Identities in Early Modern English Writing: Religion, Gender, Nation 9782503542317, 250354231X

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Identities in Early Modern English Writing

EARLY EUROPEAN RESEARCH Series founded by the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research, and now directed by The University of Western Australia Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. General Editors Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia Claire McIlroy, University of Western Australia Editorial Board Tracy Adams, University of Auckland Emilia Jamroziak, University of Leeds Matthias Meyer, Universität Wien Juanita Feros Ruys, University of Sydney Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Universitetet i Oslo Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 6

Identities in Early Modern English Writing Religion, Gender, Nation Edited by

Lorna Fitzsimmons

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Identities in early modern English writing : religion, gender, nation. -- (Early European research ; 6) 1. English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. 3. Nationalism in literature. 4. Psychology, Religious, in literature. 5. Gender identity in literature. I. Series II. Fitzsimmons, Lorna, 1957- editor. 820.9'384'09031-dc23 ISBN-13: 9782503542317

© 2014, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2014/0095/192 ISBN: 978-2-503-54231-7 Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

Introduction Lori Anne Ferrell

Mother and State: Sidney’s Arcadian Mothers Anne-Marie Strohman

Writing against the Hegemonic Discourses of Tudor Historiography in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie Allyna E. Ward

A Cave of Despair and an Irish Mantle: Ireland in the Writings of Edmund Spenser and Elizabeth Cary Marion Wynne-Davies

Hobbes’s Hebraism and the Last Judgement in Leviathan Ryan Hackenbracht

‘An offering to her memory’: Healing, Motherhood, and Identity in the Manuscript Remains of Lady Ann Fanshawe Jayne Elisabeth Archer

England’s Empire in Europe Lisa Hopkins

An ‘ardent love of my countrey’: Travel Literature and National Identity in Early Modern England Anna Suranyi

Afterword Mary Polito

Index

1 9

35

59 85

117 145

165 193 205

Introduction Lori Anne Ferrell

O

n Good Friday, 1586, Mrs Margaret Clitherow was pressed to death after refusing to stand trial at the York assizes. The charge against her was that she had harboured illicit priests, allowing them to say Mass in her home. In so doing, and in declining to answer the charge, Clitherow defied the authority of the local officials who would have compelled her to worship in the Church of England alongside people she considered heretics. It was not for lack of courage that Clitherow refused to stand to the charges, nor because she was ashamed of her principles, but because to do so would endanger her children, who surely would have been tortured at the hands of a state bent on obtaining the evidence their mother withheld from the court. The once overt rebel was silent during the public ordeal of her trial; the pressing, in which she was stripped and then forced to lie under a door, upon which increasingly heavy rocks and stones were piled, never induced her to speak, and after fifteen minutes it silenced her altogether. This is a compelling and accurate version of a story. Clitherow’s was a narrative all too familiar to those who had studied the many Western annals chronicling the violent persecution of Christians, tales nearly sixteen hundred years in the telling, now made newly resonant in the half century after England’s conversion by statute to the Protestant faith. Margaret Clitherow’s passion was first modelled in New Testament accounts of Jesus’s arrest, interrogation, and execution by the Roman state. Her life, and manner of death, ensured she would join the great cloud of martyr-witnesses whose blood had always been the seed of the true church. The saintly ‘Pearl of York’ finally became ‘St. Margaret Clitherow’ Lori Anne Ferrell ([email protected]) is Professor of Early Modern History and Literature and Director of the Program in Early Modern Studies at Claremont Graduate University

2 Lori Anne Ferrell

nearly four hundred years later, canonized by the church whose authority she had worked to preserve in Elizabethan York.1 Here is another version. On 25 March 1586—after decades of substantial and often credible threats by Catholic agents against the kingdom of England and its queen—Margaret Clitherow, recusant wife of a conforming Protestant husband, holder of illicit popish masses in her home, and thus aider and abettor of York’s outlaw Catholic community, was subjected to peine forte et dure by due order of common law. She died in the city wherein she had sparked religious controversy, rebellion, and dissention. Clitherow’s flouting of her husband, her entertainment of ‘hedge priests’, her encouragement of York’s obstinate papists at a time of grave national emergency: these were the acts of a woman unwilling to submit to lawful authority in an age of public not private, involuntary not conscientious, religious confession. This was the story told at the York assizes, one ratified by parliament and convocation: that the monarch was the legitimate head of England’s now Protestant church, and thus had the god-given responsibility and authority to order her subjects’ religious faith. This ideology was entirely unremarkable in the political context of later sixteenth-century Europe. In England it formed the legislative backbone of a campaign to conform all Englishmen and -women to one order of worship in an age that refused to recognize the claims of individual conscience against the requirement to maintain a visible, unified ecclesia representing a visible, unified kingdom of souls.2 Catholic recusancy and Jesuit-inspired insurgency in the north of England had risen to crisis levels by the 1580s. Elizabeth’s Archbishops of York and ecclesiastical courts countered them with the usual tools of an early modern church and state: admonition, examination, fines, torture, execution. In their view, if licit religious causes made martyrs, Mrs Clitherow professed no such cause and thus was no martyr. She was a traitor. But one government’s impassioned martyr had always been another’s brazen criminal, a truth that was self-evident and could cut both ways in Tudor England. A scant three decades earlier, the government of Mary I placed public rhetors in outdoor pulpits to oversee and sermonize upon the burnings of Protestants; those priests preached texts inspired by First Corinthians, arguing that government-sanctioned execution in itself was no proof that those a gov1  This version of Margaret Clitherow’s story has been best and most recently told by Lake and Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow. 2  And this version, while a staple of much of the historiography of early modern England, is summed up nicely in Jones’ Faith by Statute.

Introduction

3

ernment reckoned to be religious heretics were in fact holy martyrs, and that even yielding up one’s body to be burnt, if charitatem non habet, signified nothing good nor true.3 Religious martyrs were reliably made in the England of Henry  VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I, and the significance of a martyr’s death transcended any particular occasion, moving beyond the scaffold or the flames to define the bounds of authority wielded by church and state in a confessionally unstable world. On display in the Clitherow case, then, was one woman’s claim to be the mistress of her own conscience, and at stake was just how far such a claim could go in order to justify an individual’s behaviour in the face of governmental condemnation. In 1586, then, this declaration of religious independence was not new; what distinguished Mrs Clitherow’s principled outlawry, instead, was its singular political context. For Margaret Clitherow waged her campaign in early modern England, where the exactions of Royal Supremacy had, by the end of the sixteenth century, turned enemies of the faith into enemies of the state. The ‘early modern era’ (a term coined, of course, by historians, not its occupants) was neither early nor modern, but both simultaneously: 1509–1660 are years best described in geological metaphor, wherein deeply buried habits of medieval life shifted and heaved like tectonic plates against nascent forces scholars now call modern. With its rough-and-ready print culture and wordbesotted milieu, England provides us with a singularly communicative laboratory in which scholars can assay the transmogrifying meanings of terms like ‘public’, ‘private’, ‘conscience’, ‘nation’, and ‘identity’. Margaret Clitherow represented the last old-fashioned trial of the medieval construction of the individual soul. The contested readings of her ordeal, however—the disagreement over whether she died for religion’s sake or for being a political rebel—point to significant changes: not only in the relationship of sacred and secular in this period but, related to that, in the very way early moderns were reconstructing the ideals behind identity formation. By the end of the sixteenth century, carried along in the forced march of religious reformation and counterreformation, England had begun to lay down the structures necessary to the formation of a modern state; among these, a thisworldly attitude that increasingly privileged the secular purview and political authority of the church. Add to this revolutionary developments in print, science, and travel, and we begin to perceive a pivotal moment in what we might 3 

For one vivid example, see Foxe’s account of the burnings of Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer in 1555, excerpted in Society and Religion in Early Modern England, pp. 34–35.

4 Lori Anne Ferrell

call the History of the Individual. Forced to consult their own souls in an age of religious transformation, confronted with an unprecedented array of new and newly available information, Englishmen and -women looked back with affection at beloved old beliefs while also participating in emergent trends. In this volume’s essays, we read not only of such Janus-faced politics, but also the shifting poetics of such self-identifications, although (as befits anything early modern) religion nearly always provides the essential backdrop or backstory. The authors and their editor have assumed the once novel concept of ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, and employ not only its related cultural-historicist methods, but also more recent theories of print culture, geography, travel writing, and reciprocal colonization. Gender theory and women’s history still obtain, but they come paired with other, newer, related perspectives: theories of books and their readers; studies of gender and monarchical authority. Science and medicine are paired with theology; the evidence provided by cultural artifacts facilitates close readings of texts. Considered as a whole, these essays treat early modern identity formation as increasingly based in the realization that public life and private lives could be at odds and that this dissonance, far from being sinful, was in fact remarkably generative. Several chapters in this book assay the complexities of early modern woman’s identity in public and private life as represented in literature. In ‘Mother and State: Sidney’s Arcadian Mothers’, Anne-Marie Strohman considers the power conferred on women through maternity. In both the Old Arcadia and the New, the mother figures occupy potentially subversive positions, yet their interface with the public realm is ultimately restricted. The author examines these potentially destabilizing maternal figures in the context of the issue of succession and Protestant reforms that increased woman’s authority within the household. Sidney provides us with a range of images of womanhood, whether the comic, and critically neglected, Miso, or the excessive Cecropia, drawn on Catherine de Medici. Each embodies passions differently; all face circumscription. Early modern history writing aimed at inspiring emulation, and in ‘Writing against the Hegemonic Discourses of Tudor Historiography in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie’, Allyna E. Ward has found a rich subject in this late sixteenth-century Englishwoman and author. Ward argues that Dowriche fashioned her epic account of recent French history, which concluded with a blistering indictment of Catherine de Medici, out of two powerful literary styles: the forensic, in works like A Mirror for Magistrates; and the providentialist, in John Foxe’s masterwork, Acts and Monuments. Writing in epic verse, generally considered a male literary stronghold, thus allowed Dowriche boldly to critique Elizabeth I’s management of her kingdom’s religious affairs.

Introduction

5

In ‘A Cave of Despair and an Irish Mantle: Ireland in the Writings of Edmund Spenser and Elizabeth Cary’, Marion Wynne-Davies examines the differences between Spenser’s and Cary’s responses to Ireland. Cary’s openness to otherness led her to try to help the Irish, even though her efforts transgressed the cultural norms of the era. Spenser, on the other hand, was condemnatory in his conceptualization of the Irish and upheld repressive colonialist practices. Yet, despite these obvious differences, Wynne-Davies perceives that the issues of gender, race, and faith are complex in the writings of both authors. In ‘Hobbes’s Hebraism and the Last Judgement in Leviathan’, Ryan Hackenbracht notes the curious inattention to eschatology in critical analyses of Hobbes’s work, commenting that twentieth-century assessments of the philosopher and his philosophy were mainly invested in presenting Hobbes as a ‘champion of modern secularism’. Hobbes, according to Hackenbracht, was in fact a materialist in his ontology and a thorough Hebraist in his historical perspective. In Leviathan he proposed a startlingly literal and annaliste reading of the Old Testament: a distinct model of national identity that both accepted and wrote ‘against’ the eschatological tendency of most literature of the Civil War and interregnum period. Christ was coming, Hobbes averred, but not yet. Infallible government was thus not to be had in this world; nonetheless, fallible beings had to be governed, and, even more important, discover their own identities, even when forged under submission to earthly government. In ‘“An offering to her memory”: Healing, Motherhood, and Identity in the Manuscript Remains of Lady Ann Fanshawe’, Jayne Elisabeth Archer considers a kind of medicinal script: the recipe, or ‘receipt’, books kept and exchanged between early modern women. (The significance of such books, Archer reminds us, begins with their singular name; receipt means recipe, but it also means recep­ tion, and thus stands for the process by which such books were handed down by mothers to their daughters.) ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Book of Receipts of Physickes Salves Waters Cordialls, Preserves and Cookery’, held at the Wellcome Institute in London, provides Archer with the opportunity to construct a ‘conversation’ between this understudied manuscript and Fanshawe’s much better known Memoirs, a standard for historians of early modern women that was modernized and published in 1979. Receipt books were, then, private documents—if by ‘private’ we mean, as Archer does, related to and structured around the domestic relationships of mothers and daughters. Because the traditional genre tended to be organized around public events, even early modern women’s memoirs were structured around occasions most closely aligned to early modern men’s concerns. But Fanshawe’s book of recipes and formulas offers something very different and

6 Lori Anne Ferrell

valuable: a privileged view into what Archer calls the ‘alterity of early modern […] women’s experiences’. It thus mediates Fanshawe’s better-known and less revealing biography, offering readers today a lens with which to spy the individual behind the life story. Finally, two essays touch directly on early modern English exploration, discovery, and geography, and the impact these burgeoning enterprises made on constructions of national and, inevitably, personal identity. In ‘England’s Empire in Europe’, Lisa Hopkins returns to the complex medieval history of AngloGallic relations, analysing several plays that treat the ‘shifting borderlands’ that limned England’s claims to territories on the French continent. Following the loss of Calais, the shift in focus towards Germany is represented in plays such as Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London. Hopkins suggests how the plays enable us to trace the changing outlooks of English ambitions in Europe, from bellicose aspirations of empire, to more practical tactics of alliance. In ‘An “ardent love of my countrey”: Travel Literature and National Identity in Early Modern England’, Anna Suranyi suggests that early modern English travellers recorded their encounters with others by, inevitably, reducing these strangers to cultural stereotype. But these stereotypes just as inevitably exposed England’s own cultural constructions of England and Englishness, thus ensuring that England’s national identity was, under the pressure of these encounters, ‘fundamentally reactive and unstable’. The case studies Suranyi examines— English assessments of a servile and barbaric Ireland and, on the other hand, of a powerful but morally corrupt Ottoman Empire as elaborated by the authors who travelled to these lands—portray two remarkable and artificially-construed extremes. Her conclusion, however, rejects the commonplace that such a method produced a corresponding extremity of response. Instead, Suranyi argues, the experience of other cultures tempered England’s own imperial desires, ultimately insuring public sentiment with a desire for social uniformity. In the end, the individual perceptions of cultural difference expressed in travel literature made an indelibly republican impact on national identity formation. Lastly, in her ‘Afterword’, Mary Polito considers the changing meanings of ‘identity’, from its first uses in debates about the concept of the Eucharist to recent critical exchanges. Throughout this book, then, we see that early modern England was a laboratory for the construction of identity. Innovations ushered in with religious reformation, the printing press, and scientific and ethnographic discovery made it possible for people to form new comparisons—or, perhaps better said, draw new distinctions—between the public and private lives, temperaments, and pursuits of themselves and others.

Introduction

7

Works Cited Primary Sources Foxe, John, ‘The Ordeal of Ridley and Latimer, 1555’, in Society and Religion in Early Modern England, ed. by David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 34–45

Secondary Studies Jones, Norman L., Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (Lon­ don: Royal Historical Society, 1982) Lake, Peter, and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyr­ dom, and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Continuum, 2011)

Mother and State: Sidney’s Arcadian Mothers Anne-Marie Strohman

I

n Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, motherhood is not solely biological, nor purely cultural: it is also political. The three main mothers in the text—Gynecia, the queen; Miso, a shepherd’s wife who is guardian to the princess, Pamela; and Cecropia, the widowed mother of the former heir to the Arcadian throne—all threaten the succession. Despite their social and economic differences, the three women share proximity to the royal children and thus have the potential to destabilize the established political order of Arcadia. In both versions of Sidney’s romance, the Old Arcadia and the New, Sidney explores the possibilities of maternal authority in the public realm, only to undercut its power through chance, providence, or justice. In the Old Arcadia, Gynecia’s undoing is itself undone by her husband’s kiss, and although Miso does suffer severe punishment for her negligent care of Princess Pamela, her public faults are ignored. The mothers wield more power to affect the succession in the New Arcadia—Miso has direct influence over both princesses, and Cecropia foments civil war—but the means of neutering their power are heightened as well: Miso is ridiculed, and Cecropia plunges to her death. In Sidney’s pastoral world, although mothers have the ability to impact the political world, their power is represented as legitimate to the extent that it supports the establishment.   * My thanks to Joseph L. Black, Lisa Celovsky, Kevin Petersen, and Emily Moberg Robinson for their insightful comments and assistance on drafts of this essay.

Anne-Marie Strohman ([email protected]) earned her PhD in the English Depart­ment at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She specializes in Renaissance literature.

10 Anne-Marie Strohman

In 1580, as Sidney was composing the Old Arcadia, issues of succession, the role of the monarch, and female authority were at the forefront of his political life. Queen Elizabeth was engaged in marriage negotiations with the Duke of Anjou, the son of Catherine de Medici, and Sidney cautioned her against the match in his open letter, ‘To Queen Elizabeth, Touching her Marriage’ (late 1579).1 He suggested that Elizabeth’s stable rule would be undone by marriage to a Catholic prince. Her people loved her, he argued, and did not wish change. He mentioned succession in the letter once, alluding to his own choice for her heir, though she had not yet declared one. (Parts of the text of Sidney’s letter actually appear in the Arcadia, when Philanax enjoins Duke Basilius not to abandon his political responsibilities by retiring to the country.)2 By 1584, when Sidney was composing his revision of Arcadia, it was apparent that Elizabeth would neither marry nor bear children. As Elizabeth aged, the succession question became increasingly fraught. The New Arcadia engages with this political reality in its increased focus on the potential destabilizing effect of maternal figures—the authoritative women in Renaissance culture. In line with Protestant reforms, mothers in early modern England increasingly occupied positions of authority within their own households. They supervised their children’s educations, girls throughout childhood, and boys until age seven.3 Mothers sometimes wrote deathbed instructions meant to be read immediately by their adult children, or later in life by their infants; as these mothers’ legacies attest, maternal influence could continue into their children’s adulthood.4 Upper class women supervised vast estates, including large numbers of tenants and workers.5 Moreover, widowhood often revealed the kind of authority that women had within their households: despite the fact that women 1 

Sidney, A Letter to Queen Elizabeth, ed. by Duncan-Jones and van Dorsten, pp. 46–57. For the date of composition, see Duncan-Jones’ introduction to the letter, pp. 33–43. 2  Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. by Robertson, pp. 7–9. For the New Arcadia, I use The New Arcadia, ed. by Skretkowicz. Further citations are given in the text, noted as OA and NA. For information on dates of composition, see the introductions to these editions. 3  Travitsky, ‘Child Murder’, p.  64; Crawford, ‘The Construction and Experience of Maternity’, p. 13. See also Travitsky, ‘The New Mother’, pp. 33–43. 4  This genre depends on the bodily authority of a mother who bears children, and the biblical and cultural authority which charges a mother to instruct her children to spiritual salvation. See Heller, ‘The Legacy and Rhetorics of Maternal Zeal’, pp. 603–04. See also Heller, The Mother’s Legacy, especially Chapter 1: ‘Education and the Early Modern Mother’, pp. 15–36, and Chapter 2: ‘Generating Maternal Authority’, pp. 37–62. 5  Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 303–13.

Mother and State: Sidney’s Arcadian Mothers

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were considered weak by nature and thus were legally incapacitated, many men ‘were willing to entrust widows with important responsibilities for the rearing of children and the management of their properties—the very tasks on which the family’s future depended’.6 Within Renaissance culture women had a certain amount of power, albeit limited, and their authority was tied to maternity.7 This maternal authority within the home becomes relevant politically in the family-state analogy, common through medieval and Renaissance political theory.8 The Renaissance household, with its ‘extended network of servants, distant relatives, foster-children, laborers, and other retainers […] was a pattern in miniature of the state’.9 While some argued that the hierarchy of the state was a model for the household, most perceived that the way a household functioned was the way the state should function. The patriarchal authority of the husband/father provided an example of appropriate neoplatonic hierarchy. Cultural conceptions of women as weak-minded yet desirous of power threatened the hierarchy; a husband’s job was to maintain order. Susan Dwyer Amussen argues that ‘the control of gender disorder [within the household] symbolically affirmed all social order’.10 Women have an odd position within the family-state analogy, as Karen Raber observes: the mother’s ‘presence is additive and occasionally confusing since she can function as both subordinate and superior (wife, but also parent; woman, but also in charge of male servants and others of lower rank in her home)’.11 Thus, the sanctioned authority of mothers produced anxiety when it entered the political context, as it necessarily did. As we shall see, Gynecia, the mother-queen, Miso, the guardian of the princesses, and Cecropia, the mother to a prince, straddle both sides of the family-state analogy. Sidney uses these women to explore the unsettling political implications of motherhood, primarily through their impact on the succession. Sidney was writing Arcadia when the nation’s focus increasingly turned to motherhood and succession. Because of Elizabeth’s refusal to marry or to name an heir, England stood in a dangerous political position in relation to Europe, 6 

Diefendorf, ‘Family Culture’, p. 679. Miller, ‘Mothering Others’, p. 14. 8  Jordan traces the origins of the family-state analogy to Aristotle in ‘The Household and the State’, pp. 308–26. See also Schochet’s Patriarchalism in Political Thought, especially Chapter 3: ‘Patriarchalism in Tudor Political Thought’, pp. 37–53. 9  Raber, ‘Murderous Mothers’, p. 301. 10  Amussen, An Ordered Society, p. 182. 11  Raber, ‘Murderous Mothers’, p. 303. 7 

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and many feared the possibility of domestic unrest if pretenders began to claim the throne.12 From the first year of Elizabeth’s reign, Parliament made formal requests that Elizabeth marry and bear children to ensure the continuation of the Tudor dynasty. Elizabeth resisted Parliament’s pressure, claiming that she was married to her country and was the ‘mother of England’.13 However, the lack of an heir prompted much political positioning, especially as the Queen became older. Elizabeth entertained many suitors over the years, playing up possible alliances, and using the courtships to support her international policy. Ultimately, all of the suits were for naught. However, the second round of negotiations with the Duke of Anjou, which took place while Sidney was working on the Old Arcadia, particularly reminded Elizabethan courtiers and subjects of their precarious place in Europe: a Protestant island nation in opposition to Catholic France and Catholic Spain. Moreover, compounding the threats from the continent were challenges closer to home. Mary, Queen of Scots, actively pursued the regency, requesting regularly that Elizabeth formally acknowledge her claim to the throne and participating in plots to usurp it.14 The Arcadia must be placed in this context: Elizabeth’s unsettled succession and her anomalous female rule certainly influenced Sidney’s writing. Sidney likely did not expect that Elizabeth herself would read Arcadia, but the work still served a political purpose. As many as fourteen copies of the Old Arcadia were made, ten of which are extant, indicating that the text had some degree of circulation. In addition, notes and letters by Sidney’s close friends and their intimates show that a number of people were familiar with Sidney’s tale.15 The Old Arcadia clearly was a semi-private document, but because Sidney’s circle included counsellors and the politically interested, it had political import. He almost certainly expected the New Arcadia to have a wider circulation, mak12 

Worden, ‘Delightful Teaching’, p. 77. Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. by Marcus et al. See, for example, ‘Queen Elizabeth’s First Speech Before Parliament, February 10, 1559’, version 2, an English translation of William Camden’s printed Latin translation (1615), p.  59; and ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Answer to the Commons’ Petition that She Marry, January 28, 1563’, p. 72. 14  Though Elizabeth resisted authorizing severe punishment, keeping the Queen of Scots under house arrest for many years, Mary was finally executed in 1587. For Cecropia as Mary, Queen of Scots, see Werth, ‘The Reformation of Romance’, pp. 49–50, especially fn. 27, and Worden, The Sound of Virtue, pp. 172–83; for Cecropia as Catherine de Medici, see Chamberlain, ‘The Demonization of Sidney’s Cecropia’, pp. 5–6. 15  Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, pp. 300–03, and 354; and Robertson, ‘Introduction’ to The Old Arcadia, ed. by Robertson, p. xl. 13 

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13

ing his political exploration a part of the larger culture.16 By the time Sidney was revising his manuscript into the New Arcadia, the urgency of his ‘Letter to Queen Elizabeth’, in which he had cautioned her against a Catholic succession, had evaporated. However, his revision emphasizes the importance of the role of government and the relationship between a government, specifically the monarch, and his or her people.17 The political message within Arcadia is often located in the tale of Basilius, the king who throws his country into disarray by his seeming abdication of the throne. For instance, in The Sound of Virtue, Blair Worden sees Basilius’s story as an admonition to Elizabeth not to relinquish her responsibilities to her Protestant allies at home and abroad by marrying the Catholic Anjou.18 Deborah Shuger cautions, however, that the analogy between Basilius and Elizabeth can only go so far, and suggests looking to the central romance for political commentary.19 Similarly, Katherine Duncan-Jones argues, ‘Basilius is not precisely an Elizabeth-figure, any more than Arcadia is precisely England’.20 Brian Lockey argues that Euarchus, a neighbouring king who acts as judge after Basilius’s ‘death’, also corresponds to Elizabeth, in light of Sidney’s views on the necessity for England’s charitable intervention in the Netherlands.21 In my view, however, one can look to the mothers in the text as another viable mirror for Elizabeth. These women pose a more critical threat to the established political order than Basilius and illuminate Sidney’s concerns about the monarch and her people. In the Old Arcadia, Gynecia’s and Miso’s political threats surface when their internal passions spill over into family and public life. In the revision, however, Sidney matches his emphasis on good government with an increase in both accidental and purposeful threats to the succession by Gynecia, Miso, and Cecropia. Reading the mothers in Arcadia not only helps us under16 

Woudhuysen suggests that the calligraphic transcript made may have been intended as a present to the Queen or a family member (Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, pp. 354–55). For more on Sidney’s revision, see Schneider, Sidney’s (Re)Writing of the ‘Arcadia’. 17  The primary stated project is an entertainment for his sister Mary and her friends, but Hackett suggests, ‘we may take it that there is a degree of rhetorical exaggeration’ (Women and Romance Fiction, pp. 102, 104). Duncan-Jones claims that ‘Writing for lively young women, often away from Court, liberated Sidney from all sorts of constraints which would have operated had he chosen to write fiction for the Queen, or Cecil, or Walsingham’ (Sir Philip Sidney, p. 18). 18  Worden, The Sound of Virtue, pp. 3–4, 131–33, and 351–54. 19  Shuger, ‘Castigating Livy’, p. 536, fn. 37. 20  Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, p. 177. 21  Lockey, Law and Empire, pp. 47–79.

14 Anne-Marie Strohman

stand the relationship between individual, family, and state within the story itself, but also expands our notions of maternal identity beyond the biological and familial to include a mother’s interaction with the state—with all its potential for destabilization and danger. Both versions of the Arcadia begin with the same basic plot structure, which follows romance conventions, and in which mothers at first seem to be incidental. Arcadia is troubled. In an attempt to subvert the dire predictions of an oracle, Duke Basilius has moved his wife Gynecia, and his two daughters, Philoclea and Pamela, into the country, leaving Philanax, his second-in-command, to rule in his stead. Basilius places Pamela in the care of Dametas the shepherd and his wife Miso, and encloses Gynecia and Philoclea in a second lodge under his own care. Meanwhile, Pyrocles and Musidorus, young Greek princes, wander into Arcadia on their voyages. Pyrocles sees Philoclea and is overtaken by love. In order to have easy access to Philoclea, Pyrocles disguises himself as an Amazon princess and ingratiates himself into the family. At the same time, Basilius becomes infatuated with the ‘Amazon’ (called Cleophila in the Old Arcadia and Zelmane in the New Arcadia), as does Gynecia, who realizes that ‘she’ is a man in disguise. Soon after, Musidorus falls in love with Pamela and disguises himself as a shepherd to be near her. Although the plot ostensibly centres on the young lovers, the wider tension arises as their love is thwarted repeatedly, often by the mothers. Gynecia’s lust for Pyrocles disrupts both her family life and the political realm. In the Old Arcadia, Miso’s failure to attend to Pamela results in her attempted elopement with and assault by Musidorus. In the New Arcadia, Miso regularly interrupts the couples, and tries to drive Pamela and Philoclea away from love and marriage with her tales. Cecropia, the most politically effective mother, endeavours to place her son on the throne by engineering a civil war and by attempting to force one of the princesses to marry him. The mothers provide many of the obstacles that prevent the lovers from uniting, but more importantly, they obstruct the succession, focusing the reader’s attention on Sidney’s exploration of good government. I propose to analyse the Old and New Arcadias as two intertwined texts— the Old Arcadia stands on its own, and the New Arcadia, though it stops midsentence in Book III, provides an expansion of ideas and shift of focus in the narrative. In particular, the changes in Miso’s character and the introduction of Cecropia both affect the reading of Gynecia, whose character can be understood in comparison to the other two mothers. Sidney’s revision emphasizes the political power women have, and their obligation to use this power to support rather than disrupt the established order. In other words, maternal

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identity within Arcadia is not determined solely by biological change or constructed solely within the household; maternal identity also is established in relation to the state. Before Sidney introduces the three mothers in the New Arcadia, he provides an idealized image of motherhood that foregrounds the political aspect of maternal identity in Arcadia. As Musidorus (calling himself Palladius) recovers from a shipwreck, he tours his host Kalander’s garden and sees a statue of Venus with her son: ‘At her breast she had her babe Aeneas who seemed, having begun to suck, to leave that to look upon her fair eyes which smiled at the babe’s folly, the mean while the breast running’ (NA, 14). Mother Venus is making a bountiful offering of nurture and sustenance to her child: her milk literally is overflowing. This ‘good’ mother nurses her baby—perhaps the most physical practice of good motherhood.22 Her response to Aeneas neglecting that bounty is one of amusement, rather than anger or frustration. She serves as a graphic contrast to the living, complicated, and dangerous mothers of Arcadia, though Venus too reveals Sidney’s political emphasis. Venus is not cradling Cupid, the god of love, which would have signalled the primacy of romance within the text. Instead, she nurses Aeneas, the ancestor of the founder of Britain. Born of Venus and the mortal Anchises, Aeneas was the grandfather of Brutus, who sailed to the British Isles to found the New Troy, which later became London.23 The Roman ancestry of the British realm was commonly rehearsed in chronicles to signal a cultural equality with Rome.24 Whereas Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, makes the links explicit through invented genealogy—Arthur’s and Guyon’s histories in Book II, canto x, and Merlin’s account of the generations from Britomart to Elizabeth in Book III, canto iii—Sidney uses the figure of Aeneas to embody the dynastic ideal. The Venus statue, then, presents the ideal mother as a dynastic mother, and focuses the text on succession rather than on amorous love. Unlike Shakespeare’s mother-lover in Venus and Adonis, or Spenser’s sexualized Venus ‘joying’ Adonis on the mount in the Garden of Adonis, here Venus does not invoke primarily erotic notions. She is more akin to Venus Urania, the heavenly Venus referenced in the opening section of the New Arcadia, where 22 

For a comprehensive overview of breastfeeding in the Renaissance, see Fildes, Breasts, Bottles and Babies, Chapters 2–7, pp. 81–210. 23  The story of Brutus as a ‘brave and generous leader and worthy ancestor’ was developed by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Brittaniae (written 1123–36). See Summerfield, ‘Filling the Gap’, pp. 85–102. 24  Eckhardt, ‘The Presence of Rome in the Middle English Chronicles’, p. 196.

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the shepherds Strephon and Claius long for the shepherdess Urania.25 In her role as Venus genetrix in specific relation to Aeneas, the statue of Venus symbolizes maternal love. However, as Catherine Belsey argues, in early modern texts, ‘Love, perceived as civilizing in its effects, is also understood to be the source of all our woe’.26 The Venus of Kalander’s garden fulfils the first phrase of Belsey’s statement: maternal, dynastic love is a stabilizing force in society. The woe Belsey describes comes to the fore in the narratives of Gynecia, Miso, and Cecropia. All of Arcadia’s mothers, including Venus, play a role in political life. For Gynecia, Miso, and Cecropia, however, the power they have surfaces when they act in contradiction to the established order of government. They stand in sharp contrast to Venus, the idealized image of the loving, caring heir-bearer. In the Old Arcadia, Gynecia and Miso both exhibit qualities dangerous to order within the family, especially the ruling family. The New Arcadia, with its increased emphasis on government, places all three women in direct opposition to the succession. Their power is greatly intensified, and Sidney characterizes all of the mothers, whether beautiful, ugly, or comic, as threatening. Sidney’s exploration of the anxiety about maternal authority extends beyond female reproductive capacities and points to mothers’ potential to disrupt the very succession they are meant to perpetuate. In order to examine the implications of these political mothers for Sidney’s audience and for Elizabeth, we must first examine the ways these mothers threaten the succession, and how Sidney undercuts their political power through justice and providence. Gynecia’s threat to the succession is caused by her lust for the disguised Pyrocles, and it manifests in two ways: fracture within her family and a betrayal of her people. Gynecia attempts to keep her feelings secret, struggling internally between desire and duty but refraining from any shameful action. However, her hidden passion still affects her family and the state. She neglects one daughter—‘both the duke and the duchess had forgotten [Pamela], so were all their thoughts plunged in one place’ (OA, 50)—and becomes hateful towards the other—she falls ‘into a jealous envy against […] Philoclea, because she found Cleophila showed such extraordinary dutiful favour unto her’ (OA, 49). Later 25 

Belsey makes the connection between Venus’s maternal role and the heavenly incarnations: ‘This benign maternal, and indeed matronly, role corresponds to one of [Venus’s] traditional images: the planetary Venus was especially associated with generation and nurture’ (‘The Myth of Venus’, p. 188). For treatments of the New Arcadia’s Urania and her connection to Venus Urania, see Grossberg, ‘Politics and Shifting Desire’, pp. 63–83; and Turner, ‘The Disfigured Face of Nature’, pp. 116–20. 26  Belsey, ‘The Myth of Venus’, p. 179.

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in the text Gynecia rages: ‘No, no, it is Philoclea his heart is set upon (if he be a he); it is my daughter which I have borne to supplant me. But if it be so, the life I have given thee, ungrateful Philoclea, I will sooner with these hands bereave thee of than my birth shall glory she hath bereaved me of my desires’ (OA, 92; NA, 120). Like Medea, who murders her children to exact revenge on her unfaithful husband, Gynecia contemplates filicide, an act that would deprive the kingdom of an heir. Though Gynecia does not actually kill her daughter, she can be compared to the murderous mothers of Renaissance drama, who, as Betty S. Travitsky argues, ‘manifest the fear that women are by nature disordered, and when given power through motherhood are liable to lapse into extreme evil, uncontrollable passion, and monstrous acts’.27 Gynecia differs from many of these mothers not only in her restraint, but because her sympathy is based on her history of virtue. She is described as ‘so excellent a wife’ (NA, 17), who had a ‘well governed youth’ (OA, 4), ‘of more princely virtues than her husband, [and] of most unspotted chastity’ (NA, 16). In her own estimation, ‘she was witness of a long-exercised virtue, which made this vice the fuller of deformity’ (OA, 91). As Gynecia succumbs to jealousy and lust she threatens not only the stability of her family, but also the stability of the kingdom. Gynecia’s moral struggles remain hidden until she poisons Basilius in a bedtrick gone wrong; the consequences of her desires then affect her relationship with her people. Although she poisons Basilius accidentally—he takes and consumes what she believes is a love potion, even though she begs him not to— she sees Basilius’s death, and her subsequent punishment, as the product of her shameful passion. She confesses to Basilius’s murder after the shepherds find her, claiming, ‘It is I, faithful Arcadians, that have spoiled this country of their protector. I, none but I, was the minister of his unnatural end […]. You need not fear a woman, reverence your lord’s murderer, nor have pity of her who hath not pity of herself ’ (OA, 282). The shepherds are surprised at Gynecia’s confession because they see her as beautiful and virtuous: her people ‘had always carried a singular love for her courteous liberalities and other wise and virtuous parts which had filled all that people with affection and admiration’ (OA, 281). The long-standing public image of an honourable Gynecia makes the shepherds more sorrowful, as they lament not only the loss of their king, but also the moral loss of their queen. Furthermore, Gynecia and the people of Arcadia explicitly restate the family-state analogy as they mourn Basilius, the ‘good, just, merciful, the father of the people, the life of his country’ (OA, 283). By extension, Gynecia is the mother of Arcadia. Thus her private break with 27 

Raber, ‘Murderous Mothers’, p. 300, summarizes Travitsky, ‘Child Murder’, pp. 63–84.

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her husband and daughters transcends the family and becomes a public break between a ruler/mother and her people. The destroyed relationships between Gynecia and her daughters, and between the queen and her people, become explicit at her trial. The narrator foregrounds the public perception of Gynecia, both the former admiration of her subjects and their disillusionment. The people of Arcadia felt ‘great […] compassion […] to see their princess’s estate and beauty so deformed by fortune and her own desert, whom they had ever found a lady most worthy of all honour’ (OA, 376). Gynecia’s confession acknowledges her wrongs towards her people, her husband, and her children: ‘It was I, and none but I, […] that have made all this people orphans of their royal father. I am the subject that have killed my prince. I am the wife that have murdered my husband. I am a degenerate woman, an undoer of this country, a shame of my children’ (OA, 382). In describing herself as subject, wife, woman/mother, and murderer, Gynecia blends personal, familial, and public relationships, and acknowledges the utter brokenness of them all. However, in her confession, she no longer claims her role as queen, as mother to her people. (In this way, her name is appropriate— she establishes all the relationships she has as a woman, and neglects the one she has as queen.)28 Sidney establishes Gynecia’s maternal identity in a conflicted space between virtue and vice, in the context of household and state. Within the Arcadia, the disruption of Gynecia’s family relationships presages the disruption that occurs with her people, a situation that foregrounds her role in the state and emphasizes the public consequences of her private vice. Gynecia’s broken relationship with her people damages the body politic. In accidentally killing Basilius, she has deprived the body of its head, creating a pastoral ‘headless Rome’.29 Her initial punishment appears to make restitution for her actions; Euarchus sentences Gynecia to be buried alive in Basilius’s tomb so that ‘death might redress their disjoined conjunction of marriage’ (OA, 383). From a public perspective, this punishment restores her to Basilius by matching her demise with his, and justly requires her life for his life. However, Euarchus’s ruling is based on Gynecia’s confession, not an accurate description of the crime. Arthur Kinney argues that in ‘tak[ing] apparent truths […] as facts’ Euarchus ‘is neither wise nor just’.30 Whether or not Gynecia’s punishment is just, it does mitigate her political power. 28 

Gynecia’s name means ‘woman’, an unequal pairing with Basilius whose name means ‘king’. Grossberg, ‘Politics and Shifting Desire’, p. 26. 29  Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, 1.1.186. 30  Kinney, ‘Puritans versus Royalists’, p. 52. For more on justice in Arcadia, see Lockey, Law

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Sidney does not leave Gynecia to Euarchus’s justice, however. By the end of the tale Gynecia is restored fully to her previous position of honour, emphasizing that maternal authority should be directed towards preserving the established order and honouring the succession. Her restoration to both family and state begins with Basilius’s miraculous resurrection (the potion only induced deep sleep) and is completed through her husband’s testimony. Basilius immediately ‘recount[s] before all the people the excellent virtue was in her, which she had not only maintained all her life most unspotted but now was content so miserably to die to follow her husband’ (OA, 416). Even Gynecia’s acceptance of an unjust punishment becomes a virtue and a testament to her supposed faithfulness. Basilius ‘publicly desired her pardon for those errors he had committed’ and ‘left her to receive the most honourable fame of any princess throughout the world, all men thinking (saving only Pyrocles and Philoclea who never bewrayed her) that she was the perfect mirror of all wifely love’ (OA, 416). The text specifies that she does not deserve this fame, but that her exemplary life afterward moves towards justifying it. Her husband’s words and kiss restore her to her wifely role, which she assumes ‘observing all duty and faith’ (OA, 416). This restoration to her people (and Philoclea’s silence about her mother’s untoward desire) signals a restoration with her daughters as well. Instead of a passionate reunification scene where her daughters are reincorporated into their family of origin, they are properly married to the Greek princes, and they bear children—Pamela a daughter by Musidorus, and Philoclea a son by Pyrocles. This restoration of order elides Gynecia’s private failings, reinstating her to her roles as duchess, wife, and mother. From a dynastic perspective, the situation in Arcadia is not simply restored to its former state; it is improved. The succession has been righted—Pamela and Musidorus can rule, and their child will inherit the throne. All of the potential harm Gynecia could have caused has been mitigated by a kiss. Gynecia’s maternal authority is redirected from threatening the political hierarchy to supporting it. The ending is quite a celebration, but the joyous occasion does not fully cover up Gynecia’s dishonour, nor our readerly knowledge of her internal struggles and her potential to function in a way that compromises the right order of family and state. In fact, Katherine DuncanJones considers Gynecia’s restoration a sort of punishment in itself: ‘with the revival of Basilius, Gynecia has to accept the sentence imposed on innumerand Empire; Rees, ‘Justice, Mercy, and a Shipwreck in Arcadia’, pp. 75–82; and Worden, The Sound of Virtue, pp. 181–82.

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able real-life women in the early modern period: to remain married to a foolish elderly man for the rest of his natural life, presenting the world with the misleading impression “that she was the perfect mirror of wifely love”’.31 Gynecia’s ‘end’ here points to her performance of her role of the virtuous queen, faithful and dutiful in support of the dynastic order. This is a performance that Elizabeth would do well to imitate. In his depiction of Gynecia, Sidney allows for a difference between appearance and reality—she was ‘the perfect mirror’, containing the image of perfection, but not embodying it. He suggests that Elizabeth, too, may have had private passions that diverge from her public image. Moreover, she should maintain the public image, her body politic, even if it meant the overruling of her body natural.32 Gynecia and Miso are in many ways opposites: one is queen, the other a shepherd’s wife; one is beautiful, the other a hag; one full of pathos, the other set up as comic relief. Yet despite their differences in person, status, and character, these two mothers both have the power to affect the succession—Gynecia through intemperate passion for a young prince, and Miso through uncontrolled jealousy in the Old Arcadia, and through misplaced watchfulness and tale telling in the New. Each woman exhibits a characteristic that fuelled contemporary cultural anxieties about women—lust and jealousy were considered particularly feminine weaknesses—and each woman undermines public life as well as the life of her family. While initially Miso seems merely a foil to Gynecia, she actually reinforces Sidney’s articulation of maternal identity as politically effective—and potentially dangerous. Miso is the comic opposite to Gynecia, the shrewish scold to the beautiful and (seemingly) virtuous queen. The narrator uses a droll tone in introducing Dametas’s wife: ‘yet so handsome a beldam that she was counted a witch only for her face and her splay foot’ (OA, 30). She has a ‘hollow rotten voice’ (OA, 33) and ‘a wretched body and a froward mind’ (OA, 30); she is ‘unfit company for so excellent a creature [as Pamela], but to exercise her patience and to serve for a foil to her perfections’ (OA, 416). Moreover, she is clownish in her lack of self-awareness and in her propensity to believe what is untrue. In the Old Arcadia, Sidney pairs Miso’s unattractive visage with a character prone to suspicion, one that can be stoked into uncontrollable jealousy. He thus articulates the cultural fear that women may become overly passionate and 31 

Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, p. 185. On the queen’s two bodies, see Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, esp. pp. 9–23 and pp. 496–506, and Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies. For a more recent appraisal, see Norbrook, ‘The Emperor’s New Body?’, pp. 329–57. 32 

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disrupt the family and the community.33 When Musidorus, disguised as the shepherd Dorus, plots a way to escape with Pamela, he considers Miso’s weaknesses and hones in on her ‘cursed mischievous heart’ which he finds ‘most apt to be tickled with jealousy, as whose rotten brain could think well of nobody’ (OA, 186). Her suspicious nature is akin to Gynecia’s generalized desire, which only becomes dangerous when it turns into lust for her daughter’s lover and leads to the betrayal of her husband. Similarly, Miso’s character flaw begins to affect the public realm only when it turns from something felt to something performed. It requires little effort for Musidorus, disguised as the shepherd Dorus, to convince Miso that Dametas is cheating on her with the fictional Charita, a ploy he uses to prompt Miso to leave him alone with Pamela. Miso’s latent mistrust of Dametas turns to jealousy, envy, anger, and rage. She is overcome by her emotions: ‘her jealousy [swelled] the more with the poison of envy […][,] her hollow eyes yielded such wretched looks as one might well think Pluto at that time might have had her soul very good cheap’, and she ‘fl[ew] about the house, borne up with the wings of anger’ (OA, 192). Miso’s suspicious nature and susceptibility to lies then lead to her public display at Manitea, a spectacle that both humiliates her husband and gives Pamela the opportunity to run away with Dorus. Miso rides through Manitea’s streets, gathering a crowd to hunt for her wayward husband and ‘encouraging them with all the shameful blazings of his demeanour’ (OA, 269). Consumed with ‘devilish disdain and hateful jealousy’, Miso is incapable of imagining her husband to be innocent (OA, 269). When she finally finds her husband, she publicly berates him and beats him with a cudgel in front of the crowd. What begins as an internal propensity for mistrust—‘her heart being apt to receive and nourish a bitter thought’—poisons her relationships with her daughter (Miso actually mistakes Mopsa for the invented Charita) and her husband, whom she humiliates in the town square (OA, 269). This humiliation up-ends the right relationship between husband and wife; the private vices of women can have public consequences. Furthermore, although the larger ramifications of her jealousy seem quite accidental, the significance of Miso’s actions is not only public, but political. Miso’s jealous distraction, coupled with Dametas’s gullibility, allows Pamela, the heir to the throne, to run away with Dorus. Just as Gynecia’s consuming passion results in the ‘death’ of the Duke, Miso’s consuming jealousy results in the disappearance of the heir. Along with providing comic relief, Miso repeats 33 

For a contemporaneous example of this cultural fear, see Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, pp. 179–83.

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the pattern of Gynecia’s behaviour and its consequences: in Sidney’s Arcadian world, even a shepherd’s wife, exhibiting stereotypically feminine ‘weakness’, can disrupt the right order. In the end, Sidney gives Miso little real impact on the state, undercutting her inadvertent power when Pamela is found safe and undefiled by the amorous Dorus. Miso does not go unpunished, however. She and her family suffer greatly for their errors: the three are ‘fettered up in as many chains and clogs as they could bear, and every third hour […] cruelly whipped’ (OA, 288). Just as Euarchus’s judgement against Gynecia is harsh, substituting full justice for equity, his judgement against Miso and her family gives no consideration of the fact that Pamela was privy to the plot and has returned. In his discussion of Euarchus’s rulings, David Norbrook argues that Sidney ‘clearly expects his readers to feel the injustice of treating noble and magnanimous princes in the same way as everyone else’.34 However, Miso’s sentence is also surely much more than she deserves. This extreme punishment eviscerates all of Miso’s authority by subjecting her to unending torture. In contrast to Gynecia’s restoration to her powerful role, Miso is deprived of any autonomy. Though few critics mention Miso,35 especially in terms of Sidney’s revision, her character undergoes significant transformation from the Old Arcadia to the New. By shifting the focus onto Miso’s duties as guardian of the princesses, Sidney emphasizes her potential impact on politics, just as he does with the other primary mothers in the New Arcadia. In his revision, the jealous scold becomes an inept guardian and old wife, whose actions lead to a more significant disruption of the succession. She exhibits characteristics of caregivers that early modern society found suspicious—tale telling and over-attentiveness, attempts to dissuade her wards from necessary rites of passage, inattention to guarding moral virtue, and lack of control over her charges (Pamela is still kidnapped on her watch in the New Arcadia).36 Gynecia instructs Miso to keep 34 

Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, p. 91. Lockey reads Euarchus’s judgements as necessary to a program of charitable intervention, one that favours the justice of the nation over personal interests (Law and Empire, p. 77). 35  Roberts does not mention Miso in her book-length study of Sidney’s women, Fair Ladies. Worden mentions her once in passing (The Sound of Virtue, p. 211). Hackett discusses Miso’s tale briefly (Women and Romance Fiction, pp. 112–13), as does Eckerle (‘Urania’s Example’, pp. 27–28). Kinney considers her tale at length (‘On the Margins of Romance’, pp. 143–47). 36  On caregivers, see Miller, ‘Mothering Others’, pp. 1–8; on older women, including Gynecia and Cecropia but not Miso, see Shaw, ‘Ale Wives’; on old wives’ tales see Lamb, ‘Introduction’, Oral Traditions and Gender, pp. xvii–xviii, and Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, pp. 173–212.

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a constant eye on both daughters, ‘and particularly not to let Zelmane and Philoclea have any private conference—but that she should be present to hear what passed’ (NA, 157). Miso appears to take her commands very seriously, and instead of remaining an observer, she wields her power and interrupts the couple as they sit in the lodge telling stories. Her hovering frustrates Zelmane and Philoclea, however, as she obstructs (what turns out to be) a good match, both politically and personally. Justifying her presumption, Miso says, ‘I promise you, as long as I have the government, I will first have my tale—and then my Lady Pamela, my Lady Zelmane, and my daughter Mopsa […] may draw cuts […]. For I tell you, and this may be suffered, when you are married you will have first and last word of your husbands’ (NA, 210). Miso takes her authority from her position as wife and mother, ruling over her child and charges, and also demands that she be able to take a position of authority that is lost when she is in the presence of her husband. And although Miso grounds her own authority in the maternal, her interruptions, in fact, are a misuse of authority. In contrast to the Old Arcadia, where she humiliates her husband before crowds, the New Arcadia’s Miso speaks to only four people: Pamela, Philoclea, Pyrocles/Zelmane, and her own daughter Mopsa. However, her influence on the political realm is greater because of who her audience is. Pamela’s disappearance in the Old Arcadia is a serious consequence with respect to Miso’s folly, of course, and this is reproduced in the New Arcadia when Cecropia kidnaps Pamela, Philoclea, and Zelmane. But the lost are often found (especially in romances). More serious is Miso’s tale-telling attempt to convince the princesses to resist love and marriage, which in turn has grave implications for Arcadia’s dynastic line. The tale is, as old wives’ tales were thought to be, ‘at best trivial and erroneous and at worst dangerous and corrupting’.37 In redeeming the old wife, successful storytellers, in Julie Eckerle’s view, ‘complete their tales against the odds, not only gaining the respect of their auditors but, in best-case scenarios, actually achieving the persuasive goal of their tales as well’.38 Thus we can assume that Miso means her subversive tale to be instructive. Miso’s narrative is divided into three stages: an account of the authority of her tale, the story of how she first heard the story, and the story itself. Her claims for authority are hearsay and unsubstantiated: ‘I will tell you now what a good old woman told me, what an old wise man told her, what a great learned clerk told him, and gave it him in writing; and here I have it in my prayer-book’ (NA, 210). 37  38 

Fox, Oral and Literature Culture, p. 147. Eckerle, ‘Urania’s Example’, p. 25.

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She cites an educated male as her end source, but because she has no way to test his authority, the tale itself becomes suspect. The next part of her tale continues to discredit her sources. The ‘good old woman’ shows Miso what love is—‘a foul fiend’ painted in the corner: he had a pair of horns like a bull, his feet cloven, as many eyes upon his body as my grey mare hath dapples, and for all the world so placed. This monster sat like a hangman upon a pair of gallows. In his right hand he was painted holding a crown of laurel, in his left hand a purse of money; and out of his mouth hung a lace, of two fair pictures of a man and a woman; and such a countenance he showed, as if he would persuade folks by those allurements to come thither and be hanged. (NA, 211)

This perversion of the Cupid figure reveals the woman’s (and thus Miso’s) misinterpretation of his lineage. The woman mistakenly credits Cupid’s parentage to Io and Argus, an error first introduced in Arcadia by Dicus in the First Eclogues (OA, 65, ll. 21–24). The woman warns Miso not to love any of the young men who are pursuing her, but her misunderstanding discredits her authority. Miso says the tale is confirmed in a book that she received from the old woman who had received it from an old painter who had received it from a ballad printer. Miso seems to believe that the written word and the book making give the tale itself credibility. Helen Hackett points out, ‘Miso’s story is a stereotypical old wives’ tale, digressive, inconsequential, and embroidered by oral tradition’.39 Miso herself acts as the old wife, passing along her misinformation to the next generation, and discouraging marriage for the very women who most require a good match: the heirs to the throne. She has turned into the old woman who first counselled her, and the consequences of her tale are potentially disastrous. As he does in the Old Arcadia, however, Sidney mitigates Miso’s threat. Miso’s old wives’ tale, if taken seriously, could sour the princesses on love and marriage, bringing a halt to Basilius’s dynasty. However, her audience’s immediate reaction dispels any notion that Miso’s dangerous argument can persuade the young princesses: they laugh. According to Sidney’s own assessment in his Defence of Poetry, ‘laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Delight hath a joy in it […]. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling’.40 In a similar consideration of joy versus laughter, French physician Laurent Joubert asserts in his Traitré du Ris (1560), ‘all that is laugh39  40 

Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, p. 112. Sidney, The Defence of Poetry, ed. by Duncan-Jones and van Dorsten, p. 115.

