English cultural transformation (102). To illustrate this point, Irenius urges a “union of manners, and conformity of mindes, to bring them to be one people . . . [by] scattering [the Irish] amongst the English . . . to bring them by dayly conversation unto better liking of each other” (144–45). The goal is to leverage the Irish’s displacement into the margins and to control that displacement in order to facilitate England’s colonization of the island. By severing Irish identity from the land, Irenius is in effect exiling the Irish as a means of remaking them. Displacement transforms the Irish into exiles in their own land but not from it. Exile paradoxically becomes a place of error (you are exiled from your land because you are not English) and a place of transformation and reformation (once Irish land is English land, a new identity will come with it). It is thus through the process of exile and return that View seeks to transform Irish soil into English soil. As a result, the New English cease to be exiles by returning to their native soil. Exile is doubly transformative. It functions to remake both the exiles themselves and, in certain circumstances, the land into which the exile is banished. Hence, View emerges from in-between historical narratives, lands, and nations. Spenser writes an Irish historical narrative somewhere between polemic and chronicle, the narrative neither wholly true nor wholly false. As a polemic, the text tries to define and to dismiss Irish culture by undermining its legitimacy and professing its inferiority to English culture but cannot sustain the process. The many militant and totalitarian recommendations that View makes were, thankfully, never fully implemented, but the text’s influence helped shape English views of Ireland well into the seventeenth century.22 The voice in the text is often a hostile one that, as John Breen argues, “speaks of the insularity of the islander who, as pedagogue to the court, feels hostility for the world of the Other.”23 Breen also refers to Ireland as

114 Spenser’s Wretche a “refracted vision of England” and an “otherworld” similar in symbolic nature to the island that the exiled Meliboeus fears in Virgil’s first eclogue and to the land now “experienced by a fictive genealogical inheritor, Colin Clout.”24 The Colin figure, like Irenius, is a man between lands and, like Meliboeus, an exile. In Colin Clout, the narratives of transformation and reformation expressed in View reappear in a poetic medium. Colin assumes the role of a man caught between lands, struggling to reconcile the two cultures he simultaneously inhabits but, like Irenius, not wholly succeeding. If View attempts a history of Ireland to enable its transformation, Colin Clout represents Spenser’s poetic efforts to transform Ireland, the Elizabethan Court, and England into idealized versions of themselves by defining what it means to be both an exile and a citizen. Colin Clout, like View, has a robust and varied body of critical scholarship.25 Part of the poem’s appeal is in Spenser’s return to pastoral in 1591, at the very height of his work on The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), as well as in his return to the Colin figure after a dozen years, one of only three times in Spenser’s oeuvre when he adopts Colin as his persona.26 Colin Clout opens with a scene setting common to pastoral and a link to the eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender (1579): his fellow shepherds call upon Colin, lately returned from a trip to the Court of Queen Cynthia, to tell of his journey—a structure Isabel G. MacCaffery calls “the formula of out-and-back.”27 A liminal figure of the poetic world travels to the land’s representative center and finds both grace and falsehood. The paradox drives him back to the margins, but he carries with him the desire for the grace of the center. This desire to transform the margins to an extension of the central, Cynthian Court serves as an opportunity to both praise and critique the Court. Here, much of Colin Clout is concerned with displacement and its effects on both individuals and lands. The shepherd Hobbinol claims that Whilest thou [Colin] wast hence, all dead in dole did lie: The woods were heard to waile full many a sythe, And all their birds with silence to complaine: ... But now both woods and fields, and floods revive, Sith thou art come, their cause of merriment, That us late dead, hast made againe alive. (l. 22–24 and 29–31)28 Although the moment reflects pastoral conventions, it also idealizes the effect of Colin’s displacement on the land. The land dies for the duration of his absence, reverting to a sterile and empty place. Colin’s return brings salvation to his land, a salvation natural and aesthetic, national and poetic. Colin Clout is saturated with allusions to liminality.29 Spenser’s title suggests the poem is ostensibly about a homecoming, but its titular character

