Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England [1 ed.] 0268038414, 9780268038410

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Imitatio Christi

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I m i t a t i o C hrist i THE POETICS OF PIETY I N E A R LY M O D ER N EN G L A N D

NANDRA PERRY

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2014 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perry, Nandra, author. Imitatio Christi : the Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England / Nandra Perry. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-03841-0 (paperback) — ISBN 0-268-03841-4 (paper) — ISBN 978-0-268-08976-4 (e-book) 1. English literature —Early modern, 1500 –1700 —History and criticism. 2. Piety in literature. 3. Imitation in literature. 4. Christianity and literature —England—History —16th century. 5. Christianity and literature —England—History —17th century. 6. Imitatio Christi. I. Title. PR428.C48P47 2014 820.9'3823 — dc23 2014001703 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Acknowledgments

1 2 3

Introduction

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The Church Eloquent: Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Reformed Body Visible

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The Word Made Text: Thomas Rogers and Early Modern Imitatio

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The Word Made Flesh: Philip Sidney and the Defence of Poesy

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The Sound of Silence: Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero

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The Tragedy of Mariam: Hagiographical Contexts and Subtexts

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Cary the (Heroic) Author

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The “Book of Virtue”: Reading the Royal Body in The New Arcadia and Eikon Basilike

107

Reading the Body Natural in The Practice of Pietie

114

Reading the Royal Body in Eikon Basilike

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Pamela, Charles, and the Royal “Book of Virtue”

140

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Contents

The Church (P)articulate: Breaking the Body Visible in Eikonoklastes

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Altars, Mothers, Fathers, and Martyrs: Reading the Body in Ceremonialist and Anticeremonialist Polemic

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Gross Anatomy: Milton Dissects the King’s Book

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Postscript: A Voice in the Wilderness

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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I set out to explore the roots of early modern literary culture in the dream of a transcendent Word, only to become caught up in a story about the inextricability of human meaning making from the gritty mysteries of incarnation. That same trajectory has marked my behind-the-scenes process as a scholar and a writer. At more points along the way than I can count, my “intended pattern” has been vitally transformed by the well-timed words of those with whom I have been privileged to live and work in community. Insofar as the final pattern is a “lively” one, it is due to their ongoing inspiration. First among equals are my earliest intellectual mentors at the University of North Carolina. To Megan Matchinske, Reid Barbour, and Peter Kaufman, thank you for believing I was on to something before I did and for giving me the tools I needed to find out for myself. I am also deeply indebted to my colleagues at California Lutheran University and Texas A&M, whose good advice and good company have sustained me as my argument took shape. Particular thanks go to Pat Phillipy, Jim Harner, and Margaret Ezell for their feedback at various stages in the drafting process and to Nancy Bradley Warren for her invaluable support in that last push toward publication. Thanks are due as well to my able undergraduate vii

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research assistant, James Rians, for his careful editorial work. In addition to intellectual and moral support, I have also enjoyed generous financial support at Texas A&M University from the Department of English, the Office for the Vice President of Research, and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. This project has also benefited from support more far afield. My thanks to the International Sidney Society for providing such a friendly and lively forum for the discussion of ideas that eventually became chapters 2 and 3 and also to David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson, whose willingness to read a draft of chapter 3 changed everything. To Robert Stillman, thank you for being every bit as inclusive and intellectually generous as your beloved Philippists. Finally, I am grateful to my anonymous evaluators at University of Notre Dame Press, whose insightful comments were enormously helpful. Part of the introduction appeared previously as “The Imitation of Christ in English Reformation Writing,” Literature Compass 8, no. 4 (2011): 195–205. I am grateful to Wiley Blackwell for permission to reprint this material. Part of chapter 1 was published previously in an essay entitled “Imitatio and Identity: Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Protestant Self,” English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005): 365– 406; and part of chapter 2 was published earlier as “The Sound of Silence: Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero,” English Literary Renaissance 38 (2008): 106– 41. My thanks to English Literary Renaissance and Wiley Online Library for permission to reprint these essays. The deepest debts are always the most difficult to repay in words. My fellow Inwits will particularly appreciate this irony. To Mary Lenn Dixon and Chris Hines, thank you for sitting with me while I waited. To Logen Cure, thank you for keeping me company on many a long writing day. To the inimitable Carol Guthrie, thank you for the divine gift of true conversation. Where would I be without your clear voice? I give thanks to the people of St. Francis Episcopal Church in College Station for the many blessings of spiritual community, and to my parents by birth and by marriage for four different studies in wrestling with the angel, each of them equally faithful and beautiful. Last and most hopelessly inadequately of all, thanks to Britt Mize and Ruby Perry-Mize, my “brave and companionable” fellow travelers on this and every journey. This was for you.

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In the introductory epistle to his 1580 translation and Protestantization of Thomas à Kempis’s devotional treatise Imitatio Christi, Thomas Rogers makes a case for the continued relevance of this Continental, latemedieval text to his English Protestant audience: “A shame were it therefore for us to imitate so painfulie as manie do in eloquence Cicero; in philosophie Aristotle; in law Justinian; in Physick Galen for worldlie wisdome; yet to imitate, as most do, the French in vanitie, the Dutch in luxerie, in braverie the Spanish, the Papists in idolatrie, in impietie and al impuritie of life the Atheists, and not to folowe our Savior Christ in heavenlie wisdome and in al Godlines of manners.”1 Rogers could have saved himself the trouble. As it turned out, Elizabethan readers needed little persuading to appreciate the enduring appeal of Thomas à Kempis. Rogers’s translation of the Imitation of Christ — just one of thirteen English translations and three paraphrases of the text undertaken between 1500 and 1700— was one of the steadiest devotional sellers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was printed seventeen times between 1580 and 1640 and nearly every other year between 1580 and 1609.2 The popularity of the Imitation of Christ, not to mention the wide popularity of other religious how-to manuals like Arthur Dent’s Plaine 1

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Man’s Path-way to Heaven (printed at least twenty-seven times between 1601 and 1682) and Edmund Bunny’s Protestantization of the first part of Robert Persons’s First booke of the Christian exercise (which sold at least thirty editions between 1582 and 1640), is a powerful testament to the religious significance attached to the imitation of models in the period.3 However, while the imitative mode has long been recognized as a “central and pervasive” feature of early modern English literary and intellectual culture, imitatio Christi, the traditional devotional practice of imitating Christ in his person and Passion, has received comparatively little attention in scholarly accounts of post-Reformation English devotional culture.4 This disjunction in the critical histories of literary imitatio and imitatio Christi is at least partly attributable to a tendency among an earlier generation of scholars to organize treatments of early modern English piety along rigidly drawn confessional lines, privileging Protestant over Catholic, and “Puritan” over “Anglican,” as representative of what is most distinctive about the period and therefore most worthy of close critical attention.5 In more recent years, revisionist and postrevisionist historiographical approaches have yielded a more nuanced picture of English lay religiosity that — among other things — invites fresh attention to traditional devotional practices like the imitation of Christ.6 Even the most cursory examination of the period’s devotional print culture affirms the cross-confessional appeal of Christian imitatio. Ian Green’s critical survey of the period’s best and steadiest devotional sellers includes a significant number of sermons and devotional works that emphasize meditating on or modeling oneself after the person of Christ, among them works by “godly” authors like William Perkins (A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified, 1596), John Preston (The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, 1630), Daniel Dyke (the second of his Two Treatises, 1616), Edward Reynolds (the third of his Three Treatises, 1631), James Ussher (Immanuel, 1638), and Richard Sibbes (The Bruised Reede, and Smoaking Flax, 1630).7 The very existence of these works should put to rest the old Anglican/Puritan binary, suggesting that any “dichotomy between a puritan focus on Christ’s atoning work and an Anglican one on his moral example is far from clear cut.”8 Their circulation alongside “Anglican” and Catholic steady sellers that focused on

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Christ’s life and passion— such as Lancelot Andrewes’s Passion and Nativity sermons, Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (first printed legally in England in 1592), and Robert Southwell’s Marie Magdalen’s Funeral Teares (l591) — suggests something of the scope of recovery remaining to be done on the meaning or range of meanings attached to the imitation of Christ in post-Reformation England. Rogers’s decision, in the passage quoted above, to contextualize Protestant anxieties about the propriety of patterning oneself after Christ within humanist debates about the positive and negative potential of imitation suggests why and how scholars of English literature should participate in this project of recovery. The ease with which Rogers moves here between categories of imitation we would tend to separate out as “sacred” and “secular” is a reminder that the literary imitations of authors like Sidney and Milton, whose careers mark the literary poles of this study, spoke from and to a culture that — insofar as it recognized a sacred/secular binary at all— tended to identify it as an unfortunate and at least partially reparable consequence of Original Sin. The “turn to religion” so remarked upon in surveys of recent scholarship on early modern English literature reflects a growing consensus within the discipline that the literary innovations and anxieties of the period cannot be understood properly apart from the theological innovations and anxieties that preceded, accompanied, and sometimes grew out of them.9 As Brian Cummings puts it in his important treatment of this subject, Grammar and Grace, the Reformation was a “reformation in and of words, a linguistic, literary, and textual revolution.”10 Its literature is thus inseparable from the literary program of humanism that produced the early modern canon and that, as Cummings points out, “itself developed in response to the need to solve certain kinds of theological problem [sic].”11 Pursuing the converse of Cummings’s argument that the Reformation is ultimately a linguistic revolution, this book takes as its point of departure the thesis that early modern imitatio is always, even if at some remove, a religious project, a tribute to and (partial) rehabilitation of humanity’s original creation in the image and likeness of God. Accordingly, it reads the debates surrounding literary imitatio as corollaries of broader theological questions about the role of natural human signs in the supernatural processes of salvation and sanctification. These

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questions, I will argue, constitute the deep structure of Philip Sidney’s poetics and that of the many writers who inherited his literary legacy —John Milton chief among them. A brief overview of the critical history of the debates surrounding literary imitatio, particularly as they played out in early modern England, will help to clarify the complementary relationship between literary and theological categories of analysis in this study. Modern critics emphasize the important role literary imitatio plays in Renaissance critical discourse as a strategy for addressing a crisis of meaning precipitated by humanist innovations in literary and biblical scholarship. In contrast to the medieval model of interpretation, which necessitated reading even pagan texts in Christo, humanist textual practices took a more characteristically “modern” approach to culturally remote texts, privileging historical and philological sensitivity over typological and allegorical sophistication.12 The epistemological anxieties precipitated by this shift (while not always explicitly stated) are readily observable in the critical discourse of the period, which is preoccupied with the notion that the correct interpretation of texts, including sacred ones, is a devilishly tricky business, contingent upon the always more or less incomplete recovery of a remote context, language, and history.13 Early modern poetic theory and practice thematize the complexity of reading, writing, translating, and commenting in a world of linguistic mutability where, as Montaigne puts it, “language flows every day out of our hands.”14 As scholars like Brian Cummings, Richard Lanham, and Richard Waswo have pointed out, these new interpretative techniques effectively transferred long-standing questions about the reliability of language from their traditional home in the complex computations of scholastic logic to the pragmatic art of rhetoric, thereby extending their reach while simultaneously heightening the disturbing impression that what is perceived as “reality” might in fact be the effect of words.15 In this context, literary imitatio emerges as an important strategy for mediating the tensions between what Waswo calls “the cosmetic and [the] constitutive views of the language/meaning relation.”16 Bridging the gap between total linguistic and historical contingency and a closed system of Christian signification, imitatio allows early modern authors a large measure of creativity within an at least provisionally stable field of signification. Thomas M. Greene clarifies this idea in his classic work on literary imita-

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tio in the Renaissance: “Imitation acts out a passage of history that is a retrospective version or construct, with all the vulnerability of a construct. It has no ground other than the ‘modern’ universe of meanings it is helping to actualize and the past universe it points to allusively and simplifies. It seeks no suprahistorical order; it accepts the temporal, the contingent, and the specific as a given. But it makes possible an emergent sense of identity, personal and cultural.”17 Practiced skillfully, then, early modern imitatio is a technique for constructing original, but broadly meaningful, systems of signification from the remnants of an authoritative, but irrecoverable, past. It is a delicate art, balanced perilously between the extremes of slavish traditionalism and radically destabilizing innovation.18 Perhaps not surprisingly, it is also a site of intense cultural conflict. Throughout the early modern period, literary critics on the Continent and in England debated the ends and means of right imitatio. What criteria legitimate a given author as exemplary? Is style or substance the proper object of imitation? How closely or freely should one follow one’s model? What (if any) are the provisions for accommodating a culturally or linguistically remote original to the particularities of one’s own time, place, or dialect? And perhaps most importantly, what distinguishes true imitation or emulation — which is understood to participate in and in some cases exceed the essential excellence of its object — from mimicry, which strikes a purely superficial resemblance? In the context established above, such questions are not merely technical, nor are they exclusively literary. They speak to deeply felt and widely held anxieties about the relationship of linguistic “surfaces” to the poetic, philosophical, and theological “essences” they were long believed to contain and convey. The life-and-death confessional contests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imbued these already metaphysical questions with an emphatically “religious” urgency. Can human signs point humans to God or merely to fictions of their own making? Do they enable people to follow and become like Christ or entangle them in the labyrinth of their own selfish desires? If, as Richard Waswo’s formulation of the cosmeticconstitutive continuum implies, the Renaissance is marked by the hope of the former and the fear of the latter, then imitatio can be seen as a dangerous but necessary strategy for improving the odds in God’s favor. By grounding language in authorized and authorizing sources, it reduces (to

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borrow a phrase from Waswo) the “intoxicating and terrifying possibility of making meaning,”19 the possibility, in other, less anachronistic words, of sin. The implications of early modern debates surrounding literary imitatio for the traditional devotional model of the imitatio Christi are perhaps clearest in the writings of Erasmus, whose vision of a uniquely Christian eloquence (itself deeply influenced by the piety of the devotio moderna) was widely disseminated in England by the humanist pedagogy of his friend and admirer John Colet.20 Brian Cummings considers the publication of Erasmus’s Latin translation of the Greek New Testament in 1516 to mark the advent of a “new mode of Christian reading,” centered on the text of scripture (rather than the body of Christ or the sacrament) as the primary site of human encounter with the divine. In this new hermeneutic, the Bible (at least in its original languages) manifests the presence of Christ, celebrated in the Paraclesis as both the author and the substance of “the truth itself,” ipsa veritas.21 However, the problems accompanying this promise of a literal, “literary” presence emerge the moment one moves from Erasmus’s newly edited Greek to his parallel Latin translation, where, as Erasmus himself acknowledges, Christ is not literally present but symbolically represented. As Cummings points out, this new, emphatically “literary” Christology raises the stakes for literary study, while simultaneously necessitating the much wider dissemination of its methods and habits of mind — far beyond the narrow compass of scholars able and willing to learn Greek.22 In such a scenario, imitatio Christi can be construed as virtually synonymous with literary imitatio. The central pursuit of the Christian life is not to assimilate to Christ’s literal body, whether imagined individually or corporately, but to artfully (if imperfectly) bridge the gap between sermo’s “fallen,” historically contingent surface and its liberating, “literary” essence.23 This is certainly the position of Erasmus, who reads the preoccupations of humanist literary culture as of a piece with the pursuit of Christian piety. In his Ciceronianus, for example, he associates the linguistic and historical anachronism of the Ciceronians (scholars who advocated the strict imitation of Cicero as the sole criterion of eloquence) with sin, particularly with the “fallenness” of all good models from their original purity and with our consequent tendency to conflate the appearance of a thing with its essential reality (a tendency Erasmus identifies as idolatry):

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Just as men dishonor St. Benedict by boasting themselves Benedictines when in dress, in title, and in life they approach nearer Sardanapalus than St. Benedict; and St. Francis— that man incapable of ill-will— when they boast of his name though they represent in their characters more nearly the Pharisees— and St. Augustine when they say that they are Augustinians though they are far removed from the doctrine as well as the piety of so great a man; and possibly the Christ when they have nothing of him except the title: so men cast a blot on the fame of Cicero who have nothing on their tongues except Cicero and Ciceronians, when none are farther from the eloquence of Cicero than they.24 According to Erasmus, a true Ciceronian would privilege essence over appearance, adapting the Ciceronian ideal of eloquence to the demands of his particular time and place: “Thus it can happen,” he asserts, “that he is most a Ciceronian who is most unlike Cicero, that is, who speaks best and most pointedly, though in a different way; and this is not surprising for the environment now is entirely different” (78). For Erasmus, of course, the chief difference between the environment of Cicero and that of his early modern admirers is Christianity. He accuses the Ciceronians of impiety, insisting that while there is certainly nothing wrong with imitating Cicero, true eloquence is rooted in the imitation of Christ, the incarnate Word, whose revelation in the scriptures imbues historically contingent signifiers with transcendent significance. According to Erasmus, right belief is a precondition of eloquence. He asserts that “when this [belief ] is accomplished, nothing will seem more ornamental than the Christian religion, nothing more persuasive than the name of Jesus Christ, nothing more charming than the words by means of which the great men of the Church show forth her mysteries” (129). Disciplined by the church and steeped in the sacred language of the scriptures, the eloquence of the Christian orator is portrayed by Erasmus not as “a patchwork” of classical sources but rather as the original and natural expression of a uniquely created soul in communion with its source, “a river flowing from the fount” of the heart (123). For Erasmus, then, imitatio and imitatio Christi are one and the same, a sacred exercise in improvisation, a variation on a theme with any number of potential orientations toward the

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divine original, but with only one ultimate aim: Christian virtue. As he puts it in the closing lines of Ciceronianus, “The liberal arts, philosophy, and oratory are learned to the end that we may know Christ, that we may celebrate the glory of Christ” (129). This intersection between literary theory and theology is a doubleedged sword. If Erasmus’s epistemic optimism links more explicitly literary instances of imitatio to the imitation of Christ, so does what Waswo has called the “intoxicating and terrifying possibility” of making meaning. Indeed, in early modern England, the association between Erasmus’s moderate, moralizing vision of good imitatio and Protestant orthodoxy is both explicit and widespread.25 Slavish imitatio is most frequently linked to papist superstition, while unrestrained creativity is typically equated with Protestant sectarianism. Both extremes are idolatrous. In a letter to Philip Sidney, Hubert Languet warns his protégé to “beware of falling into the heresy of those who think that the height of excellence consists in the imitation of Cicero.”26 William Webbe seconds this advice in A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586): “An imitation should not be too servile or superstitious, as though one durst not varry one jotte from the example.”27 The association of immoderate creativity with irreverence, on the other hand, goes all the way back to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and continues throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.28 In his preface to Gondibert, for example, William Davenant links the unrestrained pursuit of originality with Puritan enthusiasm, while Milton’s Paradise Lost attributes this same quality to Satan.29 The specter of sin notwithstanding, the general hopefulness of English literary culture (particularly sixteenth-century literary culture) about the prospects of promoting good (i.e., Protestant) imitatio offers an important context for English devotional culture, which, as the work of Ian Green has amply demonstrated, is far more invested in the project of artful “self-fashioning” than the old critical consensus of its “Calvinist” character can account for. No doubt, and as Green points out, this “humanist” slant is at least partly attributable to market forces, the mysterious workings of divine providence not being particularly amenable to the steady sale of how-to manuals. That said, the surprising enthusiasm of English Protestants for devotional models is intriguingly of a piece with the faith of “forward” Protestant poets like Philip Sidney in the power of literary