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able is found in actions or in words, and is something ugly or improper, yet unworthy of pity or compassion’.41 Sidney prepares the reader for this kind of derisive laughter by describing the earnest Miso as ridiculous: ‘having threatening not only in her ferret-eyes, but, while she spake, her nose seeming to threaten her chin, and her shaking limbs to threaten one another’ (NA, 210). During her recitation Sidney emphasizes her uneducated speech and overly emotional reactions; she interrupts her own tale to exclaim on the loss of the ‘good old woman’ who warned her: ‘(Oh the good wold woman! Well may the bones rest of the good wold woman!)’ (NA, 211). Sidney’s language casts Miso as risible, and he indicates how the reader should respond to her by the princesses’ responses—they laugh and ‘make sport at the description and story of Cupid’ (NA, 213). Unlike Bakhtin’s ambiguous festival laughter, the laughter here reveals ‘indignation and scorn’ and ‘also reveals a sense of righteousness and superiority on the part of him who laughs’.42 Instead of upending hierarchies, as festival laughter does, the princesses’ laughter reinscribes hierarchies, emphasizing the class differences between themselves and their guardian. Miso’s lack of schooling coupled with her desire to impart wisdom to her charges is a destabilizing combination. And even though the ladies do not absorb her lesson (presumably because of their own schooling), Miso’s attempts to edify her charges in fact threaten to corrupt them. This silly tale about Cupid is hardly dangerous—as Eckerle concludes, ‘such narrative efforts [as Miso’s] would of course draw scorn in aristocratic and high-literary circles’—and Sidney may be making a slant justification for his writing of romances: his own silly tales, based on the authority of no one, but written down by an educated man, will hardly be as corrupting as some might propose.43 His educated readers, his sister included, will be inclined to laugh at his fantastic tales of love and adventure. But just as Sidney is clearly doing something more with Arcadia by exploring the nature of good government in a pastoral romance, Clare Kinney finds that Miso’s story acts as a commentary on the narrative events surrounding it.44 His depiction of Miso here is shaped by common fears about women 41 

Joubert, Traitré du Ris, I.1.19, quoted in Hendrix, ‘Spenser’s Venus and the Poetics of Mirth’, p. 120. 42  Hendrix, ‘Spenser’s Venus and the Poetics of Mirth’, p. 122. On festival laughter see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 10–12. 43  Eckerle, ‘Urania’s Example’, p.  28. Hackett discusses the Arcadia’s female audience and criticism of the text as inappropriate reading for women (Women and Romance Fiction, pp. 106–08). 44  Kinney, ‘On the Margins of Romance’, pp. 143–47.

26 Anne-Marie Strohman

as primary educators and about women’s words and tales as potentially corrupting. His answer to this fear is in the ladies’ dismissive response to the story. Miso is an apparent foil to Cecropia and Gynecia—their potential to impact the political realm is not laughable at all—however, she is also aligned to these other mothers; none of the mothers ends up being a credible threat to public life. As we’ve seen, Sidney continues to circumscribe maternal identity through comparison, first by showing Gynecia in contrast with the good mother Venus, then by comparing and contrasting Gynecia with Miso. He continues this strategy in the New Arcadia, by modifying Miso’s role to intensify her potential impact on the succession, and by introducing the wicked Cecropia, who dominates Book III. Sidney worked on his revision in and before 1584, when the dynastic pressures on Elizabeth’s reign were changing: it was becoming increasingly apparent that she was not going to marry or bear a Tudor heir. In designing Cecropia as a counterpoint to the (falteringly) virtuous Gynecia, Sidney drew on the character and circumstances of Catherine de Medici, mother of the Duke of Anjou, who at the time of Old Arcadia’s composition had been attempting to marry her son to Elizabeth, a match Sidney saw as detrimental to the English monarchy.45 Cecropia feeds the political elements of Sidney’s revision, for she is a political figure defined primarily by her motherhood. Cecropia is the widow of Basilius’s brother and the mother of Amphialus. Before the aging Basilius married the much younger Gynecia and fathered two daughters, Cecropia’s son Amphialus was the heir to the throne. Cecropia now is in a difficult position. As a widow and mother to a former heir, she is no longer politically necessary. Without any direct connection to Basilius and his family, she has no political clout. Stephanie Chamberlain reads Cecropia’s actions—kidnapping Philoclea, Pamela, and Zelmane, and attempting to persuade one of the heirs to marry Amphialus—as a desperate attempt to remain politically relevant.46 Cecropia is vilified, described as innately evil and without redeeming qualities. This evil mother contrasts with Gynecia in a different way from Miso. In Cecropia, Gynecia’s internal badness is made external (instead of lust for a man, she has a lust for power). Cecropia embodies yet another cultural anxiety about women: that if they are not made subservient, their thirst for power will destabilize the patriarchy. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford report, ‘Feminine insubordination ranked as an egregious crime not only in its 45  46 

Chamberlain, ‘The Demonization of Sidney’s Cecropia’, pp. 5–6. Chamberlain, ‘The Demonization of Sidney’s Cecropia’, p. 13.

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own right, but because it raised the spectre of an inversion of the sexual as well as the political gender hierarchy’.47 Cecropia’s attempts to overthrow Basilius and destabilize the government confirm her threat to society. Cecropia is the opposite of Gynecia in another way: whereas Gynecia attempts to keep her lust hidden in the hope that it will not affect her family or her public life, Cecropia’s actions are focused specifically on gaining public prominence. She believes that as the daughter of a powerful king she has married down. She did so because she believed her new husband, brother to the childless Basilius and next in succession, would become king. From early in her marriage, she plotted with her husband against the king so that they ‘should not have needed to have waited the tedious work of a natural end of Basilius’ (NA, 318). Even after her husband’s death, she continues to attempt to re-establish her role in Arcadia by increasing Amphialus’s stature and claim to the throne. When her more benign attempts to reincorporate herself and her son into the line of succession fail, she thinks ‘to play double or quit’, and subsequently kidnaps the princesses and Zelmane in a ploy to convince one of the heirs to marry Amphialus, making him again next in line for the throne (NA, 319). Her actions place Amphialus in direct opposition to Basilius: the duke and his men wait across the lake from the castle, ready to lay siege, putting Amphialus in mortal danger. Amphialus has already sustained wounds, has been labelled a traitor against the crown, and has little hope for any future. Recognizing this, Cecropia bends ‘all the sharpness of her malicious wit how to bring a comfortable grant to her son, whereupon she well found no less than his life depended’ (NA, 418). Ironically, however, in her attempts to regain her former honour and glory, she has put her son in danger. And in a reversal of Gynecia’s pattern, Cecropia’s attempts to disrupt the political order have familial consequences. Cecropia’s failing appears to be a lust for power: she plans to elevate herself and her family by destroying Basilius and his heirs. But her other and more insidious fault is a too-intense maternal love. Sidney buries the mention of her love in a long parenthetical description of Cecropia that focuses on her viciousness: ‘Cecropia (in nature violent; cruel because ambitious; hateful for old-rooted grudge to their mother, and now spiteful because she could not prevail with girls, as she counted them; lastly, drawn on by her love to her son 47 

Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp.  62 and 71.Willis discusses malevolent maternal power in Malevolent Nurture, pp. 4–14. For cultural expectations of women’s behaviour see Hull, Chaste, Silent & Obedient.

28 Anne-Marie Strohman

and held up by a tyrannical authority)’ (NA, 419). According to Jonathan P. Lamb, parentheticals such as this one ‘provide depth, revealing some element of a character or object not directly relevant to the plot’.48 Here, the parenthetical effectively buries Cecropia’s love for her son in a litany of negative qualities. Katherine Roberts points to Cecropia’s maternal love as a humanizing characteristic and one that separates her from earlier literary evil mothers.49 Though distinct from her literary predecessors, Cecropia still has a ‘crooked disposition’ at the core of her motivations, and her love for her son serves to draw out the evil that exists in her already. Her love has become corrupt because she ‘had confined all her love only unto him [Amphialus]’ (NA, 414). As with The Faerie Queene’s Cymoent, mother to Marinell, in Cecropia’s case, excessive love for a child becomes stifling to the child and ultimately proves disastrous. Cecropia’s corrupting love complicates Sidney’s concept of maternal identity. Maternal love, ostensibly a virtue, now is added to the list of canonical maternal weaknesses—specifically, sexual lust, jealousy, misuse of authority, and lust for power. It is clear from the surrounding narrative that Cecropia’s exclusive love for her son drives her to give free rein to her evil nature. She controls his sickroom, only allowing in servants who are fully under her influence, and when she gains control over all decision-making for the weakened Amphialus, she threatens to behead the prisoners if Basilius does not retreat. She exhibits her greatest cruelty to fulfil her son’s desires; she acts at his service, although she functions outside of his wishes and his character. Ultimately, she infantilizes him. Furthermore, unlike Gynecia, who accurately describes her inner state and recognizes the dangerous nature of her desire, Cecropia has a distorted view of her self. In her own backward estimation, she expects that Amphialus will see that she is motivated by love, and will justify her actions as she does. She tells her son, ‘howsoever I might be ashamed to tell it strangers, who would think it wickedness, yet what is done for your sake, how evil soever to others, to you is virtue’ (NA, 317). Sidney’s Cecropia exposes motherly love as a potential source of cultural anxiety; obsessive motherly love mixed with political ambition is especially dangerous to the established order. Cecropia’s vicious nature and attempts to overthrow the right order of the state do not go unpunished, and her punishment is in direct proportion to her 48  Lamb, ‘Parentheses and Privacy in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, p. 325. Lamb argues that the parentheses abundant in Arcadia create a private space for narrator and reader apposite to the public narrative. 49  Roberts, Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters, p. 93.

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threat to the kingdom. However, unlike Miso and Gynecia, who receive their initial sentences from the just Euarchus, Cecropia receives a kind of poetic justice, meted out by chance: she plummets to her death off the lead roof of the castle, when she is backing away from her son’s raised sword. Cecropia’s death reveals both her evil nature and her stunted relationship with her son: ‘She, fearing he would have stricken her (though indeed he meant it not but only intended to kill himself in her presence), went back so far till ere she were aware she overthrew herself from the leads to receive her death’s kiss at the ground’ (NA, 440). She dies believing her son is trying to kill her, while Amphialus reveals that he was only planning to kill himself. On the top of the castle the difference between mother and son is made clear: she falls to her death muttering curses, while he mourns her loss: ‘“And was I not enough miserable before”, said he, “but that before my end I must be the death of my mother—who, how wicked soever, yet I would she had received her punishment by some other”’ (NA, 441). In Cecropia’s death, Sidney yet again derails the threat of maternal power. Although Cecropia wreaks havoc in Arcadia, she cannot disrupt the state fully by placing Amphialus on the throne. Even the faked deaths of Philoclea and Pamela do nothing to move the princesses and do not ultimately harm them. They are saved from Cecropia’s custody and are on their way to being restored to their family when the New Arcadia’s narrative arrests. The New Arcadia ends in mid-sentence, erasing the conclusion of Gynecia’s trajectory. Nevertheless, Sidney has repeatedly connected maternal passions and misused maternal authority directly to threats to the established political order. If Karen Saupe is correct to suggest that Gynecia’s trial scene predicts the type of revision Sidney planned to do and to assume that the events of Books IV and V might have had little revision, the prominent threat of Gynecia’s effect on her family and the political order would be matched by the comic and evil versions of motherhood in the text.50 All three mothers in the New Arcadia have the potential to affect the dynastic order of Arcadia, but the increased threat of these mothers does not materialize any more than in the Old Arcadia. Though 50 

Saupe, ‘Trial, Error, and Revision’, pp. 27–29. In contrast, Lindenbaum argues that Sidney was dissatisfied with his ending, especially the trial scene (‘Sidney’s Arcadia’, pp. 205–18). Woudhuysen suggests that Sidney stopped his revision of Arcadia ‘not because […] he had to rush off to fight the Spanish, but because what he had created in the third book meant he could not finish it’ (Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, p. 354). Norbrook suggests that it was ‘possibly because he realized that the work’s serious religious and political concerns, and its increasing inwardness, were becoming incompatible with the courtly framework’ (Poetry and Politics, p. 95).

30 Anne-Marie Strohman

these mothers have the potential to undermine the governmental order, the political consequences of their internal passions are minimal. Deborah Shuger asserts that at the end of the Old Arcadia ‘fiction comes to the rescue of history’ and that ‘the justice that triumphs in the end is poetic rather than political’, as Basilius rises and the princes are saved from their death sentences. Shuger refers to Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, claiming that ‘poetic justice is superior to legal conjecture because the former is based on a knowledge of the motives hidden in the heart’s “secret cabinets”’.51 In his control of the narrative in both the Old Arcadia and the New, Sidney institutes poetic justice—Cecropia’s death, Miso’s ridicule—but in Gynecia’s case, he appears to offer her poetic mercy. She is not punished publicly for her inner passions or even for the outward manifestations of those passions, either with justice or with equity; she is restored to her former glory. In the case of all three mothers, their ‘ends’ mitigate the power Sidney initially allows them. While Cecropia’s and Miso’s authority is quashed, Gynecia’s power is rechannelled as she is given a chance to use her maternal authority for good; like Musidorus’s and Pyrocles’s mothers, she can support the established order, caring for her children and encouraging good education and marriages. In the New Arcadia’s greater focus on government and stronger links between mothers and succession, the political impact of mothers in the text is amplified, but for all their potential to threaten political stability, the mothers remain relatively innocuous. The question remains, why did Sidney establish mothers as powerful, only to circumscribe that power? One might argue that the limits to maternal authority are merely generic. The conventions of romance require that those who do evil be punished, those who are comic be mocked, and those who are noble be given an opportunity to repent and do good. Sidney does follow generic constraints here, but he departs from conventions in other ways. For example, Tiffany Werth argues that Sidney excludes magic from his romance in order to make the New Arcadia an appropriate text for Protestant consumption.52 With the elimination of the princesses’ sexual vulnerability, and a greater focus on Pamela’s moral rectitude while imprisoned, the New Arcadia breaks with convention to establish its moral credentials. It ceases to be a supposed ‘trifle’, as Sidney described the Old Arcadia, and becomes an exemplary text. Perhaps

51  52 

Shuger, ‘Castigating Livy’, pp. 543, 544. Werth, ‘The Reformation of Romance’, pp. 33–55.

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this exemplarity is why Sidney both increases maternal power and makes direct responses that mitigate it—laughter and death. The seriousness of Sidney’s project is evident, and the importance of restraining maternal authority is a necessary part of that project. Given the fraught political climate of the early 1580s, exacerbated as it was by the Queen’s final courtship, Sidney is expressing widespread anxieties about Elizabeth’s role as ‘mother of England’ and how it connects to her rule. If Elizabeth is to entertain private passions as Gynecia does, Sidney emphasizes, she can put the whole nation at risk. If she does not protect, or even acknowledge, a succession, she neglects her duty as mother and monarch. In the image of Gynecia Sidney acknowledges that there may be a difference between Elizabeth’s private and public persons. He both cautions and requests that her private person not take precedence over her public responsibilities. The grace Gynecia receives from Basilius after he wakes from his death-like sleep offers Elizabeth a vision of how her people will respond to her—if she gives up Anjou and works towards the promise of a peaceful succession, her people will forgive her and restore her to ‘all wifely love’.

Works Cited Primary Sources Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Shakespeare, William, Titus Andronicus, ed. by Eugene Waith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Sidney, Sir Philip, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (the New Arcadia), ed. by Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) —— , The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (the Old Arcadia), ed. by Jean Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) —— , ‘The Defence of Poetry’, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 59–121 —— , ‘A Letter to Queen Elizabeth’, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 33–57 Vives, [ Juan Luis] Ludovicus, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. by Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

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Secondary Studies Amussen, Susan Dwyer, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) Axton, Marie, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977) Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) Belsey, Catherine, ‘The Myth of Venus in Early Modern Culture’, English Literary Renaissance, 42.2 (2012), 179–202 Chamberlain, Stephanie, ‘The Demonization of Sidney’s Cecropia: Erasing a Legal Identity’, Quidditas, 23 (2002), 5–20 Crawford, Patricia, ‘The Construction and Experience of Maternity in SeventeenthCentury England’, in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. by Valerie Fildes (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 3–38 Diefendorf, Barbara B., ‘Family Culture, Renaissance Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly, 40.4 (1987), 661–81 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) Eckerle, Julie A., ‘Urania’s Example: The Female Storyteller in Early Modern English Romance’, in Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, ed. by Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 25–39 Eckhardt, Caroline D., ‘The Presence of Rome in the Middle English Chronicles of the Four­ teenth Century’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 90 (1991), 187–207 Fildes, Valerie A., Breasts, Bottles and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986) Fox, Adam, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2000) Grossberg, Benjamin Scott, ‘Politics and Shifting Desire in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 42.1 (2002), 63–83 Hackett, Helen, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Heller, Jennifer, ‘The Legacy and Rhetorics of Maternal Zeal’, ELH, 75.3 (2008), 603–23 —— , The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) Hendrix, Laurel L., ‘“Mother of Laughter, and Welspring of Blisse”: Spenser’s Venus and the Poetics of Mirth’, English Literary Renaissance, 23.1 (1993), 113–33 Hull, Suzanne W., Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982) Jordan, Constance, ‘The Household and the State: Transformations in the Representation of an Analogy from Aristotle to James  I’, Modern Language Quarterly, 54.3 (1993), 307–26 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957)

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Kinney, Arthur F., ‘Puritans versus Royalists: Sir Philip Sidney’s Rhetoric at the Court of Elizabeth I’, in Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, ed. by Dominic Baker-Smith, M. J. B. Allen, and Arthur F. Kinney (New York: AMS, 1990), pp. 42–56 Kinney, Clare R., ‘On the Margins of Romance, At the Heart of the Matter: Revisionary Fabulation in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 21.2 (1991), 143–52 Lamb, Jonathan P., ‘Parentheses and Privacy in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, Studies in Philology, 107.3 (2010), 310–35 Lamb, Mary Ellen, ‘Introduction’, Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, ed. by Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. xv–xxv Lindenbaum, Peter, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia: The Endings of the Three Versions’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 34.3 (1971), 205–18 Lockey, Brian C., Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2006) Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England: 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Miller, Naomi J., ‘Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period’, in Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 1–25 Norbrook, David, ‘The Emperor’s New Body? Richard  II, Ernst Kantorowicz, and the Politics of Shakespeare Criticism’, Textual Practice, 10.2 (1996), 329–57 —— , Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) Raber, Karen L., ‘Murderous Mothers and the Family/State Analogy in Classical and Renaissance Drama’, Comparative Literature Studies, 37.3 (2000), 298–320 Rees, Joan, ‘Justice, Mercy, and a Shipwreck in Arcadia’, Studies in Philology, 87.1 (1990), 75–82 Roberts, Katherine J., Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters (New York: Lang, 1994) Saupe, Karen, ‘Trial, Error, and Revision in Sidney’s Arcadias’, Sidney Newsletter & Journal, 12.2 (1993), 22–29 Schneider, Regina, Sidney’s (Re)Writing of the ‘Arcadia’ (New York: AMS Press, 2008) Schochet, Gordon, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975) Shaw, Patricia, ‘Ale Wives, Old Wives, Widows and Witches: The Older Woman in English Renaissance Literature’, in Actas del I Congreso Nacional de la Sociedad Española de Estudios Renacentistas Ingleses (SEDERI)/Proceedings of the National Con­ference of the Spanish Society for English Renaissance Studies, ed. by Javier Sánchez (Zaragoza: SEDERI, 1990), pp. 9–35 Shuger, Debora, ‘Castigating Livy: The Rape of Lucretia and the Old Arcadia’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51.2 (1998), 526–48

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Summerfield, Thea, ‘Filling the Gap: Brutus in the Historia Brittonum, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle MS F, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’, in The Medieval Chronicle VII, ed. by Juliana Dresvina and Nicholas Sparks (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 85–102 Travitsky, Betty S., ‘Child Murder in English Renaissance Life and Drama’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 6 (1993), 63–84 —— , ‘The New Mother of the English Renaissance: Her Writings on Motherhood’, in The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. by C. N. Davidson and E. M. Broner (New York: Ungar, 1980), pp. 33–43 Turner, Myron, ‘The Disfigured Face of Nature: Image and Metaphor in the Revised Arcadia’, English Literary Renaissance, 2.2 (1972), 116–35 Werth, Tiffany, ‘The Reformation of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s The New Arcadia’, English Literary Renaissance, 40.1 (2010), 33–55 Willis, Deborah, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995) Worden, Blair, ‘Delightful Teaching: Queen Elizabeth and Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed. by Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (London: British Library, 2007), pp. 71–86 —— , The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) Woudhuysen, H. R., Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)

Writing against the Hegemonic Discourses of Tudor Historiography in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie Allyna E. Ward

E

specially in England, where John Foxe’s martyrology, Acts and Monu­ ments, and the co-edited A Mirror for Magistrates govern the hegemonic discourse of Tudor historiography, it is unusual to think of women participating in the genre of history writing before the nineteenth century. However, this chapter demonstrates that by depicting gender subordination through the lens of the hegemonic political group (male historians and political participants) Anne Dowriche’s 1589 The French Historie1 offers a complex assessment of gender and identity in the late-Tudor period. I show how Dowriche draws on contemporary historical models for her own writing, especially John Foxe, to place herself within the male-dominated arena of political history writing. Written in iambic rhyming couplets and the popular poulter’s measure (alternating twelve lines and fourteen lines), Dowriche’s text is a combination of fiction and recent French history, taken primarily from Thomas Tymme’s English translation of Jean de Serres’ The Three Partes of Commentaries Containing the Whole and Perfect Discourse of the Ciuill Warres of Fraunce (1574).2 Dowriche invents a narrative voice that appeals to England’s queen 1 

The 1589 edition is used in this chapter. I have standardized early modern i/j and u/v spellings throughout. 2  Possible editions include Serres, A Discourse of the Ciuile Warres; Serres, The Fourth Parte of Commentaries of the Ciuill Warres, trans. by Tymme; and Serres, The Three Partes of Commentaries, trans. by Tymme. I will refer only to the final text in this list. Allyna E. Ward ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Early Modern English Literature at Booth University College in Winnipeg, Canada.

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to learn from the lessons of France’s recent past. More broadly, it further asks its English readers to assess the merits of the history in relation to gender and politics in England’s own cultural sphere. Although she does not write English history, Dowriche’s historical poem comments on a key cultural moment in English Protestant history following both the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the failed Babington Plot. Dowriche was also keenly aware of the market value of a text on French affairs, fitting her work into the contemporaneous publication burst of French pamphlets into English. The long titles of around thirty printed texts from 1588 and 1589 contain both the words ‘France’ and ‘history’, including Michel Hurault’s Discourse upon the Present Estate of France (1588) and the anonymous A Letter Written by a French Catholike Gentleman, to the Maisters at Sorbonne. Concerning the Late Victories Obtained by the King of Nauarre, attributed to Philippe de Mornay (STC 18144). Furthermore, Dowriche applies the providentialist vision of John Foxe’s influential Acts and Monuments to her version of French history to demonstrate the importance of ongoing reform. The title pages of three consecutive editions of Acts and Monuments expose the indeterminism of church reformers in England to firmly establish the Protestant faith. Part of this chapter explores the way in which Dowriche’s use of Foxe emphasizes this particular element in Elizabethan reform. Scholars have primarily focused on Dowriche’s poem as an example of women’s writing, unique as it is as both history and poetry.3 However, the text is also distinctive for what it suggests about women’s political participation, including the advice Dowriche offers to Queen Elizabeth. Kate Chedgzoy’s reading of Dowriche’s commentary on national identity takes as starting point the English narrator’s comments in the preface, which refer to the wandering French Protestant exile. This refugee identifies England as a safe Paradise, having fled from the bloody atmosphere in France: ‘thanke the Lord that se me safe within this pleasant ile. | O happie England, thou from God above art blest, | Which hast the truth established with peace and perfect rest’.4 Chedgzoy argues that the Frenchman’s praise of England works to reinforce the advantages of Englishness:

3 

See, for example, Beilin, ‘“Some Freely Spake Their Minde”’ for a discussion of how Dowriche’s text employs distinct strategies to participate in a male-dominated political culture. See also Beilin, ‘Writing Public Poetry’ for an exploration of how Dowriche uses her poem to discuss political history. 4  Dowriche, fol. B2r.

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The polemical and exhortatory force of Dowriche’s French Historie is thus explicit from the start of her narrative. England and Englishness are externally constructed through the vision of a foreigner contrasting the land of his enforced sojourn with his homeland. The pleasantness of the isle, mentioned twice in nine lines, is a function of the divine favour it has found as a nurse and protectress of the Reformation and therefore a refuge for godly truth and peace.5

Elaine Beilin also explores the relation between Dowriche’s text and late-Tudor political topics. She argues persuasively that Dowriche’s poem shows parallels with Parliamentary texts from the period. Furthermore, it is suggested that Dowriche may have accessed these texts through her brother Pearse Edgecombe, a member of Parliament: ‘Although a woman’s exclusion from public office may imply that she was on the political margins, reading Dowriche’s poem along with parliamentary texts from the 1570s and 1580s clarifies that she was not on the margins of political discourse’.6 Beilin demonstrates how Dowriche’s text represents a breakdown between ruler and subjects concerning religious truth. Thus, Dowriche promotes the idea of resistance to the ruler in defence of religious reform. As Beilin argues, Dowriche’s history should be placed alongside Tudor and Stuart documents that address the limits of government; the poet’s agenda touches on the rights of English subjects to participate in critiquing the government.7 Similarly, Mihoko Suzuki reads Dowriche’s text as political commentary, especially in the way it offers commentary on recent events such as the 1588 Spanish Armada and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.8 Suzuki also cites the works of Mary Sidney and Elizabeth Cary and argues these authors demonstrate that ‘women saw themselves as capable of acting as counsellors, especially to female monarchs or consorts’.9 Suzuki further argues that Dowriche’s use of contemporary discussions of obedience and resistance furthers her position in opposition to passive obedience.10 Focusing on the particular cultural exchange in Dowriche’s text, Randall Martin reads the text as a cultural critique—offering at once an assessment of Catherine de Medici as a Machiavellian patriarch. Martin also comments on the important intertextual aspect of the text. 5 

Chedgzoy, ‘This Pleasant and Sceptered Isle’, p. 27. Beilin, ‘“Some Freely Spake Their Minde”’, p. 120. 7  Beilin, ‘“Some Freely Spake Their Minde”’, p. 126. 8  Suzuki, ‘Warning Elizabeth’, p. 174. 9  Suzuki, ‘Warning Elizabeth’, p. 187. 10  Suzuki, ‘Warning Elizabeth’, p. 185. 6 

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Remarking on the way Dowriche’s method functions, he writes, ‘Dowriche interweaves heroic stories of Huguenot suffering and resistance with Old Testament, classical, and modern analogues of persecution, deliverance, and divine vengeance’.11 Martin notes that we should not dismiss the scope of her ‘scholarly ambitions’ and her use of various source materials and marginal references, and he comments on how Dowriche meticulously constructed her narrative about political intrigue, martyrdom, and retribution in her remarkable dramatic portrayal of Catherine de Medici. In this discussion, I am particularly interested in the idea of gender-fashioning as part of religious polemic in this late-Tudor text. In the fictional speeches Dowriche writes for her French characters, the reader witnesses the author’s voice on politics and religion. As Megan Matchinske notes, the speeches in the text confirm Dowriche’s convictions on the place of religion in politics.12 In the end, Catherine de Medici is derogated not because she is a female monarch actively tyrannizing, but because she is a Catholic. Her example is useful because it is used as positive evidence of women’s political capabilities to encourage political activity in a situation that does not lead to de Medici’s death (tragic as her example is for French Protestants). Furthermore, I show how the high standard of education Dowriche received allows her to contribute to a popular literary tradition. By calling on contemporary literature and specific cultural references, she is able to fashion the text in a gender-specific frame that allows her to question perceived views of women and their political experiences. Dowriche’s participation in writing political history, coupled with her unique gendering of political experience, demonstrates how for Dowriche, Catherine de Medici’s ruthless example of tyranny supports the idea that Elizabeth should be enabled to act politically as she, conversely, is specifically not a tyrant but a godly ruler. Dowriche ties this to women’s participation more generally, including her own acceptance as a writer of print history. Following the execution of Mary Stuart, the defeat of the Armada, and other tasks Elizabeth achieved in order to quell fears about a Catholic takeover, Dowriche’s Puritan text asks readers for more than continued aggression against Catholics. She argues for women to be reconsidered as relevant and serious participants in English politics. This chapter will therefore explore how Dowriche uses a male-dominated genre to question such prevailing ideologies and how she frames her argument that women, French, English, 11  12 

Martin, ‘Anne Dowriche’s “The French History”’, p. 71. See Matchinske, ‘Moral, Method, and History’, p. 191.

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Catholic, or Protestant, are equally capable and willing to engage in political events and situations. The history part of Dowriche’s text ends with a poem offered by the French pilgrim, ‘Virescit Vulnere Veritas’ (‘Truth will flourish from a wound’). The final poem recalls the title page emblem and also the lessons of Elizabeth’s coronation pageants, as discussed below. One pageant had represented the virtues of good government (True Religion, Love of Subject, Wisdom, and Justice) triumphing over the opposite vices. In the fourth pageant, Truth offers a Bible to the Queen and, in the final pageant, Elizabeth is represented as the Old Testament figure Deborah, linking the reform of England with the reform of Israel. Hester Lees-Jeffries comments, ‘In the pageant of Veritas Temporis Filia, the English Bible was thus the metaphorical fountain that would restore the barren commonwealth and sustain the fertile, through the agency of the rightful and godly prince’.13 The emblem of the triumph of Truth would remain a central part of the commodification of Elizabeth’s reign as she heralded the new reformed religious settlement for the English people. Lees-Jeffries writes that ‘[the Bible’s] materiality and its status as a gift perhaps made its didacticism more obliquely acceptable, less likely to offend or anger the Queen […]. The pageant was thus at the ideological and programmatic heart of the Queen’s civic welcome and […] expressed particular hopes for Elizabeth’s reign’. 14 By concluding with a lesson that truth may heal the wounds of the past, Dowriche is reminding her reader of the ambitions of the Elizabethan religious settlement that were indicated in the earlier pageants. She further stipulates that this queen will herald a full Protestant reformation in England. Dowriche’s text uses the male voice of counsel to encourage Elizabeth to have confidence in her active political participation in her role as queen. Dowriche’s use of the poem ‘Virescit Vulnere Veritas’ near her conclusion places her history in the frame of other, male-authored, histories. For instance, Tymme’s translation of Commentaries, Foxe’s martyrology, and Baldwin’s de casi­ bus collection A Mirror for Magistrates all use the complaint genre to write history in this way. Dowriche’s opening lines, at once declaring the poetic value of her text and deprecating her own abilities because of her sex, may serve to draw focus away from her text as a history. Dowriche understands the gender restrictions of the period and is keen to print her account of Protestant history. This is why she identifies the text as a history and includes the obligatory apology to her brother, 13  14 

Lees-Jeffries, ‘Location as Metaphor’, p. 79. Lees-Jeffries, ‘Location as Metaphor’, p. 78.

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in which she compares her literary or historical abilities to similar male-authored texts of the period. Aware that England had been ruled by women for thirty-six years, readers might be expected to note the irony and reflect upon their own, perhaps misplaced and skewed, notions of gender that have prevented women from engaging in politics before (either in texts or in the position of queen).

Hegemonic Discourses: Writing History In the beginning of The French Historie, Anne Dowriche claims to write specifically in verse, in order to ‘restore some credite to poetry’, and her poetic dialogue becomes a complaint of the French Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici. The text is overtly dramatic, framed as a conversation between two men. It was not unusual in the Tudor period for men to write women’s complaints, or to stage dialogue between women, as in, for example, Thomas Churchyard’s account of Jane Shore in A Mirror for Magistrates, and Dowriche uses this historical literary framework to ‘stage’ her own version of events. The text takes on the vestiges of drama most prevalently in the third and final part of her history involving the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, discussed below. Here the French narrator invites the reader and the in-text audience, an unnamed Englishman, to witness the events of her history as if onstage. At this point in the narrative the villainous Machiavellian heroine Catherine de Medici is brought centre stage. This section of the history works to set up a comparison between political and gendered English and French identities. On the one hand, the text is written by an Englishwoman and directed at an English queen while, on the other hand, it stages a powerful and wicked French queen who is remarkable for breaking the boundaries of gendered behaviour in a political arena, yet who is, by English Protestant reasoning, an ungodly and tyrannical ruler. Dowriche’s text engages with forms of English writing such as Acts and Monuments and Tymme’s translation of Commentaries to comment on and critique forms of English gender identity. Both texts are aggressively anti-Catholic and Dowriche’s reliance on them for both content and as a model in polemic demonstrates her ability to synthesize material intellectually. The ‘Preface to the Reader’ in Tymme’s translation states an aim to illustrate ‘a certaine View of the severall times of our Churches, both that we may stirre up such of greater learning and experience […] and also that in the meane time wee may give some [taste] of the greatest matters to Christian men, desirous to know the truth of this thing, and to men of forreine nations, bewayling our estate and condition’.15 15 

Serres, Three Partes, fol. A4v.

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The invective against Catholics is presented as an outrage against the faithful believers, whom he identifies as Christians. Following Foxe, Tymme’s translation of Commentaries suggests that the Reformation was clear evidence of God’s preference for the Protestant faith. What happened in France during the period of the wars of religion can be put down to Satan’s interference with God’s plan: ‘Sathan not forgetting hys olde subtilties and sleightes, deviseth a new accusation, […] because the faithfull throughout the whole kingdom of France defende their libertie graunted unto them by the Kings […] a new crime is nowe layde to their charge, namely Sedition, rebellion, and treason’.16 The text aims to demonstrate the lengths the French went to for the success of Protestant reform: ‘those things which were done in Fraunce for religion, might be knowne to all men, as, what is the goodnesse of the cause of the Faithfull and true churches, and what is the iniquitie and iniustice of their adversaries’.17 This ideology is confirmed in the poem by Edward Grant addressed to the reader that follows the preface. In a section on the human cost of reform in France, Grant writes, ‘Burgeus suffred losse of lyfe, and feared not the fier, | For Gospels sake and truthes defence, a lew of his desire’.18 The preface defends the Protestant participants who had been called rebels and accused of sedition in France by claiming that they were defending the Gospel, whereas the Catholic transgressors were ‘enimies of the truth and pure Gospel’.19 The first books of commentaries cover the years 1557–62, including the trial report of the execution of Annas Burgaeus. The report on Burgeaus’s trial stresses that the result was a foregone conclusion from the start: ‘was there no hope left that Burgaeus shoulde be delivered. For he had great and mightie adversaries, among whome, his chiefe and principall enimie was the Cardinall of Loraine, who left nothing undone that might by any maner of meanes hasten his death’.20 The first part of the commentaries closely follows source materials, including reports of conversations, such as the one between the Cardinal Lorraine and Theodore Beza on the matter of transubstantiation. In a note to the reader following the first section, Tymme relates the importance of translating the rest of the commentaries into English. In the letter to his patron, Sir Richard Baker, appendixed to the continuation of the commen16 

Serres, Three Partes, fol. A4r. Serres, Three Partes, fol. B2r. 18  Serres, Three Partes, fol. B3v. 19  Serres, Three Partes, fol. B2r. 20  Serres, Three Partes, fol. E4r. 17 

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taries, Tymme offers the idea that although it is easy to condemn the French for their religious trespasses against the true church, the English ought to learn from their mistakes, ‘except wee repent, wee shall in lyke manner perishe’, with a marginal note to Luke 13.21 Book four repeats the intimation that Satan interfered with the success of reform in France after the King’s edict (The Edict of January) to protect the existing Protestant churches. The account details the meetings concerning religion in France and the conditions for peaceful reform found in various letters between high-ranking nobles and church officials. These include a letter sent to the reformed Churches in France by the Prince of Condé in April to the effect that the Guises have corrupted the King and Queen and must be resisted. In this account, the King and Queen fall prey to the machinations of the wicked (Catholic) Guises who have corrupted their better instincts. In turn there is a tension between the causes for reform, leading to war, and attempts to avoid civil war in France. It is in the tenth and final book of commentaries that the infamous St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre on 24 August 1572 is reported. This section, along with the first sections on the prayer meeting in Paris and the execution of Annas Burgeus mentioned above, provides the basis for Dowriche’s version of events. For the most part, she dispenses with the details of events between the outbreak of the civil war in France and the tragedy in August 1572. In addition to the polemical qualities of Tymme’s translation, including the active role of Satan in French history, Dowriche’s history also imitates the de casibus mode of the English text A Mirror for Magistrates. She applies the dramatic quality of the prose stories in the Mirror by including lengthy speeches by the key political figures, now dead. In the Mirror the editors comment on each of the monologues and ask the reader/audience to listen to the stories of each of the ghosts of the fallen dead. Similarly, Dowriche raises French nobles from the dead to tell the story of the French wars of religion and allows them the space to tell their stories (albeit with her as the editor and director of their accounts). However, her claims of expressing the basic truth are compromised (especially for modern readers) by the strong anti-Catholic agenda that dominates the retelling of the events. Dowriche’s work encourages its readers to think about English religious identity in gendered terms: as subjects under a female monarch actively engaged in Protestant reform, English intellectuals must consider, or reconsider, the place of women in English culture. In drawing on contemporaneous historical references, Dowriche challenges the assumption that women must be silent and obedient in political, cultural, 21 

Serres, Three Partes, fol. Q3v.

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and religious matters. She shows us that in France at least, women perform active roles in politics and, although the achievements of Catherine de Medici were not favourable for the Huguenots, she was influential in religious politics. Thus, such questions remain: What is the purpose of limiting women’s participation in England? What might be lost if English women, such as Elizabeth or even Dowriche herself, are prohibited from action in England? Written from the perspective of a woman who witnessed a successful female monarch exerting control, Dowriche’s The French Historie acts as an ironic commentary on gender bias in English politics and culture. Men writing about women—or even just collecting works about women—offer just a one-sided view of how women might perceive femininity in the Tudor period. The unprecedented rule of female monarchs in Europe in the sixteenth century allowed women to understand their role in culture and politics more acutely. The polemical motive of urging further restrictions on Catholics in England is not the sole philosophical property of the text; The French Historie is also unique as a literary commodity. It is a history written by a woman, and also a work that articulates political counsel to England’s reigning monarch, not in itself an unusual approach for politically engaged writers but again unique because it is by a woman. Her text turns the dual notion of woman from a passive cultural and political figure into an active and engaged participant in the identities of queen and writer/counsellor. Dowriche uses the medium of political literature to situate Tudor women culturally; the reader witnesses how a female writer during a period that typically relegated women to subordinate positions, especially in the publishing world, uses the mode of a dramatic historical treatise to fashion gender. This achieves two important goals: firstly it brings to mind the way women were historically and dramatically disregarded in political events (real or imagined), while it simultaneously condemns such a practice of subjugating women’s counsel and advice in both politics and literary culture. Dowriche’s identity as a capable female writer of history is here dependant on her audience’s acceptance of Elizabeth’s identity as a capable, Protestant queen of England. The text was printed during a period of heightened Catholic persecution and participates in fashioning cultural and political female identity in Elizabethan England. Dowriche places herself in the literary market on equal footing to her male counterparts and uses the guise of urging Elizabeth to action. However, Elizabeth had already begun to act more harshly towards Catholics (including acting against her own cousin Mary Stuart, who was executed in February 1587). In participating in the contemporary literary market in this way, Dowriche offers a cultural monument that testifies to her remark-

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able insight and to the shifting perspective on women’s cultural and political involvement. She at once questions perceived notions of the virtuous woman, critiques contemporary hegemony regarding women’s political participation, urges the Queen to continue a ruthless religious program, and breaks in to a literary market that would otherwise exclude her on the basis of her sex.

From Silence to Print: Dowriche’s Participation in History Dowriche’s The French Historie was published in the same year, and by the same printer, as Jane Anger’s Protection for Women, a text in defence of women that advises them how to avoid controversy in matters regarding their sexuality. Dowriche’s text uses irony to reflect on conditions for women, while Anger uses direct assault on the slanderous voice of men towards women.22 In contrast to the advice of earlier conduct literature for women, Dowriche promotes active participation and verbal communication of women by exemplifying the role of female historian as well as in the advice she offered to Elizabeth. In editing her material, Dowriche chose three events to include in her nearly 2400–line poem. The poem is accordingly divided into three sections: details of an uprising in Paris during a prayer meeting in 1557; the motivations of Annas Burgeus, his trial, and execution in 1559; and the bloody St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris, including the murder of Gaspard de Coligny, the Huguenot leader. The following section of this chapter examines her work in the context of a woman writer positioning herself as an informed and engaged political participant. The early poetic dialogue between the two Protestants (the Englishman and the French male narrator) shifts to the complaint of Catherine de Medici in the last quarter of the text. The providential impetus in the text (as well as its source) moves the narrative towards an expected Protestant telos. In England, the accession of the Protestant Elizabeth progresses the course of reform closer to that telos. Dowriche’s The French Historie thus participates in the formation of a gender identity in the Elizabethan cultural world by remarking on the absurdity of the belief that women cannot act politically.

22 

To date we have no confirmation of Anger’s identity. The title page to her defence of women identifies her as a gentlewoman. There are a number of female children baptized in England with the name Jane or Joan Anger in the Elizabethan period but the author of the Protection does not offer further clues to her identity.

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While Anne Dowriche was known to be an active participant in Puritan literary circles, only two of her written works survive.23 The French Historie, Dowriche’s Puritan defence of religious freedom, is striking not just because of the polemical historical qualities of the treatise, but also because of its remarkable literariness. By participating in print culture in this way, Dowriche writes herself out of the domestic sphere of wife/mother and into the public sphere. Beilin discusses this aspect of the text at length with reference to both Isabella Whitney and Rachel Speght, who also write on history, politics, religion, and moral/social topics: ‘All three revise the humanist concept of the learned lady by repositioning her and her works in the domain of public poetry’.24 By writing history, Dowriche intends the work to be read as public property. In this, as Beilin notes, the value of the work is increased by its place within commerce— not only is Dowriche participating in the rhetoric of political counsel, but she also does so within a marketplace economy. Dowriche’s history demonstrates an awareness of the popular literary modes of the late sixteenth century. In the text she applies various genres of early modern history writing, including the chronicle and didactic examples in the vein of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. She further demonstrates the scope of her learning by the inclusion of a range of source materials and also references to important contemporary texts such as François Hotman’s A True and Plaine Report of the Furious Outrages of Fraunce (1573) and Innocent Gentillet’s Discours (printed in French in 1576 and circulated in manuscript in 1577 in Simon Patericke’s English translation Contre-Machiavel). Inherent in her Protestant reformist polemic, Dowriche uses the historical source materials and personages in her poem to remind the reader of biblical and temporal parallels. Dowriche’s purpose, ‘to restore againe some credit if I can unto Poetrie’, works to establish the text as redefining the scope of poetry. Patricia Demers comments, ‘[her purpose] publicly promotes a forceful interpretive stance’.25 Immediately, Dowriche requires her readers to assess contemporary poetry, including poetry by women, but also to consider her poetry as history. Seeking authorization, Dowriche both alludes to her male-authored source texts and writes her text from the perspective of male narrators. She therefore distances such male (authorized) voices from her own (unauthor23 

She also wrote the preface to The Jailors Conversion, a text by her husband Hugh Dowriche (published in 1596). 24  Beilin, ‘Writing Public Poetry’, p. 249. 25  Demers, Women’s Writing in English, p. 135.

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ized) female voice. In this case she uses a Foxean methodology of framing herself as the compiler of the story rather than the author of the account. But she draws on Foxe in other respects too—where Foxe focuses on the identity of English Protestant martyrs and participates in forging an English national identity in a Protestant frame, Dowriche takes England’s Protestant national identity for certain and instead looks to the identity of England’s female monarch, as an example to Protestant English women. Since English national identity, for Dowriche, is not solely a male identity, the author positions herself within the English Reformation literary tradition alongside John Foxe and the editors of A Mirror for Magistrates but also within a cross-cultural space of religious reform. Speaking to this aspect of the text, Chedgzoy comments, ‘Dowriche elaborates the destiny of international Protestantism by a series of carefully drawn distinctions between France and England’.26 For Foxe, the English Protestant Reformation was an ongoing process and in his general introduction he explicitly claims that the purpose of his text is to provide didactic examples for contemporary English Protestants. The examples of female martyrs in the text serve to offer women a type of strong Protestant heroine they could look up to and emulate. Still, traditional female virtues extolled in the Tudor period were silence and obedience, virtues that outwardly contradict the ideology of religious martyrdom. Foxe, like other martyrologists, had to confront this problem when writing about female martyrs who were, by virtue of the fact that they were witnesses (from the Greek martus, μάρτυς, a witness), not silent or obedient to one type of male authority. Dowriche takes up this challenge, typified in Foxe, and other Protestant historians, who place virtuous women in a ‘special’ category and link their virtue to God’s involvement. The nine women included in Foxe’s martyrology represent different social types and classes and for the most part he is urged to defend their place as examples in the collection (yet he offers the women an important place in the dissemination of Protestant texts and Protestant ideology). What Dowriche does by imitating his form is to offer the reader representations of women who were influential in political ways—since Catherine de Medici and Elizabeth are queens who refuse to fit into a category of silent or obedient women, by placing both types of women (a wicked woman and a virtuous woman) within her history, Dowriche therefore dismisses the cultural gender distinctions of the Tudor period and presents examples of women in post-feminist vocational spaces. 26 

Chedgzoy, ‘This Pleasant and Sceptered Isle’, p. 37.

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A key strand of this history is Dowriche’s formalistic use of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as a model, as suggested by her imitation of the details provided on Foxe’s title pages. For example, in the title to the first English edition of Acts and Monuments in 1563, Foxe exposes various intimations about the purpose of history and the course of the Reformation. This serves to place Foxe’s text within an historical frame of reference and calls our attention to the acts of the martyrs and the historical monuments for posterity: ‘Acts and Monuments of the latter and perilous days, touching matters of the Church, wherein are comprehended and described the great persecutions & horrible troubles, that have been wrought and practiced by the Romishe Prelates.’27 From this title the reader understands that Foxe’s text is concerned with the facts of Church history, focusing on the Roman Catholic persecutions of non-Catholics. Dowriche picks up this emphasis on the horror of recent history in her own title when she similarly states: ‘The French Historie. That is; A lamentable Discourse of three of the chiefe, and most famous bloodie broiles that have happened in France for the Gospell of Jesus Christ.’28 Dowriche also brings the tragedy of the Reformation to the forefront and emphasizes the importance of the Gospel, that is, the Protestant emphasis on the word of God. Furthermore, her idea of the role of the historian is based on Foxe’s discussion of the task of the historian. A few lines into the title of the 1563 edition quoted above, Foxe continues to explain his role as historiographer of the Reformation when he states that his accounts were, ‘Gathered and collected according to the true copies and writings certificatory as well of the parties themselves that suffered, as also out of the Bishops Registers, Which were the doers thereof, by John Foxe.’29 Foxe claims that his role was simply to gather and collect the accounts from historical evidence. He does not call himself author, or creator, so that the title emphasizes the truth of his account for historical (truthful) purposes. If events could be seen as a truthful account of the natural course of history then the present Elizabethan age could be interpreted in providentialist terms. For Foxe this would, in effect, create a sense of English nationalism that placed English history within the prophecies of the Book of Revelation. Similarly, on her title page, Dowriche lists the three events covered in her history and offers a biblical exegesis for her text: 27 

Foxe, Actes and Monuments, t.p. Dowriche, fol. t. p. 29  Foxe, t.p. 28 

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1. The outrage called The winning of S. James his Streete, 1557. 2. The constant Martidome of Annas Burgeus one of the K. Councell, 1559. 3. The bloodie Marriage of Margaret Sister to Charles the 9, Anno 1572. All that will live godlie in Jesus Christ, Shall Suffer persecution. I Tim. 3.2.30

The biblical verse works to place the history in the framework of Protestant providentialism that Tudor history demands. The title page also includes an emblem of a naked woman, Verity, with the inscription ‘Virescit Vulnere Veritas’ (‘Truth will flourish from a wound’), with which the poem also closes. While Dowriche may not have been personally responsible for placing the content on the title page, she indicates her agreement with its linguistic and artistic representation of her goals, structure, and ideology by signing the dedication to her brother on the 1589 edition. In her Protestant history, Dowriche applies the type of authorization that Foxe uses when he claims only to gather and collect the accounts. The use of male narrators distinguishes her account as something more than the simple poetical musings of a woman and gives the sense that she is simply inscribing the account of the two speakers. But even her choice of a male narrator is a politicized act—in the opening she makes claims to poetry and she wishes to draw her readers into the text as poetry, a medium women frequently turned to, while simultaneously luring us into a highly selective Protestant history spoken by an authorized male voice. Just as in Foxe, Providence is the motivational force behind the text, especially as a piece of history writing. Matchinske comments that Dowriche ‘uses the trajectory of a linear religious history to provide a score of causal connections that necessitate specific and vigorous political response. At the same time, the unbroken line she draws between moral right and social effect speaks volumes about a gendered status that is in all likelihood denied such direct agency’.31 In the end, the French queen is punished not just because it is a truth of history but because, for Dowriche, God will punish transgressors, particularly Catholic transgressors. As a counterbalance to the portrayal of a wicked queen, Dowriche’s dedication to her brother, Pearse Edgecombe, offers a humble acknowledgement of the text’s deficiencies while also drawing our attention to the place of women in late Tudor print culture. She asks that her brother read her work and that he consider patronizing the text, if it pleases him enough: 30  31 

Dowriche, fol. t. p. Matchinske, Women Writing History, p. 28.

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When I had ended this present Pamphlet, I saw that the simplicite of it required a Patron […][,] I confesse if base and scarce worth the seeing […]. If I were sure that you would but take so much pleasure in reading it, as I have in collecting and disposing it: I should not neede anie farther to comment it. If you should finde anie thing that fits not your liking, remember I pray, that it is a womans doing.32

In her letter to readers, Dowriche explains that throughout the text she will direct her audience towards a clearer understanding of God’s truth. She hopes to inform readers about the history of the French wars of religion and also to help save these readers by her use of three examples from recent French history, which she outlines in the epistle. Even while acknowledging the ‘problem’ of women writing history, she exposes the irony of popular cultural strictures—the French queen will later excuse her own womanly aspirations before going on to act and behave in the manner she had always intended. Thus woman’s fulfilment of the role of regent or writer/counsellor is here presented as a norm but with the expected apology included as a token to her predominantly male readership. In the dedicatory epistle, Dowriche briefly describes the 1572 massacre in Paris and outlines how it was the work of Satan. She places God’s plan for the progress of Protestant reform at the centre of the narrative, privileging the Protestant cause. Dowriche imitates the format of Foxe’s dedicatory epistle to Queen Elizabeth where he encourages the Queen to persevere in the process of reformation. The epistle opens by invoking the emperor Constantine, ‘[who] had pacified and established the church of Christ’. The dedication here works to show, by the allusion to the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, that God had chosen Elizabeth to carry out the Reformation of His Church: that a multitude of godly Martyrs were slayne before the tyme of the sayde Constantine, is partly aboue declared […]. I offer and present here unto your Maiestie [these martyrs], humbly desyring, and nothing yet misdoubting, but that your highnes and singuler clem[en]cie, likewyse followyng the steppes of that noble Const[an]tine, with no lesse propensitie of fauoure and furtheraunce, wil accept and also assiste these my laborious trauailes to the behoufe of the churche, against the importunitie of the malignaunt.33

This passage links Elizabeth’s accession with the end of Christian martyrdom, as the sign that God would end the persecution of Protestants. The dedication and the title establish the context with which Acts and Monuments 1563 should 32 

Dowriche, fol. A2r-v. 33  Foxe, Dedication.

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be read. Tom Betteridge comments on this particular aspect of Foxe’s work when he states, ‘Its textual motivation is the creation of an unembroidered textual space in which the words and example of the martyrs can be read’.34 Foxe’s work seeks to present the history of the Church so that the devastating stories of the martyrs would stand as monuments to the past. The accounts of the martyrs in Acts and Monuments progress in chronological order towards the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Throughout her text, Dowriche questions accepted gender boundaries and advocates for a serious re-evaluation of women’s participation in political events (specifically the Queen). Dowriche offers herself as an engaged participant whose actions lead to positive ends. With the allusion and in-text address to Elizabeth, Dowriche offers a contrast with the French queen, whose political participation leads to a tragedy for Protestants; thus, the text demonstrates that England’s own queen can act to positive ends for what both Elizabeth and Dowriche perceive as the true faith. In the section on the massacre itself, the author focuses on transgression from the true faith as a basis for wickedness. She describes how the Huguenots upset Satan and provoked the Devil to lure Catherine de Medici and provoke her to play a more active role in abolishing the Protestant faction in France: The Mother Queen in this must also play her part, […] and so you may your plot prepare By these and suchlike feigned things, to trap them in your snare.35

Following this, the reader learns how the French king (Charles IX) and his counsel take Satan’s advice and begin their treachery against Coligny and Henry of Navarre (including the marriage plans mentioned above). Dowriche’s account depicts the French king, Charles IX, as a tyrant and blames him for the execution of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Her accusations against Charles echo the tenor of the claims of Satan’s influence over the Queen Mother. Earlier in the poem, she asserted that although the massacre was Catherine de Medici’s idea, the French queen had verbally deferred responsibility on the basis of her sex. We learn that Satan saw that the French princes were unhappy with events in France and thought that he could profit by their unrest. The devil makes no distinctions based on sex nor does the poem offer

34  35 

Betteridge, Tudor Histories, p. 185. Dowriche, fol. F3r.