Spenser’s Wretche  115 begins and ends the poem in between lands. Although home in Arcadia, part of Colin remains behind in Cynthia’s Court. He tells his fellows: Since that same day in nought I take delight, Ne feeling have in any earthly pleasure, But in remembrance of that glorious bright, My lifes sole blisse, my heart’s eternall threasure. (l. 44–47) Part of him remains with Cynthia, dividing his loyalties and leaving him incapable of resting contentedly in Arcadia. The returning exile becomes an exile all over again in the act of composing the narrative. Colin’s in-betweenness then is simultaneously physical and mental and represents a creative matrix from which Colin attempts to understand and articulate his experiences. The poem examines the plight of an exile at home in neither England nor Ireland and his attempts to negotiate and to resolve the condition of not belonging anywhere. The poem approaches but does not attain success in this endeavor by attempting a redefinition of what it means to be an exile: not a person relegated to the margins because of an error but a true citizen from the center of England’s political life that is marginalized nevertheless. This definition of citizen is best demonstrated by Colin himself, who was never home to begin with. He, like Spenser, is doubly displaced. His encounter with the Shepherd of the Ocean occurs because he is already living on Arcadia’s margins as a result of a forsaken love, “That made me in that desart chose to dwell” (l. 91). The Shepherd of the Ocean (i.e., Sir Walter Raleigh), himself an exile “debard,” empathizes with Colin’s “lucklesse lot:/That banisht had my selfe, like wight forlore,/Into that waste, where I was quite forgot” (l. 181–3). The obvious parallel intended between Colin/Spenser and the Shepherd/Raleigh invites parallels between Colin’s feelings of displacement and Spenser’s own. When Spenser writes Colin Clout’s dedicatory note to Raleigh, he does so “not from his ‘home’ (as [the poem’s] title seems to demand) but from his ‘house’ in Kilcolman. Colin is ‘home’ in Ireland, Spenser merely ‘housed’ there.”30 Colin’s journey to Cynthia’s Court, which echoes Spenser’s own, thus carries with it a dual valence. Colin travels further away from a home where he already did not belong, whereas Spenser traveled back to an England that was no longer fully his home either. Colin leaves Arcadia with a description of the totality of his removal: [A]n huge great vessell to us came, Dauncing upon the waters back to lond, As if it scornd the daunger of the same; ... The same aboord us gently did receave, And without harme us farre away did beare,

116 Spenser’s Wretche So farre that land our mother us did leave, And nought but sea and heaven to us appeare. Then hartlesse quite and full of inward feare, That shepheard I besought to me to tell, Under what skie, or in what world we were, In which I saw no living people dwell. (l. 213–15 and 224–31) Colin fears the moment of separation between lands, for he is neither in the Arcadia that he knows nor in the realm that he plans to visit. The space is isolated and bereft of people, unsettling Colin so much that he needs reassurance that the voyage has not removed him entirely from the world. Like Chaucer’s Custance in The Man of Law’s Tale, Colin finds himself alone on the sea and unsure of his fate. And like Custance, his eventual return to land alludes to rebirth. Colin’s arrival in England is likened to a new birth when “our ship her fruitfull wombe unlade,/And put us all ashore on Cynthias land” (l. 288–9). Rebirth would seem to signal a new beginning for Colin in a paradise free from sadness, disharmony, famine, and war (l. 312–5). Yet Colin is not at home in England either. He retains and reinforces his own foreignness by identifying with some of the nymphs in Cynthia’s Court when he eventually reaches it. These include the Anglo-Irish Galathea, for whom “there is not her won, but here with us/About the borders of our rich Coshma” and “Nera ours, not theirs, though there she be” (l. 521–2 and 525). The distinction between “ours” and “theirs” reinforces Colin’s separateness from Cynthia’s realm, a distinction of which the shepherd Cuddy seems intent on reminding Colin when he interrupts the recitation of the nymphs to name Colin a “base shepherd” distinct from the “Angels” (l. 618–9). The morphological similarity between “Angels” and “Angles/Angli” must be deliberate, further emphasizing Colin’s alien presence in England. At the same time, the wordplay recalls Pope Gregory I’s words to Augustine in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica: “Non Angli, sed angeli”30 (Not Angles, but angels).31 Colin’s response to Cuddy’s challenge is especially telling and supports the idea that Colin picks up on Cuddy’s wordplay: Her name in every tree I will endosse, That as the trees do grow, her name may grow: And in the ground each where it will engrosse, And fill the stones, that all men may it know. The speaking woods and murmuring waters fall, Her name Ile teach in knowen termes to frame: And eke my lambs when for their dams they call, Ile teach to call for Cynthia by name. (l. 632–39)