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exempla to effect meaningful individual and social reformation, even transformation. Indeed, in light of recent reevaluations of both English popular devotional culture and the eclectic engagement of its “elite” counterparts with the intellectual and theological resources of pre- and CounterReformation Christianity (not to mention international Protestantism), what used to look like a painful contradiction between poetry and piety reads more like symbiosis. Sidney provides perhaps the most striking case in point. In recent years, his poetics— long presumed to be in productive tension with his Calvinism— has been decisively (if indirectly) linked to the rhetorical theology of Philip Melanchthon, whose conviction of the power of the Word to manifest divine presence was, if anything, even more firm and fully worked out than that of his acknowledged intellectual forbear, Erasmus.30 On this score, Robert Stillman has offered the fullest account of the relationship of Sidney’s vision of poetic imitatio to Melanchthon’s enthusiasm for bonae litterae as the incarnation of the notitiae, or innate ideas of the divine image and created order naturally implanted in the human mind in complement to (and imitation of ) the divine oration that is sermo. In this rereading of Sidney, whose career inspired a new generation of self-consciously religious and political imaginative literature, English Protestant poetics emerges out of (rather than in tension with) Protestant piety, both of which are rooted in a logocentric conceptualization of the imitatio Christi. If this optimistic vision of imitatio (literary and Christi ) was always portrayed as compromised, its vulnerability to the pervasiveness and intractability of human sinfulness became more pronounced in the writings of Sidney’s and Rogers’s literary and devotional heirs, including Elizabeth Cary, a Catholic convert and the first female playwright to be published in England, and John Milton, whose iconoclastic revisioning of good imitatio is the endpoint of this study. As we will see, seventeenth-century literary and devotional cultures are intensely preoccupied with questions about the reliability of language, both as a vehicle of divine presence and revelation and as an instrument of human knowledge and power. To a certain extent, this emphasis on the radical interpretability of language (and indeed all signs) is the terminus of a pan-European humanist pedagogy, with equally palpable effects on Continental literary and devotional

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culture, Catholic and Protestant alike. However, I will argue that the doctrinal emphasis of Protestantism on the centrality of the Word, combined with the uniquely “literary” character of the not-so-settled Protestant settlement, foregrounds the theological implications of imitatio for seventeenthcentury English authors with particular clarity. One of the most important issues at stake for these authors is the problem of idolatry. Both species of imitatio are associated by their critics with a sinful superficiality that seeks to redirect human signifying away from dialogue with the living Word and toward the “flesh” (by which I mean both the body and the material world) as the source and site of human knowledge, power, and pleasure. In the case of literary imitatio, this anxiety is most often focused on the seductive sights, sounds, and subject matter of poetry and playacting. In devotional culture, it clusters around the person of the monarch and the corporate worship of the church visible. Is the monarch a divinely authorized image of the divine order (and therefore to be followed without question), a fallible human imitation of said order (and therefore eligible for reformation), or a downright diabolical simulacrum (idol) in utter opposition to the Word? Are the set prayers and ceremonial worship mandated by the prayer book useful external helps for demonstrating and cultivating authentic (i.e., internalized) piety, or false, “fleshly” impediments to a genuine personal encounter with the living Word? Treating such questions as of a piece with their “literary” counterparts both allows a more accurate tracing of the continuities and discontinuities between late medieval Christocentric piety and its post-Reformation logocentric analogues and suggests how the literary movements of humanism, Protestantism, and Counter-Reformation Catholicism repurposed the remnants of late medieval popular piety as metaphors for their own hermeneutic anxieties. The book is divided into four chapters, each treating a different element of the complex relationship between religious and literary practices of imitation. That topical continuity is made more concrete by each section’s return to some aspect of the career, reputation, or intellectual influence of Sir Philip Sidney, Elizabethan England’s premier defender of poetry and internationally recognized paragon of Christian knighthood. The figure of Sidney functions as a nexus for my treatment of a wide variety of contemporary literary and religious genres, all of them concerned

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in one way or another with the ethical and religious implications of imitation. Chapter 1 concentrates on the literary questions with which Sidney himself was working, while chapters 2, 3, and 4 treat his seventeenthcentury afterlives as a literary and religious role model. By situating this project within a generously drawn version of the Sidney “circle,” my intention is to move more freely across the period, gender, generic, and confessional boundaries that often delimit treatments of early modern English piety. Throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, the Sidney legacy was appropriated by men and women, Catholics and Protestants alike. Its broad appeal and wide influence make it an especially useful vehicle for tracing the complicated relationship of imitatio Christi to the various literary, confessional, and cultural contexts within and across which it often operated. There are many other potential foci for this study, each of which would have produced a different (perhaps even radically different) version of the career of imitatio Christi in early modern England. My aim here is to offer an exemplary, rather than a definitive, work of scholarship. Sidney’s iconic status and his epistemic optimism track well with the emphasis of English devotional culture on exemplary models, which is not to say they always track perfectly, come from the same place, or arrive at the same conclusions. Sidney would no doubt have been uncomfortable with some of the lines I draw between his career and that of the other subjects of this book. That those lines nevertheless exist, I will argue, is testament to the pervasiveness of the postReformation “incarnational” poetics he so eloquently celebrated. Chapter 1 juxtaposes Sidney’s circa 1580 Defence of Poesy with Thomas Rogers’s Protestant imitation and adaptation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, which I argue offers an important theological perspective on the dangers associated with literary imitation in the period. Rogers’s 1580 translation of Kempis enacts a Protestant version of the imitatio Christi that heightens the “literary” quality of the original text. By heavily glossing scriptural references in books 1 through 3 and expunging the fourth book on the Eucharist, Rogers radically destabilizes the sacramentalist, quasi-monastic foundations of his source text to reframe the imitation of Christ as a private dialogic relationship with the Living Word. The transformative power of this relationship derives, not from the magical efficacy of the letter or the intellectual persuasiveness of the message, but

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from the ethical and emotional appeal of the divine speaker, who allures the believer into an ever greater (although always imperfect) conformity with himself by stirring up and properly orienting the reader’s desires. The Word “works,” that is, much as Sidney asserts that poetry works in his Defence of Poesy: transforming the reader from the inside out by transforming his or her desires. While this relationship of desire, heavenly rhetoric, and good imitatio is also foregrounded in Rogers’s source text, Kempis’s treatise culminates in a meditation on the Eucharist as the earthly fulfillment of heavenly desire. Rogers’s elimination of this book as “superstitious” has the effect of repositioning the experience of being “inwardly inflamed” by the Word (as opposed to being miraculously fed by the Body) as the earthly culmination of the ideal Christian life. Additionally, Rogers’s prefaces reframe the imitatio Christi as an interpretable sign (rather than a reliable means) of assimilation to Christ, which for Rogers is an entirely private miracle beyond the direct confirmation of the human senses. Rogers’s revisions to his source text mediate Protestant anxieties about the centrality of rhetoric and poetics to humanist pedagogy, establishing the sacred Word as the core of an ideal (i.e., “inwardly inflamed”) selffashioned out of but undefiled by fallen human language. The final section of this chapter reads Rogers’s translations of Lutheran treatises and Catholic devotional manuals as an attempt to work out the implications of this notion of good imitatio for Protestant piety and politics. I argue that the vision of the Church Militant that emerges from his work when taken as a whole bears a striking relationship to Sidney’s Philippist dream of transnational Protestant humanism. Both reimagine the body of Christ as a metaphorical, transnational religio-political community shaped and sustained by good words. Neither author, however, succeeds entirely at freeing this imagined community of readers, writers, and speakers from the prior claims of natural and political bodies. Chapter 2 explores the rising tensions surrounding Rogers’s and Sidney’s notion of Christian eloquence in the seventeenth century, tracing the thematic links between Elizabeth Cary’s Life, a spiritual biography written in the 1640s by Cary’s cloistered, royalist daughter, and Cary’s own Tragedy of Mariam, written a generation earlier during Cary’s intellectual engagement with the neo-Stoical aesthetic of the circle centered

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on Mary Sidney. Reading both texts alongside Protestant and Catholic martyrologies and spiritual biographies, I connect their common concern with the interpretability of “public” language to a shared engagement with both Protestant and Catholic discourses of religious heroism. By glorifying silent suffering over eloquent dissidence, both Mariam and the Life assert the interpretative instability of language outside the confines of a charitable community of faith. In these texts, to speak well is to speak charitably, which in the religiously divisive climate of early modern England means to speak privately or not at all. In response to the Protestant ideal of a bold-speaking (and dissident) public witness, they construct an alternative model of Christian eloquence centered on the “speaking picture” of the suffering body and the “silent speech” of the coterie author. Chapter 3 contextualizes the problem of interpretative instability within a debate about the role of ceremony, set prayers, and bodily worship in the Church of England. Analyzing Charles I’s Eikon Basilike alongside “Pamela’s prayer” in Sidney’s Arcadia and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety, it situates Charles I’s imitation of Christ within a mainstream “Sidnean”/ Protestant hermeneutics that equates proper signification with the process of sanctification. By submitting himself to his own divinely appointed role as a special sign of the divine order, Charles models the process by which the believer learns to transform the body into a sign, a literal imitation of the Word. In this particular version of that hermeneutics, signification/ sanctification is stabilized by the body of the king, whose person functions analogously to (though not as powerfully as) the Word and the sacraments as a special sign of the divine order. Bodily submission to the king and his prayer book is thus a marker of good imitatio. Chapter 4 takes up Milton’s famous attack on the Eikon. I argue that Milton’s reading of Pamela’s prayer as a “relic” and the king’s body as an idol marks a breakdown of the “tenuous textual and hermeneutic balance” between a “horizontal theology of dispersed individual competence” and a “vertical politics of centralized authority” that Timothy Rosendale argues characterizes the Book of Common Prayer and that I contend defines both literary imitatio and imitatio Christi in the period.31 Looking backward to the ceremonialist debates of the 1630s and forward to the publication of Milton’s Paradise Regained, I read Milton’s iconoclastic aesthetic

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as a radical reimagining of Protestant imitatio, one that seeks to emancipate Christian eloquence once and for all from the tyrannous desires of the body, both natural and politic. If this reformed Reformed imitatio marks the death of the Christian humanist dream of a godly commonwealth grounded in sermo, it also points the way toward a new, more autonomous vision of human creativity, sanctioned here by Milton’s conception of the imitation of Christ as the reading, writing, and speaking of a radically interiorized Word. In addition to their shared participation at one level or another in Sidney’s legacy, the authors treated in this book are linked by their engagement with devotional culture. Cary is an imitator of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Catholic martyrology, a translator of Blosius, and the subject of a spiritual biography written in the 1640s by a daughter cloistered on the Continent. The Eikon is an imitation of Foxe, the Psalms, and the Book of Common Prayer and, in addition to its borrowing from Sidney, cribs a prayer from The Practice of Piety, one of the best- and longest-selling devotional manuals of the seventeenth century. William Prynne, John Bastwick, and Henry Burton, the Puritan “martyrs” with whom chapter 4 opens, model themselves on their Foxean forebears, and John Milton’s Eikonoklastes and Paradise Regained can be read as further revisions to the already “reformed” genres of martyrology and romance. These authors’ lives are all also touched to varying degrees by the theme of martyrdom and the difficulties of reading and writing religious heroism and exemplarity in a religiously divided culture. Sidney died from a wound acquired on the battlefield at Zutphen, fighting for a vision of Protestant Europe that was never to be; while Milton martyred his eyes for a somewhat different but equally doomed dream of Christian cosmopolitanism. Cary authored an ambiguous religious heroine and was herself the subject of an ambivalent spiritual biography. Charles I, depending on the text in which he appears, was either a martyred king or a defeated tyrant; while Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick, his most vocal critics in the years leading up to the Civil War, were variously sainted and demonized for their sufferings at his pleasure on the scaffold. If the imitation of Christ is ultimately about words in early modern England, then these authors remind us how much more closely words were identified in the period with the particular bodies from which they originated. Mapping this area

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of overlap between early modern imitatio and the more explicitly “incarnational” aesthetic of late medieval Catholicism is one of the goals of this study. In both religious and literary discourses, I will argue, the body, whether imagined as masculine or feminine, individual or corporate, figures as both the sign and the site of all that human signifying can accomplish. It is at once the dream of organic relation between words and things, insides and outsides, bodies and souls, and heaven and earth, and the nightmare of endless, idolatrous surface. This shared preoccupation with the body, with its generative possibilities and dangerous permeabilities, suggests the relevance of both literary imitatio and the imitatio Christi to the study of early modern gender politics and also to more recent critical discourses concerning the emergence of what Peter Lake and Michael Questier have termed — in dialogue with Jürgen Habermas’s influential model of post-Enlightenment public culture — the early modern public sphere. While neither gender nor the early modern “public sphere” is the primary focus of this study, their recurrence as points of tension within both the religious and the literary texts up for analysis here suggests the centrality of imitatio Christi to emerging discourses of citizenship and to their various, sometimes competing imaginings of “public” and “private,” “masculine” and “feminine” spaces. On these important points of intersection, the chapters that follow are more suggestive than conclusive. However, they lay the groundwork for further interrogations of the role of imitatio Christi in the dramatic social, religious, political, and economic changes that defined the century following the English Reformation. This work engages with several important critical trends. At the most basic level it reflects the “turn to religion” so thoroughly anatomized by Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti as transforming the scholarship of the early modern period over the last two decades.32 Building on the work of scholars like Debora Shuger, Kevin Sharpe, and Julia Reinhard Lupton, it recognizes religion as the “master code” of early modern culture and seeks to create analytical frameworks capable of translating that culture into critical discourse without distorting or failing to take seriously its fundamentally religious character. More specifically, it is engaged in the project of reconsidering the Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation as a single, inherently “literary,” phenomenon, building on the work of

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scholars like Brian Cummings and Robert Stillman. This study differs from those of Cummings and Stillman (whose work makes a more limited version of the religio-literary argument with special relevance to Sidney scholars) in that it is less interested in the theological and intellectual roots of this revolution than in its intricately interrelated devotional and aesthetic effects. In this sense, my project is in dialogue with other recent works that attend to the intersections of devotional and literary culture in early modern England, among them Gregory Kneidel’s Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern England, Timothy Rosendale’s Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England, and Nancy Warren’s Embodied Texts. Like Rosendale, I am interested in the sometimes competing cultural literacies cultivated by the Protestant settlement in England: the productive tension between its claims for individual readers and writers and its calls for harmonious (hierarchical) social and political bodies. Like Kneidel and Warren, I am also invested in recovering narratives of the body (natural and mystical) in early modern English piety, both as carriers of medieval and Catholic continuities (Warren) and as agents of social and theological change (Kneidel). The focus on the imitation of Christ affords my study an exceptionally flexible approach to all of these areas of inquiry, allowing the reader to view early modern religious and literary culture from multiple perspectives: top-down, bottom-up, looking backward and forward. By telling one of the many stories one could tell about the relationship of literary imitation to the imitation of Christ in early modern England, my goal is not to advocate for a single narrative of their complex interaction in the period but to call for renewed attention to the imitation of Christ as a productive category of literary analysis, one that resists overly neat distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, sacred and secular, literary art and cultural artifact.