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one-sided blame: both Charles and Catherine were lured by Satan to punish the (godly) Protestants in France. In the next section, Dowriche imagines a scene in which Satan and his minions speak to the French Council about how to bring about this de casi­ bus tragedy: ‘The King as chiefest man this plaie must first begin’. Dowriche’s Satan directs the characters into their prescribed roles: the French king, he says, must listen to his council and, ‘yeeld to all that they request or crave, | And he must grant for to confirm the thing that they wold have’. Satan continues to perform the role of director in this tragedy and allocates Catherine de Medici’s dramatic role: ‘the Mother Queene in this must also play her part, | That no suspect of treason maie remaine within their heart’. When Satan finishes, the narrator explains that the French agreed to his deceitful plan to eliminate the French Protestants: The Counsell did agree, this was the onelie waie, And everie man did give his word, this sentence to obaie. And that they would devise such things to put in ure, As best might fit this cursed plot, and make the same most sure.36

There is a marginal gloss that further emphasizes the active role of Satan in this plan: ‘the king doth presentlie put in practice Sathan’s councell’.37 Dowriche dramatizes the action in the frame of the infernal influence when the character stands and gives thanks to the other actors: ‘Sathan hearing rose, and thankt them with his heart’.38 This consciously dramatic poem imagines a tangible link between the Catholic French and the infernal deity—as if their actions were instigated and initiated in hell. Once again, the late-Tudor reader would be reminded of A Mirror for Magistrates and the discussion of the ghosts coming up from their graves to tell their history to the editors. This participates in the anti-Catholic message of the poem, but also demonizes the French so that readers (particularly Elizabeth) can see a danger in what Dowriche perceives as a current political amity with the French. In this episode of her historical narrative, Dowriche reinforces the dramatic nature of her poem and also makes a distinction between the tyrannous regime in France and the more democratic parliamentary system in England. The nar-

36 

Dowriche, fol. F3r. Dowriche, fol. F3r. 38  Dowriche, fol. F3r. 37 

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rator begins, ‘But here the prologue endes, and heree begins the plaie’,39 and the villainous Machiavellian heroine takes her cue: The Mother Queen appears now first upon the stage, Where like a devilish sorceress with words demure and sage The King she calls aside, with other trusty mates Into a close and secret place, with whom she now debates. The great desire she had to quit them all from care, In planting long a bloody plot, which now she must declare.40

These words reveal that the Queen Mother is a strong-minded political participant and will be the key contributor in the final part of this French history. By staging a wicked female ruler in a text addressed to a godly female ruler, Dowriche seeks to counter the dominant view of gender and politics in the early modern period and present the case for accepting women’s political participation in England. Her argument is not that women rulers are wicked but to present evidence that women rulers are capable of initiating and enforcing religious change. By this argument, Elizabeth should not only be compelled to act more harshly towards Catholics in England, but also feel safeguarded because the Protestant cause is protected by God. Although only queen regent, Catherine de Medici wielded power and subdued her enemies and those whom she felt threatened the Catholic success of her sons’ kingdoms. Dowriche is constrained by the facts of history: de Medici did not meet a tragic death as a result of her active involvement with France’s governing.41 Unlike her Tudor stage predecessors like Gascoigne’s Jocasta or Marlowe’s Zenocrate, this dramatic queen maintains her prowess despite being actively involved in politics. She is motivated by personal politics and ensures that her will (long planted) is carried out, irrespective of her sex. Taking control of events in Paris, Catherine de Medici tells her allies they must act now while they are in a powerful position having captured the Protestant leaders: O thrice most happie day, We have them all in hold, we have the chiefest fast, […] 39 

Dowriche, fol. G3r. 40  Dowriche, fol. G3r. 41  Although Catherine did not meet death because of her involvement in the massacre, nearly all of her children died during the French wars of religion. Catherine died in early 1589 when Henry III of France, her last surviving male child, reigned.

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The captains captive are, the King of Navarre sure, The Prince of Condé with the rest that mischief did procure, Are close within our walls, we have them in a trap, Good fortune (lo), has brought them all, and laid them in our lap.42

In this passage Catherine de Medici expresses a joie de vivre in response to the fact that the Huguenot transgressors, Navarre and Condé, have been trapped— as a matter of good fortune. Dowriche does not allow Catherine to speak of this in providentialist terms because it contradicts the anti-Catholic polemic of her thesis. More importantly for this chapter, this section of The French Historie demonstrates Dowriche’s key point about women’s participation in the political world: Catherine de Medici is physically empowered to act, not just theoretically. Dowriche slants her character so that de Medici’s participation, alongside the male political participants, appears to be guided by the spirit of Satan. In this dramatic section of the text, the first act is a pseudo-parliamentary debate where de Medici addresses her king and counsel: ‘The King she calls aside, with other trusty mates | Into a close and secret place’.43 Dowriche makes a distinction here between the way male political participants behave and how de Medici might theoretically behave if her sex did not limit, even exclude, her from active political participation: ‘What shame is this that I (a woman by my kinde) | Neede thus to speake, or passe you men in valure of the minde?’.44 The excuse of womanly inability that the Queen claims, I argue, works to highlight the sheer inanity of the debate against women’s participation in cultural and political spheres. I suggested earlier how Dowriche’s self-deprecation of her womanly abilities in the epistle to her brother was a showpiece only. Here the Queen Mother couches her words in a similarly gendered language so the male participants will not dismiss her counsel outright. She boldly appeals to their male-gendered authority: For here I do protest, if I had been a man, I had myself before this time this murder long began. Why do you doubting stand, and wherefore do you stay? […] This is a woman’s mind, and thus I think it best, Now let us likewise hear I pray the sentence of the rest.45

42 

Dowriche, fol. G3v. 43  Dowriche, fol. G3r. 44  Dowriche, fol. G4r. 45  Dowriche, fol. G4r.

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The Queen Mother criticizes their inaction by saying if she were a man she would have put measures in place long ago to prevent the current crisis. By making them face the glaring error of their unpreparedness, her gender becomes irrelevant and they necessarily must follow her advice despite her acknowledged inferior position as a woman. The narrator tells us that ‘this counsel of them all was liked passing well’46 and ‘her mates’ began discussing if they should kill the King of Navarre and the Prince of Condé or spare them in the hope that they will ‘forswear their former faith’ while still torturing and putting to death the rest of the rebels.47 Just as history has shown itself to be gender-neutral, the narrator’s retelling of the dramatic details of the massacre blatantly dismisses sex discrimination: ‘they spared none they knew, no sex could pity find, | The rueful cry of tender babes could not assuage their mind’.48 Dowriche’s portrayal of the French nobles in a parliamentary setting being outmanoeuvred by their queen inverts the account of the Elizabethan West­ minster Conference found in Foxe. This works to draw the reader’s attention to the emphasis on parliamentary government and the Elizabethan settlement in contrast to the methods of some opponents of religious reform. Thus, Dowriche’s model of the French court illustrates that tyranny is not solely related to gynocracy—indeed it is Charles who is depicted as a tyrant. The portrayal of the French court also demonstrates that women are fully capable of governing in both wicked and virtuous regimes. Like Dowriche’s concluding poem on truth flourishing under Elizabeth, the concluding section of Foxe’s 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments focuses on the history of Elizabeth’s reign. This ‘sixth’ book presents an image of the English nation on a path of continuing reform under Queen Elizabeth in contrast to the recent bloody reign of her sister Mary. According to Foxe’s account, God had ‘plainly and truly displaced the cruel and horrible persecutions of queen Mary’s reign’ and provided for the ‘long wished for reign of the most noble, virtuous, and renowned sufferer of the late Mary […] Queen Elizabeth’.49 By using Foxe in this way, Dowriche sets up a contrast between France under Catherine de Medici and the tyrannous regimes of the Catholic monarchs, and England under the Protestant Elizabeth. In Dowriche’s own version of Reformation history in France, she includes the horrid details of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre to stress the gross 46 

Dowriche, fol. G4r. 47  Dowriche, fol. G4v. 48  Dowriche, fol. I2v. 49  Foxe, 1708.

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brutality of the Catholics and the value of ensuring the success of Protestant reform in England and in Europe. The reader is even invited to ‘see’ the consequences of the events in France when the narrator begins, Now let us see the ende of this perjured King, And let us weigh in future time what fearfull fruite did spring From falsed faith.50

The narrator in Dowriche’s French Historie then brings the intended didacticism of the text clearly into the forefront by explicitly stating the moral lesson: Then shall we plainlie see how that in everie land The Lord according to his law with just revenging hand The bloodie tyrants strikes, with all their faithlesse crue; As by examples we maie see of such as shall ensue.51

At this point in the narrative, Dowriche invites the reader to recognize the relation between history writing and the expression of a moral lesson. For comparison, Dowriche’s fictional narrator mentions various examples of fallen rulers in the Bible and in history who were eventually punished by God with death. She includes Tryphon among the list of fallen figures and tells us that he represents the French king, Charles IX. The lesson, ‘happy is the man that timely can beware | Of popish treason, which does seem great favour for to bear’,52 is not a straightforward political lesson but a religious moral—to avoid what she calls Catholic treason. This is followed by Dowriche’s message to readers and especially to Elizabeth, whom she mentions specifically. Here the tone changes as the French pilgrim directly addresses the Englishman in the fashion of a dramatic epilogue: Now have you heard at large the chiefe of bruted broile, That lately for the Truth hath bin in France my native soil […]. With wished life and health Lord long preserve and keepe That Noble Queene Elizabeth chiefe Pastor of thy sheepe: And that she maie finde out, and hunt with perfect hate The Popish hearts of fained frends before it be too late.53 50 

Dowriche, fol. K4r. 51  Dowriche, fol. K4r. 52  Dowriche, fol. L1r. 53  Dowriche, fol. L1v.

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Once again the narrator frames the story in dramatic language as if the characters had performed the action of The French Historie before an audience. The pilgrim appeals to Queen Elizabeth to use the example of the French to ensure that Catholics are not allowed to prosper in England. The closing section of the text reinforces the link between Elizabeth and the defeat of Satan/Catholicism in England. When Dowriche’s Catherine de Medici claims that she would have acted sooner if she had been a man and been warranted some political power, Dowriche is being ironic. She is in fact pressing the English queen, who has taken measures to suppress Catholic opposition, to continue her plans and harsh treatment of Catholics in England before the Catholic opposition presents a further problem, or before she is no longer ruling England. Dowriche’s text was published at a crucial time in Elizabeth’s history: the English had recently defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the French queen, Catherine de Medici, had died in January 1589, perhaps bringing Elizabeth’s own mortality to mind. In using Foxe as a point of reference for Dowriche’s own work, I have tried to show that Dowriche applies this historical context to suggest the effectiveness of women’s participation in the political and cultural arena as much as she uses it to further her own Puritan religious agenda. There is, of course, irony in the text about women’s governance in relation to Elizabeth. The seemingly light-hearted treatment of her text in the opening pages confirms Dowriche’s opinion that just as Elizabeth can be empowered to act because she is the monarch, the author’s Historie can equally delight and teach (the prescription in Sidney’s Defence) English readers despite her sex. Her claim to simply write poetry, rather than chronicle-history, excuses the text from having high ambitions. Both Beilin and Chedgzoy have commented on Dowriche’s protestations here, observing how Dowriche chooses to tackle the problem of women’s exclusion from public discourse. Chedgzoy writes, The situation in which Dowriche has her two anonymous male speakers, strangers to one another, meet in a wood seems less like a way of managing gender exclusion than a formulaic, even folkloric, pretext for introducing a narrative which confidently tackles massive questions of politics and religion in a quasi-public setting.54

Although women’s religious poetry was not unusual among the educated classes, women writing and publishing history was uncharted literary terri54 

Chedgzoy, ‘This Pleasant and Sceptered Isle’, p. 30.

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tory. Dowriche’s history takes a dramatic direction because the content of her account, tragic history, is suited to the dramatic mode. Dowriche gives Catherine’s speech a prominent place in the narrative to offer a contrast to Elizabeth’s recent address to the English troops at Tilbury (1588). Thomas Deloney’s account of the Queen’s speech was a popular text in its own right when it was printed in 1588. But more importantly it offers both a veiled criticism of Elizabeth and political counsel by way of a comparison of the English and French courts. I have argued that this particular criticism relates to the different treatments of gender and politics in the nearby powerful nations. Notably, Dowriche clearly did not intend to portray Catherine de Medici as unable to rule because of her sex; indeed, the French kings are not portrayed in the most flattering lens. Instead, Dowriche focuses on the role of counsel and cooperative government; de Medici is therefore cast in the tragic protagonist’s role as a wicked/evil Machiavellian counsellor. The obverse is that another ruling queen, Elizabeth, can be cast as the hero, whose Protestant faith will bring her to victory.

Works Cited Primary Sources Anger, Jane, Iane Anger Her Protection for Women (London: Richard Jones and Thomas Orwin, 1589), STC 644 Dowriche, Anne, The French Historie (London: Thomas Orwin, 1589), STC 7159 Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church, Wherein are Comprehended and Described the Great Persecutions and Horrible Troubles (London: John Day, 1563), STC 11222 Serres, Jean de, A Discourse of the Ciuile Warres and Late Troubles in Fraunce, Drawn into Englishe by Geffray Fenton, and Deuided into Three Books (London: Henry Bynneman, 1570), STC 11271 —— , The Fourth Parte of Commentaries of the Ciuill Warres in Fraunce, and of the Lovve Countrie of Flaunders: Translated Out of Latine into English, by Thomas Tymme Minister (London: Henry Bynneman, 1576), STC 22243 —— , The Three Partes of Commentaries Containing the Whole and Perfect Discourse of the Ciuill Warres of Fraunce […]. Translated Out of Latine into English by Thomas Timme Minister (London: Frances Coldocke, 1574), STC 22241.5

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Secondary Studies Beilin, Elaine, ‘“Some Freely Spake Their Minde”: Resistance in Anne Dowriche’s French Historie’, in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. by Mary Elizabeth Burke, Jane Donawerth, and Karen Nelson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 119–40 —— , ‘Writing Public Poetry: Humanism and the Woman Writer’, Modern Language Quarterly, 51.2 (1990), 249–72 Betteridge, Thomas, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) Chedgzoy, Kate, ‘This Pleasant and Sceptered Isle: Insular Fantasies of National Identity in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie and William Shakespeare’s Richard  II’, in Archi­pelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800, ed. by Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 25–42 Demers, Patricia, Women’s Writing in English: Early Modern England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005) Lees-Jeffries, Hester, ‘Location as Metaphor in Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation Entry (1559)’, in Veritas Temporis Filia: The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth  I, ed. by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 65–85 Martin, Randall, ‘Anne Dowriche’s “The French History”, Christopher Marlowe, and Machiavellian Agency’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1099, 39 (1999), 67–87 Matchinske, Megan, ‘Moral, Method, and History in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie’, English Literary Renaissance, 34.2 (2004), 176–200 —— , Women Writing History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2009) Suzuki, Mihoko, ‘Warning Elizabeth with Catherine de’ Medici’s Example: Anne Dowriche’s French Historie and the Politics of Counsel’, in The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Anne J. Cruz and Mihoko Suzuki (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), pp. 174–93 White, Micheline, ‘Power Couples and Women Writers in Elizabethan England: The Public Voices of Dorcas and Richard Martin and Anne and Hugh Dowriche’, in Fram­ ing the Family: Representation and Narrative in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by Diane Wolfthal and Rosalynn Voaden (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2005), pp. 119–38

A Cave of Despair and an Irish Mantle: Ireland in the Writings of Edmund Spenser and Elizabeth Cary Marion Wynne-Davies

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t is possible to conceal oneself either in a cave or under a mantle. This chapter takes as its starting point two such images: the cave in relation to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and A View of The Present State of Ireland, and the mantle with regard to Elizabeth Cary in her own work, The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward  II […] written by E.F. in the year 1627 and in the biography written by her daughter, Lucy Cary, The Lady Falkland: Her Life.1 In each case, the initial trope is used in order to discuss both the personal and political implications for the writers in terms of race, nationhood, and faith. The following, more detailed analyses of the texts, however, serve to challenge seemingly clear interpretations by uncovering what is concealed under and behind conventional discourse, leading to an understanding of how gender impacted Spenser’s and Cary’s engagement with early modern English colonialist policy in Ireland.

The Cave In the summer of 2004 one of my friends happened to mention that he had visited the Cave of Despair. As he began the account, however, I was under no 1 

Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. by Hamilton, and Spenser, Present State of Ireland, ed. by Greenlaw; further references to the first are given in the text. Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II and Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson. Marion Wynne-Davies ([email protected]) is Professor of English at the University of Surrey. She specializes in early modern literary studies

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illusion that he would relate a tale of tragedy and woe, either personal or political. Rather, I understood that he was about to describe to me, a fellow early modern scholar, the cavern which it is assumed Spenser used for the allegorical setting for Book I canto ix of The Faerie Queene.2 In this initial section of the poem, Spenser sends his first moral hero, the Red Cross Knight, with his lady, Una, into the Cave of Despair, which is described as, an hollow cave, Farre vnderneath a craggie clift ypight, Darke, dolefull, drearie, like a greedie graue, That still for carrion carcases doth craue. (I. ix. 33.2–5)

Despair, ‘[t]hat cursed man’ (I. ix. 35.2), encourages the Red Cross Knight to contemplate suicide, but it is not until Red Cross actually raises the knife to kill himself that Una finally intervenes to save her ‘fraile, feeble, fleshly’ knight by reminding him of his duty and of ‘heauenly mercies’ (I. ix. 53.1). While the Christian allegory of this episode may be decoded with relative ease, it is possible to excavate further levels of interpretation in both personal and political terms. For example, certain biographical details about Spenser’s own hopes for preferment and the location of his estate at the time of the poem’s composition allow the Cave of Despair to be read alternatively as an intensely personal confession of nihilistic despondency. In 1580 Spenser had become the private secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, the newly appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, and from this point his fortunes were to be intimately connected with Irish politics. Under the English system of patronage Spenser gradually progressed through the ranks of the Irish colonialist administration and, in common with other English nobles, he used his position to acquire land in the new plantations. In 1586 he was assigned the forfeited estate of the Earl of Desmond at Kilcolman in County Cork; the details of the claim to this estate are somewhat unclear, but he had certainly occupied the lands by September 2 

The cave is, supposedly, situated in a stone outcrop upon which the castle at Kilcolman was situated. The site is now on private lands and permission has to be obtained before it can be visited, although differing accounts are somewhat confusing. The Blue Guide to Ireland claims that the castle is now on Kilcolman Wildfowl Refuge and that visiting is restricted, while Hadfield states that, ‘Spenser’s house at Kilcolman is now an ivy covered ruin surrounded by an electric fence which the irate owner turns up to repel Spenser groupies’ (‘Simon Shepherd, “Spenser”’, p. 152). The cavern is also reputed to have provided Spenser and his family with the means of their escape when the castle was sacked by Irish ‘rebels’ in 1597 since it led to a tunnel coming out north of the castle in further caves (also possible sites for the Cave of Despair).

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1588.3 Kilcolman was to remain Spenser’s home until it was destroyed in 1598 during Tyrone’s rebellion, after which he returned to London, dying a year later, allegedly in poverty. Thus, Spenser’s hopes for a glittering career at court blessed with the personal preferment of the Queen were never to be realized and, even while he continued to woo his monarch in the sycophantic proems to the six completed books of The Faerie Queene, he may by the late 1580s have already understood the hopelessness of such petitions. As such, the bleak desperation imaged in the Red Cross Knight’s allegorical encounter with Despair may well have reflected Spenser’s own state of mind, or a certain aspect of it.4 At the same time it must be remembered that in colonialist terms Spenser’s acquisition of the Kilcolman estate and his marriage into one of the wealthiest Irish families must be considered a success. The description of the fictional cave is probably based upon the actual cavern and a series of tunnels that existed beneath the castle at Kilcolman. It was this spot that my friend claimed to have visited and, as he described the dank, gloomy atmosphere, it seemed perfectly plausible to envisage Spenser, thwarted in his personal ambition, isolated amongst an alienated nation, and wary of hostilities, sitting in the ‘darke, dolefull, dreareie’ cave, trying like Red Cross not to ‘moue from watchfull sted, | Nor leaue his stand, vntill his Captaine bed’, but, also like the knight, perceiving himself as a ‘man of sin’ bound by the vicissitudes of ‘fickle fortune’ (I. ix. 41.4–5, 46.1, 44.8). The thwarting of Spenser’s personal ambition at the English court was, however, more than matched by the continuing inadequacies of British colonialist policy in Ireland. The success of the Protestant Reformation in England produced a crisis in Anglo-Irish relations, mainly because of the sustained and strong support for Catholicism in Ireland. Moreover, as a result of these religious convictions, an alliance between Ireland and Spain, the dominant Catholic power in Europe and England’s enemy, became a distinct possibility. Indeed, it was the fear of a possible Spanish invasion from Ireland that partially contributed to the severe repression of Lord Grey’s administration and the subsequent fierceness of the Irish attempts to repulse the British. By the end of the sixteenth century English dominance in Ireland had been, under the generalship of the Earl of Essex, all but decimated, and it was not until 1602, under the command of Mountjoy, that these losses were to be recuperated. But even 3 

For details of Spenser’s life in Ireland I have used Maley, A Spenser Chronology. Maley notes that on its inspection in September 1586 Kilcolman castle was described as ‘a large castle, old and dilapidated, which at present time has no use except to shelter cattle in the night’ (p. 43), which certainly coincides with the overall gloomy picture in Book I canto ix. 4  For an account of Spenser’s life, see Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser.

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Mountjoy’s victory was, in the way of all English ‘successes’ in Ireland, merely a transient affair, and later Lord Deputies were, not unexpectedly, to encounter similar resistance. While it is not the concern of this chapter to trace the history of the troubled relationships between Ireland and England, the space of forty years promotes a consideration of another Lord Deputy, Henry Cary, Viscount Falkland, and another early modern English authorial incursion into a politicized Anglo-Irish discourse Ireland, but this time from the perspective of a woman, Falkland’s wife, Elizabeth Cary. But first, what of the mantle?

The Mantle The holdings of the Tate Britain Gallery include a painting entitled, Portrait of a Lady, Called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield; it is dated 1615 and is sometimes attributed to the resident Dutch artist of the Jacobean court, Marcus Gheeraerts II. The painting has been recorded three times: first, by George Vertue during his visit in 1725 to Ditchley, which had been the home of Henry Lee, when he catalogued the work as a ‘Lady with yellow lace about her neck’; second, in 1933 when the work was sold by Sotheby’s along with the portrait of Thomas Lee, also by Gherraerts; and third, in the Tate Gallery’s Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, 1978–80, which concluded that, This [the portrait] could represent Elizabeth Tanfield (1585/6–1639), a grandniece of Sir Henry Lee. She married in 1602 Henry Cary, later Lord Falkland, also a relative by marriage of the Lees, and the kinship on both sides would seem sufficient reason for there to be a portrait of her at Ditchley, the seat of the Lee family.5

The portrait depicts a young woman attired in a sumptuous red cloak and a richly embroidered green gown decorated with yellow lace, the short skirt suggesting that this is a masque costume with the hem raised to facilitate dancing. She stands next to a peach tree, her hair loose and crowned with a wreath of heart’s ease or pansies, with her right hand lifted so that it appears as if she is holding her gauze-like veil as a shield against the sun. The combination of long hair, which signifies a bride, pansies, which refer to love, and peach tree, which was linked to Venus, confirm that the overall emblematic meaning of the painting refers to love. This common symbolism thereby suggests that ‘Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield’ is shown in a costume designed for one of the numerous mar5 

Tate, Catalogue, pp. 7–8; Vertue, ‘Vertue Notebooks II’, pp. 14, 76; and Sotheby’s, Cata­ logue, lot 85.

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riage entertainments of the mid-1610s. However, given the date of 1615, the lady depicted could hardly have been Lady Elizabeth Tanfield, who would have been about fifty-six at the sitting, making a link with her daughter, the thirtyyear-old Elizabeth Cary, far more probable. Moreover, there are striking similarities with an authenticated portrait of Elizabeth Cary painted by Paul van Somer and now in the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, Texas. These include the lady’s red-blond curling hair pushed back from her high forehead, fair colouring, full lower lip, and large dark eyes. What is particularly striking and enigmatic about the portrait, however, is that Cary’s veil may be identified as an Irish mantle. The history of the Irish mantle is a complicated one. In the late sixteenth century it was considered symbolic of barbarism, immorality, and rebellion; for example, Spenser describes it in A View of The Present State of Ireland as ‘a fitt howse for an outlawe a mete bedd for a Rebell and an Apte cloak for a thefe’ as well as, with a gendered inflection, ‘a Coverlett for her [the Irish woman’s] lewd exercises’.6 By 1613, Ben Jonson had reworked the symbolism of the garment in his Irish Masque, which celebrated the wedding of Robert Earl of Somerset to Lady Frances Howard, so that the threatening cloak was made to mutate into a self-conscious relinquishing of concealment and a full acceptance of the power of the King. In the masque this is symbolized by the masquers removing their mantle, ‘this most politically charged signifier of Native Irish opposition’, and acknowledging James’ power in a final song that envisages his power as sun-like, ‘so breakes the sunne earths rugged chaines’.7 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass discuss these permutations, delineating the shift from barbarism, through the incorporation of the mantle in images of English sovereignty (Elizabeth I’s Rainbow Portrait), to the lavish self-fashioning of James I’s court in which ‘mantles in the Irish style and yellow starch alike became fashion[able] in London’.8 The ‘yellow lace’ identified by Vertue in the portrait of Cary thus underscores the Irish allusion in the portrait for, as Jones and Stallybrass note, ‘the use of saffron [as a dye] was associated above all with the Irish’.9 But to be depicted in an Irish mantle, with that incriminating yellow lace, was not altogether a statement of high fashion, for the pejorative associations, as Jonson’s 6 

The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, pp. 100–01. Smith, ‘Effaced History’, pp. 297–321, 306; Jonson, ‘The Irish Masque’, ed. by Hereford et al., pp. 403, 405. 8  Jones and Stallybrass, ‘“Rugges of London and the Diuell’s Band”’, pp. 128–49, 143. 9  Jones and Stallybrass, ‘“Rugges of London and the Diuell’s Band”’, p. 137. 7 

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masque prove, were still in place. Elizabeth Cary, therefore, determined on a representation that, as Jones and Stallybrass note, ‘complicated clear boundaries’.10 Cary was, of course, no stranger to individualism and controversy, having authored the first original tragedy by an Englishwoman when she was about eighteen, while in 1626 she converted to Catholicism and left her husband. What remains to be asked, therefore, is why, seven years before Henry Cary took up the position of Lord Deputy of Ireland, she deliberately associated herself with that nation and in a manner that might easily be misconstrued through a lens of barbarism, rebellion, and, perhaps most significantly, the lack of female chastity symbolized by the Irish mantle. The portraits at Ditchley provide the key. By returning to the references to the portrait of Cary, it is possible to trace its link with a further portrait, of Captain Thomas Lee, the younger son of Henry Lee’s half-brother, Benedict Lee. Both were purchased by Tate Britain in the 1933 Sotheby’s sale and both were recorded by Vertue during his 1725 tour of the Ditchley collection.11 Thomas Lee served in Ireland, but his career there was hardly conventional. Because Lee had become acquainted with Hugh O’Neill, the second Earl of Tyrone, during his youth, Lee was delegated to set up parleys between the Irish lord and the English commissioners in 1593 when Tyrone threatened rebellion. Lee was successful until 1595 when rebellion broke out and he was forced to return to England dissatisfied with his treatment by successive lord deputies.12 During this time Lee appears to have stayed at Ditchley and it must have been at this point that he wrote Brief Declaration of the Government in Ireland and had his portrait painted.13 Both cultural artefacts demonstrate Lee’s acute sense of displacement. In contravention of government policy, Brief Declaration outlines ways in which Elizabeth could establish good relations with the Irish lords; indeed he even advocated that English soldiers would be well advised to adopt the Irish mantle since it offered ‘protection in all weathers’.14 Still more provocatively, the portrait presents Lee as an Irish kerne, that is, a foot soldier and the most poorly paid of all the army. Although the lace at his neck and the lavish embroidery on his shirt evidences his noble 10 

Jones and Stallybrass, ‘“Rugges of London and the Diuell’s Band”’. Vertue, ‘Vertue Notebooks II’, pp. 14, 76. 12  For a discussion of Thomas Lee’s career, from which my subsequent description is drawn, see Tate, Catalogue, pp. 24–46. 13  Lee, A Brief Declaration of the Government in Ireland. 14  Jones and Stallybrass, ‘“Rugges of London and the Diuell’s Band”’, p. 135. 11 

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status, his legs and feet are bare, and while he carries a pistol at his waist, his hand holds a pike. The landscape carries a similar dialectic, with the depiction of rough Irish bog land set alongside a foregrounded oak tree, symbolizing constancy. There is a quotation on the tree, ‘Facere et parti Fortia’, which refers to the words of the Roman Caius Mucius Scaevola, who when captured by the enemy Etrurians thrust his hand into the fire to show his disdain for personal suffering, hence, to act and to suffer with fortitude. Lee must certainly have identified with Scaevola, who secured a peace treaty with the Etrurians and was rewarded with land, just as Lee himself hoped to be. Such desires, however, ended in failure, as Thomas Lee became implicated in the 1601 Essex rebellion; he was tried for high treason and executed at Tyburn on 17 February of that year. Given the date of the portrait (1594) and Thomas Lee’s known residency at Ditchley (1599–1601), it is likely that the young Elizabeth (Tanfield) Cary would have known, or known about, Henry Lee’s disreputable nephew. Cary’s own monetary indebtedness to Henry Lee is evidenced from her high valuation of his intellectual and literary approbation as may be seen from her dedication to the translation of Ortelius’s The Mirror of the Worlde (1598).15 The combinations are intriguing: both portraits employ Irish symbolism and have been attributed to Gheeraerts; Thomas Lee and Elizabeth Cary had strong personal and familial links with Ditchley, from which both paintings were purchased; the involvement of the Lees with Irish policy and governance is pursued by the Carys; and finally, the sympathy expressed by Lee for Ireland and the ways in which he challenged English colonialist policy may be identified through not only Cary’s representation in the Irish mantle, but also in her writing. However, when the portrait was painted in 1615, the Cary sympathies (Elizabeth’s) and ambitions (Henry’s) were still germinating. By 1622, when Henry Cary accepted the post of Lord Deputy, the economic and political realities of their lives had shifted. Perhaps the most important fact—and the one that is often neglected by historians and critics of Elizabeth Cary’s work— is that she mortgaged her jointure in order to buy him the post and thereby advance his political career.16 Yet, this sacrifice on her part led to as little success as had Spenser’s panegyric poetry; indeed, the action of mortgaging the estate resulted in the couple being immediately disinherited by her father, Lawrence Tanfield, in favour of their eldest son, Lucius. The longer term brought even 15 

Cary, The Mirror of the World, ed. by Peterson. For the subsequent details of Cary’s life I am indebted to Krontiris, ‘Style and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II’ and Oppositional Voices; Purkiss, ‘Introduction’; Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers; and Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson. 16 

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more disasters for Henry Cary, since his wife’s leaning towards Catholicism strengthened during her three years in Ireland and she was received into the Catholic Church in November 1626 shortly upon her return to England. This conversion soon became public knowledge and Elizabeth became a political embarrassment to her husband, who was endeavouring to establish a career in an increasingly Protestant administration. In truth, Henry Cary’s position must have been doubly undermined, since if he was seen as impotent in his attempts to control his wife’s religious persuasions, how could he possibly be effective in pursuing a Protestant policy over a long-established Catholic nation such as the Irish? In an attempt to distance himself from this damaging situation, Cary declared that he wished to separate from his wife and he subsequently withdrew from her all economic and material support. A flurry of letters testify to his desperation at this point; indeed, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski notes that Falkland’s letters to the King and court officials displays the fury of a thwarted patriarch and Protestant zealot. He denounces his ‘Apostate’ wife and those in the Queen’s court who subverted her, decrying the danger to himself ‘to nourish that serpent in my bosom’.17

All Henry Cary’s attempts to regain a significant political advantage over his wife were to prove in vain. No doubt, if he had come across Spenser’s Cave of Despair, Cary would have sat there cursing, not his own failure, but the perfidy of Duessa, the false Catholic other to the ideal Protestant Una, who seemed to be incarnated in the figure of his wife, Elizabeth. The effect upon Elizabeth Cary of those three years in Ireland must, however, be viewed somewhat differently. To begin, she would hardly have depicted herself as a wrongdoer, a false wife, or a heretic. Evidence of her own view may be gleaned from her subsequent work The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II in which she incorporates quasi-autobiographical material in her depiction of Isabel, the wronged queen of Edward II. Further, the biographical account written by her daughter Lucy Cary describes her time in Ireland in a manner that suggests saint-like veneration. Indeed, even though Elizabeth Cary’s conversion to Catholicism was to isolate her from her friends, most of her family, and her social peers, even though she became penniless as a result of her faith, and even though her literary career appeared to be subsequently truncated, no doubt about the absolute rightness of her choice is ever mentioned in either her own work or in her biography. As Nandra Perry points out, 17 

Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, p. 186.

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Elizabeth’s belief in the power of her conversion was total: ‘if Catholic polemic argues that religion is a personal affair, then Catholic biography and hagiography, alongside their Neo-stoical counterparts, celebrate the ascendancy of the personal over the political, the power of the transcendent reality hidden inside the heart to manifest itself in the material world through the body’.18 In short, the events that heralded disaster for Henry Cary were perceived by Elizabeth as a guarantee of her salvation. The political, personal, and spiritual repercussions of the early modern colonialist experience of Ireland was, therefore, widely divergent for husband and wife, and perhaps for men and women. It would, of course, be inaccurate to generalize an overall pattern of gendered perception from the writings of three individuals. Yet, the conjunction of Edmund Spenser and Elizabeth Cary, two writers who were both intimately connected to and dependent upon an English Protestant administration of Ireland, but whose interaction with the dominant colonialist ideology of their period was so utterly divergent, demands excavation. In the subsequent sections of this chapter it is necessary, therefore, to explore the way in which Spenser and Cary incorporate Ireland into their cultural discourses. Moreover, if the symbolic experience of Edmund Spenser may be linked to the Cave of Despair hidden beneath the castle at Kilcolman and the representation of Elizabeth Cary shielding her face with an Irish mantle, it is essential to focus upon the parallel notions of concealment and ask what lay within the cave and what was covered by the mantle.

Spenser and Cary: Experience The differences between Cary’s and Spenser’s responses to Ireland are considerable. The details of Elizabeth Cary’s experiences in Ireland are related in Life, which describes how, ‘Being there, she had much affection to that nation, and was very desirous to have made use of what power she had on any occasion in their behalf, as also in that of any Catholics’.19 The contrast with Spenser’s harsh condemnation of the Irish in A View […] of Ireland is stark; unlike Cary, he suggests that absolute repression is the only way to obtain submission to English rule and cites Grey’s violent policies as ideal: his course indeed was this that he spared not the heads and principals of any mischievous practice or rebellion, but showed sharp judgement on them. Chiefly, for

18  19 

Perry, ‘The Sound of Silence’, p. 138. Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson, pp. 196–97.

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ensample sake, that all the meaner sort, which also were then generally infected with that evil might by terror thereof be reclaimed and saved, if it were possible.20

Elizabeth Cary’s initial attitude, both in terms of race and religion, was clearly open to otherness, and her first thought was to help, rather than punish, the indigenous population. Moreover, the fact that she attempted to learn Irish— ‘she there learnt to read Irish in an Irish Bible; but it being very hard (so as she could scarce find one that could teach it) and few books in it, she quickly lost what she had learnt’—reveals a further welcoming of difference and a valuing of independent Irish culture.21 Again, this is antithetical to Spenser’s condemnation of the Irish tongue which he calls ‘rude and barbarous’ and points out that, It seemeth strange to me that the English should take more delight to speak that language [Irish Gaelic] than their own, whereas they should (methinks) rather take scorn to acquaint their tongues thereto, for it hath been ever the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his.22

The Life continues by explaining how Elizabeth Cary decided upon ‘a great design’, which was to establish trades in the country, ‘and for this purpose she took of beggar children (with which that country swarms) more than 8 score prentices’.23 Although this enterprise was to flounder, partly because Elizabeth Cary was such an incompetent business woman according to the Life, it is important to note that she perceived that the solution to the difficulties in Ireland lay not with pursuing a policy of ‘plantation’ or colonization by the English or Scots, but by providing the Irish people with the skills to become self-employed artisans.24 Reading further in the Life, it becomes apparent that Henry Cary was ‘displeased’ with her activities and that the project did not fail until after she returned to England.25 It is hardly surprising that Henry Cary failed to give his wife’s venture his blessing, since it ran directly contrary to the dominant British policy of plantation, which as Lord Deputy he was duty 20 

The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, p. 107. Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson, p. 197. 22  The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, p. 67. 23  Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson, p. 197. 24  See Purkiss, ‘Introduction’: ‘While [in Ireland] she learned Gaelic (perhaps from Richard Belling) and also tried to help the impoverished locals by setting up a kind of craft cooperative for them’ (p. xiv). 25  Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson, pp. 199, 201. 21 

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bound to pursue. As it was, Henry Cary was convinced that determined and sustained colonization was the only way in which English power in Ireland could be assured, and in this belief he was at one with others who had considered the situation, as Spenser had done in A View […] of Ireland.26 Indeed, Elizabeth Cary’s approach of providing the skills with which an impoverished indigenous population could earn money for themselves and thus obtain economic and political independence seems more akin to late-twentieth-century non-government organizational methodology than the budding colonialist policies of the early modern period. On the surface, therefore, Cary and Spenser seem antithetical in their responses to the Irish people: her empathic welcoming of another race, faith, and tongue proffers a sharp contrast to his dismissal of anything non-English, while her economic support is in acute opposition to his ideas of political repression. Yet for both writers such an easy challenge to, or alignment with, Anglo/patriarchal domination proved more complicated.

Within Edmund Spenser’s Cave of Despair Indeed, for all Elizabeth Cary’s sympathy with and support for the Irish peoples, the image the Life conveys of the ‘swarms’ of ‘beggar children’ conforms to the dominant representations of Ireland during the period. For example, the depiction of the Irish as savage, long-haired peasants dressed in rags is attested to by illustrations of the period such as Lucas de Heere’s watercolour drawings, and John Derricke’s woodcut illustrations to his The Image of Ireland.27 Similarly, in a brief note in the Variorum, Spenser draws our attention to the association between contemporary representations of the Irish and Spenser’s allusions to them, as in the figuring of Despair who, low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullein mind; His griesie lockes, long growen, and vnbound, Disordered hong about his shoulders round, And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne

26 

It is possible that Henry Cary knew Spenser’s work even though it was not to be published until 1633; see Maley, Salvaging Spenser, pp. 118–19. 27  Lucas de Heere travelled in England in 1567–77 and made several illustrations of Irish people (for example, BL MS Addit. 20330, 34, and John Derricke, The Image of Ireland). I have not used the more commonly chosen drawing of Irish soldiers and their attendants by Durer since this work was not taken from life and was probably executed as a masque design.

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Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound; His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine, Were shronke into his iawes, as he did neuer dine. His garment nought but many ragged clouts, With thornes together pind and patched was, The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts; (I. ix. 35.2–9, 36.1–3)

Spenser’s sources for Despair’s description are generally given as classical and Christian; for example, the use of thorns to hold his clothes together is derived from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Bible.28 However, the whole image of a starved man with long hair dressed in rags also refers to the Irish people Spenser saw about him as he worked on his poem in Munster. Indeed, by comparing the description of Despair to details of Irish style and dress discussed in A View […] of Ireland the similarity is affirmed. For example, the long, disordered hair of Despair finds its counterpart in the ‘loathly filthiness’ of the Irish ‘glibs’, that is, long, uncombed hair, which Spenser describes in A View […] of Ireland: They [the Irish] have another custom from the Scythians, that is the wearing of mantles and long glibs, which is a thick curled bush of hair hanging down over their eyes, and monstrously disguising them, which are both very bad and hurtful […][,] but for the Irish glibs I say that besides their savage brutishness and loathly filthiness, which is not to be named, they are fit masks as a mantle is for a thief.29

Evidence of Spenser’s hostility to racial difference is palpable from his comment upon the ‘savage brutishness and loathly filthiness’ of the Irish glib and these attacks are commonly linked by critics to an overt nationalistic endorsement of Britain’s harsh colonialist policy in Ireland. For example, Andrew Hadfield points out that in both The Faerie Queene and A View […] of Ireland Spenser supports the ideological premise that ‘if Ireland is (made) a desert— desolate, uninhabited, and unowned—then its colonisation becomes a right and a duty’.30 While this form of prejudice was often evidenced in the English28 

Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. by Humphries, iii. 594 (p. 81); Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. by Humphries, xiv. 166 (p. 343); and Genesis 3:18. 29  The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, pp. 50, 53. 30  Hadfield, Edmund Spenser, p. 219. In writing this chapter, I have been particularly influenced by the works of Hadfield, especially Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience; Healy, New Latitudes; and Maley, Salvaging Spenser.

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authored texts about Ireland in the early modern period, the absence of such intolerance in Cary’s biography and work demands that possible tensions in Spenser’s texts should be excavated. As such, if the cave contains that which is ‘Darke, dolefull, drearie, like a greedie graue’ then it conceals not only the promise of demise, but also the representation of material death. Indeed, an even darker parallel between poetic and political discourses occurs when comparing the starved, skull-like face of Despair to the infamous description of the ‘penurie and pine’ of the Irish populace in A View […] of Ireland where Spenser describes Grey’s successful campaign in Munster: Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves, they did eat of the dead carrions, happy were they could find them, yea and one another soon after in so much as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves, and if they found a plot of water cress or shamrocks, there they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal, that in short space there were none almost left and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast.31

Not only does the Cave of Despair appear to have its source in Spenser’s Irish estate, but Despair himself begins to look remarkably like one of the starving Irish population following the decimation of Munster. Moreover, in the context of this wholesale massacre, the scene outside Despair’s cave readily evokes the image of barrenness and death depicted in Spenser’s political tract; the poem offers a bleak, dismal view: And all about old stockes and stubs of trees, Whereon nor fruit, nor leafe was euer seene, Did hang vpon the ragged rocky knees; On which had many wretches hanged beene, Whose carcases were scattered on the greene, And throwne about the cliffs. (I. ix. 34.1–6)

This, in turn, is echoed by the prose, ‘so many wretched carcasses starving, goodly countries wasted, so huge a desolation and confusion’.32 The repetition of figures, from sixteenth-century text and image, through seventeenth-century prose, allows us to draw a continuous line of representation in which the Irish 31  32 

The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, p. 104. The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, p. 105.

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are depicted as a savage and/or impoverished other. Indeed, as Thomas Healy points out, these images have remained part of our sense of national identity: ‘The Irish as a people are still imagined as involved, as least tacitly, in perpetuating a contemporary form of savagery — terrorism’.33 With the emergence of New Historicism, and particularly since Stephen Greenblatt drew attention to the similarities between A View […] of Ireland and the Bower of Bliss sequence in The Faerie Queene, it has become conventional to read Spenser’s epic poem as participating in the same early modern political discourses as his prose treatise.34 This short comparison of Despair and his environment with the appalling treatment of the Irish people in Munster during Spenser’s administration thus participates in this critical endeavour. However, Willy Maley has proffered a more provocative analysis that points out, If Ireland is reduced to one tragic vision in the View, it detonates into a thousand fragments in The Faerie Queene. The place of Ireland in Spenser’s epic is, like the place of words themselves, constantly subject to displacement and metamorphosis. Ireland dominates the poem in the way that the poet would have wished his sovereign to dominate Ireland.35

Despair and his cave occur at one of these pivots of ‘displacement and metamorphosis’, set at the threshold between locational influence and poetic vision. Material identity may be traced to the genocide in Munster and its description in A View […] of Ireland, just as the site itself may still be seen at Kilcolman Castle. But, at the same time, Despair also evokes Christian and classical antecedents. Like The Faerie Queene as a whole, the movement of referents—historical, geographical, literary, and biographical—around the image of the Cave of Despair remains kaleidoscopic and elusive. It is this complex interplay between static symbol and continued allegory that problematizes Spenser’s allusion to Ireland in the Despair sequence, for the passage does not conclude with the description of cave, environment, and emblematic figure; instead, it explains how the Red Cross Knight becomes ‘enmoued’ by Despair’s speech. In terms of the Christian allegory, Red Cross represents all humankind and his despair at ‘man’s (original) sin’ may only be redeemed by the intervention of heavenly grace in the form of Una. However, if we transpose this narrative onto the contemporary allegory, as the symbolism demands that we should, a somewhat different reading of the episode emerges. 33 

Healy, New Latitudes, p. 104. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 157–92. 35  Maley, A Spenser Chronology, pp. 97–98. 34 

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The English knight, his ‘Red Cross’ emblazoning his national allegiance for all to see, is ‘enmoued’ at the images presented by Despair in his role as a victim of colonialist repression in Ireland. The choice of verb, ‘to be moved’, recalls the comments on the Munster famine in A View […] of Ireland, where Irenius states that ‘any stony heart would have rued the same’ and Eudoxus agrees, ‘even I that do but hear it from you and do picture it in my mind do greatly pity and commiserate it’.36 The poem, however, goes further than the prose, for while Irenius and Eudoxus grieve for the starving Irish people, they remain at a distance, subsequently castigating Elizabeth I for her leniency to that same population. In The Faerie Queene, however, the Red Cross Knight becomes so ‘emoued’ that he almost kills himself. In this way, the external personification of ‘Despair’ is mirrored by the knight’s personal, inner version of ‘despair’. This, in turn, demands that the wholesale depopulation of Munster must be perceived, not as a necessary destruction of the enemy, but as a crime that has penetrated the very heart of nationhood, threatening to consume the English from within, even as they had decimated the Irish from without. A possible explanation for Red Cross’s lack of colonialist rigour is that he may represent the ‘old English’ who had settled in Ireland in the medieval period and had become too ‘Irish’ for Spenser’s taste. As the poet points out in A View […] of Ireland: the chiefest abuses which are now in that realm [Ireland] are grown from the English, and the English that were are now much more lawless and licentious than the very wild Irish, so that as much care as was then by them had to reform the Irish, so much and more must now be used to reform them.37

Thus, Red Cross, who has become ‘emoued’ by Despair and must be saved by Una, represents the old English settlers who have adapted to Irish customs and must now be reformed by the intervention of Elizabeth I. While this is a plausible reading in relation to the historical allegory and its companionate prose treatise, it cannot be wholly sustained when considered alongside the Christian allegory. It is essential to the spiritual interpretation of the sequence in Book  I canto ix that the Red Cross Knight’s despair precipitates an awareness of both individual and collective sin, so that, like the knight, the reader must contemplate redemption only through heavenly intervention. Thus, when Despair addresses Red Cross as ‘o man of sin’ (I. ix. 46. 1) the flaw is as present within 36  The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, pp. 104–05. The OED definition of ‘emove’ is ‘to affect with emotion’. 37  The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Greenlaw, pp. 104–05, p. 63.

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the Knight as it is within all constructed Christian readers. In the political parallel, the ‘sin’ of a weakened sense of national identity is as present within the ‘old’ English of Ireland, as within the ‘new’ English colonizers, the readers of the poem in England and, more particularly, within Spenser himself. The inherence of ‘otherness’ whether savage or racially different within the dominant ideology and its subjects in the early modern period has been traced extensively. In postcolonial terms, it is illuminating to cite Homi Bhabha, who points out that, To be authoritative its [the colonial presence] rules of recognition must be breached in order to represent the exorbitant objects of discrimination that lie beyond its purview. Consequently, if the unitary (and essentialist) reference to race, nation, or cultural tradition is essential to preserve the presence of authority as an immediate mimetic effect, such essentialism must be exceeded in the articulation of ‘differentiatory’, discriminatory identities.38

If we read Red Cross’s encounter with Despair from this theoretical perspective, it becomes apparent that the English knight’s attempt to conquer and/or persuade those malevolent Faerie indigenes of his single rightness is doomed to failure, for there can be no unified identity, only a constantly mutating subjectivity which encounters the ‘exorbitant objects of discrimination’ both outside and within the national ‘self ’. In terms of the historical allegory, therefore, Red Cross draws our attention to the inevitable failure of the English discourse of colonialist power within Ireland and to the way in which the representation of the Irish as other must always breach the limits of English authority by its shifting presence, simultaneously inhering within, as well as exceeding, the definitions of difference constructed to contain it.39 Thus it becomes impossible for Red Cross not to find some D/despair within himself, just as it is impossible for an English knight living in Ireland not to consider himself in some way ‘Irish’ and therefore disassociated from English culture. Indeed, even in biographical terms this sense of alienation concurs with Spenser’s distance from the court and his lack of preferment within the immediate circles of the Queen. But despite, or perhaps because of, this acknowledgement of an internalized or excessive otherness, Spenser’s texts never embrace difference; rather, they remain persistently troubled by the inability either to annihilate or restrain it. 38 

Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’, p. 34. Here I agree with Sarah Hogan in her argument that there are ‘striking similarities be­ tween a ruthless band of brigands and a knight seeking “justice”’, in ‘Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine’, p. 482. 39 

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The Cave of Despair conceals, therefore, an awareness of how the condition of the starved populace as Kilcolman cannot but invoke the sensation of being ‘emoued’ by another human’s plight, by their starvation and ultimate death.

Beneath Elizabeth Cary’s Mantle If Spenser’s outward Anglo-Protestant discourse conceals an unease that undercuts the dominant hierarchy, so too does Elizabeth Cary’s outward show of rebellion mask the necessary acquiescence of early modern women to patriarchal rules. By invoking the ways in which postcolonial theory of early modern cultural discourses has been employed by feminist critics, it becomes possible to locate a similarly veiled interpretation. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker suggest that scholars need to address the ways in which European women, including women writers and proto-feminist movements, contributed by their own agendas and Eurocentric constructions of the culturally other to the development of imperial and domestic ideologies based on distinctions of ‘race’ and social position.40

Although it has now become a critical commonplace to consider race in Mariam, Dympna Callaghan’s early insightfulness is worth reappraising. She points out that, ‘Race’ enables Cary to stage some of the contradictions that constitute the Renais­ sance condition of femininity, and by exploring femininity through it The Tragedie of Mariam gains a double focus on the otherness of woman. Racialized difference and geographical otherness, in fact, become preconditions of the representation of resisting femininity […]. ‘[R]ace’ works to make female resistance simultaneously possible and ethically insupportable.41

This linking of race with gender identity, particularly in relation to female resistance against the dominant patriarchy as embodied by husbands, is also evidenced in Cary’s later, post-Ireland work, although here the focus shifts away from colour to ‘normative’ standards of racial behaviour. In Elizabeth Cary’s history of Edward II, the characters of Edward, Isabel, and Spencer are most commonly, and with considerable justification, taken to 40 

Hendricks and Parker, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. Callaghan, ‘Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam’, p. 170; Perry, ‘“Royal Fever” and “The Giddy Commons”’, pp. 71–88. 41 

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represent James I/Charles I, Henrietta Maria, and the Duke of Buckingham.42 However, while the political allegory of this fictionalized history is unquestioned, the coexistent autobiographical material is often ignored by critics. The account of Isabel’s difficult marriage not only parallels similar concerns about husband/wife relationships in The Tragedy of Mariam, but also replicates the distinctly awkward association between the real life couple, Elizabeth and Henry Cary. Tina Krontiris suggests, ‘The queen’s condition as described in this part [of Edward II] parallels that of Lady Falkland shortly after her conversion to Catholicism in 1626’.43 Although Krontiris is more interested in proving Elizabeth Cary’s authorship against the claims that one or both versions of the history were written by Henry Cary, her list of biographical referents is persuasive. In tracing the parallels between the lives of Isabel and Elizabeth it is possible to add further evidence to Krontiris’s argument. For example, Queen Isabel undertakes two escapes from patriarchal oppression, one from her husband, the King of England, and the other from her brother, the King of France. In the former sequence, the Queen and her party pretend to be undertaking a pilgrimage: Thus did our Pilgrims scape the pride and malice of him which little dream’d of this Adventure: his Craft and Care; that taught him all those lessons of Cunning Greatness, here fell apparent short of all Discretion, to be thus over-reach’d by one weak Woman […]. But when the glorious power of Heaven is pleased to punish Man for his transgression, he takes away the sense and proper power by which he should foresee and stop his danger.44

The possibility of an autobiographical reading is suggested by Cary’s own ‘escape’ from Ireland and consequently from her husband’s control, which she understood in providential terms, since it was her freedom in England that allowed her to convert to Catholicism. This real-life spiritual interpretation is underlined by the use of religious vocabulary to denote the fictional queen’s safety: ‘she beheld the Sanctuary of her hopes, her dearest Refuge, she falls upon her knee’ (italics mine).45 In the second episode, Isabel finds that the succour she expected at the French court is unforthcoming; she is urged ‘to reconcile her self unto her Husband’ and finds herself forsaken by all her allies: 42 

Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, pp. 175–91. Krontiris, ‘Style and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II’, pp. 137–39. 44  Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 92. 45  Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 96. 43 

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Being thus irresolute, of means, of friends, of succour unprovided […]. Declining misery that once is sinking, findes it self shunn’d like some infectious Fever, and goes alone in shades and silent darkness. 46

The fictional events closely parallel Elizabeth Cary’s own expectations of sympathy and aid at the English court, and especially from her friend, Lady Denbigh, the sister of the all-powerful Duke of Buckingham, who had also professed a desire to become a Catholic. Like Isabel, Elizabeth was deprived of ‘means’ by her husband, and found herself ‘shunn’d’ by her family, friends, the court, and the monarchy.47 As such, Queen Isabel is forced to flee again, but this time she returns to England at the head of an army which will conquer the forces of her husband. There is a telling parallel between Isabel’s voyage to Harwich and Elizabeth’s journey to England: both women encounter a storm. In the history: Scarce had they run the Mornings-Watch, the Skies grew cloudy, a sullen darkness spread all o’re the Welkin […]. The Queen, that knew no Flouds, no Tempests, but those which sprung from Sighs and tears of Passion, grows deeply frighted, and amaz’d with danger: The little Prince, that ne’re had felt such motions as made him deadly sick without disorder, takes it unkindly, and with sick tears laments.48

In parallel, Elizabeth Cary’s biography explains how she encountered a storm on her way from Ireland to England: By a violent tempest at sea they were once driven back, being in great danger to be cast away, the child at her breast (she sitting upon the hatches) had his breath struck out of his body by a wave, and remained as dead a quarter of an hour.49

The echoes are immediately apparent: the ‘tempests’, the ‘danger’, and the mortal threat to the son (‘deadlie’ and ‘dead’) all make it clear that The Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II draws upon autobiographical material, as represented in Elizabeth Cary’s biography, The Lady Falkland: Her Life. Finally, on landing safely in England, Isabel is first welcomed by the ‘black Monks’, while on escaping the Protestant court Elizabeth is first welcomed into the Catholic church by ‘black Father Dunstan’.50 The parallels continue to accrue throughout the two texts, leaving the reader in no doubt that Elizabeth Cary’s reworking of the 46 

Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, pp. 101, 105. Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson, p. 138. 48  Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 116. 49  Cary, The Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson, p. 201. 50  Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 117. Cary, Lady Falkland, ed. by Weller and Ferguson, p. 205. 47 

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historical narrative of Edward II and his queen was a commentary upon her own life. At this point in the argument it is important to note that there are two versions of Cary’s historical accounts of Edward II’s reign: the first is a folio volume, The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II written in 1627, while the second, The History of the Most Unfortunate Prince King Edward II, is a much shorter Quarto work and was revised later. Given the more detailed nature of the 1627 version, all the above quotations have, however, been taken from this version of the history, and it is significant that the autobiographical material has been completely excised or considerably watered down in the edited account.51 Given that the deleted passages include most of the material that could have been interpreted, through familial allegory, as making negative comments upon Henry Cary, the date of the Quarto might be closer to the couple’s final reconciliation around Henry’s death in 1633. There can be no question that Isabel may be associated with Elizabeth Cary as well as Henrietta Maria, and Edward II with Henry Cary as well as Charles I, but if this is so it also becomes necessary to extend the comparison between the corrupt government and brutal slaughters in medieval England to the history of the English administration of Ireland under the Lord Deputy as well as to the abuse of power at the Stuart court. Edward is berated in the text for allowing his favourites, first Gaveston and then Spencer, to have excessive power, a political allegory that comments upon Buckingham’s undue influence over Charles I. However, after a rebellion, the favourite exacts too harsh a vengeance: The Prey thus seiz’d, the Spencers long to taste it; and, like to furious Tygers, act their Passions; They give not their incensed Master time to deliberate on that Work which was so weighty, which had the Lives of such great Peers in balance. They whet on, and exasperate the Kings Revenge, that needs no instigation. Soon is the work resolv’d, where deep Revenge hath master’d humane Judgement, and Reason doth subscribe to private Malice.52

Their actions are described as those of ‘savage beasts’ and lead to a ‘bloody Massacre’, which will finally turn the kingdom against Edward and his minions.53 While there were several insurrections against James I and some early 51 

For details of the two versions, see Ferguson, ‘Introduction’, pp. xi–xii; and Purkiss, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxi–xxx. 52  Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 71. 53  Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, pp. 2, 73.