Spenser’s Wretche  117 Colin attempts to bring Cynthia to him by making the land hers in the colonial gesture of writing her name on the trees. In a similar way, Ireland is not Spenser’s home until Elizabeth’s rule extends fully into Ireland. Writing Cynthia’s name into the trees, the stones, and the very land represents Colin/ Spenser’s attempt to transform “here,” Arcadia, into “there,” Cynthia’s land. It is the poetic equivalent of the imperial agriculture occurring in View. Given this reading of Colin Clout, it becomes possible to see in the skein of the poem manifestations of a Spenserian mind of exile struggling to write a stable national identity. It is visible in Colin’s return to Arcadia and the challenge Thestylis poses to him regarding his return: Why, Colin, since thou foundst such grace With Cynthia and all her noble crew: Why didst thou euer leave that happie place, In which such wealth might unto thee accrew? And back returnedst to this barrein soyle, Where cold and care and penury do dwell: Here to keepe sheepe, with hunger and with toyle, Most wretched he, that is and cannot tell. (l. 652–59) Thestylis urges a resolution to the poem’s central paradox—namely, why Colin came home at all given the joys he experienced abroad. Nancy Jo Hoffman writes of these lines, “The source of Spenser’s wretchedness lies in his exile from the queen and court and in his reluctance to make Ireland his home, but these truths cannot be ‘told’ directly, and certainly not in pastoral.”32 Spenser would surely have known of “wretched’s” etymology from Chaucer and other early English authors, and its presence in the poem becomes more significant when reading it as a meditation on Spenser’s own exile from Elizabeth’s Court. Spenser, it seems, intends Colin to be read as a type of exile caught between lands, much as Spenser himself was. Thestylis’s inquiry instigates an extended critique of the Court at the center of Colin’s world. It would seem that if anyone in Colin Clout is truly home, then it should be those living in Cynthia’s realm and attending Cynthia’s Court. Its courtiers, however, only “happie seemd to bee” and are themselves “wretches” (l. 667 and 675). Colin sees the shallowness of the center where “each mans worth is measured by his weed” and where “single Truth and simple honestie/Do wander up and downe despysed of all” (l. 711 and 727–8). The mention of wretches suggests that the courtiers are exiles in their own right—but exiles from what? Truth seems to be the answer. Truth, like Colin, is neither in the Court nor welcomed there. Both wander in lands “up and downe despysed of all.” The center of the Court thus becomes a paradoxical place of falsehood and grace. It represents falsehood because the courtiers are concerned only with appearances and selfpromotion. Simultaneously, it represents grace because Cynthia reigns there

118 Spenser’s Wretche and the Court remains the place where Colin feels most blessed. Colin Fairweather argues that “Colin evokes Cynthia as a generative pastoral spirit who transfigures and pervades the rustic landscape. . . . Colin’s Orphic powers collapse the distinction between the center and the margins of power.”33 The Orphic moment represents a transformation occurring at the margin, affecting the center, and originating from a liminal figure that has been to the center and returned. When the reader moves to the margins of the poem in Arcadia, a similar conflict arises between authenticity and error. Colin tells Thestylis that he rather chose back to my sheep to tourne, Whose utmost hardnesse I before had tryde, Then having learnd repentance late, to mourne Emongst those wretches which I there descryde. (l. 672–75) The authenticity of the rural, pastoral, and liminal Arcadia is set in clear opposition to the corrupt and corrupting urban center of Cynthia’s Court. Despite this, Arcadia is incomplete because it lacks Cynthia’s Court. The conflict arising between the interplay of the margins and the center becomes the poem’s underlying structure. Returning, then, to MacCaffery’s suggestion of a tripartite structure, I propose dividing Colin Clout into three major episodes defined by Colin’s movement from the margins to the center and back again. The first movement is actually the last one chronologically: Colin’s return to Arcadia is the point at which the pastoral begins. The second is his narration of the journey with the Shepherd of the Ocean. The third and final movement is the poem’s shift from a bucolic to an erotic mode in its closing meditation on the Court of love. Colin affirms the presence of love in Cynthia’s Court but laments that the love worshipped there is corrupted by the same superficiality he observed in the courtiers. Against such superficiality, Spenser sets a Neo-Platonic notion of love worshipped by the shepherds of Arcadia. The Court of love corresponds to an allegory within an allegory of Elizabeth’s Court echoing that of Gloriana’s in The Faerie Queene. Colin/Spenser is one of those courtiers attempting to return from an exile both national and spiritual. The figure at the margins, Colin/Spenser, arrives at the center and sees the Court for what it is, an idealized place of grace and truth but a place corrupted by vapid courtiers and yes men. They, not Colin/ Spenser, are the true exiles—figures who deserve marginalization for their failures. Spenser attempts a resolution to Colin Clout’s central paradox by defining who the true exiles are. They are not, like Spenser, those located at the margins of the empire but those worshippers in the Court of love who are outlaws: For their desire is base, and doth not merit, The name of love, but of disloyall lust:

Spenser’s Wretche  119 Ne mongst true lovers they shall place inherit, But as Exuls out of his court be thrust. (l. 891–94) The moment is a declaration of national allegiance presented in an erotic poetic mode. The exiled Spenser, through his Colin persona, speaks truth to the power of the center to transform it. Colin/Spenser establishes himself as one of the “true lovers” who will, in fact, receive a place in the grace of the center. The only resolution to Spenser’s displacement is a return to that grace in the center of the Elizabethan Court. Together, View and Colin Clout represent Spenser’s attempts to write himself out of his in-betweenness or leverage his position in order to define a place both geopolitical and literary. In this light, Spenser’s 1592 letter, with which I began, now reads more like a declaration than a melancholy lament. Spenser is a stranger because he is not fully a member of either nation. Only his service to Elizabeth, bull’s-eye of his dart and heart, gives him a sense of place. The dart is symbolic of its giver, the Ireland man with an English heart. Certainly View and Colin Clout reflect Spenser’s desire for that transformation so that he might find a place where he truly feels at home. Spenser’s attempts at resolution, however, are incomplete, both in his poems and the historical record. Although he died in London, Spenser never achieved his desire to become a national poet in his lifetime, and his exile to Ireland fundamentally shaped his relationship to England.34 It is fitting then that in Colin Clout’s conclusion, Colin does not return triumphant to Cynthia’s Court, now restored to its true glory, nor does Arcadia become a land written over with Cynthia’s name. The poem’s final lines are far more ambiguous. Spenser closes the poem saying, So, having ended, [Colin] from ground did rise, And after him uprose eke all the rest: All loth to part, but that the glooming skies Warnd them to draw their bleating flocks to rest. (l. 952–55) Colin and his fellow shepherds, the liminal figures, can do nothing but return to their livelihoods. Like the exiled Spenser and so many of his fellow exiles, Colin must continue to wait for the transformation of either the Court or Ireland that will allow him to return home. The paradox of the poem becomes the paradox of the exile, in between grace and error, truth and falsehood, house and home. Spenser’s attempts to resolve the paradox of exile were one source of his literary genius, and exile worked its way into the very roots of his prose and poetry. Viewed in this light, View and Colin Clout allow some speculative conclusions about the mind of exile in the late sixteenth century. At the dawn of England’s colonial period, there was a complex rhetoric of

120 Spenser’s Wretche national identity at play in the margins of England’s geopolitical borders that critiqued the center of power—a rhetoric codified in the polemical and imaginative literature of Spenser, a rhetoric shaped in part by a mind of exile. Spenser’s work also shows clear evidence of the struggles that colonial apologetics would continue to wrestle with in the coming centuries. His was an English heart exiled to the margins of the empire, yet he still hoped and worked to expand those borders and eventually to come to rest in his home, an exile no more. Being at home in neither England nor Ireland had an equally important effect on his understanding of colonial expansion and his attempts to work through its many ideological and logistical challenges. Or, perhaps more succinctly, Spenser attempted to reconcile his place between the rise of an empire that was itself between what it was and, for better or worse, what it would become.