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Cha pt er 1

   Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Reformed Body Visible

The parallel careers of Thomas Rogers (ca. 1553– 1616) and Philip Sidney (1554 – 86) offer a useful starting point for exploring the major intersections between devotional and literary models of good imitatio in early modern England. Sidney’s biography is far and away the more familiar. A pious and ambitious aristocrat whose powerful family connections might (with better luck) have landed him within Elizabeth I’s inner circle, he rode out his rustication from the court by composing sophisticated fictions that, after his untimely death following the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, helped secure his lasting fame as a Protestant cultural icon.1 Rogers’s fate was more pedestrian. A prolifically publishing cleric with an eye for popular tastes, he devoted the bulk of his literary output to the translation and (when needed) doctrinal purification of Lutheran, pre-Reformation, and Counter-Reformation devotional works.2 Despite a modest literary fame and close ties to Sir Christopher Hatton, for whom he served as chaplain, and to Richard Bancroft, eventual archbishop of Canterbury, Rogers was never promoted beyond his first living at Horringer in Suffolk. His most enduring work is an exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles first 17

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published as The English Creede in 1585 and later republished in substantially revised form as The Faith, Doctrine and Religion Professed and Protected in the Realm of England (1607).3 On the face of it, there is no good reason to cross the disciplinary boundary currently cordoning off these two seemingly unrelated stories: Sidney’s as a shining star in the Elizabethan literary firmament and Rogers’s as a substantial footnote in the history of the late Tudor/early Stuart church. Upon closer examination, however, Sidney’s and Rogers’s worlds touched in a surprising number of intriguing ways. They just missed each other at Christ Church, Oxford, where Sidney was in attendance from 1568 to about 1571 and Rogers from 1571 until he graduated with a Master of Arts in 1576. Relatively early in their careers, both appear to have been influenced (Sidney profoundly so) by the moderate, avowedly humanist strain of Lutheranism promoted by Philip Melancthon and his followers on the Continent. Sidney was the protégé of the prominent Philippist Hubert Languet. Rogers was a translator of the famous Lutheran pedagogue Johannes Rivius, the Melancthon protégé Niels Hemmingsen, and Johann Habermann, whose well-known book of Lutheran prayers Rogers dedicated to Sidney’s future father-in-law, Francis Walsingham, in 1577. Even more interesting is the two men’s roughly analogous position within their respective spheres as defenders of literary arts deemed suspect by their peers. Like Sidney, whose circa 1580 Defence of Poesy was written in part as a personal apology for poetic pursuits perceived by his mentors as dangerously distracting from the duties of a would-be statesman, Rogers felt compelled in 1590, at a particularly difficult moment in his clerical career, to justify his literary activities as an author and translator of popular devotional materials.4 The details of Rogers’s difficulties with the proPresbyterian, classical “brethren” who held sway among the Suffolk clergy throughout his tenure at Horringer are secondary for our purposes to his passionate and career-long dedication to the written word as the equal (or better, depending on which pamphlet you read) of preaching in its capacity to effect personal and political reformation. Like Sidney, Rogers dreamed of a Protestant republic of letters, in which “the promise and purpose of God” would be accomplished in no small part through writing and reading.5 His preface to A General Discourse Against the Damnable Sect of User-

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ers, his 1578 translation of a work by Philippus Caesar to which Rogers appends a tract of his own culled from the commentaries of the famous Philippist Niels Hemmingsen, epitomizes his high hopes for England’s progressive spiritual literacy: servauntes shalbe instructed, his enemies shalbe tolde their faultes, all shall knowe their dueties towardes God, their Prince, their betters, their equals, their inferiours, themselves, though not by wordes of mouthe, yet by wrighting: that both the godly may be confirmed in the trueth, and the graceles converted in tyme and be saved. And therfore doth God in these daies, more than at any time, and in Englande . . . stir up, and incense the mindes of some to wright, of others to translate: whereby as wee enjoie externall happines more than many nations about us, so are wee blessed with the ritches of the soule more than all the world againe.6 As we have already seen and will explore in more depth, Rogers also shared Sidney’s enthusiasm for imitation as a religious/political/poetic art of transformation. His translation of The Imitation of Christ came out right around the time that Sidney was likely composing his Defence in the wake of repeated attacks on literary imitatio from the most puritanical faction in the Protestant left wing.7 As it was for Sidney, imitation was a career-long preoccupation for Rogers. As early as 1576, he was already dissecting its mechanisms and social effects: “For so do men frame themselves, & conforme their manners, as they see others placed in cheife seate of auctority, as it were to the vewe and sight of all men, addict themselves: thinkinge that to bee well donne, which is donne by example. And therfore as a good prince by the example of goodnes bringeth unspeakeable commodities: so an evill prince by the example of wickednes, causeth infinit calamities in his realme and contrie.”8 For all their intriguing similarities, however, the careers of Rogers and Sidney are marked by important (and equally intriguing) differences. The most important of these is that Rogers lived to see the last fifteen years of Elizabeth’s reign and the first thirteen years of the reign of James I, during which time all hopes were lost in England for the kinds of broadly inclusive, mutually edifying Protestant dialogue it was still possible to imagine

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in 1580.9 In the wake of the Marprelate controversy and his own painful involvement in local disputes over nascent Presbyterianism and Sabbatarianism, Rogers’s authorial voice became increasingly shrill.10 The author who in 1580 could unselfconsciously address himself to the “godly,” and in 1585 could sympathize in print with his “brethren” who refused to subscribe to the Book of Common Prayer, was out of patience by 1607 when he penned the revised version of his explication. “The whole worke expresseth,” he bluntly declares, “my detestation, and renunciation of all adversaries and errors, opposite, crossing, or contradicting the doctrine professed by us, and protected by our King, or any article, or particle of truth of our religion.”11 We are a long way here from the surviving Sidney circle, within the powerful orbit instead of the authoritarian Archbishop Bancroft, that inveterate enemy of nonconformity. By the end of his career Rogers’s enthusiasm for the power of the written word had been translated into a polemical concern with what would seem to modern-day readers to be superficial issues of church discipline. In addition to his 1607 work, he preached a searing sermon against Nicholas Bownde’s Doctrine of the Sabbath and wrote a 1608 defense of kneeling at Communion featuring a rather testy “dialogue” with his nonconforming Suffolk colleague, Thomas Seffray.12 That it is hard to imagine Sidney sympathizing with this older, more polemical Rogers makes all the more interesting their shared youthful confidence in the power of good words to inspire widespread personal and social transformation. As we will see in chapter 4, Rogers’s later-in-life preoccupation with policing the integrity of public worship is not a departure from his earlier principles but an outgrowth of their exposure to certain pressures. The point here is not that Sidney would have found himself in agreement with Rogers had he lived (he likely wouldn’t have) or indeed that Sidney and Rogers were ever in perfect alignment, whether politically, religiously, or aesthetically. Rogers was from the very start a much more effusive monarchist than Sidney; and he wrote for the general reading public, while Sidney’s works, at least during his lifetime, circulated within a select coterie. The point is rather more simple, if no less consequential: that Rogers and Sidney were participating (albeit in different ways) in the same broad cultural conversation, a conversation arguably as integral to the emergence

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of a post-Reformation “public sphere” as any of the many religio-political controversies (the Anjou match, the Campion affair, the Marprelate controversy, to name a few) that defined the era.13 In simplest terms, this conversation was centered on the Erasmian dream of the imitation of Christ as sermo: more specifically on the capacity (or not) of human signs to imitate and propagate sermo’s soul- and society-saving power. In the tumultuous decades between the Elizabethan Settlement and the outbreak of the Civil War, the degree of correspondence between these two categories of signs— the sacred and the “secular,” or, less anachronistically, the fallen— was a question of urgent importance to poets, pedagogues, and religiopolitical actors, not to mention ordinary churchgoing, Bible- and romancereading English men and women. Can human words imitate, perhaps even participate, in the miracle of signification made present in the living Word? A question so all-encompassing necessarily creates surprising intersections and echoes for literary and religious historians to ponder. As we will see, Sidney’s case for the metamorphic power of literary imitation is strikingly of a piece with Roger’s quest to build up the church through the provision of inspirational models. If considering them together does not widen the Sidney circle in any traditional sense, it does suggest some interesting new ways of drawing it. This chapter and those to follow will trace some of these provisional “circles,” attending to the complicated interaction of Sidney’s imitative ethos with more explicitly devotional and theological discourses of good imitatio. Taken together, I will argue, these seemingly unrelated conversations offer us a window onto the messy, sometimes violent processes of a post-Reformation religiopolitical poetics authorizing increasing numbers of Bible- and romancereading English men and women to assert their own authorial voices. Rogers’s revised version of The Imitation of Christ is an ideal starting point for this sort of exercise, not only because it roughly coincides with the writing of Sidney’s Defence, but because it is itself a kind of touchstone within the genre of Elizabethan devotional writing. Much like Sidney and Spenser, whose impeccable Protestant credentials smoothed the way for serious engagement with the literary riches of Counter-Reformation Europe, Rogers helped set the Elizabethan standard for thoughtful interaction with pre- and Counter-Reformation devotional culture. Edmund Bunny, for example, cites Rogers’s Imitation of Christ as the inspiration

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for his wildly popular 1584 Protestantization of Robert Persons’s Jesuit missionizing manual, First booke of the Christian exercise (1582).14 This devotional bestseller was in turn instrumental in the conversion of fifteenyear-old Richard Baxter, “the leading puritan man of letters” who would go on to write over 140 religious works, among them The Saints Everlasting Rest (1649) and A Call to the Unconverted (1658).15 Of course, Rogers was not the first English Protestant to translate Kempis.16 Part of what makes his translation so useful for our purposes is his understanding of his project within the broader humanist discourse of imitation. In his prefatory matter (both original and translated), he sets out to popularize an imitative ethos capable of negotiating between English Protestant intellectual culture and the literary and devotional heritage of pre-Reformation and Counter-Reformation Christianity. Like its more literate secular counterparts, Rogers’s popular Protestant imitatio seeks to strike a happy medium between “superstitious” conventionalism and heretical innovation. In the process, its rhetoric also registers the strains on imitatio in early modern England as a strategy for bridging the increasingly troublesome gap between the past and the present, the natural and the supernatural, words (even sacred ones) and things. The analysis that follows will read Rogers’s translations of Kempis along with excerpts from his translation of Hemmingsen as a kind of window onto an ambivalent Protestant theology of imitatio that I will argue also shapes Sidney’s Defence.

The Word Made Text: Thomas Rogers and Early Modern Imitatio In the “First Epistle to the Reader,” Rogers positions Kempis’s work within the epistemological framework of humanist pedagogy and poetics, a move that radically destabilizes the sacramentalist, quasi-monastic piety of the pre-Reformation original. For Rogers, imitating Christ is as much about good hermeneutics as it is about holiness. He establishes the Bible as the source text for Kempis, situating the devotional paradigm of imitatio Christi within the broader context of humanist imitatio. This strategy confers some cultural cachet on a translation project in danger of seeming obsolete or even impious. However, it also stakes the successful

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practice of imitatio Christi on the correct interpretation and emulation of a text that, despite its sacred character, is as linguistically and culturally remote as the classical objects of secular imitatio. Rogers’s opening preface illustrates just how strongly his notion of imitatio Christi is shaped by the anxieties associated with these more explicitly literary endeavors. “Who entereth into a due consideration of mans nature,” he begins, “shal easile perceave that most strangelie it is addicted unto Imitation, and though in truth we should live by lawes not by examples, that examples doe more move, than doe lawes. Servants in a familie; soldiers in an armie; subjects in a common weale maie confirme what I saie. For servants wil imitate their maisters; soliders their captaines; subjects their governors, be they good, be they bad, yea get they praise or get they infamie, profit or hurt therbie, thinking their lives to be a lawe, and that to be well done which is done after their example.”17 Here imitatio’s transformative powers are portrayed as rhetorical rather than devotional: less a time-honored technique of assimilation to the divine than an ex tempore concession to fallen human nature and culture, both of which are too tragically subject to the passions to be “moved” by reason alone. In such a (demystified) context, imitatio has equal (enormous) potential for good and for evil, depending upon one’s choice of models. For Rogers, the most reliable source of such models is the Bible. However, as he makes clear throughout the rest of the “First Epistle,” even biblical models are subject to co-optation by the flesh and must be carefully interpreted if they are to inspire correct imitatio. Rogers relates the difficulty of choosing appropriate scriptural exempla to the ongoing critical debate concerning whether it is preferable to imitate the admirable qualities of numerous lesser works or to imitate a single masterpiece in its entirety: “In oratorie imitation two sortes of examples there be: one alwaies, and most necessarie to be folowed, the other but sometime and in some things. . . . So in Christian imitation two sortes of examples there be: one to be followed and that both necessarilie, and alwaies, which is our Saviour Christ; the other but sometime, and in some things, as are good men and women, whether they be alive or dead” ([a.3]v – [a.]4r). Using the scriptures to support this distinction, he points out that while biblical heroes possess specific qualities worthy of emulation (Abraham’s faith, David’s zeal, etc.), they are also dangerously flawed. David was

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an adulterer. Moses lacked faith. The apostles were ambitious. Furthermore, Rogers asserts, “Other things were wel done by good men in time passed, which in these days cannot be folowed . . . without offence to God” ([a.5]r– v): circumcision, “blodie sacrifices,” and incest, for example. Finally, “some deedes we maie reade of which were singular, such as neither we may, nor others in those days might follow without the special and extraordinary motion of the holie Spirit” ([a.5]v), like Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Clearly, for Rogers, the sacredness of texts is no guarantee against the dangers of anachronism and decontextualization. Ultimately his twofold model, which sets Christ up as a transcendent signifier, collapses. Two paragraphs after asserting that Christ’s example is “alwaies, and necessarilie” to be followed, he cautions against imitating Christ in those aspects of his character which are “unimitable”: “For we are not commanded to make a new world, to create things visible or invisible; no nor in the world to do miracles, and to raise the dead” ([a.6]v). Citing the negative example of the “God of Norweigh,” a Lutheran infamous for his forty-day fasts, Rogers equates improper imitation of Christ with both nonconformist zeal and papist superstition ([a.6]v). According to Rogers, true Christian imitatio is mindful of the distance between human subject and divine object, between contingent sign and transcendent referent. It is a necessary but always imperfect and potentially dangerous element of Christian piety. The best one can hope for is to “imitate Christ as much as a man may imitate God,” worshipping him for “those things which he did as God” and following him only in “what he did as a man” ([a.6]v). Far more than its pre-Reformation counterparts, this formulation of imitatio Christi problematizes the gap between natural signs and supernatural referents. Here human access to the divine is mediated exclusively through the sacred Word, which must itself be mediated through fallible individual interpreters. Rogers’s modifications to his pre-Reformation source seek to meliorate this interpretative instability by enacting a conservative brand of imitatio that grounds the imitation of Christ solely and solidly in the Word. Rogers explicitly identifies Kempis’s text as an imitation of scripture, a quality he attempts to emphasize through the addition of marginal glosses. Indeed, this seems to be his primary motivation for translating the work. In his “Second Epistle Concerning the Translation and Correction of this

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Booke,” he explains, “I have taken the translation thereof upon me, not so much to translate, as to illustrate the same with places of Scripture. For doubtles great pittie was it, that a booke so plentifulie, or altogether rather fraighted with sentences of the Scripture, was either no whit, as in some, or no better, as in the best impressions, quoted” ([a.8]v). Rogers’s technique here is in keeping with the imitative practice recommended by Erasmus via Roger Ascham, who advocates comparing canonical authors in order to “write out and joine together where the one doth imitate the other.”18 Erasmus and Ascham represent this practice as the first step in good imitatio. For Rogers, it is the foundation of an approach to translation that goes a good bit beyond the usual definition of that term. Scriptural glosses adapt his late medieval source to the expectations of a Bibliocentric lay readership and, by calling attention to Kempis’s text as imitatio, cast Rogers’s expurgation of its explicitly Catholic elements (like references to merit, purgatory, the sign of the cross, and all of the final book on the Eucharist) as an attempt to observe greater fidelity to a sacred original. Indeed, Rogers’s commitment to strict biblical imitatio is so great that even when issues of theology are not at stake he frequently alters his translation in order to more closely approximate biblical language. When it comes to scripture, Rogers adopts a Ciceronian conservatism: “I have studied, as nigh as I could to expresse by the phrase of the holie Scripture, supposing it to be a comendation, as to Ciceronians to use the phrase of Cicero: so to Christians most familiarlie to have the words of holy scripture in their mouthes, and bookes” ([a.9]r). Although he acknowledges that he has taken liberties with his text, Rogers asserts that the Christian translator has “a greater dutie than of translatorship” and that for his part, he “had rather come into the displeasure of man than displease God” ([a.10]v).19 On the one hand, the effect of Rogers’s method here is to emphasize those aspects of Kempis’s piety most readily read (both by moderns and by early moderns) as “reformed.” For Rogers, unlike Kempis or even Erasmus, the sacred text is the only reliable mediator between fallen human nature and divine presence. One imitates Christ, then, not by assimilating to a publicly visible body, but by privately interpreting and emulating scriptural models of piety. Furthermore, the imitation of Christ does not effect salvation but is itself an interpretable sign of an ineffable and totally

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private instance of divine intervention. “If thou lovest to be called a Christian,” Rogers exhorts his reader, “shew the fruites of Christianitie and then well maist thou take the name of a Christian unto thee” ([a.7]r). So it at first might seem. Upon closer examination, however, Rogers’s translation and its paratexts offer a much more nuanced picture of reformed imitatio, one that defies easy distinctions between grace and works, public and private, body and soul. This complexity is most evident in the “Godlie Preface,” an English translation of the preface to Rogers’s French source text. At first glance, it seems to double down on Protestant party line items like salvation by grace, election, and sola scriptura. Its author, for example, likens the odds of salvation to those of recovering from the plague: just as “some do alwaies scape as it pleaseth God; so it is to be hoped, that among an infinite number of false Christians, God wil touch some to bring them backe from the filthines and corruptions of the world and to lead them to the fearing of himself ” ([a.12]v).20 For the author, true Bibliocentric imitatio is a legible sign of this miraculous spiritual healing, a means of distinguishing those “that are Christians but in words and ceremonies” from “true Christians,” who experience the “true feeling of God” that naturally leads to godly behavior (B.1r). These most distinctively Reformed elements of the “Godlie Preface” are particularly useful for bringing into clearer focus a major area of overlap between literary discourses of imitatio and Rogers’s reformed vision of the imitatio Christi. Where they come together, here and throughout the paratexts, is in their anxious preoccupation with the possibility of slippage between “external” signs and the essential, but ultimately ineffable, realities for which those signs purportedly stand. The author’s association of false (ceremonious) Christians with hollow rhetoricians is a case in point. Having just commended “good and holie bookes” as “ladders to climbe up to heaven,” he pauses to clarify his argument: I speake of true Christians. For as for them that are Christians but in words and ceremonies: some of them be so bereft of al true feeling of God and of their owne conscience, that they never enter into the considering of the thing that might be available and necessarie to the wel instructing of them in the truth. . . . And othersome have their minds so tied to the letter, that they can make none account of anie other

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bookes, but such as may make them skilful, eloquent, sharpe-witted, and subtile, and consequentlie woonderful among men, despising al such workes as may make them better, by mooving them to the exercises of their profession. And of this sort the number is verie great nowadaies. (B.1r–[B.1]v) Here, true imitation, whether of Christ or of Cicero, is more than a matter of words and gestures. It is an outward manifestation of an essential correspondence between oneself and one’s model (be it a model of literary genius or of Christian piety). The paratexts’ position on the relationship between the natural and supernatural orders in this process would seem at first to be relatively clear-cut (and stereotypically “Protestant”). The “Godlie Preface” in particular is emphatic that while authentic Christianity is inevitably accompanied by certain outward signs, it is not itself “an outward profession, ne a thing that consisteth in outward ceremonies . . . or in words. . . but it is the verie power and might of God, whereby God intendeth to renew, and as it were to create againe his owne image and likenes in man” ([b.2]v). True imitatio, in other words, is a miracle that happens from the inside out, an intangible “union that is betweene him [Christ] and us [the elect]” ([b.7]v) yielding perceptible fruit. This miracle is set in motion by the sacred Word, whose transformative power lies, not in the magical efficacy of the letter, but in the ethical and emotional appeal of the spirit who is its speaker. It works, in other words, like ordinary rhetoric to reorient the will. Unlike the words of institution (believed by the “superstitious” papists to possess intrinsic power), the Word remains inert without an audience.21 It works its “magic” not on the page or in the material world but inside the believer, where it cooperates with the Holy Spirit to move the “naturally” hardened hearts of the elect to imitate (or at least desire to imitate) scriptural models of piety. The paratexts’ stress on imitatio as a sign raises obvious questions about the relevance of Kempis’s text in early modern England. If outwardly imitating Christ is an effect of salvation rather than a means to it, what precisely is the point of translating an instructional handbook on the topic? Furthermore, as Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle has pointed out, the “self-contained asceticism” of Kempis’s Imitatio Christi champions contemplative silence as the surest path to Christian perfection, a far cry