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ones against Charles I, their suppression hardly merit being described as a ‘massacre’ in Cary’s political allegory. To uncover the contemporary source it is necessary to turn to Cary’s own commentary at the conclusion of the work: Certainly our Wars and our Plantations nearly resemble, being both used, as a Broom to sweep the Kingdom, rather than an enterprize to adorn it; which makes the event so unfortunate in War; which alone falls properly within the compass of this Treatie.54

The reference to ‘Plantations’ suggests that Elizabeth Cary used her experience and knowledge of the wars and clearances in Ireland to describe the tyranny, corruption, and slaughter in medieval England, and perhaps to warn Charles of the possibility of similar rebellions and insurrections at home if he failed to curb Buckingham’s power. Such allusions sit easily alongside the autobiographical material in the history, but it is important to realize that Cary uses the Irish material, not only to make a personal statement, but also to draw attention to the political and moral inadequacies of the way in which England attempted to rule Ireland. The reference to the plantations is edited out from the later Quarto text, perhaps because of the inevitable criticism it makes of Henry Cary’s policies, or perhaps because the Quarto is, overall, a less controversial work. By adding the ‘Treatie’ to the earlier Folio text, however, Cary demands that we read Edward II not only as a medieval history or fiction, but as a work with acute contemporary relevance. Moreover, the political allegory is, in turn, expanded so that a condemnation of the monarchy and administration within England is at the same time an attack upon English colonial policy in Ireland, as well as a personal account of Cary’s own troubled life. By breaching the normative generic boundaries, those between history, fiction, political commentary, and autobiography, Cary opens out The Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II to the excess of differentiation theorized by Homi Bhabha. The entire unified ideology of the authoritative forces, including patriarchal (Henry Cary), monarchical (Charles I), spiritual (Protestant), and national (English) aspects, seems to have been finally undermined by ‘one weak Woman’ and her associated beliefs. Elizabeth Cary outwitted her husband, leaving him to bluster impotently against her escape to England and Catholicism. Cary also evaded the confinement imposed by Charles I and withstood the pressure placed upon her by his court followers to return to her husband and the Protestant church. In addition, through her determined faith 54 

Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 146.

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and political commentaries she became a vocal critic of Protestant England, tacitly aligning herself in her subsequent writings with Ireland and Catholicism. Yet, there is one last point in The History about which Cary remains silent, one awkward moment that she cloaks with obscuring rhetoric: ‘The Historians of these Times differ both in the time, place, and manner of his Death; yet all agree, that he was foully and inhumanly murther’d’.55 Like her fictional other, Queen Isabel, Cary does not wish to be made ‘partaker, or privy to the time, the means, the manner’ of Edward’s death.56 The implication that she excludes the description of Edward’s death simply because there is a lack of historical agreement is somewhat disingenuous, since the gruesome method of the king’s murder was recorded in numerous histories and even staged in the public theatre.57 Tina Krontiris suggests that the omission is because cruelty was a ‘violation of her [Cary’s] ideas about comeliness and fitness’, and placed in context with other women writers of the early modern period, such as Anne Dowriche in her description of the St Bartholomew Day massacres, it seems likely that Cary’s gender militated against too graphic a portrayal of violence, especially if it had sexual or homosexual connotations.58 The veil she draws over the manner of Edward’s death constructs a female author who might well challenge patriarchy but who ultimately cannot risk a description of unlawful sexual behaviour. Like Spenser, Elizabeth Cary worries at the knot of otherness, but like her predecessor in Ireland, at the final moment she seems to withdraw behind the veil of respectability just as he submerges any sense of sympathy within the Cave of Despair. But, while Cary felt prohibited from describing the manner of Edward’s death, she described the place where his execution took place—only she got it wrong. Historical accounts describe how Edward was taken to Corfe Castle in 1326, but note that the actual murder took place in Berkeley Castle in 1327. Any confusion might be elided if Cary had located the King’s death in ‘Corfe Castle’, but in both the Folio and the revised Quarto the location is clearly stated as ‘CorkCastle’ (italics mine).59 The slippage of two letters might be explained by the 55 

Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 155. Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 154. 57  Marlowe, Edward II, ed. by Bevington and Ramussen. The chronicles make it quite clear that Edward was brutally murdered. 58  Krontiris, ‘Style and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s Edward II’, p. 145. 59  Cary, Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II, p. 154. Cary, Most Unfortunate Prince King Edward II, p. 73. 56 

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error of a setter at the printer’s, yet to make the same mistake in two separate works together with the additional displacement from Berkeley suggests either intention or an unconscious signification on Cary’s part. Perhaps, however, her allusion to Ireland was not entirely without cause, since Edward’s dungeon in Berkeley Castle was as ‘Darke, dolefull, drearie, [and] like a greedie graue’ as the Cave of Despair under Kilcolman Castle, County Cork, and the account usually given by the tour guides of Edward’s pitiful cries, ‘still to be heard on dark nights’, recalls the ‘waile and howle’ of the ghosts in Spenser’s poem.

Conclusion The place of Edward’s murder is, regardless of Cary’s spurious claims to uncertainty, precisely fixed on the tourist map; indeed, the combination of gruesome narrative, gothic environment, and location in central England has lead to a brisk turnover in ticket sales. Its popularity seems to be undiminished by the savagery of Edward’s death, perhaps because his corrupt administration and homosexuality are seen to situate him beyond the norms of the dominant ideology, and as a king whose identity exceeded the boundaries of ‘normality’, he thus becomes an expendable ‘other’. In stark contrast, there is little or no tourist trade at Kilcolman Castle. It remains on private lands, the Kilcolman Wildfowl Refuge, and few people visit the site except for bird watchers and Spenser scholars intent upon working out details of locational allegory within his literary texts. The two castles are, of course, in different states of repair—or disrepair in the case of Kilcolman—and fewer tourists drive along the L40 between Limerick and Cork than on the A38 in the west of England. But the most telling difference must surely be in the nature of the fatalities which occurred at Berkeley and Kilcolman: the former was the site of the grisly murder of a king, the latter saw the deaths of countless common Irish people who starved because of England’s grim and ruthless colonialist policy. One wonders if the tourist count would have been any different if Spenser and his family had been slain in their beds rather than escaping, through the cave, to the safety of the northern hills. This is probably so. The death of one of the ‘great’ English poets might still merit more attention in an English guide book than the genocide which occurred in sixteenth-century Munster. But for Spenser and Cary such overt and material considerations were far in the future. Instead, both authors had to contend with their experience of an Ireland and its populace that was constructed as an alien other to the Anglo-Protestant rule they had left behind. Reading their texts, initially they appear to affiliate themselves within strictly demarcated boundaries, Spenser supporting colonialist enterprise and Cary

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challenging a rule of law in which patriarchy often replicated racial repression. Still, by working within the concealments, the issues of gender, race, and faith may be complicated. For Spenser the Cave of Despair at Kilcolman served to shroud a far deeper consanguinity between the Irish peasants and their English rulers, while for Cary an outward conforming to the sexual codes for early modern women slipped uneasily when the veil was drawn back, revealing worrying concerns about female subjectivity. Indeed, Spenser and Cary do not construct neatly demarcated divisions in terms of faith, gender, or race; rather, they blur the lines of difference just as if, as readers, we must peer into the gloom of a cave or squint through the gauze of a mantle.

Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Documents London, British Library, MS Additional 20330, 34

Primary Sources Cary, Elizabeth, The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II […] written by E.F. in the year 1627 (London: Printed by J.C. for Charles Harper, 1680) —— , The History of the Most Unfortunate Prince King Edward  II […] found among the papers of […] Henry, Viscount Falkland (London: Printed by A.G. and J.P., 1680) —— , The Mirror of the World, ed. by Lesley Peterson (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s Uni­ versity Press, 2012) Cary, Lucy, The Lady Falkland: Her Life in The Tragedy of Mariam The Fair Queen of Jewry with The Lady Falkland: Her Life, ed. by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) Derricke, John, The Image of Ireland (London, 1581) Jonson, Ben, ‘The Irish Masque’, in Ben Jonson, ed. by C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 397–406 Lee, Thomas, A Brief Declaration of the Government in Ireland (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS F 4, 20, no. 652, 1594) Marlowe, Christopher, Edward  II, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. by David M. Bevington and Eric Ramussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 323–402 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. by Rolfe Humphries (London: John Calder, 1957) Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1988) —— , A View of The Present State of Ireland, in The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 11 vols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), x: Spenser’s Prose Works;

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Spenser’s Letters; Axiochus; A View of the Present State of Ireland; A Brief Note of Ire­ land, ed. by Rudolf Gottfried (1949), pp. 39–231 Virgil, The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. by Rolfe Humphries (New York: Scribner, 1951)

Secondary Studies Bhabha, Homi, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817’, in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. by Bill Ash­­croft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 29–35 Callaghan, Dympna, ‘Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry’, in Women, “Race”, and Writing in The Early Modern Period, ed. by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 163–77 Ferguson, Margaret W., ‘Introduction’, Works by and Attributed to Elizabeth Cary, ed. by Margaret W. Ferguson (London: Ashgate, 1996), pp. ix–xiii Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) Hadfield, Andrew, Edmund Spenser (Essex: Longman Limited, 1996) —— , Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Claren­ don Press, 1997) —— , ‘Simon Shepherd, “Spenser” (Book Review)’, Textual Practice, 8.1 (1994), 152 Healy, Thomas, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Arnold, 1992) Hendricks, Margo, and Patricia Parker, ‘Introduction’, in Women, “Race”, and Writing in The Early Modern Period, ed. by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Rout­ledge, 1994), pp. 1–16 Hogan, Sarah, ‘Utopia, Ireland, and the Tudor Shock Doctrine: Spenser’s Vision of Capi­ talist Imperialism’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 42.2 (2012), 461–86 Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass, ‘“Rugges of London and the Diuell’s Band”: Irish Mantles and Yellow Starch as Hybrid London Fashions’, in Material London c. 1600, ed. by Lena Cowin Orlin (Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 2000), pp. 128–49 Judson, Alexander C., The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945) Krontiris, Tina, ‘Style and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s Edward  II’, in The Renaissance English­woman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. by Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 137–53 Krontiris, Tina, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992) Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) Maley, Willy, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (London: Macmillan, 1997) —— , A Spenser Chronology (London: Macmillan, 1994)

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Perry, Curtis, ‘“Royal Fever” and “The Giddy Commons”: Cary’s History of The Life, Reign, and Death of Edward  II and The Buckingham Phenomenon’, in The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680, ed. by Heather Wolfe (London: Pal­grave, 2007), pp. 71–88 Perry, Nandra, ‘The Sound of Silence: Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero’, English Literary Renaissance, 38.1 (2008), 106–41 Purkiss, Diane, ‘Introduction’, Renaissance Women: The Plays of Elizabeth Cary: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. by Diane Purkiss (London: Pickering, 1994), pp. i–xlvii Schleiner, Louise, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) Smith, James M., ‘Effaced History: Facing the Colonial Contexts of Ben Jonson’s “Irish Masque at Court”’, ELH, 65.2 (1998), 297–321 Sotheby’s, Sale Catalogue, 1494 (London: Sotheby’s, 1933) Tate Gallery, Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, 1978–80 (London: Tate Gallery, 1981) Vertue, George, ‘Vertue Notebooks II’, Walpole Society, 20 (1931–32), 14, 76

Hobbes’s Hebraism and the Last Judgement in Leviathan Ryan Hackenbracht And why should I not be confident in this cause? Grant me but that there is a God, that he is just, and true, and good, and powerfull, that there is an Heaven, and an hell, and a day of judgement, that is, rewards and punishments; That good and evil, virtue and vice, holinesse and sin, are any thing more than empty names […] and I cannot fall in this cause. There is no doubt but the best doctrines may be abused. Archbishop Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes His Last Animadversions (1658)1

T

he publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651 prompted many fiery responses, most viciously from John Bramhall (c. 1594–1663), bishop of Derry and later archbishop of Armagh.2 The debate between Hobbes and Bramhall had deep roots. It began in 1645 as an academic dispute at the Paris residence of William Cavendish, marquess of Newcastle, and from there, it expanded into a heated pamphlet war with many salvos fired and sustained 1 

Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes, sig. Dd8r. Parkin shows that responses to Leviathan from learned contemporaries were complex. Although they often found his theology and attacks on episcopacy jure divino problematic, many political theorists nonetheless appreciated his contributions to ideas of jus naturae and absolutism, among others. As Parkin puts it, Hobbes was ‘too useful to ignore, but too dangerous to leave unchallenged’. He cites the example of James Harrington, who in The Common-Wealth of Oceana (1656), criticized Hobbes’s political theory but also praised him as ‘the best writer at this day in the world’ whose ‘treatises on human nature, and of liberty and necessity […] are the greatest of new lights, and those which I have followed and shall follow’ (Taming the Leviathan, pp. 16, 184). 2 

Ryan Hackenbracht ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He specializes in early modern British literature.

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by both sides.3 The above passage, from Bramhall’s Castigations, shows that for Bramhall, the controversy had eternal consequences. At stake was not simply the nature of liberty or government but the preservation of fundamental doctrines of the church and of what Bramhall considered to be a traditional Judeo-Christian worldview. Here and in ‘The Catching of Leviathan’, which was published separately but often bound with Castigations, he focuses on the threat Hobbes poses to belief in quatuor novissima, the theological four last things of death, judgement, heaven, and hell. His request, ‘Grant me’, indicates that Hobbes’s teachings may already have called these doctrines—‘God’, ‘Heaven’, ‘hell’, ‘a day of judgement’—into question in the mind of the reader. In asserting that they are ‘more than empty names’, Bramhall suggests that for Hobbes, that is all they are. Hobbes has taken these ‘best doctrines’ and ‘abused’ them. Bramhall’s comment reveals two important facts about Hobbes’s political philosophy as laid out in Leviathan and other works.4 First, Bramhall and others took note of the special relationship between politics and eschatology in Hobbes’s works, and they recognized that eschatology formed a crucial part of his theory of government. Second, Bramhall and others reacted violently against the kind of eschatology that Hobbes offered them. They accused Hobbes of reinventing the last things in such a way that undermined not only traditional religion but also the very spiritual economy—the system of ‘rewards and punishments’—upon which the moral fabric of their society was based.5 Despite recent advancements in our understanding of religion in Hobbes’s political philosophy, modern criticism has not arrived at full appreciation of the eschatological character of his theory of government or the centrality of the Last Judgement to Leviathan. Why does a book about civil government and civil religion, that focuses almost exclusively on this life rather than the life to come, refer so often and with such energy to the biblical ἐσχάτη ἡμέρα 3 

See Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics; and Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)’, and McCafferty, ‘Bramhall, John (bap. 1594, d. 1663)’. 4  Hobbes began writing Leviathan in 1649, and it was first printed in English in late April or early May of 1651. In 1668, the Latin edition, with two rewritten chapters and added appendices, was printed in Amsterdam (new editions of Leviathan having been banned in England). 5  On Protestant eschatology in mid-seventeenth-century England, see Ball, A Great Expectation; Capp, ‘The Millennium and Eschatology’; Christianson, Reformers and Babylon; Jue, Heaven upon Earth; The Apocalypse; Millenarianism and Messianism; and Puritans, The Millennium. See also Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 299–376, and The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology.

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(eschatē hēmera), the Last Day of Christ’s Second Coming?6 What is it about the notion of divine judgement that Hobbes finds so appealing? What purpose does it serve within his ideal commonwealth? Due in part to Leo Strauss’s influential assessment of Leviathan in 1936, the study of Hobbes throughout much of the twentieth century suffered from an anachronistic image of the philosopher as an early champion of modern secularism.7 Parts III and IV of Leviathan (‘Of a Christian Commonwealth’ and ‘Of the Kingdom of Darkness’, respectively) were seen as merely ancillary to Parts I and II (‘Of Man’ and ‘Of Commonwealth’) and were sometimes outright ignored. In 1971, J. G. A. Pocock helped precipitate a drastic overhaul of Hobbes when he asked, ‘why a notoriously arrogant thinker, vehement in his dislike of “insignificant speech”, should have written and afterwards defended sixteen chapters [Parts III and IV of Leviathan] of what he held to be nonsense, and exposed them to the scrutiny of a public which did not consider this kind of thing nonsense at all’?8 Pocock’s analysis proved a catalyst to explorations of Hobbesian religion, and it laid an important methodological foundation for the recent research of A. P. Martinich, Patricia Springborg, Richard Tuck, and George Herbert Wright, among others, who have shown how Leviathan responds to and traffics in religious issues of Hobbes’s day, including the challenge posed by the new science and conflicts over church government.9

6 

On the Johannine notion of ἐσχάτη ἡμέρα (eschatē hēmera), or the ‘Last Day’, see John 6. 39–54, 7. 37, 11. 24, 12. 48, and I John 2. 18. References to scriptural text in Greek are from The Greek New Testament, ed. by Aland. 7  Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Skinner, Curley, and Cooke are among the most distinguished disciples of Strauss in seeing Hobbes as a secular thinker. See Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty; Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context’, Liberty before Liberalism, and Reason and Rhetoric; Curley, ‘“I Durst Not Write So Boldly”’; and Cooke, Hobbes and Christianity. 8  Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 162. Pocock’s work was indebted to a growing trend in Hobbes studies—begun by Taylor and perpetuated by Warrender and Hood—that stressed the importance of religion to Hobbes’s political philosophy. See Taylor, ‘The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes’; Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes; and Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes. Other important assessments of Hobbes and religion include Baumrin, ‘Hobbes’ Christian Commonwealth’; Geach, ‘The Religion of Thomas Hobbes’; Glover, ‘God and Thomas Hobbes’; and Johnson, ‘Hobbes’s Anglican Doctrine’. 9  Martinich, The Two Gods of ‘Leviathan’; The Cambridge Companion; Tuck, Natural Rights Theories; Tuck, ‘The “Christian Atheism”’; and Wright, Religion, Politics, and Thomas Hobbes.

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This chapter explores the relationship between eschatology, national identity, and sovereignty in the English edition of Leviathan. I suggest that the notion of divine judgement is an essential component of Hobbes’s political philosophy and that attention to what Hobbes is doing with it changes the way we understand his sovereign and what it means to reign as such. I will consider how Hobbes searches for what the seventeenth century called Hebraica veritas, how his notion of ‘ruling’ as ‘judging’ is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures, how he manipulates Jewish history to narrate sovereignty’s origin, and how he continually postpones the historical outcome of that narrative: the Last Judgement and the inception of Christ’s supreme sovereignty. I show how Hobbesian eschatology as presented in Leviathan depends upon reciprocity of political value. Hobbes projects value onto that which is spiritual and otherworldly— Christ returning to Judgement—only to return value to that which is temporal and mundane: the rule of human sovereigns on Earth in the present. That reciprocity has important implications for England as the ‘sceptred isle’—as the great sea beast, leviathan, powerful and secure in its majestic ocean home.10 Hobbes suggests England has the potential to adopt an ideal government and to become the Leviathan, despite its current revolution. More generally, this chapter prompts us towards a deeper appreciation of the complex relationship between religious doctrine and political theory in seventeenth-century England, as both are transformed and recreated in the mind of the great political philosopher of the age.

Hobbes and the Hebrew Bible Early modern Europe witnessed a renaissance not only of Greco-Roman learning and literature but of interest in the Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), in Hebraica, and in Judaica, as Protestants attempted to rediscover Christianity ad fontes in the creation of new religious identities. Harold Fisch, Jerome Friedman, and Gareth Lloyd Jones have shown that Jewish studies persevered throughout the Middle Ages, especially in European Jewish communities. It was revived—not rediscovered—by the humanists Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), among others.11 10 

Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. by Blackmore (2.1.40). Fisch, Jerusalem and Albion; Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony; Jones, The Discovery of Hebrew. See also Hebraica Veritas?; Jewish Christians and Christian Jews; Jewish Messianism; and Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter. 11 

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Achsah Guibbory notes that with the Reformation, ‘The Hebraic/Jewish past once again had to be negotiated, its relation to Protestant identity defined. The Jewish past was appropriated’ and as a result, ‘the Hebrew Bible took on a new life’.12 Allison Coudert points out that ‘from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, Jewish-Christian encounters became a key element in defining attitudes toward personal, national, and religious identity, and these definitions, in turn, involved debates about the nature and basis of language, history, religion, morality, and truth in general’.13 At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the number of Christian scholars in Europe who could read Hebrew was less than a hundred. By the middle of the century, the language was being taught at major universities, studies on contemporary Jewish practices were appearing, and Hebrew grammars were being printed. However, the Hebraic renaissance was not a ‘movement’ in the proper sense. It was a largely unorganized effort on behalf of a few learned individuals, such as Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), who sometimes preached to his congregation in Hebrew, the great English Hebraist John Selden (1584–1654), and a small number of colleges (mainly at the universities of Paris, Padua, Zurich, and Heidelberg) to promote ancient Hebraic learning. Their efforts had profound effects on how sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Protestants fashioned religious identities for themselves. Protestants assimilated aspects of ancient Jewish history to address difficult crises of faith, doctrine, and worship in their own time. In his own political and ecclesiological works, Hobbes availed himself of the methodology, ancient sources, and contemporary works of the Hebraists.14 The Old Testament was important to Hobbes’s political program because of the truths it conveyed about the physical world, its status as an ancient Jewish relic, and its ties to Jewish antiquity. At some point early in his career, Hobbes rejected the tenets of Aristotelianism in which he had been educated. He adopted instead a Hebraic worldview characterized by the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures—most notably, materialist ontology and absolutist government. In his works, he pitted himself against ‘school divinity’, which he believed had contaminated the Christian faith with the errors of pagan Aristotelianism.15 12 

Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel, pp. 7, 9. Coudert, ‘Five Seventeenth-Century Christian Hebraists’, p. 286. 14  Tenywa demonstrates that Hobbes was a ‘biblical thinker’ who based his model of sovereignty upon Yahweh’s sovereignty in the Old Testament. See Tenywa, ‘The Hebraic Tradition’, p. 12. 15  Hobbes, Leviathan (4.46.15). References to the text of Leviathan are from Hobbes, 13 

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Throughout his works, Hobbes depicts Hebraism and Aristotelianism as antithetical to one another. He urges his readers to liberate themselves from ‘vain philosophy’ (4.46.40) and to rediscover their Christian faith in Hebraica veri­ tas, the ancient Hebrew truths of the Old Testament, and in the prisca theo­ logia of a belief system that predated pagan philosophers.16 However, despite his deep and abiding interest in Hebraica, Hobbes could not read Hebrew and therefore could not himself access the Hebrew texts. What he knew of those Scriptures was filtered through English translations of the Old Testament (primarily the King James Version). For his knowledge of Jewish history and customs, both ancient and modern, Hobbes likely relied on the work of his friend, John Selden, whom John Milton praised in his polemical tracts as ‘the chief of learned men reputed in this Land’.17 Through Selden, Hobbes had access to the great wealth of Jewish learning across the ages.18 More importantly, Selden’s works provided Hobbes with the methodology he needed for constructing a theory of political government based on the ancient Jewish models. Hobbes’s belief in the materiality of all things, and his denial of the classical distinction between ψυχή (psychē), ‘soul’, and σῶμα (sōma), ‘body’, were central to his Hebraic worldview and his concomitant rejection of Aristotelian learning. We might say of this rejection, which was deeply integral to his monist mechanistic materialism, what Jason Rosenblatt says of Milton’s monist animistic materialism: that it was ‘unmistakably Hebraic in its origin and nature’, Leviathan, ed. by Curley. Subsequent references are given in the text as part, chapter, and section. Springborg notes that as Hobbes saw it, ‘heresy entered the Christian Church when unemployed Greek philosophers, no longer tolerated in Rome, plied their sophistries in the Christian cause, primitive Christianity proving no match for the allure of their casuistry’ (‘Hobbes, Heresy, and the Historia Ecclesiastica’, p. 559). Fisch calls Hobbes the century’s ‘most outstanding rebel against the Aristotelian tradition’ (Jerusalem and Albion, p. 3), and Wright comments, ‘the message of Leviathan is that civil peace can be achieved in post-Reformation Europe by purging the elements of Greek thought […] from Christian theology and political discourse’ (Religion, Politics, and Thomas Hobbes, p. 232). 16  Hobbes’s attempts to extirpate Aristotelianism from university education were met with varied responses of contempt or praise. One anonymous broadsheet, titled An Elegy upon Mr. Hobbes (1680), lauded Hobbes because ‘He shew’d our Age by what Mysterious Spite | Th’ Empire of Priests obscur’d the Sacred Light; | How Foreign vain Philosophy has vext | The Christian world’. For a comprehensive account of contemporary responses to Leviathan, see Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, and Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan. 17  Milton, Areopagitica, ed. by Sirluck, p. 513. 18  See Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi, and Sommerville, ‘Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism, and the History of the Jews’.

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and that it was the rediscovery of a ‘neglected Hebraic ethos’ in the Christian system of belief.19 However, Hobbes’s refusal to divide body from soul signalled much more than a preference for Jewish tradition over the Aristotelian. It was, rather, a deliberate effort on Hobbes’s part to throw off the shackles of Greek body-soul dualism that characterized both natural and political philosophy in England and to return to an ancient Jewish ontology that offered a particular political system—which was the system that Hobbes advocated in Leviathan.20 Hobbes wrote Part I, ‘Of Man’, not merely as a manifesto for materialism. More specifically, he wrote it as a manifesto for the Hebraic materialism of the Old Testament that undergirded the entire political structure of the treatise and governed the other three Parts of Leviathan that followed. In the opening to Leviathan, Hobbes writes, For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State (in Latin Civitas), which is but an artificial man […] and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body. (‘Introduction’, 1)

For Hobbes, there is no separation between body and soul: as ‘life is but a motion of limbs’, the two are a single item. He acknowledges that a vital principle exists within the body, which he likens analogously to ‘sovereignty’ as the ‘artificial soul’ of the Commonwealth. This vital principle works by ‘giving life and motion to the whole body’, whether the natural human body or the body politic, but it is not a spiritual entity that operates the material body like a man in a machine, as Descartes had claimed. Hobbes’s rejection of Aristotelianism and of contemporary Cartesian dualism is closely related to his belief in the Hebrew doctrine of mortalism, or soul-sleep. Several passages in the Old Testament suggest that no part of the deceased lives on after death but that the dead ‘sleep’ throughout the ages until 19 

Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in ‘Paradise Lost’, pp. 73, 11. As Spragens observes, Hobbes’s political philosophy depends on his materialist ontology, and ‘any account of Hobbes’ thought, therefore, must begin by examining the substance of, and the reasons behind, this infatuation with motion’ (The Politics of Motion, p. 55). See also Milner, ‘Hobbes: On Religion’. 20 

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the General Resurrection at the end of the world.21 The Psalms, for instance, indicate that soul does not depart from body at death, but that the two are one and they both go down to Sheol or Tophet, the grave or ground. Isaiah speaks of ‘the earth’ as containing all ‘the dead’, and it refers to the departed as ‘yee that dwell in dust’.22 Ecclesiastes asks, ‘Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?’23 From these and like passages, Hobbes constructed his idea that the soul and body are one and that the self will die as the body dies. He based his monist materialism on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the passages on ontology in Leviathan make clear that contemporaneous belief in body-soul dualism stems from misinterpretation of those ancient texts. From the beginning of his treatise, Hobbes yokes together religious doctrine and political theory. For doctrine and theory to be correct, he intimates, they must both have their origin in the Hebrew Bible and in the materialist worldview that the Old Testament espouses. The word ‘motion’ in the first sentence of the passage above is particularly important to what Hobbes is saying. It materializes the subsequent discourse, and it confines all bodies and artifices to physical space and finite time. Next, Hobbes links the ancient Jewish ontology of the Hebrew Scriptures with his aims in this project, which are the creation by ‘art’ of ‘that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth’. For Hobbes, ‘art’ is the creation of an ‘artificial man’ (that is, the ‘great Leviathan’) based on something that is itself already ‘artificial’: the human being, the ‘life’ which is ‘but a motion of limbs’; whose ‘heart’ is ‘but a spring’; whose ‘nerves’ are ‘but so many strings’; and whose ‘joints’ are ‘but so many wheels’. Consequently, in one brilliantly crafted paragraph, Hobbes ties together religion, ontology, politics, and his literary craft as artifex. When reading Leviathan, we ought to keep these four sides of the treatise in mind and remain aware of the fact that it frequently traffics in all four simultaneously. Leviathan is neither political treatise, theological treatise, natural philosophy, nor literary work: it is all of them at once. Most importantly, we can recognize that Hobbes’s chosen vehicle for articulating his project in terms of these four categories is a doctrine—the unity of body and soul and their material quality—that he drew from his readings of the Old Testament. 21 

See Burns, Christian Mortalism, pp. 183–91; Henry, ‘Milton and Hobbes’; Johnston, ‘Hobbes’s Mortalism’; and Walker, The Decline of Hell. 22  Isaiah 26. 19. 23  Ecclesiastes 3. 21.

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Beside Leviathan’s well-known opening, the importance of the Hebrew Bible to Hobbes’s political philosophy is apparent in his attacks on ‘school divinity’ and on ‘deceived philosophers, and deceived or deceiving schoolmen’ (1.3.12)—that is, the pre-eminence of Aristotelianism in the universities. 24 Hobbes addresses university curriculum frequently throughout Leviathan because he is a firm believer in education reform. He states that within any commonwealth, ‘the instruction of the people dependeth wholly on the right teaching of youth in the universities’ (2.30.14). He rails against the ‘vain and erroneous philosophy of the Greeks (especially of Aristotle)’, which contaminates both religion and politics, and against the ‘doctors of School-divinity’ who teach that ‘there be in the world certain essences separated from bodies’ (4.44.3, 4.46.15). Hobbes includes them within the ‘confederacy of deceivers’ who constitute the Kingdom of Darkness (4.44.1) because they ‘mingle’ pagan metaphysics with Scripture and thus create confusion in religion, ontology, and political theory (4.46.15). An entire chapter of Leviathan, titled ‘Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions’, is devoted to proving the superiority of ancient Jewish materialism to Aristotelianism. In ‘On the Nicene Creed’, which was appended to the 1668 Latin edition of Leviathan, Speaker B summarizes Hobbes’s stance on the matter: ‘I, having now the Sacred Scriptures, do not desire the philosophers as my masters’ (Appendix 1.46). For Hobbes, body-soul unity and materialist ontology are crucial to proper religion and a peaceful, ordered commonwealth. By descrying the Aristotelian and republican character of classical learning, Hobbes advocates another in its place: the ancient Jewish model of absolutist government.25 Just as the Christian religion would have been better off without Aristotle’s intrusion, Hobbes writes, so the nations of Europe would have benefitted from an exclusively Jewish example of political power. Right government and right religion must be based on ancient Jewish precedent, rather than on the Greco-Roman newcomer, with its false ontology and troubled, democratic past.

24 

On Hobbes’s attacks on university curriculum, see Langholm, The Legacy of Scholasticism. Nelson points out in The Hebrew Republic that during the English Revolution, republican writers, like the monarchists, similarly used the Old Testament as evidence of godly precedent for particular forms of government. 25 

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Abraham and Moses: Hobbes’s Narrative of the Origin of Sovereignty Many aspects of ancient Jewish culture, ranging from Kabbalah to ritual, captured the attention of early modern Protestants. But above all, there was interest in Jewish history as found in the Old Testament and such early Jewish historians as Josephus. As Friedman explains, the key word to understanding this revival is ‘nostalgia’, as Protestants excavated Jewish antiquity and co-opted it for their own religious self-fashioning. The revival was a ‘reflection of the nostalgic desire to rediscover a pristine Jewish past’ for the purpose of constructing a ‘Christian past’ that would set them apart from Roman Catholicism.26 Guibbory points out that the revival was not merely a typological endeavour, but also a historiographic one: ‘the turn to the Hebrew Bible and to the history of ancient Israel was an effort to create a past for England, to furnish a particular national identity that had a “sacred foundation”’.27 Whether distinguished Hebraists like Selden or amateurs like Hobbes, seventeenth-century Protestants were drawn to Jewish history, and they appropriated it to craft for themselves points of origin and identity. The same fascination with ancient Jewish history is evident in Leviathan, and Hobbes’s sustained dependence on the Old Testament has a specific purpose: the construction of a narrative of origin for political sovereignty. Because the natural state of man is—as Hobbes famously put it—‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (1.13.9), human beings must have a state structure like the Leviathan to ensure peace in the commonwealth. It is not surprising that Hobbes turns to Scripture to construct his political philosophy. What is surprising, however, is the way in which Hobbes manipulates the Old Testament text, as he emphasizes some parts and downplays others, to support a Jewish model of sovereignty that is reflected in the Hebrew Bible. He does not recite biblical passages but narrates them—and there is a profound difference between the two. However, there is a major complication inherent to his project. Hobbes is in search of an ancient Jewish origin of sovereignty that he believes is to be found in the Hebrew Bible, but he must rely upon a Christianized and English translation of that Bible, even as he hunts for something that is strictly Jewish. Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty depends upon its Jewish character and origin, but that is a character and origin that Hobbes himself cannot actually access.

26  27 

Friedman, The Most Ancient Testimony, p. 54. Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel, p. 23.

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Despite his desire to discover Hebraica veritas, he sees the Hebrew Bible, and the genesis of his own political model, but ‘through a glasse, darkely’.28 Hobbes’s narrative of sovereignty begins with a sharp distinction between the Hellenic tradition, which leads to corrupt religion and a corrupt commonwealth, and the Jewish tradition, which leads to correct religion and a peaceful commonwealth. Antithesis and paradox are central to his style of articulation. From his comments on Jewish materialism, to his narrative of sovereignty’s origin, to his denouncements of natural rights, Hobbes frequently arranges his thoughts in terms of opposing categories of association. Early on in Leviathan, he claims that ‘one sort’ of men trafficked in ‘human politics’, and their religion ‘teacheth part of the duty which early kings require of their subjects’ (1.12.12). However, ‘the religion of the latter sort is divine politics’, and it concerned ‘those that have yielded themselves subjects in the kingdom of God’ (1.12.12). He makes an important distinction: ‘Of the former sort were all the founders of commonwealths and lawgivers of the Gentiles; of the latter sort were Abraham, Moses, and our blessed Saviour, by whom have been derived unto us the laws of the kingdom of God’ (1.12.12). Hobbes’s use of rhetorical antithesis mirrors the conceptual antithesis between Hellenism and Hebraism. The ‘former sort’, the Greeks and Romans, trafficked in ‘human politics’. Their superiors, the ‘latter sort’, the ancient Jews, espoused ‘divine politics’. For Hobbes, religion and politics were codependent.29 As R. J. Halliday, Timothy Kenyon, and Andrew Reeve observe, Hobbes believed that ‘the art of politics consists in the imitation of the commands of an omnipotent God’.30 Consequently, as Hobbes saw it, the ancient Hebrews had right government in part because they had right religion. The figure of the sovereign, ‘that Mortal God’, whether he be ‘one man’ or an ‘assembly of men’ (2.17.13), is at the centre of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Similarly, specific figures of authority—namely, Abraham, Moses, and Saul—are at the centre of his narrative of sovereignty’s origin. Hobbes’s emphasis on individual sovereigns gives the impression of chronological linearity. Sovereignty is invested in Abraham by God, invested again in Moses, and usurped by Saul. Hobbes’s narrative constructs a lineage of sovereignty, passing from one individual to another in a near unbroken chain. Interestingly, Hobbes 28 

I Corinthians 13. 12. Cf. ‘There can, therefore, be no contradiction between the laws of God and the laws of a Christian commonwealth’, in Leviathan, ed. by Curley (3.43.22). 30  Halliday, Kenyon, and Reeve, ‘Hobbes’s Belief in God’, p. 418. 29 

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ignores the gap from Adam to Abraham (Hobbes takes Abraham as his point of sovereignty’s origin) and the generations of slavery in Egypt until the arrival of Moses. In Chapter 35 (‘Of the Signification of Kingdom of God, of Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament’), Hobbes writes, This is it which is called the Old Covenant, or Testament, and containeth a contract between God and Abraham, by which Abraham obligeth himself and his posterity, in a peculiar manner, to be subject to God’s positive law (for to the law moral he was obliged before) as by an oath of allegiance. And though the name of King be not yet given to God, nor of Kingdom to Abraham and his seed, yet the thing is the same: namely, Abraham; which in the renewing of the same covenant by Moses, at Mount Sinai, is expressly called a peculiar Kingdom of God over the Jews and it is of Abraham (not of Moses) St Paul saith (Rom. 4:11) that he is the father of the faithful. (3.35.4)

Hobbes’s rewriting of biblical accounts creates a narrative of continuity between instances of sovereignty. He uses juxtaposition—from Abraham and Moses, and then back to ‘Abraham (not of Moses)’—to establish a relationship between two ruling figures. Hobbes’s parallelism adds further ambiguity to the difference and the historical distance between the two leaders. Additionally, the ‘contract’ (here between God and Abraham), and the ‘covenant’ (between God and Abraham and ‘renew[ed]’ by Moses), are the fundamental pillars of Hobbes’s configuration of sovereignty.31 Chapter 40 (‘Of the Rights of the Kingdom of God, in Abraham, Moses, the High-Priests, and the Kings of Judah’), which also discusses Abraham’s sovereignty, contains important side glosses that are worth noting: ‘The Sovereign Rights of Abraham’; ‘Abraham had the sole power of ordering the Religion of his own people’; ‘Abraham sole Judge, and Interpreter of what God spake’ (3.40.1–4). Although Hobbes makes it clear in Leviathan that the people cannot covenant with a ruler after having given him sovereignty, nonetheless both ‘contract’ and ‘covenant’ are essential in the initial establishing of political power. The idea that Abraham was Israel’s sovereign, and that he marks the genesis of modern sovereignty, was a revolutionary one. Responding to Leviathan in Observations Concerning the Originall of Government (1652), Sir Robert Filmer objected strongly to Hobbes’s narrative of sovereignty’s origin.32 ‘The name of King is not given to God’ in the Old 31  On the centrality of covenant to Hobbes’s political philosophy, see Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, and Kodalle, ‘Covenant: Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion’. 32  Parkin notes a crucial difference between Hobbes’s absolutism and Filmer’s, the latter of which he terms a ‘radical absolutist’: ‘Whereas Hobbes had taken the route of appropriating

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Testament, Filmer pointed out, ‘nor of Kingdome to Abraham [that is, Abraham was not given a kingdom], yet the thing if we will believe Master Hobs is all one’.33 Filmer and others did not object to the scriptural passages that Hobbes used. They objected to the way in which he manipulated and rewrote those passages to give a biblical basis to his concept of sovereignty, when they believed that it had no such basis. Moses holds a special place in Hobbes’s narrative both as a figure invested with divine authority and as a symbol of the kind of power the sovereign holds over his subjects. Hobbes focuses on him in part because Moses received his commission directly from God on Mount Sinai.34 Moreover, as the expatriated Hobbes watched his homeland be plagued first by revolution and then by a faux-government, perhaps the idea of Moses leading his people out of oppression and into prosperity resonated with him. There is yet another reason why Hobbes devotes special attention to Moses. Moses and Abraham are not only historical figures but also icons of ancient Jewish culture. Linking the origins of sovereignty specifically to them was an attempt to emphasize the Jewishness of the political model of the sovereign, which further distinguished Hobbes’s political philosophy from competing humanist philosophies. Hobbes identifies Moses as a ‘sovereign prophet’ (3.36.13), to whom Israel gave ‘absolute obedience’ (2.20.16) because God appointed him intercessor to the nation. As with Abraham, Hobbes employs side glosses to emphasize Moses’ sovereignty: ‘The authority of Moses whereon grounded’; ‘Moses was (under God) Sovereign of the Jews, all his own time, though Aaron had the Priesthood’; ‘All spirits were subordinate to the spirit of Moses’; and ‘After Moses the Sovereignty was in the High Priest’ (3.40.5–9). Furthermore, in a confession of his own anti-Trinitarianism, Hobbes implicates Moses in the representation of God: For as Moses and the high priests were God’s representative in the Old Testament, and our Saviour himself as man, during his abode on earth, so the Holy Ghost, that is to say the apostles and their successors in the office of preaching and teaching, that had received the holy Spirit, have represented him ever since. But a person (as contract theory in order to rewrite it in the cause of absolute sovereignty, Filmer had rejected any theory built upon the idea of the natural liberty or equality of mankind as a ridiculous fiction’ (Taming the Leviathan, p. 107). 33  Filmer, Observations, sig. Cv. 34  Lessay notes, ‘the laws that Moses gave to the Jews completed the historical process that saw the transformation of Israel into a kingdom with God as its monarch, contractually empowered to govern and legislate through the medium of a human representative’ (‘Hobbes’s Covenant Theology’, p. 249).

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I have shown before, ch. [16]) is he that is represented, as often as he is represented. And therefore God, who has been represented (that is, personated) thrice, may properly enough be said to be three persons (though neither the word Person, nor Trinity, be ascribed to him in the Bible). (3.42.3)

The key words here, ‘represented’ and ‘personated’, have important implications for Hobbes’s description of sovereignty’s genesis. Earlier, in Chapter 16 (‘Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated’), Hobbes tied the concept of ‘personating’ to the Latin word persona, meaning ‘character’, and the Greek word πρόσωπον (prosōpon), meaning ‘face’. He defined it as ‘to act, or represent, himself or another’ (1.16.3). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb ‘represent’ as ‘to take or fill the place of ’, and the verb ‘personate’, in the archaic sense Hobbes uses here, as ‘to assume the person or character of (another person)’ or to ‘act the part of ’ that person.35 In a manner reminiscent of medieval Joachimite heterodoxies of God’s three manifestations, Hobbes elevates Moses to the level of Christ by claiming that Moses was ‘God’s representative in the Old Testament’ in the same way that Christ represented God ‘as a man, during his abode on earth’. From its beginning in Abraham till its resurrection under Moses, political sovereignty as Hobbes sees it has always been tied to God’s omnipotence. Sovereignty was given to Abraham by God, and it was restored by covenant with Moses at God’s desire. Consequently, even though Hobbes acknowledges that subjects may covenant with one another initially to establish a sovereign to govern them, such was not always the case. At one point, in the very beginning, sovereignty was bestowed by God and exercised by his representatives, though it has since been taken over by man. This fundamental quality of sovereignty is important to remember, because, as Hobbes indicates later in Leviathan, divinity and sovereignty will one day be joined together again at the Last Judgement and the inception of Christ’s eternal reign. Hobbes’s narrative of sovereignty’s origin evinced an idea of historical progress that was particularly relevant to national identity and the state of England in the late 1640s and early 1650s. Hobbes’s Leviathan was not, as Strauss claimed, concerned solely with the ‘abstract individual’.36 Rather, Leviathan 35 

The Oxford English Dictionary, hereafter OED, s.v. ‘represent’ and s.v. ‘personate’. On Hobbes and the representation of persons, see Skinner, ‘Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives’. 36  Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, p. viii. Recent studies of Leviathan’s historical context include Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory; Johnson, ‘Leviathan’s Audience’; and Kraynak, History and Modernity.

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had important implications for Hobbes’s own day. By claiming that sovereignty had a divine origin, and that it one day would again, Hobbes made two subtle points. First, despite its rhetoric of nation-building and divine purpose, the Commonwealth government now ruling England did not in fact possess sovereignty jure divino. That type of sovereignty was lost long ago with Saul. Second, Hobbes suggested to his readers that true sovereignty resides with God, and that Christ will exercise that authority at the Last Judgement. In Leviathan, the image of Christ in Judgement is a reminder of the power Christ wields as the ultimate sovereign. His is the power to bring reckoning to rebels and others who did not obey their sovereign and disrupted the cause of peace, which is the primary objective of a commonwealth. At the Last Judgement, they and the nation will have to account for their actions. They will receive sentence from the hand of a sovereign whom they can neither escape nor overwhelm.

‘To judge (that is, to be king in this world)’ Ancient Jewish culture was fascinated with the concept of a king meting out judgement in a demonstration of political power, and when we look at Hobbes’s descriptions of reigning as ‘judging’ in Leviathan, we find the same interest. The English word ‘judgement’ and its variations (‘to judge’, ‘judged’, and ‘judge’) appear 558 times in the King James Version of the Old Testament (1611).37 There are forty such instances (7 per cent) when the ability to ‘judge’ is specifically linked to human kingship and a sovereign monarch’s control over his subjects, and when the words ‘reign’ or ‘rule’ (in reference to a monarch) appear in the same sentence as ‘judgement’. Basing his political model on the ancient Jewish example in the Old Testament, Hobbes frequently describes the sovereign’s ability to rule as an act of ‘judging’.38 In Chapter 42 (‘Of Power 37 

Of those appearances, 136 (24 per cent) speak specifically of the ‘judgements’ of God, or of God meeting someone or Israel ‘in judgement’. A considerable majority of these instances appear in three books: Deuteronomy (23), the Psalms (40), and Ezekiel (19). One hundred and three of the 558 appearances (18 per cent) refer to God as ‘Judge’, God as meting out judgement, or God as about to execute judgement—all in an active sense, as an activity God is currently doing or about to do. The majority appear again in the Psalms (34) and Ezekiel (25). Seventyfive of the 558 instances (13 per cent) refer to the ‘Judges’ of Israel. These are the Judges who govern Israel after the death of Joshua and before the institution of monarchy with Saul. 38  As many critics have noted, fear of death is the primary means by which Hobbes’s sovereign establishes and maintains his authority over subjects. Herbert comments, ‘It is the founding insight of Hobbes’s political philosophy that, to the extent that they are open to such

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Ecclesiastical’) of Leviathan, for instance, he writes that ‘to judge’ is ‘to be king in this world’ (3.42.107). Throughout the treatise, he depicts the relationship between judging and ruling as a fundamental principle of political power throughout the ages. Most importantly, Hobbes drew from ancient Hebraic tradition the notion that the sovereign’s right to judge is predicated on divine example and Yahweh’s authority over Israel. When he looked to the Old Testament, Hobbes found a number of important passages that depict judging as ruling.39 He was no doubt familiar with the second chapter of Judges: ‘Neverthelesse the Lord raysed up Judges, which delivered them [the Israelites] out of the hand of those that spoyled them’.40 The Judges’ authority to govern the people was closely linked to their authority to ‘judge’ in civil disputes, and all this happened by divine ordinance: ‘the Lord raysed’ them up. I Kings records that God commanded King Solomon to ‘execute my Judgments’. The wellbeing of the nation depended upon Solomon’s ability to do that, for only then would God ‘dwell among the children of Israel’.41 We see again the connection between ruling and judging in the 29th chapter of Proverbs, which states, ‘The king by judgement stablisheth the land: but he that receiveth gifts, overthroweth it’.42 The passage indicates that moral integrity is essential to the king’s ability to judge correctly and thereby ‘establish’ the kingdom. If the king lacks such integrity and consequently cannot judge, being given instead to bribery and ‘gifts’, then he will ‘overthrow’ the kingdom. One of the most telling passages is the 32nd chapter of Isaiah: ‘Behold, a King shall reigne in righteousnes, and princes shal rule in judgement’.43 The parallelism inherent to ancient Jewish poetry makes the analogy quite clear. As kings ‘reign’ by means of ‘righteousness’ or their own moral integrity, so too do princes ‘rule’ fear, men are governable and peace is possible’ (‘Fear of Death’, p. 56). Kraynak notes that fear of death establishes a ‘standard of natural right which can serve as a guide to lead men out of the chaos of nature to a new order of civilization’ (History and Modernity, p. 66). I suggest that the sovereign’s authority to judge is closely connected to the ability to control fear of death, and that for Hobbes, judgement ultimately consists of the power to give life or take it. See, for instance, the opening sentence of Chapter 38 (‘Of the Signification in Scripture of Eternal Life, Hell, Salvation, The World to Come, and Redemption’): ‘The maintenance of a civil society depend[s] on justice, and justice on the power of life and death’ (3.38.1). 39  On Hobbes’s methods of reading scripture, see Farr, ‘Atomes of Scripture’. 40  Judges 2. 16. 41  I Kings 6. 12–13. 42  Proverbs 29. 4. 43  Isaiah 32. 1.