Notes 1 A version of this chapter appeared as “Edmund Spenser’s Mind of Exile and Colonial Apologetics.” Reprinted with permission from SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 57, 1 (Winter 2017). 2 “Dart” refers to a gold and diamond dart included with the letter. 3 Alexander Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945), 155, qtd. in John Breen, “Edmund Spenser’s Exile and the Politics and Poetics of Pastoral,” CahiersE 53, no. 1 (April 1998): 27. 4 Andrew Hadfield’s recent biography of Spenser’s life indicates that the young poet was familiar with a number of contemporaneous exiles and that exiles played a large part in Spenser’s formative education and eschatology (Edmund Spenser: A Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]). 5 Harold Stein, “Spenser and William Turner,” Modern Language Notes 51, no. 6 (1936): 345–51. 6 Richard McCabe, “Edmund Spenser, Poet of Exile,” Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1993): 73–103. 7 Ibid., 74. 8 For an examination of the role of Spenser’s View on the formation of an Irish other, its impact on sixteenth-century colonial politics, and Spenser’s conflicted self-identification, see Bruce Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland,” ELH 57, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 263–79; Andrew Hadfield, “Spenser, Ireland, and Sixteenth-Century Political Theory,” MLR 89, no. 1 (January 1994): 1–18; and Gary A. Schmidt, “The View From Ireland: Spenser in 1596,” in Renaissance Hybrids: Culture and Genre in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 91–118. 9 Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, eds. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997). 10 Andrew Hadfield, “Introduction,” in A View of the State of Ireland, eds. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), xvii n16. 11 New English refers to the Protestants who settled in the English Pale during the sixteenth-century Protestant Ascendency. The title distinguishes them from the English settlers of the twelfth century. 12 See “Spenser’s Castle,” in Hadfield, Spenser: A Life, 197–230. 13 Hadfield, Spenser: A Life, 403. 14 Ibid., 154–55. 15 Ibid., 231.

Spenser’s Wretche  121 6 Translation by R.T. Pritchard, qtd. in Spenser, A View, n3. 1 17 Hadfield, “Introduction,” xvi. 18 Ibid., xii. 19 Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other,” 264. 20 This distinction is consistent with the sixteenth-century conceptualization of England as an island almost unto itself surrounded by the islands of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. See Alan MacColl, “The Meaning of ‘Britain’ in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (April 2006): 248–69. 21 Avery, “Mapping the Irish Other,” 272–73. 22 Hadfield, “Introduction,” xi. 23 Breen, “Edmund Spenser’s Exile,” 38. 24 Ibid., 28–29. 25 The poem’s success as a pastoral is debated in Nancy Jo Hoffman, Spenser’s Pastorals: The Shepheardes Calender and “Colin Clout” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and David R. Shore, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral: A Study of the World of Colin Clout (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985). Other scholars have focused on Colin Clout’s use of classical myth, its use of political imagery, and its central structure’s reliance upon love in order to understand it. See also Kreg Segall, “The Precarious Poet in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe,” SEL 53, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 31–51; Louis Adrian Montrose, “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” ELH 69, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 907–46; and David. W. Burchmore, “The Image of the Centre in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe,” RESLJ 28, no. 112 (November 1977): 393–406. 26 The other appearances are in The Shepheardes Calender and a brief appearance in book 6, canto 10 of The Faerie Queene. 27 Isabel G. MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 366. 28 Edmund Spenser. Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott eds., 3rd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1993). 29 See Shore, chap. 3, pp. 105–31; Colin Fairweather, “Inclusive and Exclusive Pastoral: Towards an Anatomy of Pastoral Modes,” SP 97, 3 (Summer 2000): 276–307; William A. Oram, “Spenser’s Audiences, 1589–91,” SP 100, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 514–33; and Catherine Nicholson, “Pastoral in Exile: Spenser and the Poetics of English Alienation,” SSt 23 (2008): 41–71. 30 McCabe, “Edmund Spenser,” 94. 31 Pope Gregory I’s words are paraphrased from a response he purportedly gave upon seeing English slaves in Rome. Upon asking who they were, he was told, “Angli uocarentur” [they were called Angles], to which he responded, “Bene nam et angelicam habent faciem, et tales angelorum in caelis decet esse coheredes” [Good . . . they have the face of angels, and such men should be fellow-heirs of the angels in heaven]. 32 Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 134. 33 Hoffman, Spenser’s Pastorals, 121. 34 Fairweather, “Inclusive and Exclusive Pastorals,” 302. 35 Hadfield, Spenser: A Life, 402–3.