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from the Erasmian model of godly eloquence so central to the Protestant aesthetic.22 Why would Rogers and his Protestant sources take such pains to “reform” this particular text? The devil (or perhaps in this case, the Lord) is in the details, more specifically in the imagery of the paratexts. For all their insistence on the distinction between surface and essence, inside and outside, cause and effect, the preface and the preceding epistles are all deeply invested in preserving the integrity of the sign/referent relation, an integrity figured (especially in the preface) in bodily, botanical, and sartorial metaphors that strain against easy dichotomizations of sign and referent, grace and works. The bodily metaphors are the most straightforward of these three. In the “Godlie Preface,” the author reads imitatio Christi as a spiritualized form of family resemblance, a legible mark of the believer’s miraculous incorporation into the body of Christ and consequent patrimony in the kingdom of heaven. “Of a truth,” he argues, “I cannot tel how Gods true children, who are al true Christians, coulde otherwise be better marked out, tha by applieng of themselves night and daie, to do whatsoever is pleasant and acceptable to their heavenlie Father; whom because they knowe to be righteous, they also doe wholie endevour to themselves to do righteous things, wherin they shew themselves to be borne of him” (b.5r). This image of adopted or surrogate sonship runs throughout the “Preface,” complemented by a related set of images celebrating the believer’s identity with Christ in his mystical body. In both cases, the central theme is the organic relationship between the internal miracle of salvation and the visible testimony of works. As the author puts it in his concluding arguments, “The members of Christ, are they that take pain to frame and facion themselves like to their head, as much as can be in this life; assuring themselves that it is not possible for the head to be of one wil, and the members of another” ([B.11]v). The caveat here, “as much they can be in this life,” is typical of the “Godly Preface’s” bodily imagery and carries over into the botanical and sartorial metaphors, where the sin/slippage it suggests is even more readily apparent. Take, for example, the grafting metaphor below: And certes it is not possible that they which are united and knit unto Christ as his members, should not be touched with a desire to re-

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semble him and to folowe his steps. For the verie thing wherein the union and conjunction are shewed, is that the members doe shewe themselves to be of the selfe same that the head is. And where that is not done, it is an evident proofe that the member is rotten, senseles, and void of the life which is in the head. . . . Which thing he teacheth yet more plainly in another place, where he saith that we be graffed into Christ after the likenes of his death and resurrection; meaning thereby, that we which are joined unto Christ as an imp is to the stock of a tree, ought so to live of his life as there may not appeere any deformitie in us. ([b.6]v–[b.7]r) The anxiety hinted at in this passage, that a grafted limb cannot be “knit unto” its life source as seamlessly as it “ought,” is heightened by its appearance alongside decidedly more contentious images of the imitatio Christi as a garment, a uniform, or a professional insignia: “There are alwaies ynow which boast themselves to beleeve in Christ, or to be Christians. But the verie meane to know them, is to mark whether their whole endever be to folowe Christ or no, which is as the badge of this so excellent profession, or as it were the faire colored liverie whereby we shewe and declare our selves to be the same in deede, which we report our selves to be” ([b.6]v). While the biblical trope of “putting on Christ” might seem at first to support a less problematic reading of Reformed imitatio as sign, it actually provides a handy demonstration of just how problematic signification itself could be for early modern Protestants. As Judith Anderson has demonstrated, clothing and clothing metaphors are not synonymous with “surface” in the period but are in fact important points of entry into a widespread and deeply fraught debate about the relationship of signs to referents. More specifically, she shows how the long-running controversy surrounding the propriety of church vestments in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries interrogates the ontological status of signs as mediators between human persons and their material and spiritual worlds. As Anderson observes, combatants on both sides of the vestment question, while fiercely at odds over the spiritual value of material items like surplices, are united in their shared horror of “mere language — language unmoored to a material and spiritual reality outside it.”23 In its immediate controversial context, then — where even a radical reformer

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could imagine clothes to make the man, if only for the worse — the paratexts’ repeated insistence on the imitatio Christi as a sign of salvation is anything but straightforward or straightforwardly dichotomizing: a fact that offers at least a partial explanation for its continued relevance in early modern England. Simply put, what imitatio (Christi and otherwise) is about here is the significance of signs, their essential connection or lack thereof to a transcendent order. Rogers’s translation and Protestantization of Kempis suggests how the imitation of Christ speaks to this much broader cultural question. His new and improved imitatio Christi establishes the sacred Word as the core of an ideal “self ” fashioned out of but undefiled by human language. This strategy forges an uneasy alliance between the Christian and classical epistemologies informing traditional views of language and meaning and the radical notion implicit in humanist textual and poetic practice — that words (and, by extension, all signs) constitute rather than reflect reality. Kempis’s text lends itself particularly well to this reformulation of the Christian ideal. Its deemphasis of corporate ritual and bodily discipline in favor of an orientation toward the individual conscience reflects the spirituality of the devotio moderna, a movement that anticipates Protestantism’s preoccupation with language, written and spoken, as the primary vehicle of divine presence.24 Cleansed by Rogers and his Protestant sources of its extrabiblical “superstitions,” the text of the Imitatio Christi becomes less about imitating the person of Christ than about internalizing a disembodied “voice” that speaks primarily (though not exclusively) through scripture.25 My analysis of the main text will focus on the role of this late medieval voice in constructing an ideal Christian subjectivity that reflects early modern England’s sensitivity to and ambivalence about the constitutive capacity of language. “He which followeth me, saith Christ, doth not walke in darknes, but hath the light of life: by which words we are injoined to imitate his manners, and conversation, if we desire trulie to be inlightened, and delivered from al blindnes of hart” (1). This opening passage from Rogers’s English translation of the Imitatio Christi predates by ten years the first attested usage of the word conversation to mean “familiar discourse or talk” in the 1590 version of Sidney’s Arcadia.26 However, Kempis’s statement certainly reflects his vision of conversation as a transformative di-

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alogue with the living Word, which anticipates Sidney’s fascination with the power of human language to imitate and even participate in the divine plan of (re)creation. Throughout Kempis’s text Christ is imagined primarily as a voice, whose call elicits an imitative response from the true Christian. Indeed, whole chapters are devoted to imaginary dialogues, carried out almost entirely through biblical and devotional commonplaces, between Christ and an idealized believer. As in Reformed theology, the Word’s operation here is rhetorical rather than magical or allegorical. It lies dormant until it penetrates the heart, where the “Spirit of Christ” miraculously supplies the believer with the “hidden, and heavenlie Manna in his words” (1). The spiritual sustenance derived from this indwelling and selfauthenticating Word is contrasted throughout to the confusion generated by fallen language: Happie is that man whom the truth it selfe, not letters, nor figures, which vanishe doth teach. For our owne opinions and senses doth manie times deceave, and seldome profit us. . . . What should we passe for tearmes, and questions? For he is rid from sundrie opinions, whom the everlasting word doth speake unto. . . . Many times to reade much, and to heare much it irketh me: whatsoever I can either wish or desire, it is in thee. Al teachers be ye silent, & al creatures hold your peace, but speake, Lord, speake thou onlie unto me. (6– 7) The “truth” the Word accesses here is clearly not empirical. It is defined, not as the intellectual apprehension of an object, but as a uniquely powerful connection between two speaking subjects, one of whom happens to be transcendent. This emphatically subjective orientation has its roots in Kempis’s understanding of the relationship between language and desire. For Kempis, language is a manifestation of humanity’s instinctive curiosity. “Al men,” he asserts, “naturaly desire to know” (3). “Being rightly considered,” the use of language to satisfy this desire is “good and alowed of God” (8). However, “because many desire to know, rather than to please God, it falleth out commonlie that they er; & reape either no frute, or verie litle by al their studie. . . . Assuredlie at the daie of judgment we must tel, not what we have read, but what we have done; and how religiouslie we have

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lived, not how rhetoricalie we have persuaded” (8 – 9). The pessimism Kempis expresses here about the apprehension of ultimate “truth” through “fallen” language reflects the influence of Stoicism on early Christian and medieval theology.27 For Kempis, as for the Stoics and the church fathers, human language is far too readily coopted by misdirected desires.28 His solution to this problem is not to eliminate desire (the goal of Stoicism) or to transcend language (the goal of mysticism) but to reorient the desire implicit in language away from earthly objects and toward evergreater communion with the indwelling Word. This relationship between human desire and the Word is both the source and end of all true knowledge.29 “Were thy minde upright,” Kempis admonishes in book 2, “y whole world were nought unto thee but even a glasse to frame thy life, and a booke of godlie instructions. For nothing is there so smal, & vile, but it representeth the goodnes of God” (79). He makes it clear, however, that this sort of perfect correspondence between human desire and divine revelation is impossible on earth: “Oh, when will that blessed houre come alwaies to be wished, wherein thou wilt so fil me with thy presence, that thou wilt bee all in al to me; until when my joie doubtles wil not be perfect. As yet the olde man to my great griefe, not yet wholie crucified, nor yet dead, is within me. As yet the flesh lusteth against the spirit, it fighteth within mee, and disquiets the kingdome of the soule” (200). In Kempis’s epistemology, this “burning desire of celestial things” culminates in book 4, with a meditation on the Eucharist as the earthly fulfillment of heavenly desire. Rogers’s translation, however, entirely eliminates this final book as “superstitious,” a move that has the effect of repositioning desire as an end in itself. Indeed, in this expurgated version of the Imitatio Christi, the ideal Christian subject is little else but desiring. Book 3 is almost entirely devoted to the topic. Cast as a dialogue between the Lord and his Servant, it models desire for dialogue with the living Word as the only proper response to God: Speake Lord; for thy servant heareth. I am thy servant; O give me understanding, that I maie learne thy statutes. Incline my soule unto the wordes of thy mouth, even unto thy wordes which stil downe like the dewe. The Israelites saide unto Moses in old time: Talke thou

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with us, and we wil heare, but let not God talke with us least we die. But I praie not so, Lord, I praie not so, but with the Prophet Samuel rather I beseech thee, saieng: Speake Lord for thy servant heareth. And let no Moses, nor anie other prophet speak to me, but thou Lord, which inspirest and lightenest al the Prophets, speake thou to mee. For thou canst instruct me without their helpe, but they can profit nought without thee. They maie sound out wordes in mine eare, but they bring not the Spirit. They can speake trimlie, but if thou holde thy peace, they inflame not the minde. They teach the letter, but thou openest the meaning. They talke of deepe things, but thou unlockest the sense of that which was sealed uppe. They pronounce the comandements, but thou helpest to fulfil them. They showe the way, but thou givest strength to walke in the same. They deale outwardlie with the senses, but thou teachest and lightenest the mindes. They water but thou givest the increase. They crie with open mouthes, but thou givest wisedome unto the hearer. So then, let not Moses talke with me, but speake thou my Lord, & God, which art the everlasting truth, least I die, and prove unfruteful: and least, beeing outwardlie admonished, and not inwardlie inflamed, the worde heard, not done; knowen, not loved; beleeved, not observed. (111– 13) In this scenario, desire participates in a sort of supernatural feedback loop with the Word. The Word both excites and satisfies the believer’s desire for the experience of divine presence, which is, in turn, imagined as the experience of being “inwardly inflamed” with desire for and by the Word. In this context, the epistemological value of language is heightened rather than undermined by its affiliation with desire. In opposition to the subjectobject dichotomy that would problematize fallen language, the Word establishes language as a reliable medium of relation to a transcendent subject whose speaking transforms our desires and thus redeems our response. Throughout book 3, the vulnerability of human language to false objectivity and misguided desire is measured against the Word’s power to effect genuine (i.e., emotional) conversion and connection: “My sonne, be not thou carried awaie with the faire and subtile speech of man. For the kingdome of God is not in worde but in power. Listen to my wordes, for they

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inflame the minde, lighten the understanding; set men on fire; and bring the true comfort” (216). The appropriately “inflamed” answer to this emotive heavenly rhetoric is all-consuming love, a total dissolution of the sinful flesh in the plenitudinous body of Christ.30 Throughout the text, Kempis makes it clear that what the “law of love” requires is nothing less than self-annihilation. “If a man feede the poore with al his goodes,” warns Kempis, “he hath yet done nothing; and if he chastise himselfe with sorow for his sinnes it is yet too litle; and though he knew al secretes, and al knowledge, he is yet far from the marke; yea were he most singularlie virtuous, and could burne for religion, yet lackes he something, even one thing which is needeful.” That “one thing” is that he “forsake himselfe; and going wholie out of himselfe, reteine no peece of selfe, or private love within him” (100). If the ideal Stoic is defined by his lack of desire, the ideal Christian is defined here by lack itself. He is nothing but desire: “needie and naked in Spirit,” there is “none freer, none mightier than he” (101). It is in this context that the role of the body in Kempis’s vision of imitatio Christi is best understood. If the Word is the primary point of contact between Christ and the believer, the human body becomes, literally, a site of profound significance. Throughout the text, the believer’s disciplined flesh mirrors the miracles of the Incarnation and the Passion, transforming itself through suffering from a self-referential surface into an artistic medium for the living, dialogic Word within. Indeed, the believer’s embodied suffering remains so integral to Kempis’s notion of good imitatio that he counsels his reader to “chuse to suffer for Christ rather than to be refreshed with much consolation: for so shalt thou become the more like to Christ” (108). This embodied subjectivity is spectacularly self-effacing, but it is hardly — as Boyle asserts— silent. As we have seen, much of the text is written in the form of a dialogue; and while the Servant is decidedly the junior partner, he certainly cannot be said not to hold up his end of the conversation. Like Christ himself, the ideal Christian is the very embodiment of eloquence, a miracle of perfect (or near-perfect) signification that collapses (or almost collapses) the tragic, postlapsarian disjunction between inside and outside, surface and essence, letter and spirit.

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The incarnational power of language in Kempis’s formulation of the imitatio Christi is at the root of his frequent admonitions to silence. In the context we have established, it appears as the flip side of his faith in the power of the Word — and by extension, in the power of ordinary words— to stir up and satisfy desire. The problem with human speech is that the desires it stirs up and satisfies are usually sinful.31 Human-tohuman speech, however, is not altogether condemned. In fact, according to Kempis, “godlie speech” has the power to “minister grace unto the hearers” and “greatlie availeth to a virtuous life, especialie where men of like mindes and spirit are copled together in the Lord” (19). This final caveat — “where men of like minds and spirit are copled together” — is maybe what makes silence such an attractive option for Kempis. Given the scarcity of “like minds” and how readily one can be led astray by ungodly conversation, the true Christian is wise to center himself through solitary prayer and scripture reading.32 This delicate balancing act between speech and silence is destabilized by Rogers’s translation, which relocates the text’s hopes and fears about language from their origins in the quasi-monastic piety of the devotio moderna to the diverse and divided religious culture of Elizabethan England. Unlike Kempis’s brethren, for whom speech and silence alike were contextualized by the intimate, day-to-day relationships of a local religious community clearly defined by submission to a shared rule of life and participation in a time-honored sacramental system, Rogers’s audience is a widely dispersed and variously defined community of “the godly,” dependent for its survival in England on the moral vision of a political leader who may or may not be among the elect.33 This new theological and sociopolitical context raises new questions about the means and ends of Christian imitatio. Can human words work to “minister grace”? If so, how, and perhaps even more importantly, why? If the imitation of Christas-Word is a sign of (rather than a means to) salvation, what are the appropriate aims of Protestant eloquence? Rogers’s 1592 addendum to his revision of the Imitation of Christ is perhaps the best starting place for thinking about how Rogers himself might have answered these questions. Newly designated The Fourth Booke of the Imitation of Christ (“for the great affinitie it hath with other bookes

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of the Author published heretofore in our native tongue”), it is in fact a translation and “correction” of Soliloquium Animae, a collection of meditations attributed to Kempis. Framed as Rogers’s answer to “well weening, though not so well deeming” requests for a translation of the actual fourth book of the Imitation of Christ (dismissed by Rogers as “altogether De sacramento altaris”), it offers us a fuller picture of Roger’s understanding of the proper end of Christian imitation here on earth.34 Soliloquium Animae, which Rogers subtitles The Sole-Talke of the Soule with God, is an early example of what was to become an important genre among conformist Protestants in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Distinctive for their emphasis on the passionate outpouring of the soul to God, “holy soliloquies” (as Kate Narveson has usefully described them) are meant to be imagined as internal dialogues.35 In the case of Soliloquium Animae the dialogic quality is heightened by the decision of the author to “bewreath” the text in a “sweete, and delightsome stile” that entails not only a “varietie of words, as nowe talking, nowe reasoning, praieng nowe, nowe conferring,” but also a variety of personae, the author speaking “now in mine owne, now in another mans person” ([A5]v). There is nothing particularly unusual about this rhetorical move, which in this case is perhaps most usefully understood as a late medieval example of the internal forum, a meditation or deliberation by a single individual imagined as a conversation among multiple voices. What makes it especially noteworthy here in its new context as book 4 of the Imitation of Christ is the way it extends the dialogic model of imitation at work in books 1– 3 to foreground the transformative capacity of human words. Admittedly, the dialogue between the work’s two human voices is remote from the witty exchanges of Erasmus’s dinner guests in “The Godly Feast” or Castiglione’s courtiers. Soliloquium’s personae (Soule and Man) are poorly realized and inconsistent, sometimes voicing the perspectives of what appear to be two clearly differentiated individuals (one of them more spiritually advanced than the other), sometimes personating the tension between spirit and flesh, and often lapsing into one-sided silences that leave the identity of the single remaining speaker unclear. Furthermore, the real center of the dialogue is clearly the encounter of the human voice with the living Word, whose infrequent utterances (heavily glossed by Rogers with biblical references) read in their new context as a pointed rebuttal of the Eucharistic theology

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of the original book 4. Here the “milke” of the living Word supersedes the efficacy of the Eucharistic feast, “feeding” the famished listeners “without anie corporall similitude” (70). Between feedings, however, Kempis’s human personae are left to themselves, and their dialogue offers a model of Christian imitation that is not only in keeping with the tenets of Protestant theology but also remarkably congenial to the Ciceronian ethos of imitation at work in Tudor pedagogy.36 These interlocutors, like their counterparts in Erasmus’s garden and Castiglione’s court, pursue excellence, not through conformity to an external model, but through transformative experiments in human eloquence that work gradually from the inside out to reorient the will.37 This imitative model is foregrounded in the dialogue’s opening exchange. Awed by Soule’s eloquent (and ecstatic) meditation on Psalm 73:28 (“It is good to draw neere unto God”), Man asks Soule for directions to God’s house: “Where is the place where his honor dwelleth? . . . Make answere, I praie thee. For, if thou canst, show mee him, I will go with thee, and wee will seeke him together, yea and he shall be thy God, and my God: and wee shall be full happie when wee have found him, and hold him” (3). Soule’s initial hostility to this request confronts Man with an entirely different set of spiritual coordinates: What aske you this at mine hands? Or whie so curiouslie do you enquire of this matter of me? Thinke you I can, or am able to utter such things? What though gladlie I would, conceave not yet, that what through the rarenes of the thing, and the deepnes of the mysterie, I am restrained back? What aske you mee? Aske them who have both heard and seene, they are such as better can describe him whome you seeke. But rather aske him that knoweth all things. For he it is, of whome we speake, that both best can tell you who himselfe is, yea and best declare the place of his owne aboade. Even he it is (and none other) which teacheth man knowledge, and giveth his grace also to the humble. (3– 4) For Soule, God is not an objective to be reached but a subject to be related to. Knowledge of God is therefore necessarily private, partial (those who have “both heard and seene” being the saints in heaven), and under