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by means of right ‘judgement’. The parallelism also raises an interesting point: if a prince lacks the ability to judge, does he lose the ability to rule de jure or only de facto? The structure of the lines suggests there is a close connection between the two. In these and other passages in the Old Testament, Hobbes found a plethora of biblical principles on kingship upon which to construct his notion of the sovereign who rules by judging. With the story of how Saul becomes Israel’s first king, Hobbes rewrites the biblical passage to emphasize human agency and the absolute power of the human sovereign. As he tells it, the crowning of Saul signalled the end of God’s rule in this world and the beginning of human sovereignty leading up to the present day. Hobbes rewrites the passage to point out that—as God no longer reigns—all power and authority over commonwealths belongs to human rulers alone. I Samuel records that Israel grows frustrated with the corrupt sons of the prophet Samuel, who rule as judges over them. The elders approach Samuel and demand that they be given a king ‘to judge us’.44 When Samuel tries to tell them of the misfortune a monarch would bring upon Israel, they respond: ‘Nay; but we wil have a King over us: That we also may be like all the nations, and that our King may judge us, and goe out before us, and fight our battels’.45 God then authorizes their request and instructs Samuel, ‘Nowe therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit, yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the maner of the King that shall reigne over them’.46 The elders recognize that a monarch’s effectiveness in ruling depends upon his effectiveness in judging. However, they have forgotten that God is already their king. In an act of sin, they ask Samuel for a human one. The biblical text also suggests that this moment when the elders ask Samuel for ‘a King to judge us’ signals the end of Israel’s theocracy. To reassure Samuel of his own just leadership, God explains to him that ‘they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected mee, that I should not reigne over them’. 47 The assumption is that God has been reigning over the Israelites all along—that God, not Abraham or Moses or the Judges, has had sovereignty. When rewriting this passage in Leviathan, Hobbes focused on the end of theocratic government. However, here he encountered a problem that he refused to acknowledge or address. In his desire to narrate sovereignty across the ages and thus legiti44 

I Samuel 8. 5. I Samuel 8. 20. 46  I Samuel 8. 9. 47  I Samuel 8. 7. 45 

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mate his political theory, he emphasized human agency at the expense of divine agency. Abraham held the sovereignty and exercised it, though it was given from above; Moses’ actions led Israel out of captivity; and Saul usurped God’s reign—not God who commissioned Samuel to anoint a king, as the scriptural text says. In Chapter 35 (‘Of the Signification in Scripture of Kingdom of God, of Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament’), which was one of the most controversial parts in Leviathan, Hobbes writes, The kingdom of God is a civil kingdom, which consisted first in the obligation of the people of Israel to those laws which Moses should bring unto them from Mount Sinai (and which afterwards the high priest for the time being should deliver to them from before the cherubims in the sanctum sanctorum), and which kingdom having been cast off in the election of Saul, the prophets foretold should be restored by Christ, and the restoration whereof we daily pray for when we say in the Lord’s Prayer Thy kingdom come, and the right whereof we acknowledge when we add For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen. (3.35.13)

Hobbes defines the ‘kingdom of God’ as a specific historical event, when Yahweh held sovereignty over Israel, but also as an abstract standard against which all human commonwealths, both past and present, fall short. As Naomi Sussmann points out, throughout Leviathan, Hobbes uses ‘kingdom of God’ to signify his notion of the ‘ideal’ commonwealth, as opposed to the ‘real’ and practical commonwealths of history.48 Moreover, Hobbes’s declaration that ‘the kingdom of God is a civil kingdom’ is a bold statement, and it accomplishes two things. First, it reinforces Hobbes’s assertions throughout Leviathan that the political sovereign has supreme authority in matters of religion and not only in matters of politics.49 Second, saying that regnum Dei is a ‘civil kingdom’ is as much as saying that it is not a spiritual, but a physical kingdom. Such a claim is only logical given the framework of mechanistic materialism within which Hobbes’s universe operates. But to his readers, the statement reeked of blasphemy. The second assertion Hobbes made—that that kingdom was ‘cast off 48  Sussmann, ‘How Many Commonwealths’, p. 596. Martinich notes that in Hobbes’s view of history, ‘there has already been a divine kingdom in the past; none exists now; and a second, final kingdom is reserved for the indefinite future’ (The Two Gods, p. 262). Commenting on Hobbesian eschatology, Parkin states, ‘Christ’s kingdom was wholly otherworldly and would remain so until the day of judgement’ (Taming the Leviathan, p. 42). 49  Johnston notes, ‘For Hobbes a “correct” interpretation of the Scriptures is, almost by definition, one that leads to the conclusion that those who hold civil sovereignty must also hold the supreme power in ecclesiastical matters’ (The Rhetoric of Leviathan, p. 174).

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in the election of Saul’—proved even more unsettling to his Protestant readers. If divine government was ‘cast off ’ long ago, and if God having been ‘rejected’ is no longer in charge, then who governs human affairs now? Hobbes’s answer was short and simple: people do. For Hobbes’s contemporaries, the idea that the Kingdom of God had already begun was one of the great discoveries of the Reformation, and Hobbes’s claim to the contrary was met with unflinching hostility. Richard Baxter and other ministers had this passage and ones like it in mind when they encouraged their congregations to burn Leviathan because of its ‘slander’ against the ‘Magistracy, Ministry, or Ordinances of Christ’. 50 Filmer complained that Hobbes was twisting the words of Scripture by claiming that Saul was a usurper and that regnum Dei was ‘cast off ’ in his ‘election’. ‘I see not that the Kingdome of God was cast off by the election of Saul’, he wrote, ‘since Saul was chosen by God himselfe, and Governed according to Gods Lawes’.51 Hobbes had vocalized the dangerous possibility that God, though involving himself in human affairs, perhaps does not have complete control over them, and perhaps humanity is not under the aegis of divine planning after all. The open-ended nature of his postulation, which introduced an unknown and unknowable future, terrified Hobbes’s contemporaries and helped earn him the epithets ‘atheist’ and ‘Prophet of the Leviathan’ (that is, of Satan).52 Hobbes’s account of Saul’s usurpation is plagued by a major complication that also characterizes his account of divine sovereignty’s restoration at the Last Judgement. He shows himself willing to accept the ancient Jewish model of history because it supports his political philosophy, but he is unwilling to accept the outcome of that model. After asserting that sovereignty had its origin in Abraham and Moses, and that it was once of divine origin, Hobbes moves on to state that, since God no longer reigns, contemporary sovereignty now looks nothing like that origin. It began as one thing, but it has evolved to become something else entirely. The past for Hobbes is handmaiden to the present. So too, as we shall see, with the Last Judgement, where the future is useful to Hobbes precisely because it is something that has not yet happened, but that can nonetheless inform and shape what occurs in the present. Hobbes expends much 50 

Baxter, Humble Advice, sig. B2r. 51  Filmer, Observations, sig. C2r. 52  Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory, p.  5. On Hobbes and the accusation of atheism, see Cromartie, ‘The God of Thomas Hobbes’; Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, pp. 133–35; and Smith, ‘The Charge of Atheism’.

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time and energy constructing a narrative of sovereignty that leads from Abraham in Palestine to Christ at the Last Judgement, but he is ultimately concerned with the time in between, and not with the historical beginning or end. Hobbes’s idea of history, we might say, folds in on itself, as genesis and terminus work together from opposite ends of time to legitimate and authorize the present.

‘In the meantime’: Postponing Christ and Rebuilding the Nation He deposeth Christ from his true kingly office, making his kingdom not to com­ mence or begin before the day of judgement. And the regiment wherewith Christ gov­ erneth his faithful in this life, is not properly a kingdom, but a pastoral office, or a right to teach. Archbishop Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes His Last Animadversions (1658)53

Let us return momentarily to Bramhall, whose acute observations on Hobbes’s teachings afford ample opportunity to note where and how Hobbes differs from his contemporaries—here, with regard to the Last Judgement and the nature of political government in this life. As we have seen, Filmer and others objected to Hobbes’s narrative of the origin of sovereignty because it posited the unthinkable possibility that the Kingdom of God was not now on earth—nor would it be, until the end of the world. In the passage above, Bramhall claims that Hobbes ‘deposeth Christ from his true kingly office’ with his story of Saul’s usurpation and the suggestion that we are our own masters. Consequently, the ‘regiment’ of Christ in this life ‘is not properly a kingdom’. According to Hobbes, the human sovereign, and not Christ, governs the faithful. Moreover, Bramhall’s lament that Hobbes has made Christ’s ‘kingdom not to commence or begin before the day of judgment’ captures a crucial part of how Hobbes reimagines the kingdom of God and the Last Judgement. Hobbes, Bramhall correctly notes, has postponed the Last Judgement and the inception of Christ’s reign as supreme sovereign. Having asserted throughout Leviathan the importance of the Last Judgement to human affairs, why does Hobbes seem unwilling to allow its realization in history? Bramhall, I suggest, has touched upon a major point of tension in the way Hobbes frames his political philosophy. Just as Hobbes’s recreation of the Saul narrative was essential to legitimating his model of political power in the present, so does Hobbes establish the Last Judgement as the ideal towards which human sovereignty strives—but striving, that is, in a human world whose governments rise and fall by human hands alone. 53 

Bramhall, Castigations, sig. Hh6r.

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Hobbes’s Leviathan is thus haunted by the Last Judgement as a telos that is repeatedly slighted, put off, or otherwise passed over with hastiness untypical of Hobbes’s dogmatic prose style. Hobbes has difficulty imagining human affairs sub specie aeternitatis.54 His mechanistic materialism, his narrative of sovereignty’s origin in Abraham and Moses, his narrative of Saul’s usurpation, and his model of ruling as judging are all fundamentally teleological. That end towards which they tend is the installment of Christ as ultimate sovereign, which would occur when Christ judges the world at the Last Judgement. ‘The day of judgment’, Hobbes declares, ‘is the day of the restoration of the kingdom of God’ (3.43.17). We might also note, as Pocock first pointed out, that Hobbes’s model of sovereignty is confined within historical time and restricted by the bounds of his materialist universe.55 For Hobbes, sovereignty’s origin was an actual historical event recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. Yet Hobbes treats the Last Judgement differently. As the telos towards which all things in his materialist universe progress, Hobbes might have emphasized the Last Judgement’s historicity—when it would happen, how, and where. For Hobbes’s contemporaries, both royalists and parliamentarians, the Last Judgement was an explicitly historical event.56 As Bryan Ball and others have shown, anticipation of Christ’s return was a phenomenon encompassing all religious and political persuasions, and it was not limited to the radical fringe.57 Yet for all the times Hobbes speaks specifically of the ‘second coming of our Lord’ or of the ‘day of judgment’ (forty-six times in the 1651 English edition), he never gives details about it. What is remarkable is not that he mentions the Last Judgement in Leviathan, but that he chooses to say so little about it. 54 

On Hobbes and the idea of eternal perspective, see Bertman, ‘Human and Divine Action’. Commenting on ‘the material and the temporal nature his hereafter’, Pocock notes that Hobbes’s eschatology is ‘a conjunction of some kind between Hobbes’s philosophical materialism and the apocalyptic and millennialist speculation reaching a highwater mark in England about the time that Leviathan was published’ (Politics, Language and Time, pp. 175–76). 56  For example, the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan, who fought in the wars for Charles, admonished the parliamentarians that at Christ’s imminent return they would ‘finde and see | There’s a reward for them and thee [the faithful and unfaithful, respectively]’, in ‘The Proffer’ (ll. 41–42) (ed. by Martin, p. 487). Similarly, in Of Reformation Touching Church-Discipline in England (1641), Milton wrote that soon ‘the Eternall and shortly-expected King shalt open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World, and distribut[e] Nationall Honours and Rewards to Religious and just Common-wealths’ (ed. by Wolfe, p. 616). 57  See Ball, A Great Expectation; Christianson, Reformers and Babylon; Jue, Heaven upon Earth; The Apocalypse; Millenarianism and Messianism; and Puritans, the Millennium. 55 

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The Last Judgement, I suggest, is useful to Hobbes precisely because it is the last or ultimate judgement—that is, because it is safely locked away in the future. It is a future event that does not infringe on the present, but can be used to manipulate the present. We might think of it as Jacques Derrida thought of nuclear war: as a ‘non-event’ that has not occurred in history—and perhaps never will—and exists only in the religious and literary imagination.58 The Last Judgement is an appropriate telos for Hobbes’s political project in Leviathan because, as a ‘non-event’, it will forever remain an ideal—and a powerful one at that. That ideal at the end of history, like the ideal of Abraham and Moses at the beginning, has the power of legitimating Hobbes’s political philosophy and the authority of his sovereign. As Eldon Eisenach notes, ‘until the kingdom comes, civil philosophy must now rule the bodies of men; faith in the return of the prophetic kingdom must animate men’s souls’.59 This is the tension running throughout Leviathan and throughout Hobbes’s attempts to base his theory on a model of history: Hobbes speaks of the Last Judgement not because he is concerned with Christ’s sovereignty in the world to come, but because the idea of future sovereignty can function as a powerful impetus for establishing right government in mid-seventeenth-century Europe. From the beginning of the treatise until its end, he is focused on the present—the ‘meantime’ between Saul’s usurpation and Christ’s return. Consequently, throughout Leviathan, the Last Judgement is the ideal of political power and a point of reference for the present. There are many instances in Leviathan when the Last Judgement is used in this way, but the most important is when Hobbes employs it to provide the conclusion to his narrative of Saul’s usurpation of the Kingdom of God. Having given us an account of how sovereignty began with God and was invested in Abraham and Moses, Hobbes then removes God from the equation. We are now, he says, living the period after Saul, when sovereignty must be established through a covenant between persons, consolidated in its entirety in the ‘Mortal God’ who is the ruler, and exercised by his human judgement. As Hobbes used the origin of sovereignty to legitimate his model of political power, only to withdraw that origin, so too does he show us here the end of sovereignty, only to deny us its actuality in the real world. In the continuation of the passage above, Hobbes writes,

58  59 

Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’. Eisenach, ‘Hobbes on Church, State and Religion’, p. 221.

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The kingdom of God is a civil kingdom […] and which kingdom having been cast off in the election of Saul, the prophets foretold should be restored by Christ, and the restoration whereof we daily pray for when we say in the Lord’s Prayer Thy kingdom come, and the right whereof we acknowledge when we add For thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, for ever and ever, Amen, and the proclaiming whereof was the preaching of the apostles, and to which men are prepared by the teachers of the Gospel—to embrace which Gospel (that is to say, to promise obedience to God’s government) is to be in the Kingdom of Grace, because God hath gratis given to such the power to be the subjects (that is, children) of God hereafter, when Christ shall come in majesty to judge the world, and actually to govern his own people, which is called the Kingdom of Glory. (3.35.13)

By means of antithesis, Hobbes establishes both the origin and end of the Kingdom of God. Just as it was ‘cast off ’ with Saul, so it ‘should be restored’ with Christ at the Second Coming. What follows, however, is a definite pronouncement that this kingdom has not yet come. Capitalizing on the power of ritual to shape the imagination, Hobbes takes a daily activity—the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—and uses it to teach his readers that Christ does not yet hold sovereignty over human affairs. The implication, of course, is that we rule ourselves until Christ’s return. If Hobbes’s seventeenth-century readers were to accept this argument, then the Lord’s Prayer itself becomes a mechanism of reinforcement. It reminds them on a daily basis of the truth of Hobbes’s political theory: that though sovereignty had a divine beginning and has a divine end, it belongs to a human sovereign in the meantime. Consequently, for someone to ‘embrace’ the Gospel is as much as ‘to promise obedience to God’s government’ and, by default, to the interim human government of the ‘Mortal God’. Hobbes’s use of temporal adverbs and the subjunctive mood when describing the Last Judgement are also important to note. They have the practical purpose, even at the grammatical level, of postponing judgement, and of pushing it further off into the future. The forty-six times he mentions the Second Coming and the Last Judgement are saturated with qualifying words and phrases: ‘when’, ‘till’, ‘until’, ‘in the meantime’, and the like. In the passage above, he writes of ‘when Christ shall come in majesty to judge the world, and actually to govern his own people, which is called the Kingdom of Glory’. We might note, first, that the passage is one sentence, and that at its most basic level, that sentence is: ‘the kingdom of God is a civil kingdom’. All else is ancillary to this. ‘When Christ shall come’ marks the beginning of an adverbial clause that qualifies the action of ‘God hath gratis given’, which is itself not the main part of the sentence. In the clause that follows, the adverb ‘actually’ likewise qualifies an action; here, the action of Christ ‘govern[ing] his own people’. As the OED notes, ‘actu-

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ally’ signifies doing something ‘in action; in fact, in reality, really’ as opposed to ‘possibly, potentially, [or] theoretically’ doing something.60 The distinction that Christ will someday govern at the Last Judgement but does not ‘actually’ govern now is crucial to Hobbes’s project of promoting immediate application of his political theory in his own day. Frequently in Leviathan, Hobbes capitalizes on the Last Judgement’s power as a cultural ideal but denies it historical presence, with the result that it does not infringe upon the authority of the human sovereign. In effect, Hobbes wants to harness the authority of the Last Judgement, but he does not want himself or anyone else to be yet under that authority. For humanity to be currently under God’s governance would remove the impetus for immediate political action on the part of world rulers. Hobbes stresses throughout Leviathan that the Kingdom of God is not now, and that for the time being we are the masters of our fate, because he wants human sovereigns to be active in establishing and exercising their sovereignty. In Chapter 42 (‘Of Power Ecclesiastical’), he writes, But spiritual commonwealth there is none in this world. For it is the same thing with the kingdom of Christ, which he himself saith is not of this world, but shall be in the next world, at the resurrection, when they that have lived justly and believed that he was the Christ shall (though they died natural bodies) rise spiritual bodies; and then it is that our Saviour shall judge the world, and conquer his adversaries, and make a spiritual commonwealth. In the meantime, seeing there are no men on earth whose bodies are spiritual, there can be no spiritual commonwealth amongst men that are yet in the flesh. (3.42.128)

Here, the distinction between the commonwealth of the human sovereign and the ‘spiritual commonwealth’ of Christ is even more pronounced. Christ’s sovereignty begins at the Last Judgement because then he ‘shall judge the world’ and thereby rule it, making a ‘spiritual commonwealth’. However, the abrupt phrase that follows, ‘in the meantime’, both qualifies what Hobbes has just said about this future age and simultaneously distinguishes it from the present. With the phrase ‘in the meantime’, we as readers are suddenly brought down from a theophanic vision of Christ appearing in excelsis, and descending in nubibus, to the present moment and the lowly ground of human affairs. As I have suggested, it is this ‘meantime’, this stretch between Saul and the Second Coming, with which Hobbes is concerned. We see also how Hobbes’s materialism, which he draws from his readings in the Old Testament and from Selden’s works, is 60 

OED, s.v. ‘actually’.

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closely linked to the role of eschatology within his political philosophy. As Hobbes would have it, the materiality of the universe—and God’s absence as a corporeal being on Earth—is the greatest evidence we have that God does not currently reign.61 Consequently, it is left to the sovereign as ‘Mortal God’, the ruler who is here in bodily form, to rule in his stead ‘in the meantime’. Within the context of the English Revolution, Leviathan invoked a specific call for political action on behalf of England, whose people suffered under a Commonwealth government that had displaced its sovereign, Charles I. Having fled London in the winter of 1640 for fear of parliamentary reprisal against his first political treatise, The Elements of Law (May 1640), which advocated absolutism, Hobbes witnessed the events of the Civil War from afar, and he wrote Leviathan as an expatriate living in Paris. Yet Hobbes did not abandon England in thought or sentiment, and much of what he wrote generally about the governance of commonwealths had relevance specifically to his homeland, troubled as it was by an absence of absolute, dictatorial power. The central symbol of his treatise, the sea monster leviathan, which the Old Testament describes as a ‘dragon in the waters’ made to ‘play therein’, and of whom ‘there is not his like’ in power and majesty, was a pointed reference to England, the ‘sceptred isle’ that towered above its neighbours across the Channel.62 Because they lived ‘in the meantime’ between Saul’s usurpation and Christ’s Second Coming, Hobbes indicated, the English people could make use of the means available to them to refashion their world and themselves. Hobbes saw in England the potential to become the epitome of Leviathan and to serve as an example to all other earthly governments, even as its current leaders attempted to reinvent the nation as a republic. Moreover, in the summer of 1650, when Hobbes had completed over half of Leviathan, royalist hopes in Charles II’s return were resurrected in Caroline negotiations with the Scottish Presbyterians and the resulting Treaty of Breda. Leviathan may have attempted to capitalize on renewed sympathy for the exiled king as a means of spurring the English people to action on behalf of their commonwealth. With its all-powerful sovereign, and its idea of covenant between sovereign and subjects, Leviathan offered the English people a chance to rebuild and start 61 

Hobbes’s teachings on materialism troubled contemporary notions of ecclesia universalis—a fact which Bramhall and others were keen to point out in their criticisms of Leviathan. Jackson notes that for Hobbes, ‘there is no universal church on earth to which all Christians owe obedience, for there is no universal sovereign to whom all Christians owe obedience’ (Hobbes, Bramhall, and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, p. 165). 62  Psalm 74. 13; Psalm 104. 26; Job 41. 33.

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anew. Many of Hobbes’s contemporaries saw the events of the Civil War and its aftermath as the signs of tribulation, prophesied in Scripture, which would precede Christ’s Second Coming in the ἐσχάταις ἡμέραις (eschatais hēmerais), the final days before the end of the world. For mid-seventeenth-century readers, ‘leviathan’ was an eschatological symbol of supernatural power associated with apocalypse and Christ’s return.63 In describing his ideal commonwealth as ‘leviathan’, Hobbes suggested that rather than wait for Christ’s coming as the ultimate sovereign, the English people could use the resources God gave them to bring about their own right government—in effect, to become the Leviathan and the semblance of Christ’s own unmatched power. Hobbes’s response to the tumults of his time was not to build national identity in relation to Christ’s appearance in glory, but rather to construct identity in opposition to it. We are our own masters for the moment, Hobbes claimed, and if we cannot refashion our government and our nation in the midst of crisis, then we squander the talents God has given us. For Hobbes, all human endeavor and achievement were defined by the fact that humanity still exists ‘in the meantime’, that Christ had not yet returned, and that Christ did not yet govern. This fact, he intimated, should not discourage or cripple England, but rather liberate it. As Hobbes saw it, this was the freedom that could allow England to recreate itself into Leviathan and to rest secure in the knowledge that when Christ would return, He would establish infallible government. But until then, England would be left to its own devices.

63 

Springborg, ‘Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts’, p. 354. See also Tralau, ‘Leviathan, the Beast’.

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Johnson, Paul, ‘Hobbes’s Anglican Doctrine of Salvation’, in Thomas Hobbes in His Time, ed. by Ralph Ross, Herbert Schneider, and Theodore Waldman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), pp. 102–28 —— , ‘Leviathan’s Audience’, in Thomas Hobbes: De la Métaphysique à la Politique, ed. by Martin Bertman and Michel Malherbe (Paris: Vrin, 1989), pp. 221–36 Johnston, David, ‘Hobbes’s Mortalism’, History of Political Thought, 10.4 (1989), 647–63 —— , The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) Jones, Gareth Lloyd, The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983) Jue, Jeffrey, Heaven upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006) Kodalle, Klaus-Michael, ‘Covenant: Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion and His Political System “More Geometrico”’, in Hobbes’s ‘Science of Natural Justice’, ed. by C. Walton and P. J. Johnson (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 223–38 Kraynak, Robert, History and Modernity in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) Langholm, Odd Inge, The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought: Antecedents of Choice and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Lessay, Franck, ‘Hobbes’s Covenant Theology and Its Political Implications’, in The Cam­ bridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’, ed. by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 243–70 Malcolm, Noel, ‘Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) [accessed 20 May 2012] Martinich, A. P., The Two Gods of ‘Leviathan’: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) McCafferty, John, ‘Bramhall, John (bap. 1594, d.  1663)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) [accessed 20 May 2012] Milner, Benjamin, ‘Hobbes: On Religion’, Political Theory, 16.3 (1988), 400–25 Mintz, Samuel, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) Nelson, Eric, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) Parkin, Jon, Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Patrides, C. A., and Joseph Wittreich, eds, The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) Pocock, J. G. A., Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971)

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Popkin, Richard, ed., Jewish Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994) —— , ed., Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought 1650–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 1988) Popkin, Richard, and Matt Goldish, eds, Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001) Rosenblatt, Jason, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) —— , Torah and Law in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) Schmitt, Carl, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996) Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) —— , ‘Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’, ed. by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 157–80 —— , ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’, The Historical Journal, 9.3 (1966), 286–317 —— , Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) —— , Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Smith, Nigel, ‘The Charge of Atheism and the Language of Radical Speculation, 1640–1660’, in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. by Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 131–58 Sommerville, Johann P., ‘Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism, and the History of the Jews’, in Hobbes and History, ed. by G.  A.  J. Rogers and Tom Sorrell (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 159–87 Spragens, Thomas, The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (Lexington: Uni­ versity Press of Kentucky, 1973) Springborg, Patricia, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and the Historia Ecclesiastica’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55.4 (1994), 553–71 —— , ‘Hobbes’s Biblical Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth’, Political Theory, 23.2 (1995), 353–75 —— , ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­versity Press, 2007) Strauss, Leo, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936) Sussmann, Naomi, ‘How Many Commonwealths Can Leviathan Swallow? Covenant, Sovereign and People in Hobbes’s Political Theory’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 18.4 (2010), 575–96 Taylor, A. E., ‘The Ethical Doctrine of Hobbes’, Philosophy, 13 (1938), 406–24

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Tenywa, Francis, ‘The Hebraic Tradition and Its Influence on Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory: An Examination of Sovereign and Citizens’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, New York University, 1991) Toon, Peter, ed., Puritans, The Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology, 1600 to 1660 (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Ltd, 1970) Tralau, Johan, ‘Leviathan, the Beast of Myth: Medusa, Dionysos, and the Riddle of Hobbes’s Sovereign Monster’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’, ed. by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 61–81 Tuck, Richard, ‘The “Christian Atheism” of Thomas Hobbes’, in Atheism from the Refor­ mation to the Enlightenment, ed. by Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 111–30 —— , Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) Walker, D. P, The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) Walls, Jerry, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Warrender, Howard, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957) Wirszubski, Chaim, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) Wright, George Herbert, Religion, Politics, and Thomas Hobbes (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006)

‘An offering to her memory’: Healing, Motherhood, and Identity in the Manuscript Remains of Lady Ann Fanshawe Jayne Elisabeth Archer

L

ady Ann Fanshawe (1625–80) left two manuscript remains.1 Both are acts of memorialization. One manuscript, now held at the British Library, is a memoir of the life of her husband, Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608–66), the politician, diplomat, poet, translator, and lifelong Hispanophile.2 Ann addressed the Memoirs to the Fanshawes’s only surviving son, Richard (1665–94), who was less than a year old when his father died. The Memoirs, dated 1676 and still bound in its original red leather and gilt-tooled covers, tells the story of the Fanshawe family, set against the dramatic backdrop of the English Civil War, the Interregnum, and the Restoration. It describes a family in danger and on the move, including Richard Fanshawe’s period of imprisonment in Whitehall, the family’s exile under the Commonwealth, and their time in Portugal and 1 

This chapter is based on a paper given as part of a lecture series on women’s manuscript receipt books at the Wellcome Institute, London, on 30 October 2002. I am grateful to the convenor of the lecture series, Richard Aspin, and to the audience for their questions and comments. 2  BL, MS Addit. 41161, ‘Memoirs of Ann Fanshawe, wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, 1st Bart. (1608–1666), written for the instruction of her son Richard, 2nd Bart. (1665–1694)’, 1676 (with later additions), paper, ff. vii + 124, folio; contemporary binding of red leather, gilttooled, in the centre of both covers a device of arms, Fanshawe impaling Harrison’. Jayne Elisabeth Archer ([email protected]) is an independent scholar. She specializes in early modern English literature.

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Spain in the 1660s, when Richard served as Crown ambassador. For early readers of Lady Fanshawe’s text, the Memoirs was notable chiefly for its depiction of Royalist resistance and pride, and for its portrait of the author as a devoted wife and mother. Horace Walpole, who read the work in 1792, remarked that the Memoirs, whilst ‘not unentertaining’, dwells on ‘private domestic distresses’.3 Sidney Lee, author of the entries for Ann and Richard Fanshawe in the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, commented: ‘The charming simplicity of Lady Fanshawe’s narrative of her adventures under the Commonwealth, and her love and admiration for her husband, give the book a high place in autobiographic literature’.4 Published most recently in a modernspelling edition prepared by John Loftis in 1979, the Fanshawe Memoirs has been used by scholars as a source text for seventeenth-century history and politics, as evidence for the experiences of ambassador’s wives, and as an example of early modern women’s life-writing.5 The second manuscript associated with Lady Fanshawe is perhaps less well known. ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery written the eleuenth day of December 1651’ is a large, leather-bound folio volume containing a heterogeneous collection of medical and culinary receipts, curiosities, and experiments.6 The ‘Booke of Receipts’ is the focus of this chapter. Like other examples of its genre, Ann Fanshawe’s receipt book has received relatively little scholarly attention. Early research on women’s manuscript receipt books often used such texts as relatively unproblematic evidence for culinary or (more usually) domestic medical practice.7 More recently, in work by Margaret J. M. Ezell and Catherine Field 3 

The Letters of Horace Walpole Earl of Orford, ix, ed. by Cunningham, pp. 378–79. Lee, ‘Fanshawe, Sir Richard (1608–1666)’, p. 189. 5  Halkett and Fanshawe, The Memoirs of Anne. For recent scholarship on the Memoirs, see Bassnett, ‘“All the ceremoneys and civilityes”’; Glaser, The Creation of the Self, pp. 94–113; Findley and Hobby, ‘Seventeenth-Century Women’s Autobiography’; Hickman, Daughters of Britannia, pp. 22–31; Keeble, ‘Obedient Subjects?’; Purkiss, The English Civil War, pp. 150–53; Rose, ‘Gender, Genre, and History’; Seelig, ‘Ann Fanshawe’; and Wray, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 199–200. 6  Wellcome, Western MS 7113, ‘Recipe book of Lady Ann Fanshawe, wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608–1666), English ambassador to Spain, containing medical, culinary and other recipes, compiled from 1651. With additional entries in various later hands’, 1651–1707. 7  Notable exceptions to this rather reductive approach include Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, pp. 16, 58, 183; Potter, ‘The Household Receipt Book of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’; and Purkiss, The English Civil War, pp. 150–53. 4 

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among others, the manuscript receipt book has been re-evaluated as a more subtle and complex textual phenomenon, and, interestingly, ‘a site and strategy of female self-writing’.8 Drawing on this approach in the present chapter, and setting the receipt book alongside and in conversation with the Memoirs, I argue that both manuscripts are exercises in remembering and reconstructing the past, and that both can be considered forms of life-writing. This is achieved in complementary but distinct ways, as the different identities required of Lady Fanshawe—daughter, wife, mother, Royalist, and Protestant—are explored and negotiated. Whereas the Memoirs seems to privilege the father-son bond, the receipt book, I suggest, remembers the mother-daughter relationship, thus articulating, in Mary Beth Rose’s words, the ‘essential’ but otherwise ‘untold […] saga of Lady Ann’s body’.9 Moreover, I suggest that this same act of memorialization informed Ann Fanshawe’s decision to present the manuscript to her eldest daughter, Katherine, on 23 March 1678. Whereas the Memoirs is a suitable gift for a son, the manuscript receipt book is a gift for a daughter (given by a daughter to a daughter and in memory of motherhood), and it registers and helps create a distinct model of identity—identity as a process, produced in and through ongoing shared experiences and physical processes such as grief, illness, motherhood, healing, and housewifery. Furthermore, it remembers identity as something constructed in the continuing transactions, the textual exchanges, between individuals.

Ann Fanshawe’s Memoirs Ann Fanshawe was born Ann Harrison, the eldest daughter and fourth child of Sir John Harrison of Balls Park, Hertfordshire, and Margaret Fanshawe.10 Most of what is known about her upbringing and adult life comes from the Memoirs she had transcribed by an unnamed amanuensis in May 1676. Although the dates and chronology given in the Memoirs are sometimes a little confused and unreliable, portions of it are so meticulous as to suggest that Lady Fanshawe 8 

Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers’, pp. 41–46, and Field, ‘“Many hands hands”’, pp. 49–64. For women’s cookery books as a form of life-writing, see Theophano, Eat My Words. The quotation is taken from Field, ‘“Many hands hands”’, p. 50. Other recent research on women’s manuscript receipt books includes Aspin, ‘Who Was Elizabeth Okeover?’; Pennell, ‘Perfecting Practice?’; and the essays collected in Reading and Writing Recipe Books. 9  Rose, ‘Gender, Genre, and History’, p. 259. 10  The following account of Ann Fanshawe’s life is based on Davidson, ‘Ann, Lady Fanshawe’.

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and her scribe worked from pre-existing household accounts or diaries, with some passages perhaps dictated by Ann herself.11 The narrative ends abruptly, with references to events which took place on 2 January 1672, and the manuscript concludes with two prayers in Ann’s hand, dated Portugal 1662–63 and Madrid 1666—the latter prayer being used at Sir Richard’s funeral in the Embassy chapel—and an incomplete list of the Fanshawes’s children. Following the original act of transcription, Ann went over the manuscript, making corrections, deletions, and additions in her own hand. Finally, a later hand, which is neither that of Lady Fanshawe nor her amanuensis, and which seems to postdate Ann’s death in 1680, copied out the deleted passages onto small scraps of paper which were then sewn onto the relevant pages of the manuscript. Ostensibly, the Memoirs is an account of the life of Sir Richard Fanshawe, detailing his character, appointments, achievements, and honours. Dedicated to the only surviving son of the Fanshawes, also named Richard, the Memoirs thus functions as a kind of surrogate father, remembering for the son the kind of man his father was and describing the kind of man he in turn should become: ‘because you were but ten months and ten days old when God took him out of this world’, Ann explains to her son, ‘I will for your advantage show you him with all truth and without partiality’ (1).12 The Memoirs portrays Sir Richard as the head of a close-knit but embattled family: a Royalist and Protestant, he endures imprisonment, poverty, and personal tragedy (the Fanshawes suffered the loss of several children during pregnancy and infancy), and is eventually rewarded with ambassadorial appointments in Portugal and Spain. Throughout these trials, Ann presents herself as a loyal wife whose identity, it would seem, is largely subsumed within that of her husband: ‘to commend my better half ’, she states at the beginning of the Memoirs, ‘methinks is to commend my self ’ (5). The Memoirs tells a distinct but complementary story, one of motherhood, memory, and healing. It begins with Ann’s account of her own upbringing and, specifically, her memories of her mother, Margaret Harrison (d. 1640), the daughter of Robert Fanshawe of Fanshawe Gate, Derbyshire. Chiefly, Ann remembers her mother for her charitable work, undertaken at the family home at Balls Park, Hertfordshire, and their London residence in Hart Street,

11 

On errors in the chronology, see Fanshawe, The Poems and Translations, i, ed. by Davidson, p. 13, and Loftis, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi. Loftis suggests that Ann Fanshawe and her amanuensis worked from a pre-existing manuscript or notes (‘Introduction’, pp. ix, xvi). 12  All references to the Memoirs are from BL, MS Addit. 41161, with page numbers en­tered in parentheses.

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St Olave’s. Margaret Harrison fed and healed the poor of her household and neighbourhood, Ann explains, ‘many with her own hand’: My dear mother was of excellent beauty and good understanding, a Loving wife and most tender mother very pious and charitable to yt degree yt she reliev’d (besides ye offall of ye table which she constantly gave ye poore) many with her own hand dayly out of her purse and drest many wounds of miserable people when she had health and when yt fail’d as it did often she caused her servant to supply yt place. (18)

The qualities used to describe Margaret Harrison in this passage—beautiful, loving, tender, pious, charitable—are typical of those found in testimonies to other exemplary seventeenth-century women (who are remembered in funeral sermons, spiritual autobiographies, epitaphs) as well as the prescriptive ideal of the ‘good woman’ found in early modern conduct books. The provision of medical care to members of the household and among the wider community was one such commonplace.13 Thus, for example, Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676), in her memoir of her mother, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland (1560–1616), notes that she ‘was a lover of the study and practice of alchimy, by which she found out excellent medicines, that did much good to many’.14 However, Ann Fanshawe’s description of her mother moves beyond the generic. Ann recalls that her mother’s health ‘fail’d […] often’ and this had a significant impact on her ability to dispense medical care in person and ‘with her own hand’. Indeed, Ann’s account of Margaret Harrison and her description of their bond as mother and daughter are framed by their shared experiences of health, healing, and physical disease. In short, it is in and through the healthy and sick body that Ann remembers her mother and asserts her own identity. Specifically, Ann’s presentation of her own birth is intimately connected with her account of her mother’s death. The former event, dated 25 March 1625, is immediately followed by a detailed description of Margaret Harrison’s funeral (she died on 25 July 1640): Doctor Howlsworth preached her funerall sermon in which upon his own knowledge he told before many hundred of people ys accident following, That my mother being sick to death of a feavour 3 months after I was borne which was ye occasion she gave me suck no longer her friends and servants thought to all outward appearance that she was dead, and so lay almost two days and a night but Doctor Wilson coming to comfort my father went in to my mathers Chamber and looking earnestly on her face sayd she was so handsome, and now looks so lovely I can not think she is 13  14 

See, for example, Rogers, The Character of a Good Woman, pp. 42–43. Clifford, Lives of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. by Gilson, p. 20.

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dead, and suddenly took a lancet out of his pocket and with it cut ye sole of her foot which bled Upon yis he immediatly caused her to be lain upon her bed again and to be rubb’d and such means used as she came to life and opening her eyes saw two of her kinswomen stand by her, My Lady Knowells and my Lady Russell, both with great white sleeves as ye fashon was then; and said did ye not promiss me 15 years? and are you come again? which they not understanding perswaded her to keepe her spirits quiet in yt great weaknesse wherin she then was, but some few houres after she desired my father and Doctor Howlsworth might be left alone whith her, to whom she sayd, I will acquaint you that during ye time of my trance I was in great quiet but in a place I could neither distinguish nor describe but ye sence of leaving my girle which is dearer to me yn all my children remained a trouble upon my spirit, suddainly I saw two be me cloathed in long white garments, and methought I fell down with my face in ye dust and they asked why I was troubled in so great happines I replyed o let me have ye same grant given to Esekious [i.e. Hezekiel] yt I may live 15 years to see my daughter a woman to which they answerede (It is done) and yn at yt Instant I awaked out of my trance. And Do. Howlsworth did then affirme yt yt day she dyed made just 15 years from that time. (17–18)

The occasion of Ann Fanshawe’s birth becomes, for the biographer, a trigger to move forward fifteen years to remember her mother’s funeral sermon, which in turn prompts her relation of Dr Richard Holdsworth’s memory of an incident that took place at the height of the illness suffered by Margaret Harrison three months following Ann’s delivery. This complex disruption of the Memoirs’ linear narrative collapses into one moment events that are ordinarily separated by time, and another imperative—the assertion of the interrelated identities of mother and daughter—takes precedence. Having given life to her new daughter, the mother fades away; her physical weakness strengthens her spiritual powers and enables her to make a bargain with God. The motif of the physically weak or dying woman acquiring prophetic skills was popular in the mid-seventeenth century—a comparable combination of childbirth and prophecy features in Anne Clifford’s account of her mother, Margaret Countess of Cumberland—but in a biography that is largely secular, this anecdote is striking.15 Margaret Harrison regains her will to live out of love for her daughter and, specifically, through her continuing desire to be a good mother. Recalling Isaiah 38. 5, in which the dying Hezekiah is granted an additional fifteen years of life,16 she asks that her own life be extended for the 15  On this motif, see Becker, ‘The Absent Body’ and Clifford, Lives of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. by Gilson, pp. 23–24. 16  Isaiah 38. 5, ‘Go, and say to Hezekiah, Thus saith the Lord, the God of David thy father, I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years’ (KJV).

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same period of time during which she will raise her daughter to the threshold of womanhood; only then, when her role as a mother is over and Ann is ready to become a mother in turn, will she consent to die. This sense of the enabling influence of female and maternal bonds is strengthened by the presence of the two kinswomen17 who stand beside Margaret Harrison’s bedside—transfigured, in the eyes of the dying woman, into heavenly angels.18 As Lucinda Becker notes, the detailed description of Margaret Harrison’s ‘near-death experience’ stands in place of a description of her actual deathbed, from which Lady Fanshawe was absent.19 It also serves to reinforce the idea that, for Ann, her mother continues to be a real (spiritual) force in her life. An account of the demise of Margaret Harrison’s physical body is thus replaced by an assertion of her ability to defeat time, and, seemingly, death itself. The memory of this incident haunts the Memoirs and it has a decisive influence over the future course of events. Before her mother’s death, Ann Fanshawe was, in her own estimation, ‘a Hoyting girle [i.e. riotous, a hoyden]’ who preferred ‘Acteive pastimes’ (21) such as skipping and riding. Following the funeral, Ann is transformed and, newly appreciative of her mother’s gift to her, she undertakes to repay the debt in kind: upon my mothers death I then begun to reflect and as an offering to her memory I flung away those childnesses yt had formerly possest me and by my fathers command took upon me ye Charge of his house and family which I so ordered by my excellent mothers Example as found acceptance in his sight, I was very well beloved by all our relations, and my mothers friends which I payd a great respect to and I ever was ambitious to keepe ye best company, which I have done I thank God all ye days of my life. (21)

It is as ‘an offering’ to the ‘memory’ of her deceased mother that the fifteenyear-old Ann ceases to be a girl, and, assuming her mother’s role in her father’s household, becomes a woman and a housewife. Interestingly, she chooses to single out her ‘mothers friends’ as people who loved her and who she in turn regards with ‘great respect’. 17  Lady Joanna Knollys, daughter of Sir John Wolstenholme and Catherine Fanshawe, and wife of Sir Robert Knollys of Grays, Oxfordshire. The identity of ‘Lady Russell’ is uncertain, but Loftis suggests that she could be the wife of Sir William Russell (cr. Baronet in 1627), who lived in Tower Street, adjoining the Fanshawes’s residence in Hart Street, London (Halkett and Fanshawe, The Memoirs of Anne, p. 323). 18  On this motif, see Marshall, ‘Angels around the Deathbed’. 19  Becker, ‘The Absent Body’, p. 255.

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Taking over the running of a household, Ann would have required the assistance not simply of her late mother’s friends, relatives, and employees; as will be discussed in the next section, Ann was able to emulate her ‘excellent mothers Example’ by drawing on Margaret Harrison’s manuscript receipts, perhaps collected as loose leaves or gathered in one or more receipt books. Such texts, whether in manuscript or printed form, were invaluable aids to the early modern housewife, enabling her to store the knowledge required in administering her responsibilities within and beyond the household. Ann Fanshawe’s use of the phrase ‘an offering to her memory’ is especially apt when considered in light of the importance of memory to the early modern housewife. Indeed, Tasso, in The Householders Philosophie (1588), compares housewifery to the art of memory: it belongeth to the wife to keepe, and to the husband to encrease. But forasmuch as things preserued, may the better be disposed, if they be carefully prouided for, and ordered, the good Huswife ought aboue all things to be dilligent heerein […]. And if there can be no similitiude inferd to this purpose worthie of consideration, most notable is that of Memory.20

The death of Margaret Fanshawe also marked the beginning of the process of experimenting and collecting that would eventually result in the creation of Ann’s own manuscript receipt book. In the next section I will turn to consider ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts’, in which Ann’s act of remembering her mother takes a material form, and in which the Memoirs’ narrative of the mother-daughter bond is continued, strengthened, and transformed.

Ann Fanshawe’s Manuscript Receipt Book ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery’ is now Western MS 7113 in the Wellcome Library.21 It is a weighty folio volume of 267 leaves, measuring 315mm by 200mm. The original pagination (1–512) is still visible, but many leaves have been excised. It remains in its olive morocco binding, gilt-stamped, with centre ornaments on the front and rear. There is evidence of a clasp, now missing. Like the Memoirs, then, this is a physically impressive volume, and was clearly intended to be 20 

Tasso, The Householders Philosophie, trans. by Kyd, fol. 21v. It has been published in Women in Medicine. All references to the ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke’ are from Western MS 7113, with page numbers entered in parentheses. Folio numbers are indicated as ‘fols’. 21 

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given as a gift. An inscription on the recto of folio 2 confirms that this was indeed the case: ‘K[atherine]. Fanshawe. Giuen mee by my Mother March th.23. 1678’. According to another inscription, on the recto of folio 3, ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke’ was ‘written the eleuenth day of December 1651. by Me, Ioseph Auerie’. Averie, Ann’s amanuensis, writes in an elegant forward-sloping italic hand with some secretary features, and he has taken great care in his work. Each receipt has a clear title, and a red margin has been ruled to the left-hand side of each page. ‘My Mother’ has been entered, in Averie’s hand, in the margins of the first receipts, suggesting that Averie was working from a pre-existing manuscript or collection of loose leaves handed down by Margaret Harrison. In this, the first phase of the manuscript’s compilation, it was divided into two main portions, headed ‘Physicks’ (1) and ‘Cookery’ (273), each portion being arranged into sub-sections. For example, the former portion contains sections for salves, plasters, ointments, oils, powders, distilled waters, perfumes, and wines. It begins with ‘The Lady Butlers’ method ‘To make a Suppository effectually to worke’ followed by ‘Mrs. Ailiffes’ preparation ‘for the Greene Sicknes’ (1), and contains the stock remedies featured in printed and manuscript receipt books of this time: there are, for example, a version of the popular panacea ‘Dr Steuens Water’ (117), a preservative against plague (5), and a treatment ‘Against the biting of a Mad Dogge’ (7). The latter portion, comprising methods for making sweetmeats, pastries, syrups, tarts, preserves, salads, pickles, and meat dishes, would have enabled Lady Fanshawe to satisfy her husband’s belief in the importance of hospitality, which is something she remarks on in the Memoirs: ‘He loved hospitality, and would often say, it was wholy essentiall for ye constitution of England: He lov’d and kept order with ye greatest decency possible’ (6). This concern was shared by Ann’s father, John Harrison, and its importance to Royalist families such as the Harrisons and Fanshawes is further demonstrated by the inclusion of ‘A Bill of Fare, to direct a young House=keeper for setting forth a Table’ (489–99, 501–03) and a list of ‘Drinkes proper to be mayd in the Cuntry’ (505) towards the back of Wellcome MS 7113. Reading the Memoirs alongside the receipt book, therefore, we can see the ways in which the provision of food (and of medical care) helped align women such as Lady Fanshawe with the emphasis on charity and hospitality championed by Royalist sympathizers during the 1650s and 1660s.22 22 

On the ways in which ‘Royalist allegiance was frequently coded through positive allusion to food, dining, and other traditional rituals’, see Bassnett, ‘Restoring the Royal Household’. See also n. 43, below.

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The book incorporates several practical features to help enable the realization of these ideals. There are an alphabetical list of contents, a note on converting weights and measures, and a twenty-one step guide, ‘How to order each Herbe or Flower before it is distilled’ (fols 263v–264r).23 At the end of each sub-section, Averie left blank leaves, and most often these pages have been filled with further receipts, written in a variety of later hands, presumably as and when they were received or acquired. Sometimes these additional entries observe Averie’s original ordering, sometimes not; and towards the end of the cookery section, medical receipts return, such that it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other. Approximately one quarter of the book consists of either blank or excised leaves. The manuscript receipt book was owned by Ann Fanshawe for twenty-seven years, 1651–78; it was begun some six years into her marriage to Sir Richard Fanshawe and was presented to their eldest surviving daughter, Katherine Fanshawe (1652, d. after 1707), twelve years after being widowed, and a couple of years before Ann’s own death. From the evidence provided by extant examples of women’s manuscript receipt books, it seems as though these volumes tended to be passed down the distaff line, from mother to daughter, or from mother to daughter-in-law, sister, niece, god-daughter, or granddaughter.24 Ann Fanshawe’s decision to bequeath her volume to her eldest daughter is thus not surprising. However, the timing of the bequest is rather more curious. Typically, the compilation of a manuscript receipt book was prompted by marriage, with the bride-to-be, about to leave one household in order to assume responsibility for another, either making copies of her mother’s receipts or having her mother, fiancé, or prospective mother-in-law arrange to have one prepared for her.25 Coming just two years before her death and so close in time to the gift of the Memoirs to her son, the presentation of the receipt book to 23 

A similar guide to distillation appears in Plat, The Jewell House of Art and Nature, bk. 3, pp. 3–7. 24  On the importance of a ‘matrilineal literary tradition’ in medieval women’s book ownership, see Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners’, p.  767, and Jambeck, ‘Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage’, pp. 236, 242. 25  For example, ‘A Booke of divers Medecines, Broothes, Salves, Waters, Syroppes and Oyntements of which many or the most part have been experienced and tryed by the speciall practize of Mrs. Corylon. Anno Domini 1606’ (Wellcome, Western MS 213), combining the receipts of Anne Howard, Dowager Countess of Arundel (1557–1630), and her housekeeper, Mrs Corylon, was prepared and presented to Aletheia Talbot (d. 1654) on the occasion of her marriage to Thomas Howard (1585–1646), 21st Earl of Arundel, in 1606.

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Katherine Fanshawe was perhaps motivated by Ann’s awareness of her own failing health. Moreover, when she received the manuscript from her mother on 23 March 1678, presumably as a New Year’s gift—and two days before Ann Fanshawe’s birthday—Katherine would have been fifteen years old, the same age as Ann when her own mother died and she was left responsible for the running of a large household. Knowing her own death to be imminent, Ann might have looked to Katherine, the eldest of her five surviving children, to be a surrogate mother to her siblings, just as the fifteen-year-old Ann had had to serve as a housewife to her own father. When, on 11 December 1651, Averie began his transcription, Ann had been married for seven years. Why was there a delay in beginning work on this volume, and why did Ann choose this particular moment? The time immediately preceding her marriage to her second cousin Richard (later Sir Richard) Fanshawe on 18 May 1644 had been extremely turbulent. Ann’s time in ‘Charge’ of her father’s ‘house and family’ had been cut short by John Harrison’s imprisonment by Parliament in 1642 and the sequestration of his estate. Taking refuge in the Royalist stronghold at Oxford in 1643, her marriage ceremony being performed in the nearby Wolvercote Church, Ann had precious little opportunity to organize a household, having to make do, as she recalls in the Memoirs, on ‘one dish of meat and that not the best ordered’ (12) each day. The early years of her marriage were occupied by flight to the west of England followed by the Scilly Isles and Channel Islands and a peripatetic period of exile, moving between France, Ireland, and Spain, with Ann finally returning to London in 1651. Richard Fanshawe, who joined the forces loyal to the eventual Charles II, was captured in September 1650 following the Battle of Worcester and was detained at Whitehall. Ann petitioned the Council of State on behalf of her husband, and managed to secure his release on 28 November 1651 on grounds of ill health, just thirteen days before Averie sat down to begin the initial transcription. The immediate context for the compilation of Ann’s manuscript receipt book was thus her return to England, a fraught reunion with her husband, and the latter’s ill health. For the first time since her marriage, Ann was presented with the possibility and responsibility of being a housewife. Crippled by debt under the Commonwealth, she also had to learn to conserve, preserve, and recycle the little they owned, and her experiences in Oxford and on the Continent, not to mention her husband’s recent ill health, would have acquainted her with first-hand experience of foreign cuisine and diverse approaches to disease and healing. However, there may have been another motive behind the preparation of the manuscript at this time, one invisible to all but Ann herself and again

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prompted by the memory of her mother. Katherine Fanshawe, the eventual recipient of the receipt book, was born on 30 July 1652. When Averie began transcribing the manuscript, on 11 December 1651, therefore, Ann would have been just a few weeks pregnant with Katherine. With the memory of her mother’s near-fatal post-partum illness, Ann was no doubt conscious of the dangers of miscarriage and the possibility of infant mortality. Indeed, the Memoirs details Ann’s own experience of contracting ‘a very ill kind of feaver’ which ‘turned to quartain agues’ (i.e., an illness lasting 72 hours), following the premature birth of a son: But I being with child, none thought I could live; for I was brought to bed of a son in November, 10 weeks before my time, and thence forward untill Aprill [16]58 I had 2 fits everyday. That brought me so weake that I was like an anatomy. I never stirr’d out of my bed in 7 months, nor during that time eat flesh, or bread, but sack, possett drink, and pancake or eggs, or now and then a turnip or carrot. (32)26

‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts’ contains a wealth of evidence of Ann’s difficult pregnancies and the challenges of treating childhood illnesses. One of the handful of medical receipts to bear evidence of personal experience is ‘The red powder good for [i.e., good for preventing] miscarryinge’, a concoction combining ‘Dragons blood’, ‘powder of red corall’, ‘ambergreece’, and ‘bezoar stone’ dissolved in ‘a little burnt Claret wine’ and to be followed by a broth made from ‘plantaine rootes and shepheards purse and knotted grasse, burnett and bryer leaves’ (73). Endorsed with the initials, ‘A Fan’, a note has been added to the receipt in a different hand: ‘put in to the broth joust as your drink it the treds [i.e., white membranes] of 9 Eggs; I haue found good Experementalley of this medicin’ (73). There are also receipts which might have been collected by Ann in the light of her and her husband’s emotional crises following the deaths of several of their children: a receipt ‘For Melancholy’, one of the first in the book, has a subtitle added in Ann’s hand: ‘and heauenes of spiretts’ (1). Once Averie had completed his original transcription in late 1651, Lady Fanshawe went over the receipts; her name or initials appear in the margins of most of the prescriptions. The margins are also used for attributions, linking a receipt to a named individual—a practice that will be discussed later in this chapter—and for additional comments and corrections, seemingly added at a later date and in light of personal experience. For example, the receipt ‘To make Almond milke’ has had ‘For the fase’ (216) added to the title by a later 26 

A receipt ‘To make a posset’ is Wellcome, Western MS 7113, pp. 309–10.

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hand, whilst there are several emendations to Lady Butler’s method ‘To bake a Hare’, including a suggestion that ‘bay leaues’ can be placed at the bottom of the serving dish (378). A significant number of entries have been deleted, either with over-scorings or looping circles. This editorial work might have been undertaken by Ann herself, as it is similar to the technique described earlier in relation to the Memoirs. However, in the receipt book the deleted entries remain legible, and each deleted receipt reappears elsewhere in the manuscript. The deletions would thus seem to result from an effort on Ann’s part either to remove receipts unwittingly repeated by Averie, or else in an attempt to reorganize the volume. At some stage in its history, the manuscript was subjected to further, more dramatic deletions. As has been mentioned, approximately forty leaves have been excised from the volume, their stubs still present. Some leaves might have been deleted because of a need for paper (which was, of course, relatively expensive at this time); as we will see, similar paper was used to form a separate booklet sewn inside the folio volume. Traces of writing are visible on at least one of the stubs, and from the index at the back of the manuscript, it seems that one of the portions to be removed was entitled ‘Short Observations and experements’, and that one of the receipts from this section concerned breeding pheasants (298). In contrast to these excisions, several receipts written on loose leaves have been sewn or pasted into the volume (64, 395, 457, 469, 482). Material has been sourced from printed books: a couple of printed advertisements—a flyer for ‘The Famous Scots PILLS’ of the physician Patrick Anderson (fl. 1618–35)27 and extracts from a broadside (pub. 1688 and 1697) advertising the medicinal powers of the popular panacea theriac 28—have been pasted in (452–53); and four prescriptions have been ‘Taken out of Dr Riuerius his book’ (482–83), for example, The Practice of Physick by Lazare Rivière (1589–1655), which was published in six editions between 1655 and 1678 and was described by its printer, Peter Cole, as a work suited to ‘Ladies and Gentlewomen’ so that they ‘will better know how to demean themselves towards their Husbands, Children, or other Relations and Friends’ as well 27 

Anderson published a description of the pills, which he claimed to have procured in Venice, in Grana Angelica; hoc est, Pilularum hujus nominis insignis utilitas, quibus etiam accesserunt alia quædam paucula de durioris Alvi incommodis propter materiæ cognitionem, ac vice supplementi in fine adjuncta (Edinburgh, 1635). It was reprinted as a broadside in 1677. On the publishing history of advertisements for Anderson’s pills, see Furdell, Publishing and Medicine, pp. 133, 139–40. 28  Raffaelli, Theriaca Andromachi senioris diuinum inuentum.