Epilogue

In April of 1556, John Ponet wrote a letter to Heinrich Bullinger from Strasbourg. Reflecting on his time there, Ponet writes: What is exile? A thing which, provided you have wherewithal to subsist, is painful only in imagination. I know that it is the scourge of the Lord; but with what mildness and fatherly affection he deals with me, I can readily learn even from this, that he has afforded me for my comforters Bullinger, Melancthon, Martyr, and other most shining lights of his church.1 Just over a month later, and in his final letter to Bullinger, Ponet speaks of exile a second time in reference to John Cheke’s recantation, writing that Cheke “will seal his testimony to the gospel with his blood. What will not Pharaoh attempt against Israel, especially on his return from exile?”2 His prophecy would come true the following year when Cheke was burned at the stake for apostasy. In Ponet’s final days, exile was clearly on his mind. Like Ponet, I have asked and attempted to answer the question: “What is exile?” The answer, of course, cannot be adequately articulated in only a few words. When the question, however, is expanded slightly—“What effect does exile have on the discourse of early modern English writers?”—I believe we may have some possible answers. The discourses of exile that had an affect on early modern writers had roots in the end of the Middle Ages (and before). As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the figures on the margins hoping to fundamentally change what it meant to be persons of faith did so by recognizing the power that came from being on the margins. Wycliffites such as William Thorpe wrote testimonies and sermons lauding the voices in the margins as the voices of the true faithful and, more significantly, liminality came to represent a place of truth and wholeness, distinct from the corrupted center. Chaucer recognized this in The Man of Law’s Tale when the “wretched” exile Custance emerges as the triumphant bearer of Christian faith. Thorpe testifies to the rightness of his belief only after recognizing himself as possessing a mind of exile. Exile as a state of mind could be just as powerful a force on imaginative

124 Epilogue literature as physical exile. In Gower, Chaucer, Thorpe, and others is a reliance upon a cognitive understanding of exile as a shining light of faith in a corrupt world capable of affecting significant change to the status quo simultaneously disruptive and stabilizing. Those aspects of the mind of exile easily transitioned into the early modern era where it found purchase and continued to evolve, wrestling as it did with the growing sense of English nationalism. Modern scholars have rightly criticized and rethought the idea of a clean break between the medieval and early modern worlds, and the mind of exile is yet another example of the porousness of that imagined boundary. Protestant and Catholic exiles alike embraced a mind of exile especially in their polemics. It might be possible to say that polemic was mastered in exile as it provided a means for transnational communication between exiled peoples and their estranged homelands. Through the language of faith and national allegiance, exilic polemic allowed exiles a means of returning home when they physically could not, and a means of influencing religious and political change within their homeland from afar. The experiences of exile instigated a revitalized commitment to historical narrative and the preservation of an historical past codified in print, even if that “history” was malleable and served a religious and political purpose. Polemic chronicle emerged from sixteenth-century exiles to “write” a national history consistent with an understanding of what it meant to be English and Christian. Writing a past to define their present allowed these early modern exiles a means of controlling (in some cases escaping) their “wretchedness” while reshaping their national narratives and the narratives of their enemies. Their minds of exile functioned as self-fashioning both individual and national. Though only a small selection of works, these case studies, particularly Spenser’s, allow a more speculative conclusion as well. His mind of exile suggests that by the conclusion of the sixteenth century exile had come to signify a place both of truth and falsehood, power and silence. That paradox was not entirely new. Gower’s narrator finds Wisdom only in his lowest moment. Constance’s exiles leave her impotent until she returns to shore. Thorpe’s Testimony reveals conflicting understandings of exile. When Archbishop Arundel attempts to leverage his own return from exile as evidence of God’s favor, Thorpe promptly shuts him down. Turner treats the exiles as the solution to a “disease” in the English body politic. Allen uses exile to justify an invasion of his homeland. To control the discourse of exile was, in part, to control the fracturing effect exile had on all aspects of one’s life, to assert some control over the exile’s “wrechedness.” In the final lines of Colin Clout, Thestylis reminds Colin that to be a wretch is doubly tragic for one “that is [a wretch] and cannot tell” (l. 659). The ambiguity of the penultimate word in that line serves well to highlight the progressing understanding of exile at the close of the sixteenth century. The wretch who “cannot tell” may be unable to speak, or uneducated in the way to express him or herself, or silenced by their distance or exclusion from their home.