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the divine prerogative. It would seem that the conversation between Soule and Man is closed before it has even begun. However, Soule’s standoffishness is heuristic rather than hostile. His repeated insistence on the ineffability of the divine and the inviolability of the human religious interior he represents — “You are too curious and importune upon me,” he complains (7) — slowly teaches Man how and where God truly dwells. Conversely, Man’s ever more eloquent arguments against Soule’s silence show Soule (and by extension, the reader) the value of human eloquence. The lengthy effusion below is typical: Hide not that fro mee which I demaund, but of the greatnes of your inward pleasures, poure-out even a sparcle of the firie love. Give me one small drop of pretious wine, send forth some little savour of the best ointment, whose chiefest part and lovelie comfort is well and usuallie knowne to thee, that I also maie taste thereof. . . . If you cannot describe him rightlie as he is, yet speake of him so well as you can. For indeed as he is, who is able to describe him? Yea, who is able to conceive the describer? Therefore, if not, as in himselfe he is: yet tell me what thou thinkest of him. If not what to himselfe: yet utter out how good hee hath bin to thee. . . . Of all frendship, by some similitude describe him, whose essence thou hast not yet attained unto. Niether is it for you to denie to showe him in part, whome you thinke can not wholie bee revealed. (5– 6) Man’s insistence here and throughout this work on the capacity of human eloquence to carry the “savour” of one’s ecstatic interior dialogue with God suggests that for the author (and presumably for Rogers) words can do more than merely gesture toward an interior miracle that has already occurred. They can actually imitate and to a certain degree channel the transformative power of the Word. Like the Word itself, Soule’s speech stirs up and reorients Man’s desire, away from superficial definitions of holiness toward a plenitude beyond human striving. That Man cannot himself convey presence (Soule’s worry) is not a real impediment since, as we saw in books 1– 3, the primary effect of divine presence as manifest through the Word is in fact the reorientation and intensification of human desire. Furthermore, wherever two or more are gathered together (even,

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it seems, when the two are technically one), Christ himself is always a potential interlocutor. As Man puts it in his clinching argument: “And if happelie he come while we are talking, let us give place, and let him be betweene us. If he vouchsafe to speake, let us heare him gladlie, and bee silent till hee have done. At which time you shall not be bound to satisfie my demaundes. For when he speaketh, all flesh must be still” (9). This is precisely what happens when Soule finally does consent to “show him in part” he who “can not wholie bee revealed.” He ends his speech (on God’s indescribability) by leading Man in his first real prayer, which, in turn, precipitates God’s first interjection into the conversation: “Verelie I am that I am; and besides me there is none other God; I am the beginning and the ending; I am the creator, and the governor of all things. I live saith the Lorde, and I will raigne for ever and ever” (11). This is Wordcentered imitatio at its most participatory, with human speech serving as the catalyst for divine self-revelation. Soule’s interpretation of this event is instructive, both for Man and for the reader. He admonishes Man to take God’s momentary presence as preparatory for his inevitable absence: “Talke thou onlie with him, and though he depart, leaving the roome void, beare all things patientlie. For his woont is, to goe and to come, to proove his freend, and make him perfect in loving. If thou desire his presence, beare his absence patientlie. Waite, and waite again, hee will depart for a while, and after a while hee will againe returne” (11– 12). He then offers his own experience as a model for how God behaves and how the believer should respond: “So soone as I was touched inwardlie with his love, I forthwith began so to be inflamed in my minde, that bidding adue to all things in the world, I onlie wished for his most pure embracements, and as it were bearing hote coales out of a burning oven, I uttered these words, which but few doo use. Whome have I in heaven but thee; and I have desired none in the earth with thee” (13). Soule’s account sums up Rogers’s revisioning of Imitatio Christi. Here, even more explicitly than in Kempis’s original, good imitatio emerges as a peculiar species of human eloquence: a passionate, imitative engagement with a beautiful, but erratic, heavenly voice, whose supernatural eloquence is amplified by long, strategic silences. In this sense, Soule’s conversation with Man is a perfect imitation of Soule’s “hidden” relationship with the Word. In both cases, the sinful “self ” is refashioned, not by human effort,

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but by the experience of unconsummated or partially consummated desire for the Word. Soule’s reticence, like Christ’s, is thus an essential part of his rhetoric. It works to draw the listener toward a union that will be accomplished in heaven. That human speech does, in fact, work like the Word is a major theme of this text. Indeed, the author’s imagery would suggest that Christian eloquence is as much an emanation from as an imitation of the Word. Throughout, the believer’s speech is represented in terms that emphasize its “natural” participation in the Word’s operation. As Soule describes it in chapter 11, “That which musick is at a banquet, and sweete smelling frankincense in a censar: even that is the word of God in a pure hart. And thy sancts, Lord, filled with thy spirit, have thus sounded forth the memorie of thine abundant sweetenes; and have left their words unto us to be sounded abroade” (77). The link here between smell, sound, and memory epitomizes the relationship between human and heavenly speech in Soliloquium Animae. “Sounded abroade,” the believer’s memory is more than a sign; it is an echo, however faint, from the musical banquet itself, a whiff of heavenly perfume, a “sparkle” of heavenly fire. Its power to convey “that which is hidden within” (86) is limited, but sufficient for God’s purposes. As we will see in the next section, Rogers understands this capacity of human language to be most fully realized in and through the church, imagined not primarily as a sacramental community but as a community of speakers, listeners, readers, and writers. Writing the Church Militant Rogers’s entire authorial career can be viewed as an attempt to advance the frontier of Christian eloquence from private prayer and preaching to print, all the while defending against the incursions of its fleshly counterpart. For Rogers, the stakes are nothing less than the spiritual survival of England, besieged on the right by Catholic propaganda and on the left by the pamphlets of Familialists, Brownists, Martinists, and atheists. In his Miles Christianus or A Iust Apologie of All Necessarie Writings and Writers, Rogers makes the case for writing as a privileged form of Christian imitatio, on a par with preaching in its ability to channel the transforma-

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tive power of the Word. In response to fellow churchman Miles Mosse’s critique of devotional writing as a sign of the (corrupt) times, Rogers argues for a freer interpretation of Christ’s example: “You say Christ he preached much, but wrot nothing, you may as well blame the Apostles, and al the Fathers, as any able man in these dayes for writing. For if every action of Christ is necessarily to bee imitated of his ministers, then did both the Apostles, and the Fathers ill, for writing.”38 Rogers contends that such letter-of-the-law thinking reproduces the errors of popery, which relies on a similar logic to justify its “unwritten blasphemies. and traditions” (15). It may be that “faith commeth by hearing ordinarily” (10), but it can, in certain contexts, come by reading as well.39 Rogers takes the international struggle against Catholicism as a case in point, citing the Catholic suppression of Protestant texts as proof of writing’s equality with the “lively voyce” as a conduit for the Word. “Were they dead, and had no force and power to overthrow the kingdom of errors,” he argues, “our adversaries the Papists would never proceed so hardlie against our writings, as they do” (25). However, if the written word shares speech’s privileged relationship to the Word, it also shares its vulnerability to co-optation by the flesh. In Miles Christianus, the supernatural power of Protestant writing is rivaled by the seductive power of Catholic propaganda, which works analogously and nearly as effectively: “O that Gods children were as carefull to keepe men from bad . . . as the wicked are politike to keepe ill men from good bookes: and that we made as much conscience not to reade theirs as they doe not to read our writings: if we did, sure I am as there be few Protestats among them, so would there be lesse Papistes, and Traitors, and other wicked men among us, neither would so manie of us revolt unto their idolatrie, being bewitched by their inchaunted bookes” (26). What began as an argument for Protestant literature as a special class of supernaturally efficacious writing becomes here (in practice, if not in theory) a contest between two equally “lively” literatures, one authentically spiritual and the other merely sensual. As Rogers puts it, “Both they and we, and all men know that bookes well and pithily penned are not dead letters which can not move, but of great force to perswade either unto sinne or virtue” (26). The distinction here, like the distinction between good and bad speech in The Imitation of Christ, is the

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difference between good and bad imitatio. Whether written or spoken, good language responds to and participates in the Word. Bad language begins and ends with the flesh. Rogers’s vision of the Protestant Church Militant is, not surprisingly, bound up with his commitment to this reformed redefinition of Christian imitation. In his preface to The Faith of the Church Militant (1581), a translation of a lengthy sermon by Melancthon protégé Niels Hemmingsen, he celebrates the church as a prophetic community centered on the promulgation and interpretation of the Word to a world ensnared in satanic fictions.40 After a lengthy catalogue of these fictions (starting with the fraud of the snake in the Garden of Eden and working all the way up through biblical and early church history to the founding myths of the Ottoman Empire and the Papal See), he positions the true church as a voice in the epistemological wilderness, calling sinners back to God’s “miraculous revealing of the eternall truth” through the imitative arts of preaching and writing.41 Not insignificantly (and contra Puritan commonplace), Rogers privileges writing as the superior of the two for its capacity to connect believers not only to the Word but to each other in an ongoing, edifying conversation stretching back across time and space to bring the prophets, the apostles, and the fathers into dialogue with the “Godlie learned of our age” ([¶.4]r). Hemmingsen’s sermon strongly supports Rogers’s vision of the church as a writing/reading/speaking/listening body, called into being by and miraculously incorporated into the saving message of the Word. The image of the church as a pomegranate tied to a bell perfectly captures Rogers’s dream of an eloquent transnational, transhistorical Protestantism: This unitie of the true Church gathered out of manie and sundrie nations, as it were into one house or familie, is excelentlie shadowed by a Pome-granate tied to a bel. For as in the Pome-granate under one outward barke manie granes are inwardlie united-together: so infinite people of the Church are covered under the unitie of the Church, the which agree together through true charitie, albeit in giftes and caling theie are distinguished. The bel annexed signifieth the voice of such as preach the Gospel, wherebie the members of the Church are gathered as it were into one bodie. (108)

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Although Hemmingsen does not explicitly mention writing here, his earlier commendation of his dedicatee as among those who “studie to upholde the ministerie of the worde in schooles, and temples” signals his support for the kinds of lay literacy Rogers aspired to cultivate in England ([A1]v). In any case, his account of the Word’s rhetorical operation within and through the church is strikingly of a piece with the dialogic, affective piety on display in books 1 through 4 of Rogers’s reformed Imitatio Christi. Like Kempis and Rogers, Hemmingsen understands conversion as a transformative encounter with the Word, or, as he puts it, a purging of the soul by the “cleere fountanes of our Saviour, that is by the worde of God” ([¶.6]r). Unlike the “Philosophical doctrines” of Socrates and Plato (6), which offer insights into the human condition but cannot remedy it, “the word of God, or the sound of the Gospel” ([¶.6]v) is a total cure for mind, body, and soul. “As it is in al respects pure,” Hemmingsen argues, “so it maketh the soule of him, who by a livelie faith embraceth the Gospel, pure and perfect; it delivereth him from erronioies opinions; it replenisheth him with sound judgement; and by the Spirite of Christ raiseth-up pure affections to which when the wil doth assent the actions both internal & outward, as most cleere rivers from a most pure fountaine, do issue-out” ([¶.6]v). What the Word does, in other words, is “joine us to God” ([A1]v), initiating an assimilative process that gradually reorients the believer’s will, away from the fallen flesh and toward ever fuller identity with Christ. As in Rogers’s translation of Kempis, this movement from flesh to Word inversely mirrors the miracle of the Incarnation and imitates the sacrifice of the Passion— all without impinging upon the invisible, internal miracle of salvation. Hemmingsen’s description of this process (which, in good Protestant parlance, he identifies as the miracle of sanctification) suggests how it appeals to humanism’s highest hopes for ordinary processes of signification, all but closing (while never presuming to altogether deny) the postlapsarian gap between sign and referent. He states, “This sanctification or separation of man from the uncleanesse of the gentiles, through the mortification of the fleshe; and conjunction of him with God through y quickening of the spirit, is y renuing, or repairing of the image of God in man” (128). In this scenario, the church’s role is to participate in the twin miracles of salvation and sanctification by gesturing eloquently toward the truth it

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quite literally embodies. Proceeding as it does from the Word incarnate, this “fellowship” is uniquely empowered to communicate something of the divine essence, which works naturally (i.e., rhetorically) to inflame its members with the “holy desire of the Church,” man’s “chiefest happines” (136) here on earth. Hemmingsen’s careful tracing of this rhetorical feedback loop is instructive here. Citing the example of David in Psalms 42 and 119, he explains: Therefore as the Hart, in hunting flieth being pursued of dogs, & wearied by a long course and drines, with al gredines desireth the fresh waters: so the minde of David, being now in exile, ful earnestlie longed-for the fellowship of the Church of God, wherein y word soundeth, and praiers with sacrifices are made. For that living foutaine is the word of God, from whence true life, and livelie consolations are drawen. From the cisternes of man, neither life, nor substantial comfort can be fetcht. Wherefore let us diligentlie note the order. For first knowledge goeth-before. For, as it is rightlie saide, That which is unknowne is undesired. Secondarilie, of knowledge ariseth a lust not of the flesh, but of the spirite, or fro faith. Thirdlie, this lust by due meanes is carried to attaine, to possesse, keepe, and to enjoie the end. (135– 36) That end, of course, is also the beginning, “the spring of the right fountaine” from which the church proceeds and to which it is “sent-back” (136). The erotics of this metonymic relation, whereby the church participates (however imperfectly) in the Word it seeks to imitate and propagate, are most apparent in Hemmingsen’s subtle but significant development of the trope of the church as the bride of Christ. His intermittent usage of the feminine pronoun in reference to the church marks his celebration of the Word-centered church’s “allure”—both to God and to the world— as a function of her loving incorporation into the body of Christ (130). It also suggests how the body (particularly the female body) continues to figure in reformed imitatio as metaphor not only for the affective power of human words but also for their hoped-for (heartfelt) relation to the transcendent truths they purportedly represent. If Protestant imitatio is emphatically “literary” in its orientation toward the Word, it is

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no less emphatically incarnational in its understanding of words as the literal embodiment of spirit (and in some cases, the Spirit). In this sense, it fulfills the fondest dreams of its more explicitly literary counterparts, linking transitory surface to eternal essence through the natural operations of language. This idealized state of organic relation is a fragile one, however, even (or perhaps especially) for the church. Hemmingsen’s depiction of the Mass as a finely dressed, sweet-talking whore vividly illustrates the proximity of the eloquent Body of Christ to the double-dealing flesh: For as an harlot who setteth her bodie to sale, doth paint her selfe to al lasciviousnes, and uncleanenes; doth set-out her selfe with rings and jewels; and putteth-on costlie apparel, therwithal to alure her selfe to companions, whose substace she maie wast-awaie: So that whore of Babylon, called the Masse, commeth-abroade set-out as it were with golde and jewels, while she doth use certaine holie lessons, and songes out of the worde of God, wherebie she doth easilie deceave the ruder sorte, and the simple, who deceaved with the outwarde shewe, doe thinke her to be a verie chaste virgine, who in deede is a most filthie harlot, hurting her companions more than the vilest harlot that maie be. For, as an impudent strumpet doth infect the bodie of her lover with contagions and poisoned diseases: So this Babylonish, or Romane strumpet infecteth the soule of man with moste pestilent diseases. (202– 3) If the whore’s fascination here is a perversion of the body of Christ’s “allure,” it is also a powerful reminder of the affiliation of words (even sacred ones) with potentially seductive surfaces. In this sense, the body functions as the organizing metaphor not only for the highest hopes of Protestant imitatio but for its darkest fears as well, all of which involve, in one way or another, the co-optation of words by fallen, fleshly desires. In Kempis, as we have seen, the integrity of the sign/referent relation is maintained (however imperfectly) by the daily disciplines of a small, prophetic community. Hemmingsen and Rogers, however, must work to safeguard their models of Christian eloquence on a much larger scale. This factor of size significantly complicates the project of Protestant imitation. How

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can language be stabilized sufficiently to “minister grace” to religious and literary nonspecialists within a large, corrupted, and corrupting public discourse? Rogers’s and Hemmingsen’s answer to this question is to ground Christian imitatio in the visible, hierarchical body of the national church. Both imagine a Protestant commonwealth of Christian letters in which the free circulation of words and ideas is stabilized by the day-to-day disciplines of the local, embodied religious community governed by the just laws and modeled on the good example of godly leaders. This ideal is epitomized by the woodcut facing Rogers’s translation of the text proper of Imitation of Christ in the 1580 and many subsequent Elizabethan editions (figure 1). A king kneels in prayer before an open Bible, his face turned heavenward toward the Tetragrammaton, which shines down upon him from a cloud of glory. An excerpt from the Geneva Bible’s translation of Ecclesiastes 10:17 appears in the frame encircling the portrait: “Blessed art thou O lande, when thy King is the Sonne of Nobles.” Rogers’s “First Epistle” helpfully expands on this idea. Having observed the “natural” propensity toward imitation among the junior partners within the (presumably equally “natural”) hierarchies of servant and master, soldier and captain, subject and governor, he credits those in high places with special exemplary power. “They should have great regard unto themselves,” he argues, “who are anie waie either for birth, or for office, or for calling, whether it be spiritual or temporal better than other men. For they cannot sinne without great hurt, and danger to the Common-weale” ([a.]3v). Here the affiliation of “natural” hierarchies with the divine order allows them to function analogously to the Word as particularly potent catalysts of desire. In such a scenario, the godly ruler is the earthly guarantor of the body of Christ. While not a sacred sign, he or she is nevertheless an especially legible sign of the sacred, drawing Christ’s speaking/hearing/ reading/writing members into ever greater communion with God and each other through the “allure” of his or her godly example. This reimagining of the visible body of Christ lends Rogers’s version of the Imitatio Christi a political resonance absent from the original. For example, Kempis’s emphasis on submission to one’s superiors presumes an explicitly monastic context; but in Rogers’s translation, these passages apply to political and economic relationships as well. In Kempis, self-subjugation