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as the ‘poor distressed Creatures in their respective Countries and place of Habitation’.29 The process of editing, augmenting, and reorganizing the manuscript probably took place in the years 1652–58, when the Fanshawes were compelled, under the terms of Richard’s bail, to live in seclusion. During this period, they moved from Tankersley Park in Yorkshire, the residence of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Stafford, to Hamerton in Huntingdonshire, Chancery Lane in London, Ware Park in Hertfordshire, and Bath (where Richard Fanshawe sought treatment for a recurring illness). This time provided the Fanshawes, freed from the immediate demands of political service, with a rare period of introspection. Richard Fanshawe devoted himself to poetry and translation—two pieces, translations from Latin and Portuguese, were published at this time—whilst Ann, it seems, administered the household and raised their family.30 The third and final phase of compilation to be overseen by Ann Fanshawe corresponds to Richard’s ambassadorial appointments in Portugal (10 August 1662 to 23 August 1663) and Spain (20 January 1664 to 26 March 1666). In the final years of Richard’s life, Ann seems to have been working on the notes that would provide material for the Memoirs as well as extending her knowledge of housewifery, hospitality, and healing. There are culinary receipts for ‘Lemonado’, ‘synamon water’, ‘Alman Milk’, and ‘To dresse Chocolatte’, all dated Madrid, 10 August 1665, and the last of those receipts is accompanied by a drawing of one of the ‘chocelary pottes that are mayd in the Indis’ (331–33). Other receipts combine medicinal with cosmetic uses (or ‘Face Physick’, as it was called): a method for ‘ye famous oyle called ye Queens oyle’, which is reputed to ‘make hayre grow’, is dated Madrid, 8 December 1664, and is noted as best prepared ‘in ye Months of Iune, Iuly, August’ (74). Perhaps the most striking feature of ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke’ is the incorporation of a second, smaller receipt book, comprising just six pages, sewn onto page 209 of the larger volume. Headed ‘Perfumes’, this booklet is written on the same paper as that used for the receipt book (complete with red-lined margins), although the leaves have been cropped. It contains receipts for perfuming skins and gloves; scented powders for linen; perfumes for sprinkling on rose leaves; pomanders; pastilles for scenting a room; and, perhaps incongruously, 29  Rivière, The Practice of Physick, sigs A1v, A2r. The receipts, which are paraphrased in Wellcome, Western MS 7113, appear on p. 268 of The Practice of Physick. 30  Horace, Selected Parts of Horace, trans. by Fanshawe; Camões, The Lusiad, trans. by Fanshawe.

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a receipt ‘To make Paste Beades’. The receipts are variously dated Madrid, 18 June 1650, 11 November 1664, and 3 and 4 October 1665. They also reveal that Ann received instruction from a nephew and servant of one ‘Francisco Moreno’ (65–67, 190, 195), who gave practical demonstrations in the art of perfumery in the Fanshawe residence in Madrid. Ann’s interest in perfumery preceded her time in the Iberian Peninsula, with ten receipts for perfumes dating from her time in England. Two of these prescriptions, both for ‘Sweet Water of Roses’, employ perfume in a medicinal context. One is attributed to Lady Bedell (189–90), and the other, the source being identified as ‘Dr Fraiser’, is ascribed the following virtues: ‘There will come of this water an oile with which anointing ye Temples and ye mole of the Head is the greatest comforter of the braine yt is, & helpeth the paine in the Head’ (190). During the course of the seventeenth century, as attitudes to the role of bad odours in spreading disease changed, there was an associated transformation in the use of perfumes, as they gradually lost their medicinal associations and came to assume only cosmetic, decorative connotations. As Madeline Bassnett argues, the recipes testify to Ann Fanshawe’s attempts to establish her social connections in Spain ‘and thereby her effective contribution to the embassy’s—and her family’s— accomplishments’.31 As a record of the movements, experiences, appetites, and ailments of the Fanshawes, and particularly when set in conversation with the Memoirs, the manuscript receipt book thus helps reveal various aspects of its original owner’s life. However, features of the receipt book invite us to reconsider notions of selfhood and identity in a more subtle way. As its name suggests, a ‘receipt’ was something that was given and received. Two related meanings help refine our understanding of its usage: on the one hand, ‘receipt’ denoted intellectual capacity (the ability of the mind to take in, store, and process information); on the other, in medicine and stillroom technology, the ‘receipt’ was the name for the vessel into which the refined, purified product of the process of distillation was fed.32 To put it simply, the receipt thus operated at the interface between mind and matter. Distilling and packaging knowledge of the operations of the natural world in textual form, it provided a step-by-step method by which to put that power into practice and thereby affect the outside world in accord31 

Bassnett, ‘“All the ceremoneys and civilityes”’, p. 107. For an example of the former usage, see Bacon, The Twoo bookes of Francis Bacon, fol. 4v. For examples of the latter usage, see Plat, The Jewell house of Art and Nature, p. 3 (‘receyuer’), and Charas, sig. A1r (‘recipient’). 32 

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ance with the wishes of the practitioner. It also helped fashion the ‘identity’ of the owner, situating the giver and receiver within a nexus of social, political, and familial networks and knowledge communities.33 One way in which the efficacy of a receipt could be endorsed was to associate it with a named individual, or source, sometimes supplementing this attribution with a date, place, and case history: for, as Robert Boyle observed, ‘In all actions, the Autority of the Person gives autority to the Example.’34 The practice is particularly common in receipt books compiled by or associated with women, and this is especially true of Lady Fanshawe’s manuscript, in which approximately 260 out of just over 500 receipts are identified with a named individual. As in similar books of its type, Wellcome MS 7113 contains receipts that have been lineally transmitted—by mother to daughter—and horizontally disseminated, circulated among the predominantly female members of Ann Fanshawe’s social circle. Of particular importance to the Fanshawes, given their peripatetic history, receipts could be sent across great distances in order to preserve an intimacy through shared practical tasks where friends and relations had been separated from one another. Such networks, as Margaret Ezell has argued in relation to manuscript coteries, provided an informal means to education for early modern women, providing them ‘with opportunities for intellectual engagements and insights which their circumstances, excluded from universities and learned societies, might not easily suggest’.35 Equally important, though, was the sense of privilege and exclusivity conjured by the act of giving and receiving receipts: establishing intimacy and trust between donor and recipient, the exchange also created an invisible and unwitting majority who were not in on the secret.36 To return to Boyle’s formulation, therefore, and revise it in light of the manuscript receipt book, the ‘authority’ of the owner/ recipient was constituted not in the individual him- or herself, but in the ongoing transactions of knowledge between like-minded individuals. Ann Fanshawe’s manuscript receipt book thus records not so much, perhaps, her medical practice or culinary preferences, but remembers and, in a sense, contributes to the creation of, her social network and knowledge com33 

On the use of manuscript records in reconstructing ‘networks’ and ‘communities’, see Scott-Warren, ‘Reconstructing Manuscript Networks’. 34  Cited in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p. 126. 35  Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife, p. 73. 36  On the exchange of secrets and receipts as ‘tokens of exclusiveness and privilege […] creating bonds of mutual obligation and trust between like-minded individuals’, see Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 345.

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munity. Among these sources, there is a noticeable gender bias. Eighty women are named as donors of at least one receipt, in contrast to just twenty-five men, of which ten appear to be licensed physicians: one, a ‘Mr Rowzell’, is an ‘Apothecary of London’, who has ‘approued and giuen’ his ‘Medecine for the Stone’ (p. 71), and a ‘mr dixson surgion’ is identified with ‘a gargle for a cancer in ye mouth’ (loose leaf inserted between pages 431 and 432). ‘Dr Lower’— possibly the physician Richard Lower (1631–91)—is associated with four receipts (395, 431, 434, 449). The other male donors appear to be drawn from various ranks of society, with a ‘Mr Battersby’ (13), the ‘Earl of Cleveland’ (10), Sr r. Stone’ (66), the ‘Bishop of Salsberrey’ (483) each contributing a single receipt—the latter supplying his ‘Syrop for a Cough’.37 The great majority of donors are responsible for a single receipt: Mrs. Gadford is accredited for her ‘Cakes’ (218), and Mr. Battersby for his ‘Purge for a Child’ (13), to name just a couple of examples. In such cases it is difficult to ascertain the identity of the donor and the nature of their relationship with Ann Fanshawe. In a couple of instances, a receipt is said to have been passed on via an intermediary: for example, ‘Aunt Harrison’ has supplied a receipt for Lady Chichester’s ‘famous neck plaister’ (461), and ‘Cousin Coke’ is the source for a receipt for ‘The Lady Hewits Cordiall water’ (432)—a list of ‘virtues’ of this famous panacea, written in a different hand, is given in a loose leaf sewn onto page 432. In reconstructing the networks remembered in Ann Fanshawe’s manuscript receipt book, the Memoirs are helpful. ‘Lady Browne’, who might also appear in the volume as ‘Mrs Browne’, is connected with two receipts (290). She can probably be identified with Lady Elizabeth Browne, née Pretyman (1610–52), a firm friend of the Fanshawes and the mother of Mary Browne, the wife of John Evelyn, who was also a good friend to Richard and Ann Fanshawe. (Mary Evelyn’s manuscript receipt book is held among the Evelyn Papers of the British Library.)38 ‘Mrs Copley’, who is credited with two receipts, one for a medicinal ‘drinke’ and another ‘To dresse a Calues Head with Oysters’ (12, 292) can probably be identified as the wife of Colonel Christopher Copley, who is described in the Memoirs as ‘a great Parlement man whose wife had formerly been obliged to our family’ (42). Despite their political differences, Copley returned this obligation by acting as their representative before Parliament during Richard Fanshawe’s imprisonment in 1651. 37  Identifying donors is by no means an exact science: the same individual can be mentioned by using more than one name, the same name can be spelled in a number of ways, and it is not always possible to determine the gender of the donor. 38  BL, Evelyn Papers MS 51.

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Two other donors link Ann to the intellectual circle of Queen Henrietta Maria, whom she had attended during their time in Oxford and in exile on the Continent. The first is Susan Feilding, Countess of Denbigh (1583–1652). First lady of the Queen’s bedchamber, Susan Feilding probably met the young Ann Harrison at Oxford in 1644. As ‘my Lady Denbigh’ (38) she is mentioned in the Memoirs, resident in the Palais Royal, Paris, in December 1648, attending on Henrietta Maria, where she was joined by her daughter, Elizabeth Boyle, ‘Lady Guildford’ (d. 1667). Susan Feilding is connected with fifteen receipts, making her the most significant source outside of Ann’s immediate family. The second is Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65), Henrietta Maria’s former Vice Chancellor and another Catholic convert. Digby’s name is associated with eight receipts, including methods for ‘Ulcer Water’, ‘Gascoigne Powder’, and his famous ‘Weapon Powder’, a treatment for wounds based on sympathetic magic (7, 11, 65, 70, 135).39 Like other members of Henrietta Maria’s entourage, Digby was an avid collector of receipts: his large collection of medical, alchemical, and culinary prescriptions was published posthumously from 1668 onwards in a number of volumes, including Choice and Experimented Receipts in Physick and Chirurgery (1668) and The Closet of […] Sir Kenelme Digbie […] Opened (1669). Indeed, the latter publication features ‘My Lady Fanshaws way of feeding Capons, Pullets, Hens, Chicken or Turkies’. 40 Variations on ‘Gascoigne Powder’ appear in a number of printed receipt books, including the Countess of Kent’s A Choice Manuall (1652), but none are attributed to Digby.41 A couple of receipts by Digby appear in the Countess of Arundel’s Natura Exenterata (1655), but not the ones owned by Ann Fanshawe. 42 It would thus seem likely that Ann obtained the receipts from Digby in person rather than from a printed book. As a fellow Royalist in exile, and an intimate of Henrietta Maria, Digby knew Ann and Richard Fanshawe well, and he features in Ann’s Memoirs in a memorable passage which perhaps casts doubt on his reliability as a source of information: 39 

Digby defended the latter remedy in A Late Discourse, trans. by White. Digby, The Closet, p. 275. This receipt does not appear in Wellcome Western 7113. Digby’s Closet is notable for the proportion of receipts associated with named individuals, mostly drawn from the aristocracy. There appear to be few overlaps with the donors identified in ‘Mrs Fanshawes Booke of Receipts’, although Digby’s work includes two prescriptions for ‘My Lady of Portland’s Minced Pyes’ (pp. 183–85) and ‘My Lord of Denbigh’s Almond March-pane’ (pp. 265–67). 41  Grey, A Choice Manuall, pp. 183–85. 42  Howard, Natura Exenterata, pp. 206–07, 210. 40 

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When we came to Callais we met the Earle of Strafford and Sir Ke[nelm] Digby, with some others of our countrymen. We were all feasted at the Governour’s of the castle, and much excellent discourse passed; but, as was reason, most share was Sir Kellan Digby’s, who had enlarged somewhat more in extraordinary stories of the French then at table. But the concluding was that barnackells, a bord in Jersey, was first a shell fish to appearance and from that sticking upon old wood became in time a bird. After some consideration they all unanimously burst out into laughter, believing it altogether false; and to say the truth, it was the only thing true he had discoursed with them. (40)

‘This was his infirmity’, Ann Fanshawe concedes, ‘though otherwise a person of most excellent parts and a very fine bred gentleman’ (40). Digby’s ‘infirmity’— his proclivity for telling ‘extraordinary stories’—suggests that his inclusion in ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts’ was motivated by concerns other than his reliability as a source of information. Specifically, by connecting her name to Digby, Lady Fanshawe aligns herself with a prominent representative of the Caroline court in exile, and with what Laura Lunger Knoppers among others have identified as the Royalist equation between good housewifery and good government.43 Although the sense of a particular social network is strong in this manuscript, the sense of family is stronger. Richard’s second sister, Mary Newce (d. 1666), is associated with four receipts (6–7, 285, 313). ‘Mrs Fanshaw of Jenkins’, whose receipt for ‘sack posset’ comes with an endorsement in a different, later hand, ‘the Besst that is’ (320), could be Margaret Heath (d. 1674), the first wife of Sir Thomas Fanshawe of Jenkins, who was the second cousin of the younger Richard Fanshawe (Ann and Richard’s son, to whom the Memoirs are addressed). Lady Bedell (also entered as ‘Lady Bedle’ or ‘Beadle’), who is credited with eighteen receipts, is Alice Fanshawe (c. 1602–66), Richard’s elder sister and the wife of Sir Capell Bedell (c. 1598–1643). She appears in the Memoirs as ‘a most worthy woman and eminently good, wise and handsome’ (Memoirs, 43). It was to Alice’s home in Hamerton, Huntingdonshire that the Fanshawes retreated and stayed for six months following the death

43 

See, for example, May, The Accomplished Cook, in which May, addressing Sir Kenelm Digby among others, claims that ‘Hospitality which was once a Relique of Gentry, and a known Cognizance to all ancient Houses, hath lost her Title through the unhappy and cruel Disturbances of these Times’ (sig. A3v). On the use of women’s printed receipt books to advance Royalist politics during the Commonwealth, see Archer, ‘The Queens’ Arcanum’; Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity; Snook, ‘“Soveraigne Receipts” and the Politics of Beauty’.

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in July 1654 of their eight-year-old daughter Ann from smallpox.44 One of Lady Bedell’s receipts, ‘A Medecine for the Iaunders [i.e. jaundice]’, bears testimony of personal experience: ‘yt by Experience I haue found most Excellent’ (7–8). ‘Lady Butler’, who is named as the donor of twenty-four receipts, is another of Richard’s older sisters: Joan Fanshawe (1607–72), whose first husband, Sir William Boteler of Teston in Kent, was killed whilst commanding the Royalist army at Cropredy Bridge in 1644. Her second husband, Sir Philip Warwick (1609–83), is attributed four receipts in ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke’, in which he appears as ‘My Broth: Warwicke’, including ‘The Wound Drink and for the Kings Euill’, ‘A drinke admirable against a Cold or Consumpsion’, and ‘Opening Pills’ (8–9). All three receipts are endorsed in the left-hand margin: ‘A Fanshawe’. From the evidence of the Memoirs, where she is called ‘sister Butler’, Joan Fanshawe seems to have been particularly close to Ann, assuming a quasi-maternal role. Ann lodged with Joan in London in 1646–47, and stayed with her at Frog Pool, Worcestershire, during periods of illness and low spirits in the 1650s. Reporting the death in July 1656 of her second daughter, Elizabeth, Ann writes: ‘I had left with my sister Buttler at Froggpool, to see if this would recover her [i.e., Elizabeth], but she dyed of a hecktick feaver’ (44), meaning a fever characterized by flushed cheeks and hot, dry skin, and associated with wasting conditions, such as consumption. More happily, Ann records that the Fanshawes’s sixth daughter, also called Ann (or ‘Nan’) was born on 22 February 1654/5 while staying at ‘Frogg Poul in Kent’, at ‘my brother Warick’s’ (42). The receipts attributed to Lady Bedell and Lady Butler appear in clusters in the manuscript. Typically, two or three receipts appear on a single page, indicating that Lady Fanshawe and Averie were working from pre-existing books, loose leaves, or letters. The fraught and complex textual history of ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke’ is typical of its genre. Manuscript receipt books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were usually accretive, and if, as was often the case, the volumes were in active use, subsequent owners entered their own corrections and additions in light of personal experience. The variety of hands present in Ann Fanshawe’s receipt book, together with the multiple provenances of the receipts, suggest that this volume, as it has come down to us, complicates notions of the ‘author’ as a single, bounded entity, and the ‘text’ as a coherent and finished unit. Read 44 

Wellcome, Western MS 7113, pp. 17–18, includes a receipt for ‘An excellent cordiall’ to counteract fever in smallpox. The cordial requires ‘Orenges 100, more or lesse’, which are brought to the edge of putrefaction before being distilled.

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in parallel with the Memoirs, Ann Fanshawe’s receipt book expresses and informs distinctive models of authority and identity that are created in the relationships and exchanges between individuals. These findings are supported by recent work on women’s writing and early modern cultural practices. Thus, for example, Judith Kegan Gardiner has argued that women’s writing shows that ‘female identity’ is ‘relational and fluidly defined’, and that it is in a continuous process of being constructed with relation to others.45 Thomas Keuhn, from his study of gifts of maternal inheritance by women in Renaissance Florence, has argued that ‘women’s personhood, textually recoverable, was relational and not individualistic’, whilst Natalie Davies sees this as a model to be extended to men as well as women as she alerts us to the danger of perceiving early modern ‘personhood’ as ‘a bounded unit […] morally self-contained and standing in contrast to both nature and society’.46 The manuscript receipt book asks us to see Lady Ann Fanshawe as, to use Kuehn’s phrase, ‘part of a field of human relations’.47 It also invites us to consider the giving and receiving of receipts—maybe enclosed within a letter, perhaps with a sample of the preparation enclosed; copied down from a pre-existing book (manuscript or printed); or taken down from dictation, conversation, or observation—together with the careful act of transcribing and identifying the provenance of those receipts—as one of the ways in which that ‘field of human relations’ could be created, revised, and remembered. The exchange of receipts detailed in these books thus means that the model of personhood to which they contribute has a material dimension and that it is constituted through a shared sense of physical intimacy. Compared to the ritual of giftgiving, through which early moderns negotiated social hierarchies and obligations, the exchange of receipts is more subtle, hinting at shared concerns and desires whilst gesturing towards physical tasks, experiences, and processes common to donor and recipient.48

45  46 

Self ’. 47 

Gardiner, ‘On Female Identity and Writing by Women’, pp. 185, 183. Kuehn, ‘Understanding Gender Inequality’, p. 59; Davies, ‘Boundaries and the Sense of

Kuehn, ‘Understanding Gender Inequality’, p. 60. On the physical intimacy created by women in their acts of gift exchange, see Harris, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’ and Klein, ‘“Your Humble Handmaid”’. 48 

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Conclusion In her will dated 30 October 1679, Ann Fanshawe made detailed bequests, distributing her assets, including property, manuscripts, and paintings, between her son and three of her four surviving daughters. However, the most important bequests had already been made: the manuscript Memoirs had been presented in 1676 to her only surviving son, Richard, and the manuscript receipt book had been given to her eldest daughter, Katherine, just over a year later, in 1678. A number of entries in the latter volume postdate the 1678 bequest. One receipt, for ‘Snayle Watter’, bears the endorsement: ‘Write by me M. Grantham April ye 20 1707’ (464). Another prescription, ‘Dr Nerts direction for Nan Gale’ (endorsed ‘T W’), is dated ‘Jul. 1. 1708’ (482); written on a loose leaf in Latin and English, it has been sewn into the book. Other receipts may have been entered by Katherine herself, who, unlike her sisters, remained unmarried. Perhaps for this reason, the book seems to have passed out of her keeping fairly soon: the ‘M. Grantham’ responsible for writing a receipt in 1707 might be Margaret Grantham (b. 1653, d. after May 1705), Katherine Fanshawe’s younger sister—and the only daughter not to receive a bequest in their mother’s will—who had married Vincent Grantham of Goltho, Lincolnshire, before 1676. Perhaps Katherine passed the manuscript on to her younger sister hoping that it would help her raise her young family, thus fulfilling her role as a surrogate mother to her siblings. The Memoirs and ‘Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts’ can be thought of as living gifts. As Madeleine Masson has observed, manuscript receipt books were ‘the dedicated opus of a lifetime’, and, as such, Ann Fanshawe’s volume yields a rich supply of information about her travels, household management, reading, family illnesses, intellectual pursuits, and her and her husband’s social and political networks, as well as affording insight into intimate matters such as their responses to bereavement and miscarriage.49 Just as Richard Fanshawe Jr was expected to study the biography of his father’s life so that he might learn from and emulate his example, so also Ann Fanshawe’s manuscript receipt book underwent textual evolution with each successive owner, all of whom in turn used it in order to fashion and refashion themselves in the variety of roles required of early modern women—as healers, housewives, mothers, siblings, neighbours, friends, subjects, and administrators. The evidence provided by the receipt book, read alongside the Memoirs, thus complicates Mary Beth Rose’s assertion that the latter text demonstrates the ‘secondary role’ Ann Fanshawe 49 

Masson, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.

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accorded to her own life, when compared with that of her husband, and to her identity as a mother.50 More so than jewellery, clothing, cabinets, and plate, the manuscript receipt book, which tended to be passed down the mother-daughter line, was an intensely personal bequest, tying together mother and daughter in a textual display of intimacy. It offered women a particularly potent means by which to memorialize their own mothers, and to preserve their own memory in the minds of their daughters. It also reached beyond the immediate family to memorialize the network of neighbours, employees, social acquaintances, and friends in and through whom a woman negotiated and fashioned her own identity as a process that does not end with her life but is passed on to subsequent generations—to use Lady Mary Fane’s description of her mother’s manuscript papers, it was ‘The Treasure of this my worthy mother’s mind’.51 After all, the word ‘remember’ reminds us that remembering involves the piecing together of material remains. The manuscript receipt book, as a record of hands-on healing and personal experiences such as miscarriage, childbirth, and post-partum illness, thus offered women a particularly potent means by which to memorialize their own mothers, and to preserve their own memory in the minds of their daughters.

50 

Rose, ‘Gender, Genre, and History’, p. 259. Cited in Mildmay, With Faith and Physic, ed. by Pollock, p. 110. Lady Mildmay’s medical papers are Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton, W/A misc. vols xxxii and xxxiii. 51 

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Documents London, British Library, Evelyn Papers, MS 51 London, British Library, MS Additional 41161 London, Wellcome Institute, Western MS 213 London, Wellcome Institute, Western MS 7113

Primary Sources Bacon, Francis, The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon: Of the Proficience and Aduancement of Learning, Diuine and Humane (London: Thomas Purfoot and Thomas Creede for Henrie Tomes, 1605) Camões, Luis de, The Lusiad, or, Portugals Historicall Poem, trans. by Richard Fanshawe (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1655) Charas, Moyse, New Experiments Upon Vipers (London: Printed by T. N. for J. Martyn, 1670) Clifford, Anne, Lives of Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery (1590–1676) and of Her Parents Summarized by Herself, ed. by J. P. Gilson (London: Roxburghe Club, 1916) Digby, Kenelm, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened (London: Printed by E. C. for H. Brome, 1669) —— , A Late Discourse Made in a Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier in France […] Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, trans. by R. White (London: Printed for R. Lownes, and T. Davies, 1658) Fanshawe, Richard, The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, ed. by Peter Davidson, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997–99) Grey, Elizabeth, A Choice Manuall, or Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery, 4th edn (London: G. D., 1654) Halkett, Anne, and Ann Fanshawe, The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. by John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) Horace, Selected Parts of Horace, Prince of Lyricks […] Concluding with a Piece Out of Ausonius. and Another Out of Virgil, trans. by Richard Fanshawe (London: Printed for Gabriel Bedell and T. Collins, 1652) Howard, Aletheia, Natura Exenterata: Or Nature Unbowelled By the Most Exquisite Anatomizers of Her (London: Printed for H. Twiford, G. Bedell, and N. Ekins, 1655) May, Robert, The Accomplished Cook, or, The Art and Mystery of Cookery (London: Printed by R. W. for Nath. Brooke, 1660) Mildmay, Grace, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620, ed. by Linda A. Pollock (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993) Plat, Hugh, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London: Peter Short, 1594) Raffaelli, Francesco, Theriaca Andromachi senioris diuinum inuentum (Venezia: Domenico Milocho, 1688)

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Rivière, Lazare, The Practice of Physick (London: Peter Cole, 1655) Rogers, Timothy, The Character of a Good Woman (London: Printed for J. Harris, 1697) Tasso, The Householders Philosophie: Wherein is Perfectly and Profitably Described, the True Oeconomia and Forme of Housekeeping, trans. by Thomas Kyd (London: Printed by I. C. for Thomas Hacket, 1588) Walpole, Horace, The Letters of Horace Walpole Earl of Orford, ed. by Peter Cunningham, 9 vols (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1866) Women in Medicine: Remedy Books, 1533–1865, ed. by Sara Pennell (Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Microfilm, 2004) [accessed 26 June 2011]

Secondary Studies Anselment, Raymond A., The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in SeventeenthCentury England (London: Associated University Presses, 1995) Archer, Jayne Elisabeth, ‘The Queens’ Arcanum: Authority and Authorship in The Queens Closet Opened (1655)’, Renaissance Journal, 1.6 (2002), 14–25 Aspin, Richard, ‘Who Was Elizabeth Okeover?’, Medical History, 44 (2000), 531–40 Bassnett, Madeline, ‘“All the Ceremoneys and Civilityes”: The Authorship of Diplomacy in the Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’, The Seventeenth Century, 26.1 (April 2011), 94–118 —— , ‘Restoring the Royal Household: Royalist Politics and the Commonwealth Recipe Book’, Early English Studies, 2 (2009) [accessed 17 August 2011] Becker, Lucinda, ‘The Absent Body: Representations of Dying Early Modern Women in a Selection of Seventeenth-Century Diaries’, Women’s Writing, 8.2 (2001), 251–62 Bell, Susan Groag, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’, Signs, 7.4 (1972), 742–68 Davidson, Peter, ‘Ann, Lady Fanshawe (1625–1680)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 18 June 2010] Davies, Natalie, ‘Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France’, in Re­ constructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, ed. by Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 53–63 DiMeo, Michelle, and Sara Pennell, eds, Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1600–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012) Eamon, William, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) Ezell, Margaret J. M., ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture in Early Modern Women’s Life-Writing’, in Genre and Women’s Life-Writing in Early Modern England, ed. by Julie A. Eckerle and Michelle M. Dowd (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 33–48 —— , The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)

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Field, Catherine, ‘“Many Hands Hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books’, in Genre and Women’s Life-Writing in Early Modern England, ed. by Julie A. Eckerle and Michelle M. Dowd (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 49–64 Findley, Sandra, and Elaine Hobby, ‘Seventeenth-Century Women’s Autobiography’, in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. by Francis Barker and others (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981), pp. 11–36 Furdell, Elizabeth Lane, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002) Gardiner, Judith Kegan, ‘On Female Identity and Writing by Women’, in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. by Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 177–91 Glaser, Brigitte, The Creation of the Self in Autobiographical Forms of Writing in Seven­ teenth-Century England: Subjectivity and Self-Fashioning in Memoirs, Diaries, and Letters (Heidelberg: Winter, 2001) Harris, Barbara J., ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 259–81 Hickman, Katie, Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives (London: Harper Collins, 1999) Jambeck, Karen K., ‘Patterns of Women’s Literary Patronage: England, 1200–c. 1475’, in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. by June Hall McCash (Athens, GA: Uni­versity of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 228–65 Keeble, N. H., ‘Obedient Subjects? The Loyal Self in Some Later Seventeenth-Century Royalist Women’s Memoirs’, in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History, ed. by Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 201–19 Klein, Lisa M., ‘“Your Humble Handmaid”: Elizabethan Gifts of Needlework’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), 459–93 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Kuehn, Thomas, ‘Understanding Gender Inequality in Renaissance Florence: Personhood and Gifts of Maternal Inheritance by Women’, Journal of Women’s History, 8.2 (1996), 58–80 Lee, Sidney, ‘Fanshawe, Sir Richard (1608–1666)’, Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 63 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1885–1900), xviii (1889), 185–89 Loftis, John, ‘Introduction’, in Anne Halkett and Ann Fanshawe, The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. by John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. ix–xviii Marshall, Peter, ‘Angels around the Deathbed: Variations on a Theme in the English Art of Dying’, in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. by Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 83–103 Masson, Madeleine, ‘Introduction’, in Rebecca Price, The Compleat Cook; or, The Secrets of a Seventeenth-Century Housewife, ed. by Madeleine Masson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 1–36

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Pennell, Sara, ‘Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England’, in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. by Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237–58 Potter, David, ‘The Household Receipt Book of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’, Petits Propos Culi­ naires, 80 (2006), 19–32 Purkiss, Diane, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: Harper Perennial, 2007) Rose, Mary Beth, ‘Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography’, in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. by Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 245–78 Scott-Warren, Jason, ‘Reconstructing Manuscript Networks: The Textual Transactions of Sir Stephen Powle’, in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. by Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 18–37 Seelig, Sharon Cadman, ‘Ann Fanshawe: Private Historian’, in her Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 90–109 Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) Snook, Edith, ‘“Soveraigne Receipts” and the Politics of Beauty in The Queens Closet Opened’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 15 (2007), 1–19 Theophano, Janet, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003) Wray, Ramona, ‘Autobiography’, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Laura Lunger Knoppers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 194–207

England’s Empire in Europe Lisa Hopkins

F

or much of the medieval period, roughly half of what is now France was held by various kings of England in their capacity first as descendants of William the Conqueror in his capacity as Duke of Normandy, and subsequently as the inheritors of Geoffrey of Anjou and self-proclaimed heirs to Philippe IV of France through his daughter Isabella, wife of Edward II and mother of Edward III. This vast territory, known at its height as the Angevin Empire, reached from Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyrenees, and its French element included Normandy, Gascony, Aquitaine, Poitou, Maine, Touraine, Saintonge, Périgord, and Limousin as well as Anjou itself; various other territories such as the Vexin were also under its sway for some or all of the period of its heyday. Marlowe’s Edward  II glances directly at the role of Isabella in transferring to the English monarchy a claim to the crown of France, while a number of Shakespeare’s plays including Henry V, the three parts of Henry VI, and Edward III, of which Shakespeare is generally accepted to have written at least part, all take as a central concern the ebb and flow of England’s attempts to cling to the territorial possessions in France inherited from the Conqueror and the Angevins. Once the loss of Calais made that impossible, and in the wake of the failure of the Earl of Essex’s 1596 attempt to compensate for that loss by capturing Cadiz instead, attention began slowly but with mounting intensity to shift decisively towards a new centre of gravity, focused now on western Germany rather than on northern France, and specifically on Aachen, traditional coronation site of the Holy Roman Emperors, in the light of first the possibility and then ultimately the fact that James  I’s daughter would make a German marriage which might just conceivably win her an imperial crown. Thus a second Lisa Hopkins ([email protected]) is Professor of English and Head of the Graduate School at Sheffield Hallam University in England. She specializes in Renaissance drama.

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Elizabeth might achieve what the first had not been able to, and a virtue could be made out of necessity given that the very name Elizabeth had to a certain extent come to connote ideas of boundedness and of England as confined to its own geographical borders: as Jeffrey Knapp points out, as a virgin ‘Elizabeth could seem […] the providential consummation of England’s efforts to realize itself as an island. William Paten (1575) lists “Ad Insulam” or “To the Isle” […] as one derivation of the queen’s name’.1 In this chapter, I shall trace the unfolding of this narrative through a number of plays from Edward II, the earliest in chronological sequence, through Edward III, the Henriad, Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, which was possibly though not certainly written by George Chapman, and Wentworth Smith’s The Hector of Germany. Or The Palsgrave, prime Elector. Collectively, the plays I discuss plot the changing contours of England’s attempt to carve an empire for itself in Europe and the consequences of these for political, religious, and national identities as they tell a story of how a desperate determination to own territory overseas underwent an enforced modulation into a tamer and more achievable aspiration to exert political influence, and how the terrain of the debate concomitantly shifted from the physical arena of the battlefield to the more symbolic one of marriage and alliance. ‘Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube’ (‘let others make war; you, happy Austria, marry’) may have been a motto associated specifically with the Habsburgs, but it was one with which James VI and I would have been in instinctive sympathy, and these plays too find it an ethos increasingly congenial. In that shift from landholding to influence, an increased investment in the power of natural borders and in the idea of England (or occasionally and more accurately Britain) as an island plays a central part. And since the marriages and alliances in question are almost by definition international, an inevitable concomitant of this emerging emphasis on cross-border collaboration is that shared nationality starts to loom less large than shared confessional allegiance. Edward II, which opens that story, can usefully be understood in the context of Marlowe’s general interest in troubled and unstable borders.2 Emden, of which Doctor Faustus craves the seigniory (A text, II.i.23), is poised so exactly on the border between Germany and the Netherlands that as recently as 2011 Google Maps could still inflame tensions over the ownership of its port.3 1 

Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, p. 67. Marlowe references are to Complete Plays, ed. by Thornton, and given in the text. 3  ‘Google Maps Incites Dutch Border Dispute’, The Local: Germany’s News in English, 21 February 2011. 2 

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Dido, Queen of Carthage takes as its subject one of the original examples of border-setting, for the legend of Dido spoke of how, told that she might take so much land as could be covered by the hide of an ox, she cut it into thin strips and used those strips to mark out a substantial area. I have argued elsewhere that Tamburlaine becomes extradiegetically identified as a patroller of borders,4 and Hero and Leander is set on the banks of the Hellespont, one of the points where Europe meets Asia, and involves repeated and increasingly dangerous negotiations of that threatening, liminal space. In Edward II, Marlowe revisits both the Hero and Leander narrative and the boundary between Europe and Asia, this time in order to raise questions about the borders of England and how secure they are or are not. At the very beginning of the play, attention is drawn to England’s coastline as Gaveston exclaims, Sweet prince, I come; these, these thy amorous lines Might have enforced me to have swum from France And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand. (I.i.6–8)

This is a play which repeatedly recurs to the idea of borders and edges: Mortimer imaginatively inhabits the marches of Wales when he storms that ‘Wigmore shall fly, to set my uncle free’ (II.ii.195); Lancaster is worried about ‘The northern borderers’ who are ‘seeing their houses burnt’ (II.ii.178); and in Ireland the crucial border of the Pale has been comprehensively penetrated: ‘The wild O’Neill, with swarms of Irish kerns, | Lives uncontrolled within the English pale’ (II.ii.157–57). Even domestic space is understood as both bounded and as potentially breachable, as we see when Margaret says to Spencer and Baldock ‘meet me at the park pale presently’ (II.i.73). It is in this context that Isabella vows to Sir John of Hainault, Ah sweet sir John, even to the utmost verge Of Europe, or the shore of Tanaïs, Will we with thee to Hainault, so we will. (IV.ii.29–31)

John Michael Archer notes that ‘Lake Maeotis or the Tanais river (the Don) were often said to demarcate Asia from Europe’;5 Ukraina, the name of one of

4 

See Hopkins, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars. Archer, Old Worlds, pp. 102, 105, 108. John Gillies notes that, ‘If for no other reason, Marlowe’s familiarity with the ancient boundary discourse may be assumed on the basis of his translation of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia’ (‘Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography’, p. 210). 5 

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the territories through which the Don flowed, translated as ‘on the edge’.6 More directly relevant for the idea of an English empire in Europe, though, is the border which Sir John himself represents, which would become important in English history when Edward III, a mere child in this scene, in due course married Philippa of Hainault. Hainault was a border region, as Marlowe would certainly have been aware, not least because Abraham Ortelius, whose Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Marlowe is known to have used, was born in Antwerp and famous for his maps of Flanders. This was territory so uncertain that Thomas Danett’s 1600 A Continuation of the Historie of France from the Death of Charles the Eight where Comines Endeth, till the Death of Henry the Second could speak of a previous king of France, Francis I, as having ‘inuaded the Emperours dominions in Picardie and Artoys’,7 while the citizens of these areas owed obedience only to Henri IV at the time when Danett was actually writing, as is made clear in The Copie of a Letter Sent by the French king to the People of Artoys and Henault, Requesting them to Remooue the Forces Gathered by the King of Spaine, from the Borders of France, Otherwise Denouncing Open Warre, printed in London in 1595, in which Henri warns the inhabitants of Hainault and Artois that ‘it being manifest that you be a little faulty of this war, you must endure the chiefest and most fierce assaults, when it shall be open war’.8 In that sense, coupling Tanaïs with Hainault would serve only to underline what was already obvious, that the part of France to which England here establishes a claim is a perilously embattled one whose borders are permeable and unstable, and that attempting to hold it might prove more trouble than it was worth. Edward III, which focuses on the reign of Edward’s more successful son, also looks at the borders of France, taking as one of its central events the fourteenth-century English conquest of Calais. Ultimately, though, the play is less attracted to images of conquest than to the idea of strongly defined, natural borders, as when Edward says to the Countess of Salisbury: Arise, true English lady, whom our isle May better boast of than ever Roman might Of her, whose ransacked treasury hath tasked The vain endeavour of so many pens. (II.ii.192–95)

6 

Davies, Vanished Kingdoms, p. 260. Danett, A Continuation of the Historie of France, p. 87. 8  Henri IV, The Copie of a Letter, p. 4. 7 

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Here the idea of the sprawling Roman empire attaches itself to the violated Lucrece, while the Countess is both chaste and the inhabitant of an island, just as the supposed link between the name Elizabeth and insula proposed an absolute equation between the queen and her realm. It was certainly a good idea to be resigned to the idea that English territory should be coterminous with England and Wales, because in Henry VI, Part One, which opens with a messenger’s announcement that ‘Guyenne, Compiègne, Rheims, Rouen, Orléans, | Paris, Gisors, Poitiers, are all quite lost’ (I.i.60–61), we see battles before Orléans (I.iv), Rouen (III.ii), and Bordeaux (IV.ii) before York laments that ‘Maine, Blois, Poitiers, and Tours are won away’ (IV.ii.45) and the Dauphin declares triumphantly, ‘I am possessed | With more than half the Gallian territories’ (V.iv.138–39); by Henry VI, Part Two, Anjou and Maine have been signed away to the father of Margaret of Anjou as part of the negotiations for her marriage, and since, ‘These counties were the keys of Normandy’ (I.i.111), when King Henry asks about France in general, Somerset bluntly tells him that ‘all your interest in those territories | is utterly bereft you: all is lost’ (III.i.83–85).9 Henry V is also interested in the borders of France, and surprising as it may seem this play too is imaginatively prepared to accept that England cannot permanently hold territory there.10 The Prologue invites us not, as we might expect, to imagine ourselves in either England or France but rather to contemplate the space which lies between them: Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder. (19–22)

After Canterbury and the King consider the border with Scotland (I.ii.140–45), Henry, himself a liminal figure in that he was, as Fluellen reminds us, born at Monmouth (IV.vii.11), moves from Calais, which is clearly established as a firm base for the English (III.ii.45, III.iii.55–56, III.vi.139–40 and V.0.6–7), first to Harfleur (III.iii.8) and then across the Somme (III.v.1), while the French king and the Dauphin fall back on Rouen (III.v.64). In this shifting world it is no wonder that Macmorris should ask, ‘What ish my nation?’ (III.ii.124), or 9  Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part One, ed. by Hattaway and Henry VI, Part Two, ed. by Hattaway. Further references are given in the text. 10  Shakespeare, King Henry V, ed. by Craik. References are given in the text.

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that the disguised Henry’s account of Sir Thomas Erpingham’s view of their situation should be that they are, ‘Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide’ (IV.i.98–99). Nevertheless we end as we began, with the two fixed edges of ‘the contending kingdoms | Of France and England, whose very shores look pale | With envy of each other’s happiness’ (V.ii.344–46), and the closing chorus is quick to remind us that all Henry’s gains in France will disappear during the reign of his son. The last remnant of the Angevin Empire was Calais. In 1556, however, Calais was finally prised back by the French, and this heralded a significant shift in English ways of thinking about Europe and of the possibility of gaining a foothold there. Although Shakespeare’s Henry V may still declare in 1599, ‘No king of England, if not king of France’ (2.2.194), in practice that dream was dead. In its place a new one was born, and that was focused on Germany—or rather on a part of Germany that had always been difficult to tell from France. In Henry V, Charlemagne is clearly established as a foundational figure in French history when the Archbishop of Canterbury assures the king that the only way the usurping Hugh Capet could attempt to legitimize his claim to the throne was by asserting descent from Charlemagne (I.ii.69–77). However, it is oddly difficult to pin down the actual borders of Charlemagne’s France, or indeed to be sure that it really was France. As the Archbishop explains, the French base their opposition to female rule on the principle that: ‘No woman shall succeed in Salic land’ (I.ii.39), Yet their own authors faithfully affirm That the land Salic is in Germany, Between the floods of Sala and of Elbe, Where Charles the Great, having subdued the Saxons, There left behind and settled certain French. (I.ii.43–47)

This territory, Canterbury declares, did not become French ‘Until four hundred one-and-twenty years | After defunction of King Pharamond’ (I.ii.57–58), while John Coke’s 1550 The Debate betwene the Heraldes of Englande and Fraunce muddies the waters still further by declaring that ‘this Charlemayne was a Dowcheman’.11 Given such confusion, it is not surprising that national identity should start to recede in importance and be supplanted instead by other considerations.

11 

Hillman, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France, p. 20.

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The same phenomenon is also visible in Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London, a play with many similarities to Henry V, whose heroes are French-born but English-domiciled, and though this is set much earlier—in the last years of William the Conqueror—it can, paradoxically, both help us understand what happened next and also trace the contours of the substitution by which, as in Canterbury’s speech, France was increasingly replaced by Germany in English dreams of empire. As well as the time gap between the composition of Heywood’s play and the events to which it refers, there was also a gap between composition and publication, for when it first appeared in 1615 a preface apologized that ‘as Playes were then some fifteene or sixteene yeares agoe it was in the fashion’.12 The preface goes on to attribute the decision to publish now to a renewed public interest in martial arts: Nor could it haue found a more seasonable and fit publication then at this Time, when, to the glory of our Nation, the security of the Kingdome, and the honour of the City, they haue begunne againe the commendable practise of long forgotten Armes. (sig. A2v)

However, the marital was at least as important as the martial, for both the moment of publication and, for that matter, the renewed exercises in the Artillery Garden to which Heywood is referring were fundamentally conditioned by the marriage of James’s daughter to the Elector Palatine, known as the Palsgrave, and by the agenda behind that marriage, which can be glimpsed in John Taylor’s prefatory remarks in Heauens Blessing, and Earths Ioy […], where he remarks of his description of the celebrations that I did write these things, that those who are far remoted, not onely in his Maistties Dominions, but also in foraine territories, may have an vnderstanding of the glorious pomp, and magnificent domination of our high and mighty Monarch King Iames: and further, to demonstrate the skills and knowledges that out warlike nation hath in engines fire-works and other military discipline, that there may be knowne, that howsoeuer warre seemes to sleepe, yet (vpon any lawfull ground or occasion) the command of our dread Soueraigne can rouse hir to the terrour of al malignant opposers of his royall state and dignity.13

The applicability of Heywood’s play to the 1615 context is made clear by the way a character is repeatedly referred to as the County Palatine. This is Tancred, prince of Italy, but the fact that he eventually marries a princess who comes 12 

Heywood, The Four Prentices of London, sig. A2v. Further references are given in the text. 13  Taylor, Heauens Blessing, and Earths Ioy, sigs A3r–v.

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from London, the heroes’ sister Bella Franca, would have made the story readily amenable to a setting nearer to home; moreover Bella Franca herself, like her predecessor Bel-Imperia of The Spanish Tragedy, can be seen by her name to be encoding a concept of rule, in this case of the semi-unified Frankish kingdom over which Charlemagne had ruled before it was broken up into the separate entities of France and Germany. In 1615 it would also have been possible to read Robert, Duke of Normandy, eldest son of William I who predeceased his father, as a Prince Henry figure, though in Heywood’s play Robert explicitly (and inaccurately) notes that he has received news of his father’s death and is returning to England to reign. Finally, the marriage of Elizabeth and the Palsgrave inevitably recalled the world of The Four Prentices in that as Tristan Marshall notes, ‘the Huguenot Duc de Bouillon […] had as early as 1611 become the leading influence on James’ policy towards France and was appointed by the Palatine court as their chief negotiator in the marriage of Frederick and Elizabeth’;14 the heroes of Four Prentices are the sons of the Duke of Bouillon. Heywood’s play, with its original composition close in date to that of Henry V and its publication in the aftermath of the palatinate marriage, offers a neat bridge between these two historical moments and the differing political imperatives that condition them. Early in the play, a Presenter echoes the Chorus of Henry V by assuring us that the four brothers have sailed across the sea before a series of dumbshows and subsequent glosses show each being separately shipwrecked in a different part of Europe. (Henry V is also echoed when Guy, like Henry, marries the daughter of the king of France.)15 The subsequent adventures, involving a motif of reuniting of the brothers and multiple failures to recognize either each other or their sister (with whom they separately fall in love), enact a parable of accidental division and providential unification with obvious applicability to the contemporary divisions among the sibling states of Christendom: as the Clown says to two of the brothers, Eustace and Charles, who are fighting each other over the love of their own sister, ‘What do you meane Gentlemen to fight among your selues, that should be friends, and had more need to take one anothers part’ (sig. D4r); the ludicrousness of the squabbling is underlined by the fact that, as Jane Pettegree observes, ‘The image of the exemplary crusader is shaped by the comic stereotypical awareness of the miles gloriosus in scenes such as that in which Godfrey argues with Guy 14 

Marshall, Theatre and Empire, pp. 115–16. On the similarities between the two plays, see also Connolly, ‘Guy of Warwick, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Elizabethan Repertory’, p. 142. 15 

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of Lessingham over who should march at the head of the army’.16 Fortunately, however, there is also another repeated pattern of hostilities eventually paving the way to friendship as each of the combatants is invariably impressed by the fighting skills and chivalry of the other, offering hope for unification and progress. Particularly resonant in this context is another evocation of Henry V, this time of the Four Captains scene, when Guy declares that, ‘Within our Troupes are English, French, Scotch, Dutch’ (sig. K2r): united these can beat the combined forces of the Sultan and the Sophy, divided they must fall. In Heywood’s play, a number of people not originally born to inherit crowns eventually manage to obtain them. Although Anna of Denmark might lament that her daughter would henceforth have to answer to ‘Goody Palsgrave’, at least two plays of the period seem to make it their business to spell out exactly who and what Frederick was and why his wife might be one day something rather grander than ‘Goody Palsgrave’. One of these, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, may possibly have been written by George Chapman, and Roy Strong observes that ‘out of all the poets with connections to St James’ court, Chapman by 1612 was beginning to emerge as the most important’,17 although Fredson Bowers does not entertain Chapman as a possible author.18 Bowers also argues for a date in the 1590s,19 which would of course significantly predate the Palatinate marriage; however, the play may very possibly have been revised and certainly took on new urgency in the context of the marriage and the build-up to it. (It also had an unusually long afterlife if, as Marshall thinks, ‘The Tragedy of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany was performed on 3 October 1630 at court and on 5 May 1636 at Blackfriars before the Queen and the Prince Elector’,20 though again Bowers argues the opposite view.) The second play, which definitely postdates the marriage, is Wentworth Smith’s The Hector of Germany. Or The Palsgrave, prime Elector. The prologue to this explicitly disavows any connection between the Palsgrave who is its subject and the Palsgrave who had just married Princess Elizabeth: Our Authour for himself, this bad me say, Although the Palsgrave be the name of th’ Play, 16 

Pettegree, Foreign and Native on the English Stage, p. 127. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance, p. 180. 18  Bowers, ‘The Date and Composition of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany’. 19  Bowers argued that ‘the date of composition can be assigned to the years 1594–99 (and probably to 1597–99)’ (‘Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, and the Ur-Hamlet’, p. 102). 20  Marshall, Theatre and Empire, p. 188. 17 

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Tis not that Prince, which in this Kingdome late, Marryed the Mayden-glory of our state: What Pen dares be so bold in this strict age, To bring him while he lives upon the Stage?21

This is, however, clearly disingenuous; Jaroslav Miller suggests that the play had been censored, prompting the sardonic tone of those last two lines, and that the author obviously counted on the ability of the audience to grasp the historical theme in the context of the current political and religious situation in England and on the Continent […]. The plot […] works with an allegorical identification of Palsgrave with the Black Prince, Henry Stuart and Frederick of the Palatinate […]. The chief message of the play is to present Frederick as the legitimate heir to the still living political and religious legacy of Henry Stuart.22

Marshall concurs, arguing that, ‘Throughout The Hector of Germany the character of the Palsgrave is moulded less by the real-life Frederick, though it is in him that Protestant hopes lie, but rather by a romantic image of what glory Britain’s prince might have found in Europe had he lived’,23 while Hans Werner sees the play as clearly and uncompromisingly ‘encoding the equation […] Frederick V = Prince Henry’.24 Indeed, if by nothing else, the game would be given away when the hero, Palsgrave Robert, is explicitly said to be at odds with ‘the bold Bastard, late expulst from Spayne’ (sig. A3r) who aims at the empire. The reference to Spain maps the play directly onto the contemporary political landscape as seen by the Protestant party and also creates an exact parallel with Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, where almost the first thing Alphonsus does is to reveal the fundamentally Spanish identity which lurks hidden beneath his official title as he muses that, ‘The Spanish Sun hath purifi’d my wit’.25 Thereafter he is repeatedly referred to as the King of Castile and the point is reinforced by the introduction of the other half of the polarity by which the Spain of this period was so often characterized, the Netherlands, when one of the seven electors is addressed as ‘Brave Duke of Saxon, Dutchlands greatest hope’ (sig. B4r), which seems a pointed variation from the more usual and certainly available terms ‘Germany’ or ‘Almain’. 21 

Smith, The Hector of Germany, sig. A2v. Further references are given in the text. Miller, ‘The Henrician Legend Revived’, p. 324. 23  Marshall, Theatre and Empire, p. 157. 24  Werner, ‘The Hector of Germanie, or The Palsgrave, Prime Elector’, p. 119. 25  Chapman, The Tragedy of Alphonsus, sig. B1r. Further references are given in the text. 22 

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In both these plays, the status of the Palatinate and its ruler is carefully and repeatedly boosted. As in William Fennor’s gratulatory poem, ‘A description of the Palsgraves Countrey, as it was delivered in a speech before the King, the Prince, the Lady Elizabeth, at White-Hall’, where the territory of the Palsgrave is said to lie between rivers ‘like a Paradice’, this Palatinate is a land worth having, even for an English princess.26 In Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, in a scene which could be seen as functioning almost as a modern newspaper briefing piece on a royal’s prospective spouse might do, the electors introduce themselves one by one, each giving his full name, title, and responsibilities. The Palsgrave is third and explains that The next place in election longs to me, George Cassimirus Palsgrave of the Rhein, His Highness Taster. (sig. B4r)

The Hector of Germany goes even further: its Palsgrave Robert declares that ‘I am chiefe Elector of the seven, | And a meere Caesar now the Chayre is voyde’ (sig. A3r). The imperial ambitions hinted at here were indeed an important subtext of the Palatinate marriage. Jaroslav Miller notes that ‘in September 1620 James I acknowledged in Privy Council that as early as 1612 he had discussed with his future son-in-law the hypothetical chance of Frederick’s accession to the Bohemian throne’,27 but Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany hints at glories greater even than that. The play opens on a situation in which Alphonsus must say to his chief adviser, O, my Lorenzo, if thou help me not, Th’Imperial Crown is shaken from my head, And giv’n from me unto an English Earl. (sig. B2r)

Soon the earl in question, Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III, and younger son of King John, soliloquizes, Here rest thee Richard, think upon a mean, To end thy life, or to repair thine honour, And vow never to see fair Englands bounds, Till thou in Aix be Crowned Emperour. (sig. E1r)

26 

Fennor, ‘A description of the Palsgraves Countrey’, sig. B3v. 27  Miller, ‘The Henrician Legend Revived’, p. 317.