Epilogue  125 Simultaneously, “cannot tell” may also mean that one is a wretch, an exile, who is in error and does not know it. In the context of Colin Clout, these would be the yes-men and false-faced courtiers who will be thrust out of Love’s court. What is new, however, in Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland and Colin Clout is the deployment of discourses of exile in a newly emerging narrative of colonization. Together, these rhetorics utilize historical narrative and a desire for transformation—truly reformation in both the secular and religious meanings of that word—to write a need and justification for the expansion of socio-political and territorial boundaries beyond the English island. Where then does that leave the understanding of the discourse of exile in early modern English literature? Appropriately, in-between truth and falsehood, grace and error. The center imagines the exile to be a wretch cut off and excluded from truth and the community. From the margins though, exile becomes much more potent. The literatures of exile, and the minds behind it, create narratives of transformation and self-identification. The mind of exile allows and encourages the composition of a new national identity. It is a means of expressing control over an uncontrollable situation. Most importantly, it is a matrix of creative possibility formed at the intersection of culture, history, and literature. Ponet was right. Exile is “painful only in imagination.”

Notes 1 John Ponet, “John Ponet to Henry Bullinger,” April 14, 1556. Reproduced in Hastings Robinson, ed., Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), 116. 2 John Ponet, “John Ponet to Henry Bullinger,” June 1556. Ibid., 117–118.

Index

Allen, William: and historical revisionism 96 – 99; and nationalism 84, 91 – 94; and sovereignty 85 – 91 Allen-Persons party 12, 83, 95 Antwerp 1, 57

Henrican 63 Henry II 111 – 112 Henry VIII 3, 56, 71 – 72, 91 heretic 36 – 37, 86 Huss, Jan 35, 52

Bale, John 1, 58, 61, 68, 88, 107 Bonner, Edmund 3, 61

Langland, William 35 – 36, 48 Latimer, Hugh 56 liminal see liminality liminality: and authenticity 27, 36, 123; definition of 5 – 6; and exile 11, 48, 101; and pilgrimage 16; and place 4, 18 Louvainists 83 Low Countries 3, 57, 82

Cecil, William 56, 84 Chaucer, Geoffrey 3, 11, 35 Christendom 100, 109; political metaphor of 69, 96; transnational 10, 30, 86 chronicle 69, 73; mode of 82, 96, 108 – 110; polemic 12, 84, 98, 100 – 101, 113, 124 commonwealth: Christian 68 – 70; English 81, 92; Irish 108; tradition of 58, 67 Douai 1, 83, 107 Edward VI 3, 81 – 83, 97 Elizabeth I 63, 105, 107, 119; ascension of 3, 7, 81; body of 91, 93; origin narrative of 97 – 98; rhetorical attacks on 85, 88, 91 – 93, 98; rule of 82, 114, 117; spiritual authority of 89, 95 Eucharist 39, 75 excommunication 8, 47 Frankfurt 1, 56 Gardiner, Stephen 56, 58 Gelasius I 90 Geneva 1, 86 Gregory I 64, 73, 98, 116 gyvovagi 36, 41

Marian Exiles 99, 107; number of 1, 6, 82 – 83 Mary I: ascension of 3, 55 – 56, 67; legitimacy of 82, 92, 96 – 97, 99; rhetorical attacks on 56, 71 mens exili 3, 9, 11, 21 monasticism 8 nation building 75, 101 nationalism: English 57, 75, 85, 124; and exile 4, 9; and historical revisionism 73, 76 Northumberland 22 – 24, 26, 28 – 30 Oxford 35 – 36, 83, 111 Paul III 65 Peasants’ Revolt 17 – 20 peregrinatio 15 – 16 Persons, Robert 1, 12, 83, 90 – 91 pilgrim: and communities 5 – 6, 15 – 16, 31; and exile 8, 16, 42 – 43, 48 – 49 Plantagenet, Henry see Henry II

128 Index Plantagenet, Richard see Richard II Plato 60, 118 Ponet, John 1, 107, 123; polemic of 58, 67; and sovereignty 85, 88 Richard II 1, 17, 43 self-fashioning 12, 124 Sixtus V 94 Spanish Armada 91, 95 Stapleton, Thomas 12, 86, 97, 107 Strasbourg 1, 3, 56, 57, 67, 123 Thorpe, William: as exile 62, 105; historicity of 39; and liminality 41 – 44; preaching of 40 – 41

Tolwin, William 61 Tudor, Edward see Edward VI Tudor, Elizabeth see Elizabeth I Tudor, Henry see Henry VIII Tudor, Mary see Mary I Turner, William; as exile 59; and national body 69 – 74; and nationalism 65 – 67; polemics of 11, 56 – 58; and sovereignty 60 – 64 Virgil 1, 114 Wraghton, William 59 Wyclif, John 4, 97, 35 Zurich 1, 57