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Figure 1. Thomas Rogers, Of The Imitation of Christ . . . . (London, 1580). Huntington Library shelfmark RB 69654. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Image published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Produced by Proquest as part of Early English Books Online.

serves a clear purpose, the promotion of harmony within a small community of self-selecting brethren. Rogers would apply this discipline to society at large, a much taller order indeed: “It is greatlie for our behoofe to live under others, not as we list our selves; and at more ease live subjects, than rulers. Many obeie for feare rather than for love; & grudginglie, not gladlie. But such can never have the libertie of minde, before they obeie both for conscience, and for the Lords sake. Wheresoever thou becommest, looke never to live at ease, unles thou keepe thy selfe within thy calling, and obeie thy superiors” (17). Such passages bring us back to the woodcut, specifically the ominous, omitted portions of Ecclesiastes 10:17, which reads in full, “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning. Blessed are thou, O land, when thy king is

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the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness!” Given the ever-present possibility of “woe,” one is left to wonder: How, if at all, does Protestant imitatio speak to the problem of tyranny? Hemmingsen’s explication of Psalm 84, the source text for his sermon, envisions a powerful (if somewhat paradoxical) role for the Church Eloquent in this worst-case scenario. Extrapolating from verse 1 (“O Lord of hostes, how amiable are thy tabernacles!”), he pictures the true church as both a court in exile and an army on the march, “tending towardes her countrie by folowing her captaine Christ” (Rogers, Faith of the Church Militant, 104). This hierarchical “host” wages a guerrilla war of words (or rather Word) from within the “kingdome of the dracon,” imagined throughout as a wasteland or sea of “idols and blasphemies” (12). Hemmingsen is explicit about the participatory nature of human signification in this struggle. Christ, he argues, “gathereth . . . an hoste to him selfe, not because he is weake of him selfe, and of smal power: but for that he will communicate his owne glorie after a sort with his soldiers” (10 – 11). Depending on their “order,” soldiers share equally in Christ’s glory as “godlie teachers” or as “godlie hearers” (12– 13) of the Word, which works in both cases to liberate human captives — tyrants included — from the enslaving illusions of “the flesh, sinne, the world, and the divel” (13). The career of the Psalmist himself is a case in point. According to Hemmingsen, David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah are the backdrop for Psalm 84, which is occasioned — courtesy of his rebellious son, Absalom — by David’s expulsion from Jerusalem and consequent exclusion from Temple worship (5– 7). David’s ecstatic recognition of “the courts of the Lorde” as superior to the “tabernacles of the ungodly” foreshadows the prophetic power of the church to reconcile sinners of all ranks to itself. However, it also epitomizes the simultaneity of the two courts here on earth. If the church is not of the world, it is very much in it, working on and through its institutions to redeem them from the inside out. Indeed, Hemmingsen goes so far so as to collapse the two orders above into a third human order, that of “everie particular man in his vocation” (14). “Everie man,” explains Hemmingsen, “fighteth under the banner of Christ, when stoutlie in y feare of God he doth those things, which in respect of

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his calling, he is bound to do” (14). Clearly, the “courts of the Lord” are not entirely antithetical to earthly courts; neither, for that matter, are the tropes of citizenship incongruous with the duties of the Christian. Hemmingsen’s use of the latter further clarifies the complicated dynamic between the two kingdoms in his thinking. Citing the “Attike oath” as a model of Christian piety (“I will fight both for religious, & for prophane causes, and that alone and with others; and wil leave my countrie not the worser, but the better and more ample to the posteritie” ([A.1]v–[A.2]r), Hemmingsen salutes his aristocratic patron as one of the “Citizens of the Church of Christe,” who by his wealth promotes “the studies of true doctrin, & of good arts” ([A.2]v). Not insignificantly, Hemmingsen compares him to David, who “loved his countrie because of the Church that was therin” ([A.2]v). Here, the interdependence of church and state mirrors (and to a certain extent, follows from) the integrity of the sign/referent relation as initiated (or reinitiated) by the incarnation of the Word. The state gives shape to a mystical body of speakers, listeners, readers, and writers, who in turn redeem and repurpose the fallen forms of sovereignty and citizenship into vehicles for the ever-wider propagation of the Word. This reciprocal relation between secular “surface” and spiritual “essence” is the dream of Protestant imitatio as imagined by Hemmingsen and Rogers: an elegant, eloquent, equitable body visible, “alluring” its members into ever greater communion with each other and with Christ.

The Word Made Flesh: Philip Sidney and the Defence of Poesy Robert Stillman has shown how a similar vision of the Protestant Church Eloquent informs Sidney’s argument for poetry. Tracing Sidney’s ties to the internationalist Protestant intellectual circle centered on the legacy of Philip Melanchthon (Hemmingsen’s teacher), he demonstrates how Sidney’s poetics are shaped by his engagement with the political theories and hermeneutic practices of his Philippist mentors. Unlike older treatments of the Defence, which posit a painful contradiction between Sidney’s poetic commitment to imitation and his Protestant (presumably Calvinist) theology of grace, Stillman’s study portrays Sidney’s imitative ethos as an outgrowth of Melancthon’s more optimistic and equally influential brand

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of Protestant Bibliocentrism, which (unlike Calvin’s) finds much of transcendent worth in the “zodiac” of the properly educated human wit.42 In Stillman’s reading of the Defence, human words can and do participate with the Word in the rehabilitation of the divine image within: not through the miracle of prophecy (although that too is always a possibility), but through the ordinary powers and processes of language, which is naturally imitative of the Word, quite apart from its engagement or not with the material text or “letter” of scripture.43 In the case of poetry (according to Sidney), this “natural” analogy can be taken one step further. Unlike the “serving sciences,” which use words to describe the fallen natural world (natura naturata), poetry uses words to make “another nature” (216), thereby imitating the Word’s originating intelligence and goodness at the dawn of creation (natura naturans).44 Just as the prelapsarian natural world embodied the love and logic of the logos, so the poet’s “golden” world (216) figures forth his or her “idea” or “fore-conceit” (216), which is, in turn, an image of humanity’s original creation in the image of God. This incarnational quality lends poetry its special metamorphic power in Sidney’s argument. Like the Word itself, poetry makes present to fallen persons, living in fallen times and fallen places, the compelling beauty of the divine essence, which, if it is perfectly embodied in the eloquence of Christ, is also (at least according to Sidney) embedded in the natural workings of the human heart and mind. Sidney’s famous account of the poetic “life cycle”— from embedded “idea” to self-multiplying Cyruses— spells out the tremendous, transformative potential of this particular mode of imitation: Go to man— for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her [Nature’s] uttermost cunning is employed — and know whether she have brought forth so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon’s Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgil’s Aeneas. Neither let this be jestingly conceived, because the works of the one be essential, the other in imitation or fiction; for any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had

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imagined them. Which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him. (216– 17) If this passage suggests the shared (linguistic) means of poetic and Protestant imitatio, it also brings into focus their complementary ends. While the poet’s words cannot save the soul, they can help shape the state to the service of the Church Eloquent. The poet’s “heart-ravishing” (214) images of virtue — literal substantiations of the divinely imprinted golden world within— have the capacity to liberate prince and people alike from the tyranny of history, with its disheartening narratives of “misty fearfulness and foggy desires” (231). Indeed, according to Stillman, the whole point of poetry in Sidney’s aesthetic is liberation from tyranny, both at the level of style (the tyrannies of philosophical abstraction and historical verisimilitude) and in the real, “brazen” world of events, where self-love (man’s original sin according to Melancthon) and the “self-loving powers in the state, the despot and the mob,” distort the divine gift of language.45 As Stillman points out, Cyrus’s early modern reputation makes him the perfect poster boy for this moderate Protestant vision of poetic imitatio. Long lauded by humanists, Xenophon’s heavily fictionalized portrait of Cyrus as the paradigmatic “just prince” who rules his people by first ruling himself was particularly valued in Philippist circles, where it was interpreted in light of the biblical account that celebrates Cyrus as God’s appointed liberator of the Jews from Babylonian captivity.46 Read in this context, Sidney’s repeated citation of Cyrus, specifically the “feigned Cyrus in Xenophon” (224), as the leading “exemplar of poetry’s real value to the public domain” can be taken as more than an attempt to draft a key player from Team History (the “true Cyrus in Justin”) into the service of poetry (224).47 It can also be read as an expression of Sidney’s understanding of poetic imitation as an art of (Protestant) politics. What the poet does, in bestowing upon the world a Cyrus “to make many Cyruses,” is offer the reader a way out of the echo chamber of the fallen (i.e., self-loving) language of history and political rhetoric and back to the founding first

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principles of human nature. Embodied in poetic “matter,” the poet’s “conceit” (i.e., “the divine consideration of what may be and should be” [218]) works analogously to the Word to reorient the reader’s desire: if not to incorporation in the body of Christ, then at least to more healthful participation in the body politic, which (as we saw in both Hemmingsen and Rogers) can be a powerful partner with the Church Eloquent in the propagation of the Word. The bodily imagery here is not ornamental. For all its concern with words, Sidney’s vision of poetic imitatio, like the Protestant version of imitatio Christi at work in Rogers and Hemmingsen, is ultimately about bodies, individual and corporate. More specifically, it is about their successful rehabilitation into worthy media for the divine image. Stillman’s characterization of this incarnational quality is apt: So often when Sidney writes about poetic action in idealizing terms, he does so with metaphors of the chaste body: in the portrait of Lucretia, in the repetition of Agrippa’s tale about the divided body politic, and in the complementary stories of David’s lust for Bathsheba’s body and Nathan’s healing fiction. The chastening of the body — its government, its discipline, and its purgation — goes hand-in-hand with Sidney’s desire to liberate history from tyranny. It joins hands too with Sidney’s desire to chasten the discourse of the public domain, to free Ideas from contamination by tyrannical passions.48 However, if the bodies scattered throughout the Defence offer a key to Sidney’s thinking about poetry’s methods and aims, they can also be used to map his anxieties about its potential abuses. The defensiveness of the Defence about poetry’s inherent sensuality is, after all, painfully clear. Mary Ellen Lamb and Robert Matz, just to name two prominent and relatively recent voices, have convincingly contextualized the Defence within a cluster of overlapping economic, political, and pedagogical discourses that increasingly problematized pleasure (particularly bodily pleasure) as antithetical to the aspirations of an emergent bourgeois subject. Lamb traces the anxiety surrounding poetry to the early modern grammar school, where “the stirrings of a Cartesian splitting of the self ” were fashioning a newly sedentary class of privileged males who, lacking traditional aristocratic

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outlets for martial service, increasingly equated the reasoning mind with masculinity and the desiring body with effeminacy;49 and Matz reads the Defence as a not entirely successful attempt to reconcile aristocratic male privilege (including the privilege to pleasure) with a Protestant “ethic of service” centered in an ascendant merchant class.50 Other critics have attributed the Defence’s sometimes palpable squeamishness about the “embodiedness” of poetry to Sidney’s conflicted identity as both a forwardthinking (presumably Calvinist) Protestant and a pleasure-loving humanist and courtier.51 In all of these accounts, poetry’s public value is seriously compromised by its association with the seductions of the effeminized and effeminizing flesh. Not without reason, Stillman tends to treat this common critical emphasis on the Defence’s supposed ambivalence as at least in part an effect of theological oversimplification by modern-day critics. He rightly points out that our tendency to equate Sidney’s Protestantism with Calvinism and then on those grounds to presuppose a fatal paradox at the heart of his argument obscures our appreciation both for the genuine epistemic optimism of his poetics and for the Defence’s originality as a synthesis of a distinctively Protestant brand of humanism. The fact remains, however, that the bodies Sidney so clearly strives to “chasten” throughout his argument, and indeed, throughout his career, simply won’t sit pretty. Just as the beautiful body of Christ in Hemmingsen’s argument is disconcertingly proximate to the seductive whore of Babylon, so here human virtue, set out by the poet “in her holiday apparel to the eye of any that will deign not to disdain until they understand” (231), bears a troubling if only superficial resemblance to the seductive and effeminizing “nurse of abuse” (234). Although critics like Lamb and Matz offer persuasive sociocultural framings of the problem, Stillman’s revision to our understanding of Sidney’s religious context calls attention to the need for a revised religious perspective on the Defence’s double vision. I would argue that Rogers’s devotional milieu suggests just such a perspective. Read alongside texts like Rogers’s Imitation of Christ and Hemmingsen’s Church Militant, the Defence’s ambivalent fixation on the precarious relationship between words and bodies comes into clearer focus as part of a widely shared religio-political preoccupation in early modern England. This preoccupation is not limited to Philippists or Calvinists,

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or even (as we will see) to Protestants. Rather, it functions as a common denominator within a diversity of devotional, political, and literary discourses, all of them dependent to varying degrees on the “correct” interpretation and imitation of signs. In such a context, the Defence’s convergence on the body — as both the site and the sign of all that words can do (both for good and for evil)— reads like an Arcadian oracle of the crises that were to redefine religion, poetry, and politics alike in the decades to come. In all three cases, questions about the relationship of human signs to transcendent reality are played out on, in, and through bodies that gesture toward the pleasures of divine assimilation even as they foreground the tragic corruptibility of the flesh. Perhaps the clearest example of this divided consciousness in Sidney’s Defence is the image that Stillman has singled out as its controlling metaphor for poetic imitation: the body of Lucretia. In this famous passage, Sidney compares the imitative process of the right poet to that of a master painter who, taking Lucretia for his subject, does not seek to copy the physical features of the historical Lucretia but “the outward beauty of such a virtue” (218). As Stillman has pointed out, the rhetorical impact of this illustration turns on Lucretia’s untold (but generally known) backstory. In Livy’s account, Lucretia’s rape at the hands of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king of Rome, features as the founding myth of the Roman Republic. Preferring death to dishonor, Lucretia stabs herself in the heart after recounting her story to her father, thereby inspiring Lucius Junius Brutus to hatch a plan for revolution that catches fire with his incendiary display of Lucretia’s bloody corpse in the Forum. Stillman’s analysis of the role of this story in Sidney’s argument is worth recounting in full: In Sidney’s version of the story, Lucretia is liberated twice, both times by the agency of her own virtue. In one instance, her chastity frees her from the tyranny of Tarquin (“when she punished in herself another’s fault”) and in the second instance, that chastity frees her from the tyranny of historical verisimilitude (when the speaking picture declines to copy her body in order to imitate her virtue) [102]. When history itself emerges as a form of tyranny —both history conceived as the brazen world of events, and history conceived as a science captive to the folly of the world of events— then the conjunction of poet-

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ics and politics is startlingly complete. Real freedom from tyranny becomes more than a possible subject of poetry. It emerges instead as its necessary and important work.52 While this reading of Sidney’s Lucretia is compelling, it is only half of her story; for if Lucretia embodies here the hope of language liberated from the tyrannies of verisimilitude and history, she also epitomizes its terrible vulnerability to misdirected desire. In Livy’s account, after all, it is Lucretia’s resolute chastity that incites Tarquin’s violence. One need not be the “nurse of abuse,” it would seem, to serve the lusts of the flesh. Furthermore, while Lucretia’s translation from tyrannized subject to transformative sign is the central meaning of Sidney’s (and Livy’s) narrative, that conversion is not without cost or trace. Lucretia’s inner “virtue” is made present to her “readers,” immediate and secondary, primarily through the spectacle of her bleeding and violated body. Neither her nor Brutus’s eloquence, one suspects, would have been sufficient to topple Tarquin. In this sense, Lucretia suggests a chilling correlation between Sidney’s vision of poetic imitatio and the imitation of Christ as Word. In both cases, the miracle of eloquence is inextricably rooted in the indignities of incarnation, in the body’s perilous penetrabilities and death-dealing passions. Lucretia’s history as a humanist icon further complicates this story. Stillman, Stephanie Jed, and Debora Shuger have all explored the complicated relationship of Lucretia’s catalytic chastity to what Shuger has called “humanism’s philological politics and politicized philology.”53 Depending on the critic, Lucretia’s body is evidence for a link between humanism’s pursuit of textual purity and a broader cultural quest for tighter control of male (Shuger) or female ( Jed) bodies. Jed shows how humanist ambitions to “transmit a faithful, chaste, untouched textual tradition to posterity” participate in the policing of patriarchal social structures.54 Shuger reads those same ambitions as an effort to rein in the rapacious impulses of aristocratic males. For our purposes, the point is essentially the same; either way you gender it, the body is the beginning and end of eloquence in the early modern English imagination. If beauty and integrity are its teleological ends, its original sins are lust and violence. Shuger’s argument is perhaps the most useful for shedding light on Sidney’s response to this dilemma. Her reading of Sidney’s multiple rewritings of Livy (both

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in the Old and New Arcadias and in the Defence) foregrounds the embeddedness of his aesthetic in a “princely” political theory that invests poetry with a “natural” power to discern and gently discipline the potentially unruly desires latent within the body politic. In this scenario, “aristocratic modes of behavior and discourse,” all of them predicated on the essential liberty of “true” nobility from the superficial moralities of the law code, “provide the ideological basis for Sidney’s subsequent defense of the natural creative power of the imagination.”55 Simply put, Sidney makes princes of poets. Just as the wise ruler has the power (indeed, the responsibility) to privilege the spirit over the letter of the law (particularly with respect to the “naturally” high spirits of his noblemen), so the poet transforms bare words into an instrument of true (i.e., poetic) justice. Such an aesthetic may be antityrannical, but it is profoundly hierarchical, grounding the natural powers of poetry in the natural privileges and naturally privileged perspectives of aristocracy. Even— perhaps especially — in the golden world of human making, not everyone can be a prince. Sidney’s impatience with “servile” profit-driven “wits” in the Defence (241) and his harsh treatment of the similarly motivated “poor painter” in book 2 of the revised Arcadia suggest how his reformist republic of letters remains rooted in the aristocratic ideal of service to a harmonious, hierarchical corporate body.56 Whatever his misgivings about the “popular” press, given the “natural” proclivities of both princes and poets in Sidney’s fictions, it is safe to say that he was well aware of the inherent precariousness of his own “princely” model of poetic imitation. This is hardly a home run for Lucretia. Poised between “the corporate, aristocratic culture of the Middle Ages” and the enlightenment “trinity of author, imagination, and individual,” she epitomizes the incarnational paradox at the heart of Sidney’s aesthetic.57 She also accentuates what it has in common with other Protestant discourses of imitation in the period. Like Rogers, Sidney dreams of a beautiful religio-political body, shaped and sustained by good words. Also like Rogers, he struggles to make sense of language’s seemingly irredeemable fleshliness, its endless susceptibility to the twin tyrannies of slavishness and self-love. In the Defence, the epistemological and ethical paradoxes of poetic imitation are at least partially mediated by the principle of decorum, a