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Here the play can be seen as reinventing Henry V’s ‘No king of England if not king of France’ to show the focus switching from Angevin empire to Holy Roman in line with the priorities that drove the Palatinate marriage. By the end of the play, Richard’s aim has been triumphantly achieved: the Duke of Saxon tells Richard that, ‘The Royalties of the Coronation | Shall be, at Aix, shortly solemnized’ (sig. K3v) and Richard’s nephew, the future Edward I, declares, Was never Englishman yet Emperour, Therefore to honour England and your self, Let private sorrow yield to publike Fame, That once an Englishman bare Caesar’s name. (sig. K3v)

The play then closes with Richard himself confirming the importance of his new status: Sweet Sister now let Caesar comfort you, And all the rest that yet are comfortles; Let them expect from English Caesar’s hands Peace, and abundance of all earthly Joy. (sig. K4r)

Richard of Cornwall had been not just the first but the only Englishman to hold the title of Holy Roman Emperor, but the Palatinate marriage made it possible to think that perhaps an English head might once again wear an imperial crown, for Jaroslav Miller notes that, ‘Some texts from these years indicate the existence of public conviction or faith that within a certain time the Palatine dynasty could be elevated to the status of Roman Emperors’, and Jane Pettegree concurs: ‘The panegyrics that accompanied the marriage of Elizabeth Stuart to Prince Frederick of the Palatine suggested the dynastic alliance would create a new, Protestant Holy Empire’.28 Henry Peacham’s Prince Henrie Revived (1615), for example, celebrates the birth of Frederick and Elizabeth’s first son and wishes that ‘Caesar Henrie thou maist one day raigne, as good, as great, as ever Charlemagne’.29 It was for this, presumably, that the anonymous pamphlet The Marriage of Prince Fredericke, and the Kings daughter, the Lady Elizabeth notes that the bride wore ‘upon her head a crowne of refined golde, made Imperiall (by the Pearles and Dyamonds thereon placed)’30—that is, a crown closed with a hoop, which signified imperial status, rather than an open one, 28 

Pettegree, Foreign and Native on the English Stage, p. 146. Miller, ‘The Henrician legend revived’, p. 317. 30  Anonymous, The Marriage of Prince Fredericke, and the Kings Daughter, sig. B1v. 29 

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which was merely regal. In Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany an unusually careful stage direction is used to introduce a key character: ‘Enter the Empress Isabella King John’s Daughter’ (sig. B4v s.d). Since John’s defiance of the Pope had made him a Protestant icon, this would already have evoked easily recognized connotations at the time of the play’s composition, but the Palatinate marriage brought it an important new association to compound its original meaning, for now it was again possible to fantasize about the daughter of an English king becoming an empress. Two aspects of the language and iconography attending on this imperial theme prove particularly resonant in the context of English dynastic politics and national and confessional allegiances: these are the name of Caesar and the idea of Rome, and the possibility of a Protestant Holy Roman Emperor obviously brings them into direct collision. In Heauens Blessing, and Earths Ioy, John Taylor draws on a standing Renaissance pun about the word room and the contemporary pronunciation of Rome when he declares that, ‘Since first the framing of this worlds vast Roome, | A fitter, better match was not combinde’,31 and in Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, Alexander may say, ‘Now is my Lord sole Emperour of Rome’ (sig. H2v). Although it had been a long time since there had been anything particularly Roman about the Holy Roman Empire, a similar association can be seen at work in these plays. In the classic style of Renaissance empire-building as identified by J. H. Elliott,32 classical mythology is extensively evoked, with the story of Troy in general and of the urcolonizer Aeneas in particular deployed in the service of presenting Germany as both the home of people fundamentally kin and also as territory amenable to imperial ambitions. In The Hector of Germany, the King of Bohemia reveals the logic of the play’s title by saying of the ailing Palsgrave, The strength of Germanie is sicke in him, And should hee die now in his prime of life, Like Troy we loose the Hector of our Age. (sig. A3v)

In Fennor’s ‘Description’, we are told that Poets leave writing of the Grecian Queene, And of Aeneas, Lady Venus sonne: Two rarer beauties shortly shall be seene in Almany, when Englands pride is wonne. (sig. C3r) 31 

Taylor, Heauens Blessing, and Earths Ioy, sig. D1r. 32  Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650.

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In Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, the Duke of Saxon initially casts around for a suitable classical precedent: Me thinks I now present Mark Antony, Folding dead Iulius Caesar in mine arms. No, no, I rather will present Achilles, And on Patroclus Tomb do sacrifise. (sig. K1v)

However, later Alexander settles definitively on a Trojan model when he explains how he watched the battle from the tower and posted from the turrets top, More furiously than ere Laocoon ran, When Trojan hands drew in Troy’s overthrow. (sig. K3r)

And in The Four Prentices of London, Eustace compares himself to Hector while Guy sees himself as Achilles (sig. F1r), while the envoy of the Persian Sophy, who is sent to defy them, is significantly named Turnus, like the prince who opposes Aeneas in the Aeneid, and it is he who in due course notices that the Christians have succeeded in entering Jerusalem through, ‘The selfe-same breach that Romane Titus made, | When he destroy’d this Citty’ (sig. K4r). All the good characters are thus presented as sharing with the English, who claimed descent from Aeneas’s great-grandson Brutus, a fundamentally Trojan identity which helpfully brings with it the motif of the translatio imperii. Of course, Rome connoted Roman Catholicism as well as the Roman empire. Inevitably, the villains of these texts are Catholic. In Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, Alphonsus himself declares at the outset that he is an apprentice Machiavel—‘To be an outward Saint, an inward Devill; | These are the lectures that my Master reads’ (sig. B1v)—and after Alexander’s murder of the Bishop of Mainz plots cynically that I will procure so much by Gold or friends, That my sweet Mentz shall be Canonized. And numbred in the Bed-role of the Saints, I hope the Pope will not deny it me. (sig. H2r)

The Palsgrave, meanwhile, is firmly Protestant, as is made clear in Fennor’s ‘Description’: Pals, Brandenburgh, and Saxony in one hand, unite their strength which makes their powers last: The Popish Prelates at these Princes frowne, yet these three Protestants uphold the Crowne. (sig. B4r)

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For the earlier plays I have been discussing here, the question of empire is always one that must be viewed sub specie aeternatis. Jane Pettegree remarks on the Henry plays ‘repeatedly present[ing] domestic unrest as an unwelcome distraction from the business of Holy War’, and Henry  IV himself laments when he receives news of trouble in Wales that, ‘It seems then that the tidings of this broil | Brake off our business for the Holy Land’ (I.i.47–48).33 In The Four Prentices of London, Godfrey of Bouillon refuses the crown of Jerusalem because the only crown he desires is one of thorns. In Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, Isabella says, Alas I know my Brother Richard’s heart Affects not Empire, he would rather choose To make return again to Palestine, And be a scourge unto the Infidels. (sig. B4v)

Richard is presumably named after Richard the Lionheart, who was his uncle and who had acquired his sobriquet from his valiance while on crusade, and this stresses the extent to which the pursuit of empire on earth is habitually set in opposition to crusade and the pursuit of a crown in heaven. Real rulers might also be moved by the same considerations as these fictional ones. In A Continuation of the Historie of France, Danett speaks of how Charles the Emperour who was so ambitious a Prince that hee thought to haue swalowed vp both France and Germanie, was chaced out of both those countries with great ignominie, and was neuer able to hould no not [sic] one pore towne in either of both those realmes, & in the end through moodinesse of his euell successe, gaue a deffiance to all the world, and dyed in an Abby among a companie of Monkes.34

In his letter to the people of Artois and Hainault, Henry IV was careful to declare that he too had been motivated by spiritual as well as political considerations: albeit that euer since we haue had both courage, and the same right and abilitie that we now haue, to reuenge our selues vpon ye countries and subiects of the King of Spaine (the principall author and enterpriser of this war) yet being holden backe by many considerations of great importance to al Christendom, we haue chose rather to beare much, defending our selues but simply, than to set vpon those forcibly, to

33  Pettegree, Foreign and Native on the English Stage, p. 134. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, ed. by Bevington. 34  Danett, A Continuation of the Historie of France, p. 147.

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whome we could peraduenture, haue procured and done as much hurt as we haue receiued at their hands.35

He argues that ultimately, though, his hand has been forced because of ‘the present danger that threatneth all christendome (which euerie man knoweth to haue risen through the discords, and iust gelousie that the King of Spaine his ambition hath bred euery where)’. However, the effect of the wars had been so severe that Thomas Danett in his preface to A Continuation is inclined to wonder whether this part of France actually was still in Christendom: passing out of Spaine through France in the yeare 77 […] we found such a wildernes in all the country between Bayonne and Bourdeaux, that whole forrests and woods were turned vp and consumed, the townes vtterly desolated, the people despearsed, the churches quite subuerted, and the children (a lamentable thing to bee recorded) remaining vnchristened by the space of ten yeares, which bred in mee such a commiseration, to see so noble a member of Christendome so miserablye torne in peeces with hir owne teeth.36

At best, the status of this part of France as Christian territory must be considered imperilled; at worst, as The Four Prentices of London had shown, any and all of Christendom can be threatened by disunity within it. A sense of national identity, with the differences it implies, must give place to one of shared religious allegiance and fundamental commonality. It is, though, unusually easy in these plays to imagine Christendom as being capable of unification. In Heauens Blessing, and Earths Ioy, John Taylor speaks of how The Royall blood of Emperours and Kings, Of Potent Conquerors, and famous Knights Successiuely from these two Princes springs: Who well may claime, these titles as their rights: The Patrons Christendome to Vnion brings.37

Indeed perhaps the most surprising result of this ideological slippage between Germany and ancient Troy and its descendant Rome, in a landscape where a city may be called either Aachen or Aix and speak of a heritage which is simultaneously French, German, and neither, is the unexpected cosmopolitanism and linguistic proficiency of so many of the Englishmen in these plays. In 35 

Henri IV, The Copie of a Letter, pp. 2–3 and 7. Danett, A Continuation of the Historie of France, sig. A3r. 37  Taylor, Heauens Blessing, and Earths Ioy, sig. D1r. 36 

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them, an island nation is briefly and improbably glimpsed in a rare moment of pro-European sentiment and attitudes. In The Hector of Germany, the ailing Palsgrave greets the disguised King of Spain with, ‘Before this dangerous sicknesse was my Foe, | No Christian King that came to me for ayde | But hee should speed’ (sig. B1v), and this sense of a fundamentally united entity called simply ‘Christendom’ pervades both this play and Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, where Alphonsus declares (albeit insincerely) that, ‘This is a joyful day to Christendome, | When Christian Princes joyn in amity’ (sig. E3v). Its most striking manifestation comes when young Fitzwaters in The Hector of Germany, finding himself shipwrecked on a rock (here represented by the upper acting area), looks down at the stage below, which is temporarily representing an ocean, and laments that, Since I was cast vpon this fatall Rocke, And saw my Loue disseuered by the waues, And my kinde Steward in the Ocean drownd, Here I haue liu’d, fed onely with raw Fish, Such as the Sea yeelds: and each Shippe I see, (As dayly there are some furrow this way) I call vnto for ayde, but nere the neere. On[e] ask’t me, What I was? I answer’d him, An Englishman. Quoth he, Stay there and starue. To the next that past, I sayd I was a French-borne. Ile ayde no French quoth he. Vnto a third, That I a Spaniard was. He bad me hang: So that I know not what I ought to say, Nor whom to speake to. (sigs F4v–r)

Beneath the familiar narrative of dissension between nations lurks a much stranger one, that of an Englishman who can convincingly pass for Spanish or French. Similarly in Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, the King of Bohemia may scornfully ask ‘what have we to do with Englishmen? | They are divided from our Continent’ (sig. C1r), and Prince Edward is certainly not well equipped for life abroad, being slow on the uptake, resolutely monoglot, openly scornful of local customs, and easily given the slip by his bride on their wedding night. Richard, however, copes noticeably better; if we were to transpose the play onto the politics of our own age he would be a Eurocrat or member of the European Parliament, equally at home in London, Brussels, and Strasbourg, and even trailing a whiff of an expenses scandal when the Bishop of Cologne attempts to buy him off with the promise that ‘his charges what so e’re they are | Shalbe repaid with treble vantages’ (sig. C2v). He even speaks German, which

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the audience seem also to be expected either to understand or to put up with, since there is a fairly substantial amount of untranslated German spoken on stage, though its foreignness is acknowledged in the quarto by the fact that it is printed in black letter. This world of these plays is, however, not the usual xenophobic and isolationist England of so many early modern plays, but an England unusually imbricated in European affairs, whose pan-nationalism is stressed when a character in Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany introduces himself as ‘Frederick ArchBishop of Trier, | Duke of Lorrain, Chancelour of Italie’ (sig. B4r). They refer to German as well as to English politics, and to questions of succession and rule in particular, as is stressed by the presence of two highly suggestive metaphors in Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany: Alphonsus’s declaration that ‘men rather hon­ our the Sun rising than the Sun going down’ (sig. B2r) and Saxon’s ‘Why here’s a tempest quickly overblown’ (sig. C2r). The first of these, which has its origins in Plutarch’s Life of Pompey, had been used by Elizabeth herself to figure her successor: in conversation with the Scottish ambassador, William Maitland of Lethington, she observed, I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and has [sic] their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed; and naturally men be so disposed: Plures adorant solem orientem quam occidentem [More people adore the rising sun than the setting one].38

The word ‘tempest’ could also be associated with succession: Leanda de Lisle notes that, ‘The playwright Thomas Dekker’s Wonderful Year of 1603 recalls the harbingers of Elizabeth’s decline as “a hideous tempest, that shook cedars, terrified the tallest pines, and cleft asunder even the hardest hearts of oak”’,39 while Mortimer Levine observes that John Hales wrote ‘a tract entitled A Declaration of the Succession of the Crown Imperial of England’ and launched ‘a storm that Walter Haddon called the Tempestas Halesiana’.40 Rather than a world in which England is attempting to invade parts of Europe, then, this is a world in which England is attempting to position itself as part of Europe, and doing so through marriage rather than through war, as part of a policy which sought to decouple the notion of the Holy Roman Empire from the taint of Roman Catholicism and present instead a Protestant version built on a common foundation of romanitas. 38 

Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. by Marcus, Mueller, and Rose, p. 66. De Lisle, After Elizabeth, p. 118. 40  Levine, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question, pp. 63, 76. 39 

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Works Cited Primary Sources Anonymous, King Edward III, ed. by Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1998) Anonymous, The Marriage of Prince Fredericke, and the Kings Daughter, the Lady Elizabeth […] (London: Thomas Creede for William Barley, 1613) Chapman, George, The Tragedy of Alphonsus, Emperour of Germany (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1654) Danett, Thomas, A Continuation of the Historie of France from the Death of Charles the Eiight where Comines Endeth, till the Death of Henry the Second (London: Thomas East for Thomas Charde, 1600) Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Fennor, William, ‘A Description of the Palsgraves Countrey, as it was Delivered in a Speech before the King, the Prince, the Lady Elizabeth, at White-Hall’, in Fennors Descrip­tions, or A True Relation of Certaine and Diuers Speeches (London: Edward Griffin for George Gibbs, 1616) Henri IV, The Copie of a Letter Sent by the French king to the People of Artoys and Henault, Requesting them to Remooue the Forces Gathered by the King of Spaine, from the Borders of France, Otherwise Denouncing Open Warre (London: Peter Short for Thomas Millington, 1595) Heywood, Thomas, The Four Prentices of London (London: Nicholas Okes for John Wright, 1615) Marlowe, Christopher, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999) Shakespeare, William, Henry IV, Part One, ed. by David Bevington (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1994) —— , Henry VI, Part Two, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) —— , King Henry V, ed. by T. W. Craik (London: Routledge, 1995) —— , King Henry VI, Part One, ed. by Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1990) Smith, Wentworth, The Hector of Germany: Or The Palsgrave, Prime Elector (London: Thomas Creede for Josias Harrison, 1615) Taylor, John, Heauens Blessing, and Earths Ioy […] (London: E. Allde for Joseph Hunt, 1613)

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Secondary Studies Archer, John Michael, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Bowers, Fredson, ‘Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, and the Ur-Hamlet’, Modern Language Notes, 48.2 (February 1933), 101–08 Bowers, Fredson, ‘The Date and Composition of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 15 (1933), 165–89 Connolly, Annaliese F., ‘Guy of Warwick, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Elizabethan Reper­ tory’, in Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, ed. by Bernadette Andrea and Linda McJannet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 139–58 Davies, Norman, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2011) Elliott, J. H., The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; first publ. 1970) Gillies, John, ‘Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography’, in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. by John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), pp. 203–29 ‘Google Maps Ignites Dutch Border Dispute’, The Local: Germany’s News in English, 21 February 2011 [accessed 29 July 2014] Hillman, Richard, Shakespeare, Marlowe and the Politics of France (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) Hopkins, Lisa, The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) Knapp, Jeffrey, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from ‘Utopia’ to ‘The Tempest’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) Levine, Mortimer, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question 1558–1568 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966) Lisle, Leanda de, After Elizabeth (London: Harper Collins, 2006) Marshall, Tristan, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Miller, Jaroslav, ‘The Henrician Legend Revived: The Palatine Couple and its Public Image in Early Stuart England’, European Review of History: Revue europénne d’histoire, 11.3 (2004), 305–31 Pettegree, Jane, Foreign and Native on the English Stage, 1588–1611 (Basingstoke: Pal­ grave, 2011) Strong, Roy, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986) Werner, Hans, ‘The Hector of Germanie, or The Palsgrave, Prime Elector and AngloGerman Relations of Early Stuart England: The View from the Popular Stage’, in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. by R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 113–32

An ‘ardent love of my countrey’: Travel Literature and National Identity in Early Modern England Anna Suranyi

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hen early modern English travellers traversed Europe and beyond, they were doing more than merely recording their observations. They strongly promoted a sense of English national identity, manifested in praise of English society, values, and potency. Furthermore, they located English identity in relation to the other cultures they encountered. The construction of difference through the creation of cultural stereotypes was a central aspect of this endeavour. In all of these spheres, they demonstrated English ideas about their own role in the world, and their aspirations for the future. An analysis of the language of travel, geographic, political, and historical writings from the early modern period illuminates the significance of discourses about foreign cultures. For travel writers, the political configurations and cultural practices of each region they depicted explained not only superficial characteristics, but also the fundamental natures of those societies, imagined as a hierarchical arrangement based primarily on distinctions between civility and savagery. England itself was manifested as a civilized and cultivated nation, characterized by technological abilities, civil liberties, and political moderation. Furthermore, the populace of England possessed masculine qualities such as strength and ‘warlikeness’ that would help to pave the way for an imperial destiny. Most other countries were believed to have deficits in comparison to the English. In some cases those differences were relatively small, as in the case of Anna Suranyi ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of History at Endicott College in Massachusetts. She specializes in Atlantic and British history

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the continental European states. However, English depictions of Ireland and Turkey particularly illustrate the anxieties that the English felt in encounters with other regions. Ireland was seen as a naturally servile region with barbaric inhabitants who were nomadic, had failed to properly cultivate the land, and who had thus no right to permanent property in land. At the same time, the region caused particular apprehension, because it was a colonized territory that seemed always on the verge of rebellion. Thus the Irish people were represented as ‘wild’ animals that lacked civilization. Depictions of the Irish justified the conquest by focusing upon disorder, animal-like behaviour, and rebelliousness: they were said to wallow in filth and to eat bloody, raw meat. The Irish could even potentially corrupt the English character, yet the Irish could also be civilized, a task that would require firm control, but that would reflect to both their own benefit and that of their English overlords. The Turkish state was very different. In the early modern period, the vast and sophisticated Ottoman Empire presented a powerful challenge on the borders of Europe. Unlike the Irish, the Turks were seen as civil, sharing with the English a religion that rejected high-church practices and exhibited moderate desires, an imperial nature, technological sophistication, and agricultural sufficiency. In describing the Ottomans, the travel writers’ emphasis was on orderliness, military readiness, and their deliberately spartan way of living. Like England, the Turkish Empire was believed to possess a masculine people, poised for conquest. Both the Turks and the English were sometimes seen as heirs of the Roman Empire, justified in their use of force to pacify and civilize barbarous peoples. Yet the Turkish Empire was also fearsome to the English for a number of reasons. It was seen as a tyrannous region of sycophantic slaves, sexually and morally corrupt, and a potential military threat as well as a threat to English mariners in the Mediterranean. The English thus possessed a dual image of the Turks: both a powerful empire to emulate—the epitome of civility—and an absolutist tyranny to reject. Ultimately these representations fit into a worldview in which England was urged to join the ranks of dominating and imperial states. English writers strove to articulate a national identity that existed between the two extreme poles of the absolute liberty of the Irish, and the absolute control of the Turks. The national identity thus conceptualized was fundamentally reactive and unstable. Nevertheless, it was part of the emergence of a genuine sentiment that included fundamentally republican notions about social uniformity, as well as declarations of heartfelt patriotism. In addition, it paved the way for more developed

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discourses in the following centuries. The identification of difference and the development of a sense of national identity were inextricably intertwined. In order to analyse the changes in nationalistic ideals during the early modern period, I will examine the expression of ideas as well the use of specific words to shape meaning.1 The works of two early modern English writers, the travel writer Richard Hakluyt, and Thomas Sprat, promoter of the Royal Society, particularly illustrate a construction of English identity coinciding with a sense of national rivalry between England and its European competitors that was also amplified in travel writing in general. This chapter will first focus on the ideals expressed by these authors, and then address the broader context of national identity as it appeared in travel literature. The two authors wrote sixty years apart, in 1598 and 1664, but showed a great deal of concurrence in their views of the English nation. Both authors strove to combat the supposed inferiority of the English in comparison with continental nationalities by emphasizing and promoting what they believed were uniquely English virtues. Both writers agreed that one of the particular and also characteristic skills of the English was in travelling, and that travel itself could bring significant benefits to England. Their work fit into an English discourse about national differences that appeared in travel literature and other writings of the time and was critical in the development of an early modern national identity.2 Much has been written about Hakluyt’s attempts to instigate English exploration and trade and to promote English deeds of exploration.3 Hakluyt proclaimed his national allegiance within the title of his most famous work, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, in which he concentrated exclusively on his own countrymen’s achievements—the only early modern writer to do so.4 Hakluyt repeatedly delineated this aim, and 1 

On the use of key words to denote meaning in travel literature, see Gerbig, ‘Key Words and Key Phrases’. 2  Some recent work on the significance of early modern English and European travel writing includes MacLaren, ‘In Consideration of the Evolution of Explorers’; Hadfield, ‘Lenten Stuffe’; Travel and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England; and Carey and Jowett, ‘Early Modern Travel Writing’. 3  For example, discussions of Hakluyt that address his nationalistic ideals include Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire’; Neville-Sington, ‘“A very good trumpet”’; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, pp. 149–92; Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 61–99; Pennington, ‘Hakluytus Posthumus’; Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise; Fuller, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Foreign Relations’; and Carey, ‘Hakluyt’s Instructions’. 4  See Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations. The first edition was published in 1598. On Hakluyt’s unusual national interests, see Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 152; Payne, ‘Strange, remote, and farre distant contreys’, p. 18.

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also that he was writing for English readers, stating in his preface that he would discuss ‘the Navigations onely of our owne nation’.5 Throughout the multiple introductory prefaces and epistles of the first volume, his use of the possessive pronoun ‘our’ conveyed for his readers a mutually exclusive Englishness, part of which included a shared interest in their national past. Hakluyt continually repeated words and phrases that embraced a sense of mutual English purpose and unity, including ‘we’, ‘ours’, ‘our nation’, ‘our country’, ‘our English nation’, ‘our voyages’, ‘our English Fleete’, ‘our forren trades’, ‘our traffiques and negotiations’, and so on. Thus his text constructed a sense of mutual Englishness which, he implied, was shared by his readers. Not only did the English possess a shared sense of affinity, Hakluyt implied, but also a stronger relationship expressed through a sense of devotion to their country. He himself, he declared in the dedicatory epistle to the second edition, had been impelled to write his book by ‘the ardent love of my country’.6 This was not only a private sentiment, because his book was also composed in ‘the honor and benefit of this Common weale wherein I live and breathe’.7 In this statement Hakluyt located his life geographically in England where his readers also lived, while his use of the word ‘commonweal’ implied a sense of common purpose and common aspirations uniting him to his countrymen.8 In addition to calling upon a shared sense of Englishness with his readers, Hakluyt also expressed a conviction in English exceptionalism, arguing that the English had a singular calling for colonization and commerce. In the dedicatory epistle, he gave ‘just commendation’ for the English, who ‘have bene men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world’, who, ‘in compassing the vast globe of the earth more than once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth’.9 Like the act of dedicating his text to English readers, this was a statement without precedent in the works of continental travel writers, who focused on the deeds of nobles or intrepid explorers rather than on the deeds of their co-nationals. Hakluyt was representative 5 

Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, p. xxiv. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, p. xxxi. 7  Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, p. xl. 8  The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘commonweal’ as both ‘common well-being; esp. the general good, public welfare, prosperity of the community’ and also, ‘The whole body of the people, the body politic; a state, community’. Both of these definitions date from the Middle Ages, and both meanings might be comprehended in Hakluyt’s use of the term. 9  Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, p. xx. 6 

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of a new change in England that marked the beginnings of the development of English nationalism.10 Hakluyt continued his text in the same vein, writing that another aim in publishing his book was thus to instruct ‘posteritie’ in the great ‘renowme’ (sic) due ‘unto our English nation’—‘the valiant English’— who were ready to take their place as explorers and ‘discoverers’ alongside other Europeans.11 To delineate the importance of this task, he continued to repeat variations of this claim, also writing that he had produced the book ‘for the benefit and honour of my Countrey’ and ‘to preserve certain memorable exploits of late yeeres by our English nation’.12 Hakluyt’s assumption of mutual feelings shared with his English readers seems to have garnered a response. Reprinted a number of times, his many volumes were owned by a number of important contemporaries, and found in university and cathedral libraries, the archives of the Virginia and East India Companies, and travellers’ personal collections.13 Although he may have been at the forefront in the birth of national feeling, he was not an outlier. He remained a very influential writer whose works were widely read, and his readers likely shared many of his convictions, while they were influenced by his ideals. Thomas Sprat, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, is less well known to modern readers, but he was also prominent in his own time as an Anglican bishop, scientific promoter, and satirical writer. Sprat began writing in praise of the English when he was stung into penning Observations upon Monsieur de Sorbier’s Voyage into England in 1665, a response to French philosopher Samuel de Sorbière’s 1664 book, Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre, in which the latter described a visit to England and mocked English customs and society.14 Sprat retaliated by mocking Sorbière, but also by defending the English. Two years later, Sprat wrote The History of the Royal Society of London, in which he continued to defend English qualities and values. Like Hakluyt, Sprat repeatedly implied shared interests among his fellow citizens, including them in his opinions by employing first person plural pos10 

For a list of sources that discuss Hakluyt’s nationalism, see footnote 3. Helgerson, in Forms of Nationhood, has shown that the sixteenth century constituted a unique period in which English writers, scholars, and politicians were united in the project of creating a new sense of nation. 11  Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, p. xl. 12  Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, p. xxxix. 13  Payne, ‘Strange, remote, and farre distant contreys’, discusses this topic throughout. 14  Sprat, Observations; Sorbière, Relation d’un voyage.

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sessive pronouns such as ‘ours’, ‘us’, and we’, as well as frequent references to ‘our people’, ‘our Countrymen’, ‘our owne Countrey’, and most commonly, ‘our Nation’.15 Throughout his two books, he continued to praise the English, concluding his rebuttal to Sorbière by praising ‘a Great, a Valiant, and a vertuous people’.16 In his book on the Royal Society, Sprat repeatedly used phrases such as ‘English Greatness’, or the ‘Genius of the English Nation’.17 He strongly supported a patriotic ideal, in which men should aim to be ‘serviceable to their Country’.18 Sprat also coincided with Hakluyt in believing that travels were crucial to the unique nature of the English, although remaining primarily focused on scientific and intellectual achievements. In order to demonstrate the ‘generous English Spirit’, he contrasted Sorbière’s book on England to ‘several Volumes of the Voyages of some of our Countrymen […] which have given a more advantageous account of those Infidels, and Barbarians, then (sic) he has done of one of the most polite Countries in Europe’. He continued that, ‘The English have describ’d, and illustrated, all parts of the Earth by their Writings: many they have discover’d; they have visited all’.19 Other writers concurred. For example, Anthony Nixon, who wrote about the travels of the Sherley brothers, a family of upper class travellers and adventurers, maintained that, ‘Our English nation […] by reason of their travels’, in which they were ‘second to no country’, had great ‘knowledge, and experience of all people, of their customs and conditions’.20 Likewise, traveller Fynes Moryson wrote, ‘no nation labours more then the English (as well by travailing into forraine kingdoms, as by the studie of good letters, and by other meanes) to enrich their mindes with all virtues’, while traveller William Carr agreed that ‘relations of travels, voyages, &c. are generally very acceptable to the genius of the English nation’.21 Sprat also agreed that travel was central to English activities, and like Hakluyt, he believed the most beneficial aspect of travel to be the extension of English trade and commerce. He extolled England’s foreign trade and wrote that ‘the Natives of all the Trading-Countries, have still maintain’d 15 

Sprat, Observations, and Sprat, History. Sprat, Observations, p. 298. 17  Sprat, History, pp. 404, 413. 18  Sprat, History, p. 26. 19  Sprat, Observations, pp. 59–61. 20  Nixon, Three English Brothers, n.p. 21  Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 28; Carr, An Accurate Description, preface. 16 

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a peculiar respect for the English integrity’; he predicted that ‘infallibly’ the English would soon be ‘the Masters of the trade of the world’.22 Sprat did not waver in his devotion to England, though he sometimes betrayed a sense of inferiority in comparison to continental competitors. This was particularly notable in his attack on Sorbière’s book, in which his stated intention was to defend ‘the glory of England’ and ‘the honor of the English’ against one who had cast ‘disgraces […] on our whole Nation’. 23 Sprat’s response was to extol as many aspects of English society and culture as possible, including English drama, intellect, writing, government, philosophy, literature, clergy, historians, mathematicians, and doctors.24 Sprat also commended ‘the Noble and Inquisitive Genius of our Merchants’.25 He even critiqued Sorbière’s disparagement of English cooking, admitting it to be plain and simple, but as such, exemplifying the English cultural style, writing ‘the English have the same sincerity in their Dyet, which they have in their Manners: and as they have less mixture in their Dishes, so they have less sophisticate compositions in their hearts, then the people of some other nations’. This elucidation might perhaps have been more convincing if Sprat had not been praising English cuisine at the expense of French, but the meaning is clear enough—English cooking exemplified the straightforward and honest English character, rather than that of the devious and sophistic French.26 Sprat visualized English nationhood as encompassing all the members, at least male, of the polity. On numerous occasions, Sprat demonstrated that when he spoke of the English, he meant that all of the English, from low to high, joined in the shared project of knowledge, and also implicitly, of nation. Thus he wrote that ‘English disposition is of all others the fittest’ for the ‘discoveries of this Age’, particularly in the realm of science. He continued that a ‘universal zeal towards the advancement of such designs, has not only overspread our Court and Universities; but the Shops of our Mechanicks, the fields of our Gentlemen, the Cottages of our Farmers, and the Ships of our Merchants’.27 It was the intrinsic nature of the English people, not only of their rulers, Sprat declared, that made England so praiseworthy. The English were suited for gov22 

Sprat, Observations, pp. 83, 90, 165. Sprat, Observations, pp. 5–6. 24  Sprat, Observations, pp. 248–71, 283–89. See also Sprat, History, pp. 13, 25, 414. 25  Sprat, History, p. 88. 26  Sprat, Observations, pp. 277–78. Note that ‘sophisticate’ implies dual meanings here: sophisticated cooking and sophistic behaviour. 27  Sprat, Observations, pp. 290–92. 23 

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ernance and dominion he wrote, because ‘the disposition of the people is bold in dangers, severe in Discipline, valiant in Arms, virtuous in Life, relenting to the afflicted, and merciful in Conquest’.28 Even English vices were ‘not natural to our Soil, but imported hither from forein Countries’.29 Sprat even criticized French theatre because it focused only on the doings of courtiers, while touting English comedies that included ‘the Speeches of Waggoners, of Fencers, and of Common Souldiers’, because they expressed all the varied human thoughts and emotions.30 Implicit in this critique is not only a praise of English drama for its artistic merits, but by extension, a validation of the portrayal of ordinary people’s thoughts and ideas. Indeed, Sprat proclaimed, the realm of ideas was more open in England than elsewhere, not only in occupation but also in religion, where one could observe an ‘unusual sight […] that men of disagreeing parties, and ways of life’, such as ‘the Soldier, the Tradesman, the Merchant, the Scholar, the Gentleman, the Courtier, the Divine, the Presbyterian, the Papist, the Independent, and those of Orthodox Judgment’, had ‘laid aside their names of distinction, and calmly conspir’d in a mutual agreement of labors and desires’.31 Sprat admired the bravery of the English in the face of disaster, highlighting the simultaneous disasters of the plague, Great Fire, and Anglo-Dutch wars. His praise is instructive, because it focused on the courage of ordinary Londoners: ‘no unmanly bewailings were heard […] they beheld the Ashes […] without the least expression of Pusillanimity’.32 And yet, he pointed out, such ‘greatness of heart’ was found among ‘poor Artizans, and the obscure multitude’ which was ‘no doubt one of the most honourable events, that ever happen’d’.33 That these same people went on to ‘prosecute the War with the same vigour and courage’ was evidence of ‘an invincible and heroic Genius’ among the English.34 Sprat’s vision of nation was much like that suggested by Benedict Anderson’s imagined community—a ‘world of plurals’, in which all Englishmen saw themselves speaking with the same voice, though Anderson himself was sceptical that nationalism could exist before the nineteenth century.35 Furthermore, 28 

Sprat, History, p. 420. Sprat, History, p. 420. 30  Sprat, Observations, pp. 252–55. 31  Sprat, History, p. 427. 32  Sprat, History, p. 121. 33  Sprat, History, p. 121. 34  Sprat, History, p. 122. 35  Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 32. For other prominent sceptics of early modern nationalism, see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Gellner, Nations and 29 

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while full-blown nationalism was still in the process of emerging in the early modern period, the writings of Sprat, Hakluyt, and travel writers who disseminated ideas about English identity and distinctions between societies in widely read and influential books were themselves ‘writing the nation’.36 While this emerging and nascent form of national identity was not identical to the nationalism of the nineteenth century, it did share some features with it. It is apparent that for early modern English travel writers, conventions existed for delineating between whole countries, and their peoples, on the basis of supposedly innate characteristics. Such distinctions served not only to describe the differences between foreign peoples, but also to define what it meant to be English. An important element of this was the assumption that the English had shared interests and a common frame of reference: that they were a unified people. Furthermore, they shared special abilities and an exceptional destiny. This was frequently underscored when early modern writers, Sprat and Hakluyt among them, used first person plural possessive pronouns when they wrote about ‘our nation’, ‘our people’, and ‘our country’. Sprat repeatedly praised what he perceived to be exceptional English qualities. Although he had royalist sympathies, he also displayed hints of republicanism, emphasizing ‘how careful the English are of their own Liberty’, and that ‘the Government which we injoy, is justly compos’d of a sufficient liberty, and restraint’.37 He continued that the abundance of liberty ‘might be suspected […] a little to incline the people to disobedience; yet in a calme and secure time (such as this at present) it serves admirably well to breed a generous, an honourable, and invincible spirit’.38 He again reemphasized his point: ‘The temper of the English is free’.39 Nationalism; Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism; Kedourie, Nationalism; and Kumar, The Making of English National Identity. Those who defend the idea of early modern nationalism include Smith, who has written numerous works on the topic, including The Antiquity of Nations; Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism; Duara, ‘Historicizing National Identity’; Hroch, ‘From National Movement to Fully Fledged Nation’; and Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood. 36  For Anderson, print capitalism was a crucial factor in the dissemination of nationalism. Travel literature, one of the most popular and widely reprinted genres of early modern literature, took this role in the seventeenth century. 37  Sprat, Observations, pp.  82, 288—note that here the ‘restraint’ was embodied in the king—Sprat was not criticizing monarchical government. In fact, he was the author of a pamphlet entitled A Loyal Satyr against Whiggism. 38  Sprat, Observations, pp. 288–89. 39  Sprat, Observations, p. 289.

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Yet while promoting English liberty, Sprat believed that the English had a destiny of dominion over other parts of the world. In his rebuttal to Sorbière, he wrote that while he had previously believed ancient Rome to be the ideal society, he now considered England to be the best, writing ‘the condition of our owne Countrey appears to me to be such, that we need not search into antient History for a reall Idea of happiness’.40 England, he continued, though ‘not the seat of the Empire of the world’ as Rome had been, was destined to master ‘that which confines the world it self, the Ocean: To this Dominion our Nation is invited’.41 In his book on the Royal Society, he proposed that readers should look on the Society as a way ‘to make England the glory of the Western World’.42 Indeed, in his latter book he did not always confine himself to asserting that England had a glorious destiny, but also claimed that it was already at the forefront of nations. There were no cities ‘comparable to London of all the former or present Seats of Empire’, he wrote. ‘It is the head of a mighty Empire, the greatest that ever commanded the Ocean’, he continued presciently, if not accurately by contemporary standards.43 Indeed, he continued, ‘there are very many things in the Natural Genius of the English, which qualify them above any other for a Governing Nation’.44 For Sprat, English nationhood was also tied to masculinity, which he saw as a central part of the English character. Just as he had praised the English avoidance of ‘unmanly bewailing’ and pusillanimity, he contrasted English manliness to foreign weakness of spirit. In rebuttal to Sorbière’s critique of brusque English manners, he turned the slur into an accolade, asserting that the English, even ‘if they are thought, by some of their neighbors to be a little defective in the gentleness, and the pliableness of their humour’, were rather characterized by ‘their firme and their Masculine virtues’.45 Even the English language exemplified masculinity, as well as domination; he hoped that it might someday be employed to disseminate insight to the rest of the planet: ‘the English tongue may also in time be more enlarg’d, by being the instrument of conveying to the world, the masculine arts of knowledge’.46 Sprat even gave grudging praise to a 40 

Sprat, Observations, p. 286. Sprat, Observations, p. 286. 42  Sprat, History, p. 79. 43  Sprat, History, p. 87. 44  Sprat, History, p. 420. 45  Sprat, Observations, pp. 289–90. 46  Sprat, History, p. 129. 41 

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French historian, writing that his work could not be criticized because it was ‘so masculinely, so chastely, and so unaffectedly done’.47 Even Sprat’s use of the word ‘vertuous’ in his tract against Sorbière implied not only righteousness, but also manliness.48 Sprat’s perception of masculinity as an important cultural value, as well as one that the English held in abundance, was also enlarged upon in the writings of his contemporaries. Although Sprat’s ideals were those of his time, in Hakluyt’s day, the latter’s perspectives had been novel. Although less information is available about the readership of Sprat’s works than about those written by Hakluyt, Sprat was an influential and well regarded man throughout his lifetime who published numerous works on many topics, including a number of sermons and volumes of poetry, among others. It is likely that his ideas, like Hakluyt’s, were both influential and acceptable.49 This is suggested by the fact that many of his works were reprinted both during and after his lifetime. His 1665 book on Sorbière was reprinted in 1668, 1677, 1708, and 1709, while his book about the Royal Society, originally published in 1667, was reprinted in 1702, 1722, and 1734, and ironically came out in a French edition in 1669 which was reprinted in 1670.50 In addition, during his lifetime he held a number of important and influential ecclesiastical positions, including dean of Westminster and bishop of Rochester, during the administrations of Charles II, James II, and William. Although more than half a century separated the works of Hakluyt and Sprat, they were similarly compelled to defend and extol England and the English. These two men were part of a developing English public sphere which was increasingly coming to regard national identity as having paramount importance. Hakluyt and Sprat’s nationalistic ideals were echoed by others during the period between the publication of their books. During this period, many other writers also took part in a complex discourse constructing national identity, striving to delineate and simultaneously praise England and the English. A number of these writers focused on the representation of other cultures through travel literature, as well as what we might call geopolitical analysis. They depicted travel not only as a form of broadening experience, but 47 

Sprat, History, p. 40. See the OED—‘virtuous’. 49  In Hakluyt’s Promise, Mancall shows Hakluyt’s growing influence on early modern English policy makers and thinkers. 50  L’histoire de la Societe royale de Londres. Sprat also published many other works during his lifetime. 48 

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also maintained that it demonstrated English character to be resilient, courageous, and imperial. They also acknowledged the advantages of travel in providing opportunity for commerce, increased knowledge, and commercial development, and they believed that the English were particularly poised to take advantage of these benefits. Descriptions of other societies also served as foil to demonstrate English values and ultimately exceptionalism in these works. Many of the values espoused by Hakluyt and Sprat, from devotion to nation, national virtue, and even the association of diet with national character can be seen in the travel writings which proliferated during the seventeenth century. As I have argued elsewhere, travel literature was the ideal venue for explicating national identity and difference, as it afforded a template within which the English could be readily compared with other societies, who could then be found wanting.51 Travel literature was one of the most popular literary genres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and hundreds of travel works were published, and often repeatedly republished, during this period.52 They were found in the libraries of many influential individuals, who sometimes also wrote travel or ethnographic works themselves, including Sir Robert Cecil, Sir Edward Coke, Prince Henry, John Selden, John Milton, John Locke, Isaac Newton, and others.53 Like Sprat and Hakluyt, English travel writers, as well as authors who wrote geographical works, historical chronicles, or geopolitical texts showed a strong allegiance to England and identified themselves as part of the English nation, referring repeatedly to ‘our countrymen’, ‘our auncestors’, and ‘our nation’.54 Like Sprat and Hakluyt, they employed first person plural possessive pronouns when discussing their country, and identified English characteristics as superior to those of foreigners.55 Also like Sprat and Hakluyt, many of these writers showed strong evidence of nationalist feelings. Historical writer Peter Heylyn characterized England as ‘my dearest mother […] the best of mothers, and more glorious than the rest, thy sister nations’.56 Like Hakluyt, Heylyn desired to promote the idea of English greatness, declaring that he had ‘apprehended every modest occa51 

Suranyi, Genius of the English Nation. For some examples, see Cox, Reference Guide, and Sherman, ‘Stirrings and Searchings’. 53  Payne, ‘Strange, remote, and farre distant contreys’, pp. 20, 22; Cawley, Milton and the Literature of Travel; Boswell, Milton’s Library, pp. 75, 160, 216; Harrison and Laslett, The Library of John Locke, pp. 13, 18, 19, 27, 225. 54  Dallington, Method, n. p.; Perrott, The Chronicle of Ireland, ed. by Wood, pp. 4, 5. 55  Montague, The Delights of Holland, p. 39; Heylyn, The Voyage of France, p. 18. 56  Heylyn, Voyage, pp. 3, 4. 52 

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sion, of recording the heroick acts of my native soil, and filing on the registers of perpetual fame the gallantry and brave atcheivements (sic) of the people of England’.57 Other writers also believed themselves to be acting in the interests of their country. In the dedication of his prose History of England, the poet Samuel Daniel, while describing ‘our owne historie’, proclaimed that the English were superior to other ‘nations’ in ‘magnificence of state, glory of action, or abilities of nature’. His aims in writing his book were ‘to do my countrey the best service I could’.58 More forcefully, John Milton famously characterized England as a ‘noble and puissant nation’, and ‘a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point that the highest human capacity can soar to’.59 Frequently, the most important attributes were English potency and imperialism. Sir James Perrott, chronicler of Ireland, praised England, ‘this nation, havinge in all ages bredd as worthy spirits for literature and militarie profession as any other kingdom hath possessed’, and celebrated ‘the most noble achivementes of our auncestors, who have sette up troph[i]es, and deserved triumph, in the recovery of Palestine from the Turkes; conquered Ireland; subjugated Wales; supported the Netherlands; subdued Fraunce; both assisted and affronted Spayne’.60 He described the ‘deedes’ of the English as ‘remarkable’, and praised their ‘trew valoure [true valor], bountie, magnanimitie, wisdom, and other rare virtues and wonderfull indowments, which our predecessors were possessed of ’, as well as ‘the glorie of our nation’.61 Thus the projects of Sprat and Hakluyt both bracketed and meshed with inclinations developing in many spheres of English society. A final aspect of early modern English identity was self-identification as a colonizing power, which can be seen in many of the nostalgic or romanticized references to an English empire. Often English commentators unequivocally stated that colonization was a necessity, almost a foregone conclusion, in the destiny of the English. Often this premise was encapsulated in comparisons of England to the Roman Empire. For example, it was clearly expressed by Sir Thomas Smith when he wrote, ‘In my mind it needeth nothing more than to 57 

Heylyn, Cosmographie, Epistle to the Reader, n.p. On this statement see also Markley, ‘Riches, Power, Trade and Religion’, p. 506. 58  Daniel, The Collection of the History of England, ed. by Grosart, p. 76. 59  Milton, Areopagitica, ed. by Bush, pp. 196, 192. 60  Perrott, Chronicle, ed. by Wood, p. 4. 61  Perrott, Chronicle, ed. by Wood, p. 5.

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have colonies. To augment our tongue, our laws, and our religion in that Isle, which three be the true bands of the commonwealth whereby the Romans conquered and kept long time a great part of the world’.62 Ireland was the foremost, and almost the only, colonial possession at this stage, and so its continued subjugation became crucial to English self-perceptions. Indeed, Thomas Smith, as well as others, saw it as analogous to Roman colonies.63 Travel writers did not only confine themselves to praising and representing England, but also aimed to define English identity by delineating differences from other peoples. One of the fundamental ways in which travel writers distinguished foreign peoples was by separating them into the two oppositional categories of civility and barbarism, another form of comparison which related well to the Roman model. For example, this dichotomy is exemplified in Thomas Palmer’s travel manual, which consistently urged travellers to note whether foreign societies fell into these categories, although the terms reappeared throughout travel literature.64 Typically, there was a tendency for the English to find flaws in most other national characters, but in the case of the continental European states, these defects were relatively small. However, English depictions of Turkey and Ireland are some of the most interesting, because they give voice to anxieties, of very different kinds, voiced by travel writers. Turkey was praised for its civility, strength, and imperial nature, but that very same quality of domination was also criticized as tyrannical. Like the English and most European regions, the Ottoman Empire was perceived as civil. In contrast, Ireland was usually seen as a stronghold of savagery. It should be noted here that although many authors have argued that Catholicism was the primary reason to critique the Irish, a study of travel literature demonstrates that there were other forces that were equally important in denigration of the Irish. Like Sprat with his utopian expectations of common interest among Presbyterians, Catholics, and others, many writers often expressed more nuanced views of religious differences.65 For instance, travel62 

Sir Thomas Smith to William Cecil, 7 November 1565, quoted in Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, p. 157 and again in Armitage, Ideological Origins, p. 49. 63  Canny, ‘The Ideology of English Colonization’, p. 595. See also Canny, ‘Origins of Empire’, pp. 8, 14–15; and Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, pp. 108, 113; Pagden, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy’, p. 35; Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 11; Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 29–31, 49, 68, 92; Quinn, ‘Renaissance Influences’, pp. 98, 100–04, 108–12. 64  Palmer, An Essay of the Meanes. 65  Steven Pincus has argued that English attitudes towards Europe in the seventeenth

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ler Fynes Moryson, found ‘great difference’ between ‘heathen idolators worshipping imaginary gods, yea very divels’, and ‘superstitious’ Christians, such as Catholics, whom, he said, ‘I cannot condemn’ for an act which caused ‘no offense’.66 Naturalist John Ray found Catholic Italian society in general ‘agreeing very well with the English’.67 Thomas Sprat himself, though a member of the Anglican clergy, assured his readers that English Catholics were not interested in restoring Catholicism to England, preferring ‘the peace of their country’, and rather startlingly defended them from charges of irreligiousness by Sorbière by referring to them as ‘the most devoted children of the Church of Rome’.68 Religion was also de-emphasized in the realpolitik of English policy makers, with leaders allying with Mazarin’s France or warring with the Protestant Dutch, even devout predestinarian Protestants like Cromwell.69 Travel writers openly disapproved of Irish Catholicism, but they typically did not see other Catholic nationalities, such as the French, Spanish, or Italians, nor the Muslim Turks, as savage or barbaric. Rather it was conquered and subjected peoples like the Irish or the Arabs who received the latter designation. Ireland was seen as a naturally servile region with barbaric inhabitants who were nomadic, had failed to properly cultivate the land, and who had thus no right to permanent property in land. Thus the charge of Irish barbarism, as well as the rejection of Irish Catholicism, served to underscore and justify Ireland’s conquest by the English throne. Irish lack of civility was a common theme for travel and geographical writers such as Peter Heylyn, James Perrott, and Fynes Moryson.70 Travel writers frequently depicted the Irish as living chaotic, animalistic lives, with dirty and repugnant habits. They ate rotten ‘stinking’ meat or ‘the blood of raw flesh’, and lived in ‘uncleanlinesse’ and ‘inhuman loathsomnes’.71

century were more concerned with political systems than religion. ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes’. See also Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism and Harris, ‘The British Dimension’. 66  Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 33. 67  Ray, Observations, pp. 392–93, 396. 68  Sprat, Observations, p. 136. 69  See Rabb, The Struggle for Stability, pp. 80–81 and n. 111. 70  Heylyn, Microcosmus, pp. 271–72; Perrott, Chronicle, ed. by Wood, pp. 5, 16, 19, 21, 38; Moryson, Itinerary, ii, 101; iii, 62, 74, 158, 180. 71  On repugnant eating habits, see Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 162–63; Campion, ‘Historie of Ireland’, pp. 18, 110; and also Holinshed, Chronicle, ed. by Miller and Power, p. 113. On filthy living, see Rich, New Description, p. 16, and also p. 26; Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 163, 180; Davies, Historical Relations, p. 164.

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These kinds of allegations allowed some writers and policy makers to justify the conquest of Ireland as a mission to civilize the barbarian, and often to maintain that the Irish could be taught to emulate the English.72 Others, like travel compiler Samuel Purchas, felt that such a goal was impossible, disparaging Ireland’s persistent ‘barbarousnesse in many of her wilder natives, after so long trayning in civilitie’.73 Often such critics imagined Irish traits to be related to their political situation—for instance, Sir John Temple explicitly linked the ‘barbarism’ of the Irish to their ‘malice and hatred against all the English Nation’.74 Commentators, many of them personally involved in the colonization of Ireland, frequently fretted that Irish barbarism could contaminate Englishmen, who would ‘become degenerate’.75 For instance, Edmund Spenser charged that an Englishman in Ireland would ‘forget his own nature and forgoe his own nacion [nation]’.76 Sir John Davis, concerned that the English in Ireland had become too Irish, contended that ‘the English, which hoped to make a perfect conquest of the Irish, were by them perfectly and absolutely conquered’.77 In addition to the term ‘barbarous’, the Irish were frequently described as ‘wild’, a term which implied animal-like behaviour, and which was also juxtaposed to civility.78 The term ‘wild Irish’ was repeated often by a number of well-known writers such as Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, William Camden, John Good, Andrew Boorde, and others, as well as in official government 72 

See Canny, ‘Ideology’, pp.  588–89; Armitage, Ideological, pp.  50–51; Hadfield and Maley, ‘Irish Representations and English Alternatives’, p. 8. For contemporaneous sources, see Rich, New Description, p. 15; Campion, ‘Historie’, pp. 13–14; Davies, Historical Relations, p. 242; Holinshed, Chronicle, ed. by Miller and Power, pp. 13–14, 29, 115–16. 73  Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, v. 1, p. xl. 74  Sir John Temple, The Irish Rebellion (London: 1646), pp. 9–10, quoted in Tumbleson, Catholicism, p. 88. 75  Holinshed, Chronicle, ed. by Miller and Power, p. 115. See also p. 14; Campion, ‘Historie’, p. 14; Moryson, Itinerary, ii, 2, 299; iii, 158, 161, 164, 180; ii, 300; Perrott, Chronicle, ed. by Wood, p. 18; Davies, Historical Relations, pp. 22, 27, 32, 65, 149, 164, 242. In part this fear stemmed from the Catholicism of the ‘Old English’ who had emigrated to Ireland prior to the Reformation. 76  Spenser, Present State of Ireland, ed. by Gottfried, pp. ix, 96, 113. Armitage discusses the latter comment, Ideological, p. 54. 77  Davies, Historical Relations, p. 149. In part this was occasioned by the acclimatization of the Catholic ‘Old English’ whose ancestors had been involved in the conquest of Ireland before the Reformation. 78  On the juxtaposition of wildness and civility, see Leerssen, ‘Wildness, Wilderness, and Ireland’, pp. 26, 28. See also Snyder, ‘The Wild Irish’.

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documents.79 This pejorative adjective, while particularly attached to the Irish, was also used to describe other subjected peoples, such as Native Americans, Caribbean maroons, and Scottish Highlanders.80 It also appeared in a particularly instructive setting in some travel works, in descriptions of the nomadic ‘wild Arabs’ within the Ottoman Empire.81 These accounts emphasized the lawlessness and itinerancy of the ‘wild Arabs’, and their resistance to the central government, much as the Irish were described in travel works. Tellingly, some writers compared the ‘wild Arabs’ specifically to the ‘wild Irish’, like Fynes Moryson, who wrote ‘The Arabians are not unlike the wild Irish’.82 Implicit in this association of ‘wild’ outlying subjected peoples was a resemblance between the English polity and the Turkish Empire itself, which implied an imperial identity for the English. The divergence between wildness and civility was mapped onto a spatial distinction between centre and periphery, creating a parallel between Turkey and Britain based on the relationship of the colonizing state with its imperial subjects. It was not only the supposed wildness of the Irish that was criticized: the nomadic life ways of some of the Irish, often imagined as the pattern for an entire society, was an equal spur to English antagonism and imperial inclinations. Transhumance was considered barbarous by definition.83 However, criticism of the practice also fit imperialist aims because land ownership was secured through cultivation. Thus many supporters of colonization stressed Irish inability for or aversion to agriculture. For instance, Scottish courtier William 79 

Boorde, Introduction of Knowledge (1542); Good, A Description of the Manners and Customs of the Wild Irish (1566), Richard Stanyhurst, Description of Ireland; Camden, Britannia (1695—English edn); Spenser, Present State of Ireland, ed. by Gottfried; Jonson, The Irish Masque, The Devil Is an Asse; and others. These are cited in Snyder, ‘Wild Irish’, along with a number of other examples, pp. 154–56, 158, 167; Canny, ‘Ideology’, pp. 593–94. See also Heylyn, Microcosmus, p. 271, and Cosmography, p. 291; Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 156, 162, 163, 164, 180; Davies, Historical Relations, pp. 106, 145, 241. 80  Morgan, ‘Encounters between British and ‘Indigenous’ peoples’, p. 57; Vaughan, ‘Early English Paradigms’, pp. 35–40. 81  Howell, Familiar Letters, iii, 35; Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, vi, 217; Sandys, Sandys Travels, p. 154; Timberlake, Discourse, pp. 4, 5, 25; Biddulph, Travels, pp. 88, 98, 106, 107; Blount, Voyage, p. 56. 82  Moryson, Itinerary, i, 216. Other such comparisons occur in Blount, Voyage, p. 13; Sir Thomas Smith cited in Armitage, Ideological, p. 50, and also in Canny, ‘Ideology’, p. 587; Lithgow, Totall Discourse, p. 374; and Lithgow and William Parry in Early Modern Tales of Orient, p. 23. 83  Canny, ‘Ideology’, p. 587. Laurence, ‘Cradle’, p. 63.

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Lithgow faulted the Irish ‘manner of tillage’, which was ‘as bad a husbandry […] as ever I found among the wildest savages alive’, while Raphael Holinshed wrote in his discourse on Ireland that ‘if the husband man wyll not manure […] plow […] harrow […] dig […] and sowe’ the soil, ‘it will bring forth weedes’.84 In not cultivating the land properly, the commentators implied, the Irish had lost the right to own it.85 In the case of Ireland, then, the English could legitimately lay claim to the land themselves, and also maintain that they were bringing civility to it. Yet Ireland continued to cause particular apprehension, because it could be colonized and civilized by the English, but it was also potentially a corrupting force, and a territory that seemed always on the verge of rebellion. In contrast to Ireland, the Turkish Empire occasioned both admiration and fear. It presented a powerful challenge in many ways. Like the English, the Turks were represented as a masculine, conquering, and civil people. This was a complex characterization which could be simultaneously employed as admiration of Turkish imperial vigour, criticism of Turkish tyranny, and a marker of moral corruption. Many travellers focused on just one of these themes, though they sometimes appeared within the same work. Travellers usually agreed that the Turks were civil.86 A significant portion of them admired the Turks as powerful conquerors, emphasizing the qualities of militarism and virility that were so important to English identity. John Cartwright described them as ‘warlike and politic, magnificent and stately, and to say in a word, the very hammer of the world’.87 Historian Henry Marsh referred to them as ‘that puissant nation’, while the Ottoman Empire itself possessed ‘Majestical and August Form and Feature’.88 Henry Blount concurred, writing that the Turks were ‘the only modern people, great in action - he who would behold these times in their greatest

84 

Lithgow, Totall Discourse, p. 377; Holinshed, Chronicle, ed. by Miller and Power, p. 29. See also Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 161; Rich, New Description, pp. 5, 26; Brereton, Travels, p. 149; Spenser, Present State of Ireland, ed. by Gottfried, p. 218. 85  On this point, see for example Jones and Stallybrass, ‘Irena’, pp.  158–59; Canny, ‘Ideology’, p. 587; Ohlmeyer, ‘Civilizinge of those Rude Partes’, p. 140; Armitage, Ideological Origins, pp. 29–31, 49, 68, 97; Pagden, Lords of All the World, pp. 42–48, 76–79. For American examples, see O’Brien’s article, ‘“They are so frequently shifting their place of residence”’; Cave, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Savages’, pp. 9, 10. See also Zuckerman, ‘Identity in British America’, p. 154, and Cronon, Changes in the Land, especially chapter 4, ‘Bounding the Land’, pp. 54–81. 86  Burbury, Relation, p. 175; Biddulph, Travels, p. 66; Blount, Voyage, p. 42. 87  Cartwright, The Preachers Travels, p. 105. 88  Marsh, New Survey of the Turkish Empire, pp. 4, 47. See also p. 1.

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glory, could not find a better scene then (sic) Turky’.89 He too emphasized the Ottomans as a conquering force: ‘if ever any race of men were borne with spirits able to beare downe the world before them, I thinke it to be the Turke’.90 He continued by distinguishing ‘the greatnesse of their sprits’ from ‘petty states with their petty employments’ and ‘timid counsels’ which ‘enfeeble mens fancies, rendring them pusillanimous’.91 Ambassador Paul Rycaut made the connection between civility and conquest very clear in writing, ‘a people, as the Turks are, men of the same composition with us, cannot be savage and rude […] for ignorance and grossness is the effect of poverty, not incident to happy men, whose spirits are elevated with spoils and trophies of many nations’.92 Like the English, the Turks were seen as heirs of the Romans, a justification of colonial aims in both regions. Historian Richard Knolles described how ‘so many provinces and realms which in former times depended upon the Roman empire, do now acknowledge their power’.93 Many other authors also noted similarities between Turkish, English, or Roman societies.94 Perhaps surprisingly, some even approvingly noted similarities between Islam and English Protestantism, especially in rejection of elaborate religious ritual.95 For instance, Henry Blount maintained that Muhammad had restricted ‘outward solemnities’ from Islam, including ‘daintie pictures’ and ‘strange vestures’ because he judged them ‘effeminate’.96 In addition, English writers found much to praise in the life ways of the Turks. In their food habits, English writers portrayed the Turks as sparing and deliberately simple, very unlike the gross habits of the Irish. The Turks were 89 

Blount, Voyage, p. 2. Blount, Voyage, p. 97. 91  Blount, Voyage, p. 97. Also see pp. 2–3; Abercromby, The Present State of the German and Turkish Empires; Osborne, Political Reflections, p. 51. 92  Rycaut, Present State, n.p. 93  Knolles, History, iii, 955. 94  Knolles, History, iii, 983; Lithgow, Totall Discourse, p. 149; Blount, Voyage, pp. 54, 82–83, 90; Sandys, Sandys Travels, p. 54; Rycaut, Present State of the Ottoman Empire, p. 98. This work is appended to Knolles, History of the Turkish Empire, iii; Evelyn, Diary, ed. by Bray, iv, 265. 95  See Burbury, Relation, p. 114; Colley, Captives, pp. 122–25; Goffman, Ottoman Empire, pp. 111–12, 169–71, 212; McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks, pp. 127–32. 96  Blount, Voyage, p. 77. See also Osborne, Political Reflections upon the Government of the Turks, pp. 6–7 and Colley, Captives, pp. 22–25. Note that this kind of commendation also implicitly critiqued Catholicism. 90 

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also noted for their cleanliness. Moryson, for instance, was not alone in commenting on the ‘sparing’ and ‘temperate’ Turkish diet or the cleanliness of their clothing.97 Authors related these qualities specifically to Turkish austere manners as well as military readiness, both traits that the English admired. Travel writer Thomas Smith asserted Ottoman Janissaries, trained to live an ascetic life, ‘go soberly to destroy their enemies’.98 Moryson concurred, writing that it could not ‘sufficiently be commended’ that since ‘their greatest men can bee content’ to eat simply, ‘it is no marvell, that with ease they keepe great armies in the field’.99 Henry Marsh agreed that Turkish ‘temperence and abstemiousness’ had enabled them to ‘become the mightiest nation, and the greatest lord of the universe’.100 Thus moderate Turkish life needs were closely correlated to their imperial success. Yet while these kinds of comparisons were inherently favorable to the Turks, British writers also searched for reasons to disparage the Turks. When negative judgements were levelled at the Turkish state, they were based upon two related aspects. Early modern writers rejected what they described as Turkish tyranny, and they also criticized Turkish sexual behaviour, as they perceived it, which they believed was the consequence of a despotic state. Rejection of this ideal created an opportunity to define by contrast what it meant to be English.101 Many of the writers who had praised other aspects of Turkish society also strongly condemned Turkish tyranny.102 Richard Knolles labelled the sultan a ‘tyrant’, who held his people in ‘so absolute a sovereignty’ that it was ‘by any free born people not to be endured’.103 Often English authors charged that Turkish subjects were like slaves.104 Similarly, many writers believed that 97 

Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 128. In general, Turkish food was described as simple yet tasty, much as English food was believed to be. Biddulph, Travels, p. 65; Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 129; Bargrave, Travel Diary, ed. by Brennan, p. 127; Smith, Remarks, p. 188. 98  Smith, Remarks, p. 132. 99  Moryson, Itinerary, iii, 128. 100  Marsh, Survey, Dedicatory Epistle, and pp. 90–91. See also Blount, Voyage, pp. 70–71; and Speed, A Prospect, p. 183. 101  Tumbleson, in Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination, argues that popery, as a representative of overbearing tyranny, became a foil against which English national identity developed. 102  For instance, see Knolles, Turkish History, pp. 982–83; Burbury, Relation, pp. 113–14. 103  Knolles, Turkish History, pp. 982–83. 104  Knolles, Turkish History, p. 982. See Sandys, Sandys Travels, p. 25; Biddulph, Travels, p. 82; Moryson, Itinerary, p. 227; and Scott, Commonwealth Principles, pp. 159, 162–63.

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despotism led to corrupt morality, especially as exemplified in sexual practices, as well as loss of masculine vigour. While the Turks had begun as masculine, as the empire became corrupt, caused both by the tyrannical government and the natural weight of a great empire, the people were becoming effeminate. Yet at the same time, early modern observers admitted, and even hoped for, the possibility of Turkish decline, which they represented as a decrease in Turkish manly vigour. Henry Blount, for example, wrote, that while ‘for some ages, the Turkish race may retaine its own proper fierceness; yet in time’ it would succumb to ‘softnesse’.105 Likewise, Paul Rycaut charged that the Turkish militia ‘is now become degenerate, soft, and effeminate’.106 Furthermore, the English believed that the Turks had begun to compromise their previous masculinity, engaging in sexual excess and ‘sodomy’.107 For early modern writers, ‘sodomy’ was not a specifically defined behaviour, but implied sinfulness and malevolence, usually tied to particular sexual practices such as male homosexuality.108 It was believed connected to sexual excess.109 The opposition between virility and effeminacy served not only to encapsulate dualistic images of Turkey. It also defined an English form of national identity that remained moderate while avoiding the excesses of both the Irish (absolute liberty) and the Turks (overweening control). At the same time it allowed for the assimilation of certain values identified with the Turks. In par-

105 

Blount, Voyage, p. 83. Traveler Fynes Moryson also contended that the Roman Empire had fallen because of effeminacy. Itinerary, iii, 37. 106  Rycaut, Ottoman Empire, pp. 82, 101. 107  Rycaut, Present State, pp. 4–5; Bargrave, Travel Diary, ed. by Brennan, p. 83; Knolles, History of the Turkish Empire, iii, 990; Nixon, The Three English Brothers, n.p.; Sandys, Sandys Travels, p. 54; Biddulph, Travels into Africa, p. 22; ‘Master Thomas Coryates travels’, in Purchas, Hakluytus, viii, 425; Lithgow, Totall Discourse, pp. 145–46; Blount, Voyage, p. 79. 108  The literature on early modern writing about ‘sodomy’ includes Puff, Sodomy in Refor­ mation Germany and Switzerland; Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance, ed. by Borris; Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men, especially the first chapter, pp. 5–61; Bray, Homo­ sexuality in Renaissance England; Stewart, Close Readers; Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England; Goldberg, Sodometries; Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation. 109  European observers of elite Muslims criticized polygamy and concubinage, which they described as corrupting. Ottoman sultans such as Ibrahim I, as well as European monarchs such as James I, Charles I and II, William III, and Henry III of France, were perceived as having surrendered to the soft life of the seraglio and the court, abandoning weapons and the masculine com­panionship of warfare. Ottoman writers made similar arguments. Baer, ‘Manliness’, especially pp. 134–36.

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ticular, it established the English as an imperial people who were justified in their right to rule. Taken as a whole, this was an essentially reactive as well as unstable way in which to conceptualize national identity, but it served in an era where nationalism was a nascent rather than fully developed ideological system. Indeed, this reactive sense of national identity was sufficient to induce identification, affinity, and even patriotism. The books of popular writers who explained to their readers what it meant to be English were crucial constituents of the growth of national identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the most important were works of two early modern English writers, the travel writer Richard Hakluyt, and Thomas Sprat, promoter of the Royal Society, who both promoted a construction of English identity coinciding with and based upon a sense of national rivalry between England and its European competitors. These ideals were also promoted by travel writing in general. Such authors’ work fit into and amplified a discourse about national differences that was a crucial element in the early development of national identity in England. Although feeble and inconsistent by comparison with later nationalism, the early modern national identity articulated by these writers marked a critical stage in the development of modern nationalism.

Works Cited Primary Sources Abercromby, David, The Present State of the German and Turkish Empires (London: Published for D. Brown and T. Goodwin, 1684) Bargrave, Robert, The Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave, Levant Merchant, ed. by Michael G. Brennan (London: Hakluyt Society, 1999) Biddulph, William, Travels into Africa, Asia and the Blacke Sea (London: Printed by Thomas Haveland for W. Aspley, 1609) Blount, Henry, A Voyage into the Levant (London: Printed by I.L. for Andrew Crooke, 1636) Brereton, William, Travels in Holland the United Provinces England Scotland and Ireland, 1634–1635 (London: Printed for the Chetham Society, 1844) Burbury, John, A Relation of a Journey of the Right Honourable My Lord Henry Howard (London: Printed for Timothy Childe, 1671) Campion, Edmund, ‘Historie of Ireland’ [1633], in James Ware, Two Histories of Ireland (Antwerp: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press, 1971; repr. of Dublin: Printed by Andrew Crook for Matthew Gunne in Essex-Street and Eliphal Dobson, 1704), pp. 1–138

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Carr, William, An Accurate Description of the United Netherlands (London: Printed for Timothy Childe, 1691) Cartwright, John, The Preachers Travels (London: T. Thorppe, 1611) Dallington, Robert, A Method for Trauell (London: Printed by Thomas Creede, [1605(?)]) Daniel, Samuel, The Collection of the History of England, ed. by Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963; orig. publ. London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, 1612) Davies, Sir John, Historical Relations: or, A Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Intirely Subdu’d (Dublin: Printed for Samuel Dancer, 1666; orig. publ. 1612) Evelyn, John, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by William Bray (London: Frederick Warne and Co, 1901) Hakluyt, Richard, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the Eng­ lish Nation (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903; orig. publ. London: Prin­ted by George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Robert Barker, 1600) Heylyn, Peter, Cosmography in Four Books: Containing the Chorography and History of the Whole World (London: Printed for Anne Seile and Philip Chetwind, 1674) —— , Microcosmus, or A Little Description of the Great World (Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lichfield and James Short, 1621) —— , The Voyage of France (London: Printed for William Leake, 1673) Holinshed, Raphael, Irish Chronicle, ed. by Liam Miller and Eileen Power (Dublin: Dol­ men, 1979; orig. publ. London: at the expenses of Iohn Harison, George Bishop, Rafe Newberie, Henrie Denham, and Thomas VVoodcocke, printed by Henry Denham, 1587) Howell, James, Familiar Letters (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1903; orig. publ. London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1645) Knolles, Richard, The History of the Turkish Empire (London: J. D. for Tho. Basset, R. Clavell, J. Robinson, and A. Churchill, 1687) Lithgow, William, The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures & Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteene Yeares Travayles (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906; orig. publ. London: Imprinted by Nicholas Okes, and are to be sold by Nicholas Fussell and Humphrey Mosley, 1632) Marsh, Henry, A New Survey of the Turkish Empire (London: Published for Henry Marsh, 1663) Milton, John, Areopagitica, in The Portable Milton, ed. by Douglas Bush (New York: Viking Press, 1949), pp. 151–204 Montague, William, The Delights of Holland (London: Printed for John Sturton and A. Bosvile, 1696) Moryson, Fynes, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell (London: Printed by John Beale, 1617) Nixon, Anthony, The Three English Brothers (London: Printed by John Hodgets, 1607) Osborne, Francis, Political Reflections upon the Government of the Turks (London: Printed by J. G. for Thomas Robinson, 1656)

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Palmer, Sir Thomas, An Essay of the Meanes How to Make our Travailes, into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable (London: Printed by H. L. for Matthew Lownes, 1606) Perrott, James, The Chronicle of Ireland 1584–1608, ed. by Herbert Wood (Dublin: Stationary Office, 1933) Purchas, Samuel, Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes, 20 vols (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1905; orig. publ. London: by W. Stansby for H. Fetherstone, 1625) Ray, John, Observations Topographical, Moral, & Physiological Made in a Journey (London: Printed for John Martyn, 1673) Rich, Barnaby, A New Description of Ireland (London: Printed for Thomas Adams, 1610) Rycaut, Paul, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: Printed by J. D, 1687) Sandys, George, Sandys Travels (London: Printed for John Williams, 1673) Smith, Thomas, Remarks Upon the Manners, Religion and Government of the Turks (London: Printed for Moses Pitt, 1678) Sorbière, Samuel, de, Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1664) Speed, John, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (London: Printed for Roger Rea, 1668) Spenser, Edmund, A View of The Present State of Ireland, in The Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. by Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 11 vols (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1932–57), x: Spenser’s Prose Works; Spenser’s Letters; Axiochus; A View of the Present State of Ireland; A Brief Note of Ireland, ed. by Rudolf Gottfried (1949), pp. 39–231 Sprat, Thomas, L’histoire de la Societe royale de Londres (Geneva: Published for I. H. Widerhold, 1669) —— , The History of the Royal Society of London (London: Printed by T. R. for J. Martyn, 1667) —— , A Loyal Satyr Against Whiggism (London: Printed for C. B., 1682) —— , Observations upon Monsieur de Sorbier’s Voyage into England (London: Printed for John Martyn and James Allestry, 1665) Timberlake, Henry, A True and Strange Discourse of the Travailes of Two English Pilgrimes (London: Printed for Thomas Archer, 1603)

Secondary Studies Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) —— , ‘The Literature of Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. by William Louis and others, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), i: The Origins of Empire, ed. by Nicholas Canny (1998), pp. 99–123 Armstrong, John A., Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)

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Baer, Marc, ‘Manliness, Male Virtue and History Writing at the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Court’, Gender & History, 20.1 (2008), 128–48 Borris, Kenneth, ed., Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2004) Boswell, Jackson Campbell, Milton’s Library (New York: Garland Publishing, 1975) Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) Bredbeck, Gregory, Sodomy and Interpretation, Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) Canny, Nicholas P., ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 30.4 (1973), 575–98 —— , ‘The Origins of Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. by William Louis and others, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), i: The Origins of Empire, ed. by Nicholas Canny (1998), pp. 1–33 Canny, Nicholas P., and Anthony Pagden, eds, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) Carey, Daniel, ‘Hakluyt’s Instructions: The Principal Navigations and Sixteenth-Century Travel Advice’, Studies in Travel Writing, 13.2 (2009), 167–87 Carey, Daniel, and Claire Jowett, ‘Introduction: Early Modern Travel Writing: Varieties, Transitions, Horizons’, Studies in Travel Writing, 13.2 (2009), 95–99 Cave, Alfred A., ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Savages’, International Social Science Review, 60.1 (1985), 3–24 Cawley, Robert Rawson, Milton and the Literature of Travel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951) Colley, Linda, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002) Cox, William, A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel, 3 vols (Seattle: University of Washington, 1935–49) Cronon, William, Changes in the Land (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) Das, Nandini, ed., Travel and Prose Fiction in Early Modern England, special edition of Yearbook of English Studies, 41.1 (2011), 1–204 Dewar, Mary, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone, 1964) Duara, Prasenjit, ‘Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When’, in Becoming National, ed. by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 150–77 Fuller, Mary, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Foreign Relations’, in Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, ed. by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 38–52 Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) Gerbig, Andrea, ‘Key Words and Key Phrases in a Corpus of Travel Writing: From Early Modern English Literature to Contemporary “Blooks”’, in Keyness in Texts, ed. by Marina Bondi and Mike Scott (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010), pp. 147–68 Goffman, Daniel, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

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Goldberg, Jonathan, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stan­ ford University Press, 1992) Hadfield, Andrew, ‘Lenten Stuffe: Thomas Nashe and the Fiction of Travel’, Yearbook of English Studies, 41.1 (2011), 68–83 Hadfield, Andrew, and Willy Maley, ‘Irish Representations and English Alternatives’, in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. by Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–23 Hammond, Paul, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) Harris, Tim, ‘The British Dimension, Religion, and the Shaping of Political Identities during the Reign of Charles II’, in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850, ed. by Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1998), pp. 131–56 Harrison, John, and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) Hastings, Adrian, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) Hroch, Miroslav, ‘From National Movement to Fully Fledged Nation’, New Left Review, 198 (1993), 3–20 Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Dismantling Irena: The Sexualizing of Ireland in Early Modern England’, in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. by Andrew Parker and others (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 157–74 Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1960) Kumar, Krishnan, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Laurence, Ann, ‘The Cradle to the Grave: English Observation of Irish Social Customs in the Seventeenth Century’, Seventeenth Century, 3.1 (1988), 63–84 Leerssen, Joep, ‘Wildness, Wilderness, and Ireland: Medieval and Early-Modern Patterns in the Demarcation of Civility’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 56.1 (1995), 25–39 MacLaren, I. S., ‘In Consideration of the Evolution of Explorers and Travellers into Authors: A Model’, Studies in Travel Writing, 15.3 (2011), 221–41 Mancall, Peter, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) Markley, Robert, ‘Riches, Power, Trade and Religion: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1720’, Renaissance Studies, 17.3 (2003), 494–516 McCarthy, Justin, The Ottoman Turks (London: Longman, 1997) Morgan, Philip D., ‘Encounters Between British and ‘Indigenous’ Peoples, c. 1500–c. 1800’, in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds, Empire and Others: British Encounters

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with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 42–78 Neville-Sington, Pamela, ‘“A Very Good Trumpet”: Richard Hakluyt and the Politics of Overseas Expansion’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. by Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (New York: St  Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 66–79 Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987) O’Brien, Jean, ‘“They Are So Frequently Shifting Their Place of Residence”: Land and the Construction of Social Place of Indians in Colonial Massachusetts’, in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds, Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 204–16 Ohlmeyer, Jane H., ‘“Civilizinge of those Rude Partes”: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580s–1640s’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. by William Louis and others, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), i: The Origins of Empire, ed. by Nicholas Canny (1998), pp. 124–47 Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) —— , ‘“Strange, Remote, and Farre Distant Contreys”: The Travel Books of Richard Hakluyt’, Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers, and the Book Trade, ed. by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999), pp. 1–37 —— , ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. by William Louis and others, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), i: The Origins of Empire, ed. by Nicholas Canny (1998), pp. 34–54 Parker, Kenneth, ed., Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology (London: Rout­ ledge, 1999) Pennington, Loren E., ‘Hakluytus Posthumus: Samuel Purchas and the Promotion of English Overseas Expansion’, The Emporia State Research Studies, 14.3 (1996), 5–39 Pincus, Steven, ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Senti­ ment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s’, The Historical Journal, 38.2 (1995), 333–61 —— , Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Puff, Helmut, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) Quinn, D. B., ‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (1976), 73–93 Rabb, Theodore, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) Scott, Jonathan, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

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Sherman, William, ‘Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1700)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (New York: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2002), pp. 17–36 Smith, Anthony, The Antiquity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity, 2004) Snyder, Edward D., ‘The Wild Irish: A Study of Some English Satires Against the Irish, Scots, and Welsh’, Modern Philology, 17.12 (1919–20), 147–85 Stewart, Alan, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1997) Summers, Claude J., ed., Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England (Binghampton, NY: Haworth, 1992) Suranyi, Anna, The Genius of the English Nation: Early Modern Travel Literature and English National Identity (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008) Tumbleson, Raymond D., Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Vaughan, Alden T., ‘Early English Paradigms for New World Natives’, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 102.1 (1992), 33–67 Zuckerman, Michael, ‘Identity in British America’, in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1987), pp. 115–58

Afterword Mary Polito [Knowledge and belief are] contestatory, overused, and ultimately unsatisfactory terms, terms that are both empty and loaded. Empty because they can mean so many different things in different disciplines, practices, and semiotic schemes. Loaded because they are stuffed, even overstuffed, with meanings and implications, like a sofa or a foie gras duck or a comic farce. Or a loaded gun.1

M

arjorie Garber finds the emptiness of the words ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief ’ in the historical contingency of their truth claims, and their loadedness in the danger they pose to the productive proliferation of dialogue. She advocates instead for the value of learning, not a ‘little learning’, which, as she reminds us, Alexander Pope called a ‘dangerous thing’, but rather Pope’s notion of learning as ‘an open and continuing question, not or not only, a content’.2 She also defends in the name of learning, within the field of literary criticism, the recently maligned ‘lady Theory or Theoria’ with her speculative and discursive practices against the ‘rising stock’ of the empirical.3 The study of literature and culture of Renaissance England by way of ‘theory’ and empirical history has existed for more than thirty years in a state of mostly productive crisis, often generated by conflicts about knowledge and beliefs about the status of the human sciences. The field was, arguably, generated by bringing into question, through theory, the existence or at least the discernibility of the prima 1 

Garber, ‘Loaded Words’, p. 618. Garber, ‘Loaded Words’, p. 620. 3  Garber, ‘Loaded Words’, pp. 621, 623. 2 

Mary Polito ([email protected]) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She specializes in early modern studies

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materia of humanism, human nature. It proceeded by investigating how that nature was discerned by the early moderns themselves and how such discernment was deployed. The project remains important, even for post-humanists, because at stake is human agency in the realm of ethical action. One of the reasons I am delighted to contribute an afterword to Identities in Early Modern English Writing: Religion, Gender, Nation is because this collection continues the tradition of historicist and materialist investigation of early modern writing, culture, personages (historical and fictional), and the ethics of representation. The contributions represent the maturation of the general project in the ease with which the authors write across disciplinary boundaries and in the depth of their engagement with history. Further, I welcome the opportunity to consider the crisis that inheres in conceptions and lexicons of human selfhood and the particular status of the word ‘identity’. For, curiously, unlike such loaded words as ‘the individual’ and ‘the subject’, ‘identity’ remains a workhorse that does its duty without incurring serious charges of ahistoricity, essentialism, or determinism. While the word ‘identity’ was barely in use during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—Shakespeare, for example, never uses it or any English cognates—its earliest usages in print are often instructive regarding the concerns of this volume: religion, gender, and nation. I begin, however, by touching base with the tenor of recent debates about ‘the self ’, usefully illustrated in the incredibly lively discussion around David Hawkes’s essay ‘Against Materialism in Literary Theory’, published in Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar.4 Five interlocutors respond to Hawkes’s essay, Hawkes rebuts with ‘Against Idealism Too: A Response to Critics’, and four respond to his response. Hawkes charges in his initial essay: all of the materialisms currently prominent in literary studies share one fundamental assumption. They all believe that the human subject, mind or soul is an illusion […]. Any evaluation of materialism’s benefits for literary analysis must therefore focus on this core shared assumption. Is it true that human beings have no soul?5

The essay and this question in particular are clearly crafted for polemical effect; Hawkes knows very well that ‘the soul’ is a loaded word and that it will ‘go off ’, as Garber predicts loaded words are bound to do, even if, in his response piece, Hawkes vehemently denies that he is using ‘soul’ in a theological sense. 4  Hawkes, ‘Against Materialism’. Hawkes’s essay appears in this forum almost simul­taneously with its appearance in print in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies. 5  Hawkes, p.  21. Hawkes’s essay is paginated, while the other contributions appear in numbered paragraphs.

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He charges that materialists in the humanities are suffering from false consciousness in assuming that their project is ‘politically progressive’, because in truth materialist methods are aligned, in their attention to the performative nature of the sign, with late capitalism and its ever more abstract units of trade and its representation of commodities and commodified consumers as ‘idols’ at the expense of the ‘real’ signifying primates. In humanist terms, this concern with matter and sign, Hawkes implies, is dehumanizing. In the exchanges that follow, that element that we perceive (falsely?) as ‘that within which passeth show’ (and which, the Prince continues to argue, is not at all revealed by the external signs for Hamlet) is described and sometimes defended as ‘substance’, ‘mind’, ‘the subject’, ‘consciousness’, ‘qualia’, ‘the cognizer’, ‘soul’, and occasionally as ‘identity’. Hawkes himself refers to ‘identity politics’ as a realm in which, he allows, materialist approaches have served ‘politically progressive causes’ (if still not anti-capitalist ones).6 In ‘Against Idealism Too’, he declares that what he is for is dialectical thinking: Dialectics argues that, in the act of identifying anything as conceptually existent, we automatically bring something other than that thing into conceptual existence. We conceptualize things by their relation to what they are not, with reference to their ‘other’. Identity is relational, not essential, so that such concepts as ‘ideas’ and ‘matter’ must be understood via their relation to each other. The apparent opposites interpenetrate, each side of the polarity bringing the other into conceptual being. One could not exist, in human consciousness, without the other.7

Responders object to this claim.8 None of his interlocutors and perhaps few others would quibble with Hawkes’s statement that ‘identity is relational, not 6 

Hawkes, pp. 22–23. Hawkes, ‘Against Idealism Too’, para. 16. 8  Egan defends Marx as a materialist in ‘Materialism, the Mind/Body Problem and Genetics’, para.  4; Booth, in ‘Counter-response to David Hawkes’ objects to Hawkes’s characterization of dialectics: ‘The doctrine of constitutive binarisms is, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, greatly overprized and overextended in contemporary critical discourse’ (para.  12); Flesch, in ‘Reductive Anti-reductionism’ charges Hawkes with eschewing the dialectical method in his own highly polemical position papers (para. 10). In their counterresponse, ‘Traffickers in Transformation’, Sutton and Tribble also contend that Hawkes is not himself a dialectician: ‘we take him to be a substance dualist (rather than, for example, merely a property dualist). In any case, like all dualists before him, Hawkes will need to specify more about how there can be the kinds of interactive relations between material and non-material realms which the dialectician presumably wants’ (para. 5). 7 

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essential’, thus illustrating the apparently innocent and dialectical nature of this term. Such concordance would seem to imply that the question is settled: ‘identity’ is neither too empty nor too loaded a word to foreclose on its critical utility, except that etymologically the word first comes into use in English as a staple of idealism.9 The Oxford English Dictionary argues that this is the case in its definitions and by way of the earliest citations it provides, in which the word appears in the service of the primary tenets of natural philosophy, theology, mathematics, economics, and the law. Yet these citations from early printed works often belie, rather than support, the given definitions. The OED finds the origin of ‘identity’ in the Latin idem (the same), ‘postclassical Latin identitat-, identitas’ and Middle French ‘identité, ydemtité, ydemptité, ydentité’. (The Middle English Dictionary also gives us ‘ydemptifically’ in Ranulph Higden’s fourteenth-century Polychronicon.) The OED’s first definition of identity is ‘[t]he quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration’. This sense conforms to the Aristotelian and medieval understanding of identity as the union of matter and substance. This first principal of natural philosophy, that a physical body is ‘made up of its substantial form—its essence, a composite of prime matter and the form that Nature imposes on that prime matter—and its accidents—inherent qualities that, were they to change, would not change the essence of the physical body’ provided a challenge, argues Katherine Eggert, for academics on the question of transubstantiation, well before the Reformation.10 Higden’s use is a case in point; he employs the word in a complaint against the many heretical ‘conclusions’ of ‘Wiclif ’: ‘Also anoþer conclusion, that Criste is not in that sacramente ydemptifically, veryly and really, in his propre presence corporealle’.11 It is not surprising, then, to find, in citations given by the OED and Early Modern Lexicons of English and in searches of Early English Books Online that the word ‘identity’ was first employed in print during the Reformation in debates about the Eucharist. We find John Bale using it in 1545 while in exile in Amsterdam, in one of his brilliantly satiric invectives against the Roman church and the doctrine of transubstantiation. In A Mysterye of Inyquyte Contayned within the 9 

Identity politics is more actively problematized, especially by those many who have worked within the paradigm. See Diamond, ‘Identity Politics Then and Now’, pp. 64–68; Clifford, ‘Taking Identity Politics Seriously’, pp. 94–112; and Gilroy, After Empire. 10  Eggert, ‘Hamlet’s Alchemy: Transubstantiation, Modernity, Belief ’. 11  Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Maonachi Cestrensis, p. 462.

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Heretycall Genealogye of Ponce Pantolabus, he rails against a poem (not extant) which defends the doctrine and which Bale claims had been published recently in England.12 Bale lists the proliferation of theoretical complexities employed by scholastics to reconcile the idea that a set of accidents (bread and water) can be signs for more than one substance and that this singular substance (the body and blood of Christ) can be present in more than one place at the same time: After that came in ydemptyte / realyte / formalyte / materyalyte / propryete / veracyte / absolute beynge / multiplicacyon / vnyon / diffynita|cyon / essenciacyon / vbiquite fyguralite / symbolycalite / naturalyte / potencialite / personalyte / presencialyte / proporcionalite / perticipalite / habitualite / virtualite / dymencio|nalite / substancialite / deificalite / carnalite corporalite / modalite / supposytalite / yposta|ticalite / and a great sort more amonge their Sentencioners and Scolistes.13

Bale’s set of terms, led by ‘ydemptyte’, seems in some ways startlingly familiar, aside from the archaic orthology, and might even remind us of the terminological proliferation in contemporary debates such as those in the above mentioned issue of EMC. Without understanding precisely what Bale, or the enigmatic Ponce Pantolabus, may have meant by ‘naturalyte’, ‘personalyte’, and ‘fyguralite’, we can certainly see that these early clerics were concerned about this insubstantial thing named ‘substance’ and its relation to materiality and representation. Despite the theological nature of the debate about the special problem of the Eucharist, the meaning of identity was imbricated in debates about materiality (if not strictly materialism) idealism and difference from its inception in English. The OED employs another treatise concerned with theology—the first edition of Thomas Morton’s 1596 A Treatise of the Threefolde State of Man—written while he was a student at Cambridge—to illustrate definition 2.a.: ‘The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition of being a single individual; the fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality’. The sentence fragment cited from Morton, however, seems at odds with this definition: ‘The mutabilitie of the creature (whereby the identitie of God is illustrated) appeareth […] in the generall diuersitie of mans state, which sometimes is innocent and hap-

12  Rainer states that Ponce Pantolabus ‘was a pseudonym for John Huntington’, ‘John Bale’s Nondramatic Works’, p. 221, n. 7. 13  Bale, A Mysterye of Inyquyte, pp. 33–34.

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pie, other times sinfull and miserable’.14 Morton calls his work, in his address ‘To the reader’, ‘an anatomie of the soule’ in an early figurative use of anatomy, to enhance a comprehension of his object by casting it in material terms. In this abstraction, the ‘creature’ called ‘man’, is similar to other such creatures in that he is subject to change, in this case as it happens, through the Calvinist notion of ‘regeneration’ (47). This iteration of identity, however, clearly implies sameness, not with the self, but with an entity that is not the self, namely the divine. The omitted portion of the sentence cited by the OED declares that the recognition of the possibility of such changes must disallow ‘that he may say truely of himselfe, I am that I was, and will be that I am and no otherwise’ (349). Morton, who will eventually temper his Calvinism as a royal chaplain, attempts to inculcate in his reader a sense of self, not fixed, but full of promise. Morton dedicates his work, ‘To the godly, wise, and vertuous ladie, the Ladie Elizabeth Cary’ (though not the same Lady Cary we have already met in this collection) and in his dedication he invokes as well, though here for rhetorical purposes, the relationality of identity.15 He refers to ‘her sexe’ and his hopes that she might, by her example ‘wipe away that blot of sillie simplicity and want of deepe reach in matters of importance, wherewith it is vsually stained and debased’ (6). Cary is identified by her ‘sexe’ and also by the grace of her ‘worldly honour and power’ (6) and status as a patron to help guide ‘spirituall zeale in the right course’ (6). She is a woman different from the general case of woman, but other women have the potential, through their relation to her and her exemplarity, to improve the sad though mutable state of their intellectual and spiritual superficiality. While theological works provide most of the early citation sources for ‘identity’, we find its use increasing in the 1520s, in the service of mathematics, logic, grammar, and geography.16 The word is used in an ambitious and wide-ranging work that takes on the tone of nationalistic utopianism, and is also an apology 14 

Morton, A Treatise of the Threefolde State of Man. The ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ and the address ‘To the Reader’ are not paginated. Pagination is provided for the main body of the work, however, and therefore these page numbers are provided in text. 15  According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the surname for Lady Elizabeth and her husband Sir Robert is Carey, not Cary. Lady Elizabeth Carey was the daughter of Sir Hugh Trevannion and is most remembered for having cared for Charles I in his early years. See Loomis, ‘Sir Robert Carey, First Early of Monmouth’. 16  See, for example, Billingsley, Euclide; Cotta’s treatise against magic, The Infallible True and assured Vvitch; Heylyn’s self-described work of ‘Geographie’, Mikrokosmos; and Richardson’s The Logicians School-Master.

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for the standardization of weights and measures: Thomas Milles’ 1627 OutPort-Customers Accompt.17 One of the four figures whose writings are considered ‘by economic historians as the canonical documents of early English mercantilism’, Milles argues that nothing less than national order, abundance, and liberty will be the fruits of the ‘identity of ‘Standarts’ for which he lobbies.18 In a section in dialogue, the character Ignorance inquires of Customer, ‘What meane you by Standarts?’ and Customer replies, ‘Unity and Truth, in Weights, Numbers, and Measures’, arguing further that Proportions shewe Perfection, whose vses being Union and Endes being Peace; bring all at last to Happinesse by Identity of Standart, and Mutuall Exchange. For look how Exchange, of the selfe-same Truth and Goodnesse, in Gold and Siluer fixt, by the Name of Bullion, way’d out in Coyne, and warranted for vse by the name of Money, shewes Men to be Kings by generall consent, and Kings to be Gods, by infusiue Grace: And how Gold and Siluer becomes in this respect, the very Body and Blood of Kings; for without the Power of coynage, euen Kinges are but Men, and without their materials, how can they Coyne Money?

Gil Harris observes that Milles and his fellows saw ‘the prince as the fons et origo of the nation’s riches’.19 The above passage also suggests, in its allusion to the Eucharistic formula, a moment of ‘political theology’. The nationalist utopianism of his policy is apparent as the above passage continues: ‘the Identity of Standarts betweene Kinges and their Kingdomes by Reciproke Commerce, is the meanes of mutuall Happinesse; as well in Matter, Order, and End, as Persons and Place, by protecting all their Liuings, all their Liberties, all their Liues, all their Honour, and the Peace of all their Land’. Milles believes passionately in the efficacy of the instruments that will ensure such national standards. Through the mundane work of weighing and measuring and of weighing and measuring the weighing and measuring, the highest ideals of the Jacobean nation will be achieved. A debate about marriage provides what seems to be the first use of the word ‘identity’ in a work of drama. Walter Montagu’s court pastoral The Shepheard’s Paradise was performed for the King in 1633. It was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria, who also appeared, and significantly also spoke and sang, as the character Bellesa.20 While women had performed in court masques for 17 

Milles, Out-Port-Customers Accompt. Harris, Sick Economies, p. 2. 19  Harris, Sick Economies, p. 14. 20  The publication date for the dramatic work is erroneously given on Early English Books 18 

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nearly thirty years, sometimes in all women casts, in this production the women were also cross-cast as men. These events generated William Prynne’s famous declaration that women on stage are ‘notorious whores’.21 Generally recognizing it as not a very good play, scholars find this work an intriguing cultural artefact, nevertheless, and speculate that it must have been a spectacular performance. In her chapter, ‘The Fashioning of a Self in The Shepherd’s Paradise’, Karen Britland demonstrates how the play engages ‘with questions of marriage, government, and masculine constancy, interrogating notions of personal identity and promoting a role for women as the cornerstones of a virtuous society’.22 Britland finds allusions to contemporary European political and religious tensions in the play and she argues convincingly for the significance and sophistication of Henrietta Maria’s role as producer and performer. The word ‘identity’ is employed in a debate between minor characters whose subplot is not addressed by Britland. Camena (a shepherdess played by Anne Kirke) and Melidoro (a shepherd played by Elizabeth Howard) discuss the relative merits of platonic versus married love.23 The stakes are high because Melidoro is in love with Camena and is trying to convince her to leave the paradise of women and marry him. While as we would expect, Camena does consent to marriage at the conclusion of the play, this exchange provides an extraordinarily revealing understanding of the complexity that was early modern marriage. As Melidoro addresses Camena’s reservations, he argues, Nuptiall bonds Camena do not convey you over to the propriety of him they are delivered to; they rather do enlarge the owning of your selfe. For they make the same as your selfe, what you vouchsafe to joyne unto it. So you are still owned, but

Online as 1629; the correct date for the publication is 1659. See Poynting, ‘Introduction’, p. vii. Poynting relates that there are five extant manuscripts of the play and she provides a strong case for her use of the Tixall Manuscript as copy text for her edition. I am citing from the published edition, however, as it gives a more extensive discussion of the status of identity within marriage. 21  Prynne, Histrio-Mastix. The famous phrase appears in the non-paginated, alphabetized ‘Table (With Some briefe Additions) of the chiefest Passages in this Treatise’, following p. 1006. Under ‘W’, Prynne gives us ‘Women-Actors, notorious whores […]. And dare then any Christian women be so more then whorishly impudent, as to act, to speake publikely on a Stage, (perchance in mans apparell, and cut haire, here proved sinfull and abominable) in the presence of sundry men and women?’. 22  Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, pp. 113–14. 23  Poynting, ‘Introduction’, p. ix. Also performing, notes Poynting, was Victoria Cary, the twelve-year-old daughter of the Lady Elizabeth Cary who was married to Sir Henry Cary, 1st Viscount of Falkland.

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by your selfe inlarged. D […] not fright me then Camena, with that word [submission [sic], when all I wish is but this Identity, To become mo […] subject to you, because we do dispose of nothing so freely as our selves.24

While the value of anything like neoplatonic love and most certainly the contemplative life has all but disappeared in our own contemporary discourse, what Melidoro is experiencing and celebrating here is the ideal of romantic love very much as it is experienced and understood today: he sees Camena as his ‘soul mate’. Camena, on the other hand, understands the union in far more material terms: That which in our freedome Melidoro, is an a[…]surance against these bonds, after our engagement do […] expose us most to the penalty of them. This Identity […] man and wife, this aggravates our faults […] all our suffering made legall by this Identity.25

For Melidoro, marriage is described as a transcendence of the material accidents of their individuality into a union only a little removed from the ideal of neoplatonism. Camena, on the other hand, makes reference to the legal ‘identity’ of married women in English law. As the anonymous author of The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, published just a year before the performance, explains, the ‘Law’ regards a married couple ‘as one individed substance’ and ‘Matrimony’ as signalling their ‘identitie of person’.26 He acknowledges, however, and not without at least a show of sympathy, that this ‘wise fiction of Law’ does not denote equality; a wife, now ‘feme covert […] that is, vailed, as it were, clouded and over-shadowed’.27 She might even wonder ‘whether shee bee either none or no more then halfe a person’.28 Montagu’s Camena sees that under the law identity is indeed relational and she distrusts the ‘bonds’ of matrimony. These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usages of identity do not yet realize the notion of individuality as the self-conscious perception of personal singularity, what the OED defines as ‘personal identity’ and finds in citations from the late seventeenth century.29 This is not to say, of course, that such ideas and 24 

Montagu, The Shepheard’s Paradise, pp. 52–53. Montagu, The Shepheard’s Paradise, p. 53. 26  T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights, pp. 116, 120. 27  T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights, p. 125. 28  T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights, p. 4. 29  See OED ‘personal identity’ under ‘Special Uses’ of the adjective ‘personal’. 25 

202 Mary Polito

sensibilities about the self were not present in the period.30 ‘Identity’ would come to be synonymous with such loaded words as ‘the individual’ in common parlance and in literary studies. It was surely the work of both theory and identity politics that in some ways returned the word to its more productive early modern sphere of concerns. These instances of early usage show that the word’s official work to establish sameness necessitated the recognition of difference and that ‘identity’ operated early on by foregrounding not sameness with the self, but sameness with others: God, the nation, the lover. This does not mean that it was or is an innocent word, but rather that the way perception of identity depends on a kind of contrapuntal motion away from the self tends to prevent the word itself from becoming ‘loaded’, in Garber’s terms. More importantly, this brief review of early usage shows that the approach to identity as relational that we find in this collection, and these chapters’ focus on religion, gender, and nation as integrated spheres, reflect on concerns very central and urgent for the early moderns themselves.

30 

For an engaging philological investigation of historical shifts in grammatical construc­ tions that may reveal a changing experience of identity, see Adamson, ‘Questions of Identity in Renaissance Drama’.

Afterword

203

Works Cited Primary Sources Bale, John, A Mysterye of Inyquyte Contayned within the Heretycall Genealogye of Ponce Panto­labus, is Here Both Dysclosed & Confuted by Iohan Bale (Geneva: Mychael Woode, printer, 1545) Billingsley, H., The Elements of Geometrie of the Most Auncient Philosopher Euclide of Megara: Faithfully (Now First) Translated into the Englishe Toung, by H. Billingsley, Citizen of London (London: Iohn Daye, printer, 1570) Cotta, John, The Infallible True and Assured Vvitch: or, The Second Edition, of The Tryall of Witch-Craft Shewing the Right and True Methode of the Discouerie: with a Confutation of Erroneous Vvayes, Carefully Reuiewed and More Fully Cleared and Augmented (London: Richard Higgenbotham, publisher, 1624) Heylyn, Peter, Mikrokosmos: A Little Description of the Great World (Oxford: W. Turner and T. Huggins, 1625) Higden, Ranulph, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Maonachi Cestrensis; Together With The English Translations Of John Trevisa And Of An Unknown Writer Of The Fifteenth Century, 9 vols (London: Longman & co., 1865–86) Milles, Thomas, Out-Port-Customers Accompt, of all his Receipts, to a Shilling, or a Penny, without Concealement or Enstaulement of Any; According to his Oath at his First Admis­ sion: Wherein he Plainely Sets Downe, as well the Motiues and Occasions, as the Method and Style of all his Former Writings (London: W. Jaggard, 1627) Montagu, Walter, The Shepheard’s Paradise: A Comedy: Privately Acted before the Late King Charls by the Queen’s Majesty, and Ladies of Honour (London: Thomas Dring, 1659 [given as 1629 in error]) Morton, Thomas of Berwick, A Treatise of the Threefolde State of Man wherein is Handled, 1 His Created Holinesse in his Innocencie; 2 His Sinfulnesse Since the Fall of Adam; 3 His Renewed Holinesse in his Regeneration (London: Robert Dexter and Raph Iackeson, 1596) Prynne, William, Histrio-Mastix The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie, Divided into Two Parts (London: Michael Sparke, 1633) Richardson, Alexander, The Logicians School-Master: or, A Comment Vpon Ramus logicke (London: Iohn Bellamie, 1629) T. E., The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1979; orig. publ. 1632)

Secondary Studies Adamson, Sylvia, ‘Questions of Identity in Renaissance Drama: New Historicism Meets Old Philology’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 61.1 (2010), 56–77 Booth, Michael, ‘Counter-response to David Hawkes’, Early Modern Culture: An Elec­ tronic Seminar, 9 (2012) [accessed 1 August 2013]

204 Mary Polito

Britland, Karen, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Clifford, James, ‘Taking Identity Politics Seriously: The Contradictory, Stony Ground …’, in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, ed. by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 94–112 Diamond, Elin, ‘Identity Politics Then and Now’, Theatre Research International, 37.1 (2012), 64–68 Egan, Gabriel, ‘Materialism, the Mind/Body Problem and Genetics: A Response to David Hawkes’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, 9 (2012) [accessed 1 August 2013] Eggert, Katherine, ‘Hamlet’s Alchemy: Transubstantiation, Modernity, Belief ’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 64.1 (2013), 45–57 Flesch, William, ‘Reductive Anti-reductionism’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Sem­inar, 9 (2012) [accessed 1 August 2013] Garber, Marjorie, ‘Loaded Words’, Critical Inquiry, 32.4 (2006), 618–28 Gilroy, Paul, After Empire: Melancholia Or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004) Harris, Jonathan Gil, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) Hawkes, David, ‘Against Idealism Too’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, 9 (2012) [accessed 1 August 2013] —— , ‘Against Materialism’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, 9 (2012) [accessed 1 August 2013] Loomis, A. J., ‘Sir Robert Carey, First Earl of Monmouth’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) [accessed 1 August 2013] Poynting, Sarah, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Montagu, The Shepherd’s Paradise, ed. by Sarah Poynting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. vii–xxvi Rainer, Pineas, ‘John Bale’s Nondramatic Works of Religious Controversy’, Studies in the Renaissance, 9 (1962), 218–33 Sutton, John, and Evelyn B. Tribble, ‘Traffickers in Transformation’, Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar, 9 (2012) [accessed 1 August 2013]

Index

Baldwin, William A Mirror for Magistrates: 4, 35, 39, 40, 42, 46, 51 Cary, Elizabeth The History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II: 59, 66, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 The Tragedy of Mariam: 75, 76 Catherine de Medici: 4, 10, 26, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56 Chapman, George The Tragedy of Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany: 146, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162 Civil War, English: 5, 109, 110, 117 Clitherow, Margaret: 1–3 Dowriche, Anne The French Historie: 4, 35–58 Elizabeth I, queen of England: 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 26, 31, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 63, 64, 73, 74, 146, 149, 162 Fanshawe, Lady Ann Memoirs: 5, 117, 119–24, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138 “Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts”: 5, 118, 119, 124–39

Foxe, John Acts and Monuments: 4, 35, 36, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 56 France: 12, 36, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 76, 127, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156, 159, 160, 179 Hakluyt, Richard The Principal Navigations: 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 175, 176, 177, 186 Heywood, Thomas The Four Prentices of London: 5, 146, 151, 152, 153 historiography: 5, 35–58, 94 Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan: 5, 85–115 Ireland: 5, 6, 60–84, 127, 147, 166, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182 Marlowe, Christopher Edward II: 145, 146, 147 martyrs: 1–3, 35, 38, 39, 46, 47, 49, 50 Mary I, queen of England: 2, 3, 54 Mary I, queen of Scotland: 12, 37, 38, 43 Milton, John: 90, 177 Ottoman Empire: 6, 166, 178, 181, 182, 183, 184 Reformation: 37, 41, 46, 47, 49, 54, 61, 89, 103, 196

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Shakespeare, William Edward III: 145 Henry IV, Part I: 159 Henry V: 145, 149–50, 151, 152, 153, 156 Henry VI, Part I: 145, 149 Henry VI, Part II: 145, 149 Venus and Adonis: 15 Sidney, Philip The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: 4, 9–34 Defence of Poetry: 24, 30 Smith, Wentworth The Hector of Germany. Or the Palsgrave, prime Elector: 146, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 161 Spain: 12, 61, 118, 120, 127, 130, 131, 148, 154, 159, 160, 161 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene: 15, 28, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 81 A View of the Present State of Ireland: 59, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 81, 180 Sprat, Thomas The History of the Royal Society of London: 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175 Observations upon Monsieur de Sorbier’s Voyage into England: 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 179 Tudor dynasty: 2, 12, 26, 35, 37, 38, 40, 43, 46, 48, 51, 52 Tymme, Thomas: 35, 39, 40, 41, 42

INDEX

Early European Research

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Nicholas Eckstein and Nicholas Terpstra (2009) Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Yasmin Haskell (2011) Giovanni Tarantino, Republicanism, Sinophilia, and Historical Writing: Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) and his ‘History of England’ (2012) Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Jean Andrews, and Marie-France Wagner (2013) Friendship and Social Networks in Scandinavia c.1000–1800, ed. by Jón Viðar Sigurðsson and Thomas Småberg (2013)

In Preparation ‘Fama’ and her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Heather Kerr and Claire Walker