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topic to which Sidney returns repeatedly throughout his argument. In the context that has been established, Sidney’s preoccupation with “right use of both matter and manner” (248), his hypervigilant policing of dramatic unities, generic boundaries, and “poetical sinews” (243), is more than merely a flourish of “princely” poetic prerogative, although it is that. It is also a gentlemanly gesture to the “honey-flowing matron Eloquence,” whose “courtesan-like” apparel, much like the priestly vestment in Puritan polemic, presents a danger both to herself and to others (246). Sidney’s careful attention to audience should be understood in this context as well. After all, if Lady Eloquence must be carefully dressed in order to be taken seriously (and safely), she must also travel properly escorted. In this sense, Sidney’s career-long concern for the status- and situationappropriate publication and circulation of his own works is not merely a marker of aristocratic hauteur but also an expression of his Philippist commitment to a charitable, mutually edifying public sphere in which words really do work to draw readers, writers, and speakers into harmonious, spiritually and ethically liberated and liberating wholes. The concern that his fictions might not work this way, that their “heart-ravishing” beauty might in fact invite abuse from all but the most careful and charitably disposed readers, is the theme of his prefatory letter to the Arcadia, originally addressed to his sister Mary Sidney Herbert: Here now have you . . . this idle work of mine, which, I fear, like the spider’s web, will be thought fitter to be swept away than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you: if you keep it to yourself or to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. . . . In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as I would it were (and shall be when God will) some way delivered, would have grown a monster; and more sorry might I be

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that they came in than that they gat out. But his chief safety shall be the not walking abroad.58 According to Fulke Grevelle’s biographical Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, poetry’s potential for misappropriation by inexperienced or malicious readers ultimately led Sidney to reject it altogether as a legitimate public activity: “When his body declined, and his piercing inward powers were lifted up to a purer horizon he then discovered, not onely the imperfection, but vanity of these shadowes, how daintily soever limned; as seeing that even beauty itself, in all earthly complexions, was more apt to allure men to evil, then to fashion any goodnes in them. And from this ground, in that memorable testament of his, he bequeathed no other legacie, but the fire, to this unpolished embryo.”59 Whether or not we take this idealized scene at face value, it seems clear that Sidney was painfully aware of the spiritual and social dangers inherent in the “princely” art of poetic imitatio. It is impossible to say how the mature Sidney might have worked to address these dangers. However, a brief closing consideration of Greville’s own literary career suggests something of the pressures that would soon be brought to bear on poetic imitation as a strategy for stabilizing the relationship between word and body, spirit and letter. The verse treatises and Senecan closet dramas that he dedicates to Sidney in the biographical Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney are at best an ambivalent tribute to the poetics of the Defence. Indeed, they seem perversely fixated on reversing the polarity of its organizing metaphor. Far from celebrating the liberatory potential of human creativity, Greville’s own verse persistently and forcefully implicates the “princely” power of poetry in the religio-political fictions of tyrannous princes, whose dazzling (and false) imitations of the divine transcendence work to transform naturally inspirable subjects into artificially impressionable “blankes where pow’r doth write her lust.”60 The narrative above of Sidney’s deathbed renunciation participates in this project, dissolving Sidney’s “unpolished embryo” into the poetical/ political “shadowes” that pervade Greville’s works. Jonathan Dollimore’s reading of the shadow metaphor as the key to Greville’s aesthetic suggests just how far we are here from the incarnational aspirations of Sidnean imitatio. According to Dollimore, the “construct of the shadows” is Greville’s partial poetic solution to the problem of sin, which his “protestant

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pessimism and mimetic realism” construe as an insuperable barrier to true signification.61 In the face of ever worsening linguistic and indeed epistemological breakdown, the “shadowes” serve a dual function in Greville’s fallen imaginary. On the one hand, they confirm the “complete disjunction” of earthly sign and divine referent. On the other, they affirm the necessity (if not the success) of continued human efforts at good imitatio. Dollimore’s description of their double-edged significance is succinct: “Although the discrepancy between divine and secular is appalling (and getting worse), we do at least have the opportunity to try and live according to the closest approximation to the divine order.”62 That such efforts inevitably end in failure is the theme of Greville’s two surviving dramas and the thrust of his retrospective on Sidney’s literary corpus, which he has Sidney consign to the flames here in the very first chapter of the Dedication, some seventy-five pages before his account of Sidney’s actual death in chapter 13. As Elizabeth Spiller has noted, this preemptive rhetorical strike on Sidney’s Arcadia clears the way for Greville’s defense of his own realist mode of poetic imitatio.63 For Greville, the appropriate object of imaginative writing is not the partial recovery and propagation of the divine image within but the accurate portrayal of postlapsarian politics — both “without” in the corrupt “public” sphere and within the equally riven interior of the individual psyche. As he puts it in the last chapter of the Dedication, “For my own part, I found my creeping genious more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose feet the black ox had not already trod (as the proverb is), but to those only that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world, such as, having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands.”64 What is interesting about Greville’s poetics for our purposes is the degree to which they are complicated by his biography of Sidney. If Greville is determined to consign Sidney’s “images of wit” to the “shadowes,” he is equally determined to bring Sidney himself to literary life: an effort that has the ironic effect of transforming his historically contingent subject into the Sidnean speaking picture of all Sidnean speaking pictures.65 In the persona of Sidney, Greville figures forth a textual body that incarnates the highest hopes of Sidnean imitatio. Indeed, Greville’s Sidney

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is less an exemplary actor than an extraordinarily effective sign: an “architectonical” masterpiece of near-miraculous correspondence between virtuous “matter” and aristocratic “manner.” Like Rogers’s godly king and Hemmingsen’s church beautiful, Greville’s Sidney has a “natural” capacity to draw others to the good. “Wheresoever he went,” says Greville, “he was beloved and obeyed: yea, into what action soever he came last at the first, he became first at the last, the whole managing of the business not by usurpation and violence, but (as it were) by right and acknowledgement falling into his hands, as into a natural centre; by which only commendable monopoly of alluring and improving men, look how the sun draws all winds after it in fair weather — so did the influence of this spirit draw men’s affections and undertakings to depend upon him.”66 Here is a Cyrus to make many Cyruses. The problem, of course, is that Sidney is not a Cyrus but a subject, and of a queen who does not seem to appreciate his rather too “princely” forthrightness and initiative. Much of the Dedication is taken up with Sidney’s frustrated efforts to “allure” Elizabeth toward a more aggressive (progressively Protestant) foreign policy. His combined excellence and eloquence may be the wonder of Protestant Europe (particularly William of Orange, the exemplary prince of the piece), but they are “no received standard at home,” where the “the sweet stream of sovereign humours . . . run against him” and his dreams of Spanish invasion and New World exploration.67 In his home country, this “reformed standard” of militant Protestantism is an “unbelieved Cassandra,” reduced to contesting lordly insults on the royal tennis courts.68 This is the tragedy of Sidnean imitatio as the Dedication would have it: that princes are indeed poets— capable, in the case of Catholic Spain, of perpetuating “lively images of the Dark Prince, that sole author of discreation and disorder”—but poets are not princes.69 How does a loyal subject figure forth the divine image in this world of political delusion and illusion? In the Dedication, as in the Defence, this question comes down to the observance of decorum. Sidney’s integrity as a Sidnean sign/hero requires his submission to the divine order as embodied in the will of his sovereign. When Elizabeth orders him to abandon his voyage for the Americas in order to accompany his uncle on an expedition to the Low Countries, Sidney obeys, even though he rightly believes that the enterprise is doomed. His fatal injury on the battlefield at Zutphen is thus a kind of martyrdom.

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The meaning of such sacrifices is another question altogether. Looking back on Sidney’s life and death from a distance of over twenty years, there is nothing in the Dedication to suggest that England’s present has been in any way redeemed by Sidney’s heroism and much that portends a future even more benighted by princely poetasting. By the second half of the work, as Greville approaches more current events, even the intractable Elizabeth is celebrated as a relic of a past Golden Age. In this sense, the Dedication’s perspective on Sidney is in keeping with Greville’s representation of religio-political heroism in his Senecan closet drama, Mustapha, which he is believed to have been revising during his long period of political exile from the court of James I at roughly the same time he was composing the Dedication.70 Based on a recent historical event, the 1533 murder of the eldest son of Solimon the Magnificent (“the Great Turk”) on the orders of his father, Mustapha dramatizes the intrigues leading up to the sultan’s politically disastrous decision. The moral center of the play is the young prince, Mustapha, who, learning of his father’s plans, chooses nevertheless to obey the summons he knows will lead him to his death. He suffers bravely, offering a final speech that echoes of the words of Christ at the crucifixion: O Father! Now forgive me; Forgive them too, that wrought my overthrow: Let my Grave never minister offences. For, since my Father coveteth my death, Behold with joy, I offer him my breath. (5.2.84 – 88) This incident prompts a popular rebellion that is suppressed (though not entirely put down) by the end of the play, leaving the unchastened Solimon still in power. Joan Rees first called attention to the martyrological subtext linking Mustapha to the Sidney of the Dedication. Like Sidney, Mustapha is set in “a vast drama of conflict between the world and the spirit.” Also like Sidney, “he is willing to serve the world on his own high terms but he is never a servant to it, always free within himself and able to renounce it.”71 What is interesting about this subtext for our purposes, however, is

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the shared emphasis on “public” or political failure. As Debora Shuger has pointed out, Mustapha’s “muddied” New Testament allusions force the reader to “traverse the distance between its supernatural ethos and Greville’s dark worries about the uses which this passive heroism serves. Mustapha’s imitation of Christ is, as it were, political suicide.”72 Shuger’s dim view of Mustapha’s martyrdom is shared by most critics and by more than one character in the play, including the Tartars who make up its final chorus. Their pronouncement on the action— a pointed rebuttal of Mustapha’s last words — is not necessarily authoritative, but it does take pride of place: Forsake not nature, nor misunderstand her: Her mysteries are read without faithes eyesight: She speaketh in our fleshe: and, from our senses, Delivers downe her wisdoms to our reason. If anie man would breake her laws to kill, Nature doth, for defense, allowe offenses. She neither taught the father to destroy: Nor promise’d anie man, by dieinge, joy. (Chor. 5, 26– 33)73 However, if Mustapha’s “political suicide” portends, as Dollimore claims, “the breakdown of a certain kind of Protestantism,” Greville’s lifelong devotion to Sidney’s literary remains figures forth the paradoxical logic of its incarnational poetics. In this sense, Sidney was his own best Lucretia. By the time of Greville’s writing, the disappointments of Sidney’s failed political career and the tragedy of his untimely death had been transformed by the incarnational miracles of poetry and (not insignificantly) print into the stuff of national legend.74 Much more importantly, they had paved the way for an emergently “public” literary culture authorized by Sidney’s heroic reputation.75 Clearly, from Greville’s point of view, the ends that culture served were as open to question as the meaning of Mustapha’s martyrdom. Indeed, his Dedication (which, like most of Greville’s works, remained unpublished until after his death) can be and has been read as an attempt to privately recover Sidney-the-martyr from a posthumous print career that to Greville’s way of thinking had distorted

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the original and originating “matter.”76 He was not entirely mistaken. Sidney’s glittering literary corpus, with its royal cast of characters and chivalric codes of conduct, could be (and was, as we will see in chapter 3 below) recruited to the service of a religio-political hierarchy increasingly viewed by its critics (the Sidneys and Greville among them) as deluded and deceptive. On the other hand, his “princely” poetics and sacrificial service to a politics unpopular with his queen offered a self-authorizing model of human creativity that set the stage for further poetic and political innovation. Not least among these afterlives are the literary experiments of Greville, whose “shadowy” poetics point the way toward more “modern,” less mystified theories of language and literature even as they recoil from the potential costs and compromises of “public” authorship. For our purposes, what ultimately matters about Sidney’s literary legacy is its contingency on the catalyzing and stabilizing power of Sidney’s “martyred” corpse, without which his poetry might never have come into print and Greville might never have had the inspiration to discover his own literary voice. In this sense, Sidney’s personal imitatio Christi is the best measure of the distance and difference separating his innovative model of poetic imitation from Shuger’s modern-day Holy Trinity of author, imagination, and individual or Habermas’s post-Enlightenment “public sphere.” Never again in early modern England would a dead body have such authorizing power. Indeed, in the years to follow, the radical interpretability of bodies—individual and corporate, at play, under persecution, and at worship — would spark a revolution that struck a mortal if not quite final blow to the dream of an organic connection between language and some sort of sacred body visible. In the meantime, Sidney’s incarnational poetics— with its paradoxical martyrological underpinnings— would undergo some surprising reincarnations. It is to one of these more unlikely imitations that we now turn.

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Cha pt er 2

    Elizabeth Cary and the Christian Hero

Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, author of The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), was the first female playwright to be published in England. She is also the subject of one of the earliest extant biographies of an Englishwoman, The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters.1 This coincidence has been a mixed blessing for Cary scholarship, for while the Life offers a rare glimpse into the world of an early modern woman writer, it also raises methodological questions about whether and how such “background” information should be integrated into current criticism of her work. In Cary’s case, this dilemma is complicated not only by the cross-disciplinary character of feminist scholarship but also by the numerous parallels between Mariam’s plot and Cary’s life. These parallels are so striking that it is difficult not to construe Mariam, the unhappily married Jewish wife of a tyrannical Edomite king, as the literary alter ego of Cary, the unhappily married Catholic wife of an authoritarian Protestant courtier.2 In recent years, the tendency of early Cary scholarship to employ this interpretive strategy has been justly criticized for ignoring Mariam’s literary and sociopolitical contexts. Karen Raber, Laurie Shannon, and Marta Straznicky 65

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have called attention to the play’s engagement with the conventions of the not-so-closeted neo-Senecan “closet drama” and with the neo-Stoical political philosophy of the so-called “Sidney circle” that included Fulke Greville and centered on Philip’s sister and literary executrix, Mary Sidney Herbert,3 while Margaret Ferguson and others have traced Mariam’s complicated relationship to contemporary political anxieties surrounding wifely diplomacy and Catholic equivocation.4 Such treatments of Mariam apart from the Life have gone a long way toward restoring Mariam to its original Jacobean milieu. However, they have also obscured an intriguing literary genealogy that merits further exploration.5 Rather than relegating Cary’s biography to the “historical” background of her play, I would like to position Mariam as the missing link in a literary lineage that would establish the Life as the “natural” offspring — if not exactly the legitimate heir — of the Sidnean aesthetic of imitatio. Taken together, I will argue, these mother-daughter texts expose and explore the expressive outer limits of the “incarnational” poetics articulated in the Defence and interrogated in Greville’s Mustapha. In their shared preoccupation with the ethics of domestic and religio-political dissent, Mariam and the Life bring us into painful proximity with the silenced, subjugated, sometime sacrificial bodies underwriting (and, as we have seen, often undermining) Sidney’s liberatory, Philippist vision of literary eloquence. Indeed, the spectacular and strategic authorial “embodiment” of the extraordinarily discursive heroines who headline these two historical narratives of personal and political oppression allow us privileged, plot-level access to the making of Sidnean “speaking pictures.” More precisely, they offer us what is perhaps an unprecedented opportunity to measure what stands to be gained and lost in such a literary bargain. Do the emphatically fleshedout “virtues” of Cary and Mariam have the power to transcend or even transform the alienating religio-political rhetorics within which they are embedded, or do their captivating surfaces merely whitewash the fallen, “fleshly” discourses they seek to refuse and refute? Assuming the former is even possible, what is lost in these translations from “sinful” historical subject to heroic, poetic object? What sacrifices of particularity and positionality are required to create the potentially soul- and society-transforming spectacles that are “Mariam” and “Elizabeth Cary”?

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As we have seen, Greville’s textual bodies pose similar kinds of questions about the epistemological and ethical value of Sidnean poetics. However, what makes the bodies on display in Mariam and the Life uniquely evocative is their explicit citation of the equally “incarnational” (and equally contested) discourses of early modern hagiography and martyrology. Mariam in particular invites us to consider the purported power of poetry to make civilization-building Cyruses in light of the historic claims of martyrology and hagiography to disseminate, à la Tertullian— the saintly “seeds” of the one, true church. In another time and place, this structural analogy between Sidnean aesthetics and sacred biography could simply be taken as compliment to poetry, an unequivocal “second” to Sidney’s Defence that firmly distances fictions from “shadowes.” However, in early Jacobean England, such a comparison contextualizes the debate about the moral status of poetry and playacting within a relatively recent history of particularly gruesome religious violence, whose ultimate spiritual significance was a matter of bitter dispute not only between but also within competing confessional groups. If this is an endorsement of the Sidnean vision of poetic imitatio— and I believe it is— it is anything but an unequivocal one. By contextualizing both works within the conventions of postReformation sacred biography, this chapter treats Mariam and the Life as intergenerational testaments to the terrible costs of incarnational poetics. In these texts, true signification is portrayed as contingent on the Passion of a speaking subject, who must learn to discipline her desiring flesh into an appropriately passive medium of divine revelation. Here is the feminine flip side to Sidney’s masculine, “princely” poet, the chaste, silent, and obedient Lucretia out of which empires and epistemologies are built. Here also, however, sacrifice sets the stage for something altogether new; for if the martyrological and hagiographical subtexts of Mariam and the Life confront the reader with the tragic “personal” histories of their speaking pictures, they also bear witness to the struggle for the liberation of such images from the fallen, “princely” politics of their Sidnean original. In this sense, they pick up where Mustapha and the Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (rather deliberately) leave off, crossing over from eloquent, but ultimately conservative, critique into subtle, but unmistakable, subversion.

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That neither Cary nor her daughter is entirely comfortable in this subversive element is the point of entry for my analysis of their engagement with the “Protestant” poetics of imitatio as articulated in the Defence. As women and Roman converts, who used their pens to trace the distinctive contours of dissident female heroisms, Cary and Cary apply maximum pressure to the links in Sidney’s argument between exemplarity and empire, Cyrus and Christ. In their struggle to figure forth a heroine who is both authorized and self-authoring — a female, Counter-Reformation Cyrus, if you will— they inadvertently exhume the stigmatized, C/catholic body lying beneath Sidney’s anatomy of good imitatio, thereby compelling a harrowing reexamination of its liberatory claims. Can poetry really regulate/reform the body politic? How does one speak truth to power without denying the divine image from which poems and princes alike derive their “natural” authority? Assuming one succeeds at this feat, how can it be shielded from the “fleshly” eyes of sinful or unskillful readers? For Cary and her daughter, as for Sidney and other members of the Sidney circle (Greville among them), the partial solution to this problem is privacy, defined here not in anachronistic terms as a state of more or less complete segregation from the as-yet-embryonic “public sphere” but as the observance of an Augustinian hermeneutic of charity that privileges the mutuality of Christ’s visible body as the guarantor of meaning.6 In such a scenario, good imitatio can be recognized by its careful respect for the continuum of “natural” (if imperfectly realized) hierarchies linking speaking, writing, reading, and listening subjects to God and to one another in a body politic that (ideally) imitates and anticipates the plenitude that is Christ’s Body Mystical. As we have already seen, Sidney’s “charitable” concern for the maintenance of harmonious religio-political bodies is at the heart of his argument for poetry. The natural power of literary imitatio to transcend the distracting rough-and-tumble of historical, philosophical, and political argument is at least part of what affords it its privileged status in his epistemology. This same concern for “bodily” integrity is arguably also central to Sidney’s career-long preoccupation with matters of decorum, both in terms of the “reform” of individual literary genres and with regard to their contextually appropriate publication and circulation. Fulke Greville, Mary Sidney Herbert, and the circle of writers surrounding her were the inheritors of this charitable, “body-conscious”

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legacy. Like Philip Sidney before them, they were dedicated to the eradication of literary “barbarisms” and to the cultivation of a socially and spiritually improving literary culture, capable of speaking to the most pressing religious and political concerns of the day. Elizabeth Cary’s connections to this circle have been well documented, as has her engagement with the moral questions and generic conventions that characterized its “closet” dramas.7 Like Mustapha and the other neoSenecan tragedies in this loose grouping, The Tragedy of Mariam is both thematically and stylistically attentive to the strategies and stakes of Sidnean “decorum”: to the pressing need, in other words, for ethical (charitable) and effective media of political and personal expression. What makes Mariam special in this regard is its capacity to lay bare the theological underpinnings of this urgently felt requirement for a poetics that is both politically activist and more or less markedly “privatizing.” Mariam puts Sidnean imitatio in direct dialogue with perhaps its most important literary ancestor and chief contemporary rival, the equally incarnational aesthetic of sanctity, understood here in its broadest sense as exemplary religious heroism. Furthermore, it alludes both thematically and stylistically to the traumatic transformations of martyrology and spiritual biography in early modern England, to the radical upheaval of their narrative conventions and pedagogical objectives under the enormous pressures of violent confessional change and conflict. This head-to-head meeting of two main early modern methods of imitatio forces a split in terms of the Sidnean “speaking picture,” exposing the paradoxical primacy of the charitable, pictorial “body” as the guarantor of eloquence in even this most Protestant of early modern poetics. In such a scenario, words can work to scatter the “shadowes” of earthly politics, but only at great cost and often in the historical distance. A brief overview of the continuities and discontinuities between pre- and post-Reformation conventions of sacred biography will set the stage for this argument.

The Tragedy of Mariam: Hagiographical Contexts and Subtexts Perhaps no literary genre is more closely linked than sacred biography to the devotional paradigm of imitatio Christi. The sine qua non of antique

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and medieval sanctity, the imitation of Christ, is the organizing metaphor for two sites of privileged meaning in pre-Reformation Christian life-writing: one centered on the inspirational example, the other on the participatory mystery of Christ’s life and passion. Of these two possible understandings of good imitatio, the latter is by far the privileged partner. The lives of the saints may be models for personal imitation, but they are also — always — traces of the transcendent, rhetorical occasions for the contemplation and collective celebration of the miracle of the Word made Flesh, made present to the mystical body of Christ in the transubstantiated body of the Host and the mortal bodies of its saints and martyrs. This “incarnational” reading of the pre-Reformation vita is deeply rooted in Augustinian hermeneutics, which is predicated upon the assumption that human signs are a natural medium of transcendent reality: that words, in addition to their more mundane signifying functions, can both illuminate and participate in the mystery of the Logos.8 The interdependence of stylistic “surface” and saintly “essence” in this hermeneutic is reflected in the narrative conventions of medieval Christian life-writing. In these works, sanctity inheres not only (or even primarily) in the “essential” exemplarity of the subject but also (and indeed principally) in the quasi-sacramental quality of his or her literal and literary “bodies.”9 While this formulation of sanctity can accommodate figures who are both imitable and venerable, it is also open to scenarios in which the holy and the heroic are not so neatly conjoined. These are the superstitious fables of reformist satire: religious romances complete with singing corpses (St. Kenalm), pious cows, and exploding devil-dragons (St. Margaret of Antioch). In terms of their relationship to the imitation of Christ, such narratives are perhaps most usefully thought of as topics of ritual invention: the literary originals for miracles, pilgrimage sites, and relic cults that renew and perpetuate the power of the Word incarnate to unite believers across time and space in the charity that, according to Augustine, grounds human signs in transcendent reality.10 This is, in short, a sacramental rather than biographical enactment of the imitatio Christi, a literary celebration and continuation of the Word’s rehabilitation of the human sign. One need only glance at John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563) to grasp how out of place such an understanding of imitatio Christi would be within its pages.11 In this truly monumental revisioning of the not-so-

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natural history of the church visible, religious heroism is the only legitimate criterion of good imitatio.12 Unlike their pre-Reformation counterparts, Foxe’s “saints” and martyrs are — one and all—exemplary champions of the faith. They hazard their personal safety for the perpetuation of the Gospel, argue eloquently and fearlessly with learned priests and magistrates, cheerfully bid their loved ones farewell, sing joyfully on their way to the stake, and manage extraordinary displays of self-possession on the pyre. They do not as a general rule perform miracles or leave behind wonder-working relics, nor is there any suggestion of special intercessory power. This is not to say that Foxe’s hagiography is short on supernatural intervention — far from it. Such interventions, however, are largely restricted to the interiority of the martyr/saint. What is available to the observation of the hagiographer and his audience is more often on the order of the superhuman than the supernatural. In a typical scenario, the extraordinary patience, bravery, or eloquence with which a given subject faces torture and death confirms his or her miraculous internal transformation. Even when bona fide “public” miracles do occur, they are treated as interpretable signs, rather than communally available instances, of divine intervention.13 That said, it would be going too far to say that Protestant martyrs are perfectly ordinary signifiers. They decidedly are not. As a number of recent studies have convincingly argued, Foxe’s Actes does not so much reject as reverse the “incarnational” terms of pre-Reformation hagiography, making flesh into words that imitate the saving, suasive power of scripture.14 This shared “incarnational” matrix shows through not only in Foxe’s heavy reliance on exceptionally graphic images and imagery but also in his strikingly material understanding of written lives as literal “monuments” to the faith, to be reinscribed not only in hearts but (reminiscent of Erasmus’s garden in “The Godly Feast”) on “walls, cups, rings, and gates,” not to mention in new editions (“Utilitie of This Story,” n.p.). Foxe got his wish for a perpetual, material monument. His Book of Martyrs, as it came to be known, was an item of near-fetishistic faith among English Protestant readers, across multiple generations and a surprisingly wide spectrum of theological and sociopolitical positions. However, while the martyrs’ suffering bodies clearly afforded their words special status in Foxe’s widely shared epistemology, they did not

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transform their lives into transparent conduits for the holy. As Foxe makes clear in his preface, the power of the martyrs to “manifest . . . Gods divine working” is strictly secondhand. Like all human signs, their lives are available for interpretation and imitation, a point Foxe emphasizes by presenting his martyrology as a counterargument to other, more secular, histories: “As one sayd of Harpalus in times past, that his doyngs gave a lively testimony agaynst God, because he being so wicked a man escaped so long unpunished; so contrariwise in these më[n] we have a much more assured and playne witnes of God” (“Utilitie of This Story,” n.p.). For Foxe, only God himself, to whose mysterious “divine working” the martyrs bear witness, is worthy of veneration. The centrality of this distinction to his narrative is signaled by the care Foxe takes to distance proper imitation— which, as he makes clear, entails the fallible human processes of interpretation, adaptation, and application — from the superstitious pursuit of miracles and relics: “And though we repute not theyr ashes, chaynes, and swerdes in the stede of reliques: yet let us yeld thus much unto theyr commemoration, to glory the Lord in hys Saintes, and imitate theyr death (as much as we may) with like constancy, or theyr lives at the least with like innocency” (“Utilitie of This Story,” n.p.). Although clearly informed by Reformation theology, the boundary Foxe establishes here between the holy and the heroic, the venerable and the imitable, is not unique to Protestant life-writing. This shift toward a less sacramental, more biographical understanding of good imitatio was in the making at least as early as the fifteenth century, when Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, established guidelines for the authentication of miracles.15 It is full-blown in the writings of Erasmus, who shared both Foxe’s faith in the exemplary power of literary lives and his scorn for the “superstitious” beliefs and practices encouraged by traditional hagiography.16 By the 1580s, when English Catholics first began to be martyred in large numbers, Catholics and Protestants alike in England had moved away from traditional hagiographic models in favor of one that treated sanctity as a largely private experience only partially available to the broader community through a set of highly interpretable actions and events. English Catholic hagiographers, for example, continue to attribute miracles to their subjects, but they are careful to support their claims with thorough documentation and to defer in questionable cases to the

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authority of Rome.17 John Wilson’s English Martyrologe (1608), the first printed post-Reformation collection of British saints’ lives, is typical in this regard. Emphatically rejecting “all Apocryphall legend or other fabulous Historyes,” Wilson bases his accounts on no fewer than 129 sources, all of which he insists are “approved by the sea Apostolick.”18 Furthermore, Catholic life-writing in the period (whether hagiographic or strictly biographical) tends to share its Protestant counterpart’s emphasis on exemplarity, a shift that privileges less spectacular (more imitable) subjects whose actions are more open to interpretation.19 However, if this post-Reformation emphasis on the gap between res and verba, holiness and its fallen human signifiers, has its roots in the innovations of humanist scholarship, it was sped to fruition by the splintering of the charitable community so central to Augustinian habits of interpretation. This violent translation from literary to religious reformation raised the spiritual and social stakes of sacred biography even as it undermined its traditional epistemological foundations. By the time of Mariam’s probable composition, England was the setting for two recent and contradictory histories of religious heroism, each laying claim to legitimacy through remarkably similar narratives of conformity to Christ’s life and passion. In practice, if not in theory, post-Reformation imitatio had become a topic for rhetorical invention. No longer the privileged medium of a collectively legible absolute, it had become a manipulable, interpretable signifier, clustered around an ineffable and violently contested center. This already confusing interpretive situation was exacerbated by the fractured character of both Protestant and Catholic communities. Protestant reform had halted in the via media, halfway between Rome and Geneva and far from the primitive ideal embraced by its more radical proponents. English Catholicism, on the other hand, had exchanged the hope of a Counter-Reformation for an embattled minority status, jealously guarded by a divided and largely domesticated clerical caste.20 On the international front, England’s consistently politic positions in the brutal wars of religion that had ravaged the Continent since the Reformation and would rage with particular ferocity from 1618 to 1648 had seriously embarrassed the Elizabethan myth of a heroic English Protestantism.21 This climate of religious controversy and compromise inevitably inspired uncomfortable questions about the significance of religious heroism in the

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fallen world. If, as Tertullian says, martyrs are the seeds of the church, then had the seeds planted in England—Catholic and Protestant alike — fallen on stony ground? The indebtedness of Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam to the strategies that would also shape her Catholic vita offer an interesting perspective on the relevance of such questions to the Sidnean aesthetic of poetic imitatio. Cary’s interpolation of highly charged hagiographical motifs into a “private” drama about the interpretative instability of “public” speech contextualizes the epistemological claims of the sacrificial Sidnean speaking picture within an emergent religio-political conflict over the vestigial, “sacramental” power of bodies, individual and corporate alike. This move, I will argue, offers important insights into the necessary conditions of Sidnean imitatio. Like the suffering body of the Catholic or Protestant “saint,” the power of poetry to “figure forth” truth is contingent upon its appropriate disposition toward and within a sacred or at least divinely sanctioned corporate body that stabilizes its meaning. Indeed, Mariam’s plot turns on the enormously complicating, if not downright circular, logic of this criterion for its heroine, a woman trapped within an abusive marriage to the morally bankrupt ruler of a deeply dysfunctional state. The text’s privileging of “private” over “public” speech, and its affiliation of the former with the silent spectacle of Mariam’s martyred, female body, ultimately aligns the liberatory power of the Sidnean speaking picture with the “privatizing” politics of English Catholic martyrology and sacred biography. In both cases, the affective power of the authorized/authorial image transcends (or at least claims to transcend) the decidedly uncharitable tenor of a religiously and politically riven “public sphere.” If this convergence of two such seemingly disparate (presumably competing) cultures of good imitatio suggests hidden limitations of postReformation poetics, it also sheds new light on epistemological (and ultimately theological) anxieties underlying the ambivalent status of literary “making” in emerging English discourses of “public” and “private” spheres. In the face of urgent questions about the capacity of human signs to reflect ultimate reality, Mariam’s concern for the proper relationship of the speaking “part” to the sacred (or quasi-sacred) whole is not simply strategic, a class- and gender-appropriate subversion of taboos regarding aristocratic publication and female “publication.” It is also a stopgap, the last

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resort of a traditional Christian hermeneutic centered on charity as the means, end, and measure of truth. Private, elliptical, and equivocal modes of expression certainly can be strategic, even subversive, and I do not deny the validity of readings that highlight Mariam’s subversive qualities.22 However, I would like to suggest that the emphasis of the text on modes of “speaking” coded as “private” (or at least nonpublic) plays another role as well. As inherently personalist (rather than objectifying) media of communication, predicated upon the Philippist/Sidnean dream of the charitable communion of citizen-saints, such strategies do not merely create a space for resistance. They also legitimize that resistance as an instance of true (i.e., Christian) signification. In Mariam and the Life, the distance between speaking truth to power and circulating seductive, seditious falsehoods is sometimes no wider than a single proverb. In the contentious and potentially corrupting “public spheres” of post-Reformation England and Intertestamental Judea, a suitably sacrificial speaking picture is worth a thousand words. The analysis that follows explores the implications of this maxim for our interpretation of Mariam, first at the level of plot and then at the level of characterization. Unlike the Life, which assumes a Catholic, primarily monastic audience, The Tragedy of Mariam is not an explicitly Catholic work. Elizabeth Cary did not formally convert to Catholicism until 1626.23 However, the composition of Mariam, written sometime between 1603 and 1611 and probably before the birth of Cary’s first child in 1608, coincides with the spiritual crisis that, according to the Life, precipitated her initial period of recusancy.24 Thrown “into much doubt of her religion” (Life, 190) by her study of the church fathers and her encounters with Catholics and Catholic sympathizers, Cary was eventually pressured by family and friends (including the bishop of Durham) to return to the Anglican communion. What followed, according to the Life, was a twenty-year period of reluctant and uneasy conformity predicated upon the hope that “she might lawfully remain as she was, she never making question for all that but that to be in the Roman Church were infinitely better and securer” (Life, 191). Cary’s long-term engagement with Catholicism has led many critics to treat Mariam as a de facto “Catholic” work, despite the reluctance of Cary’s Benedictine biographer to fully endorse her pre-1626 religious experiences. In any case, Cary’s treatment of Mariam’s source material

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suggests at the very least an intellectual interest in the moral dilemmas associated with recusancy.25 Like recusant hagiography and biography, including Cary’s own biography, Mariam is deeply concerned with finding an ethical solution to the problem of oppression. Moreover, its religious imagery frames this project in explicitly theological terms: a move that could hardly fail, given the political climate of the early seventeenth century, to evoke associations with the predicament of English Catholics. Mariam’s plot is loosely based on Josephus’s first-century account of the troubled marriage of Herod the Great to the Hasmonian princess Mariam.26 In brief, Mariam’s outspokenness provokes her tyrannical husband to falsely accuse her of adultery and put her to death. The heroic dignity with which Mariam meets her fate drives Herod mad with grief, foreshadowing the imminent downfall of his dynasty to Christ, the true king of the Jews.27 Unlike its neo-Senecan predecessors, which, like Greville’s Mustapha, tend to privilege the perspective of the tyrant, Cary’s version of this story deemphasizes Herod’s downfall, concentrating instead on Mariam’s struggle for integrity within a difficult political marriage.28 The play’s structural emphasis on the character of Mariam is reinforced by the religious imagery surrounding her. Throughout the play, Mariam is associated with Christological imagery and with images from hagiography and the earlier mystery tradition. Herod refers to her as “the fairest lamb of all the flock,” and the butler, driven to hang himself by his complicity in the plot, numbers Mariam among the “innocents.” Most significantly, Mariam’s execution scene is full of analogies to the Passion.29 She is associated with Abel and the phoenix, and her last words carry an unmistakable allusion to the Resurrection: “By three days hence if wishes could revive, / I know himself would make me oft alive” (5.1.77– 78). As in Mustapha, this Christological subtext considerably complicates interpretation, only this time in ways that invite (rather than obscure) the application of biblical and hagiographical hermeneutics. Critics have often noted that Cary’s adaptations of her source material shift the focus of the Herod-Mariam conflict from the anatomy of tyranny to the ethics of resistance.30 Much of the play’s dialogue is in fact commentary on Mariam’s behavior from her fellow characters and the stoical Chorus. Although these commentators are unanimously critical of Herod, they lay some of the blame for Mariam’s downfall on Mariam

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herself. The Chorus in particular locates Mariam’s tragedy in her lack of self-control, specifically her inability to control her tongue; and the focus of the plot is on her development from a stereotypically weak-willed (talkative) woman into a silent, stoical hero. Mariam’s real problem, however, is her general reputation for eloquence (her “public voice,” as she calls it in 1.1.1). Throughout the play, her tendency toward bold speech is marked as transgressive less because of its “subversive” or “political” content than because of its “public” context. For example, the Chorus’s critique of Mariam focuses not on what she says but on the special danger speech itself poses to her as a married woman. Mariam’s “public voice” leaves her vulnerable to the charge of adultery because such speech by women is associated with uncontrolled female sexuality. Whatever her other faults (and the Chorus mentions several), the ultimate cause of Mariam’s tragedy from its point of view is her lack of gender-appropriate discretion: ’Tis not enough for one that is a wife To keep her spotless from an act of ill: But from suspicion she should free her life, And bare herself of power as well as will. ’Tis not so glorious for her to be free, As by her proper self restrain’d to be. . . . . . . . . . . . . That wife her hand against her fame doth rear, That more than to her lord alone will give A private word to any second ear, And though she may with reputation live, Yet though most chaste, she doth her glory blot, And wounds her honour, though she kills it not. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And every mind, though free from thought of ill, That out of glory seeks a worth to show, When any’s ears but one therewith they fill, Doth in a sort her pureness overthrow. Now Mariam had (but that to this she bent) Been free from fear, as well as innocent. (3.3.215– 20, 227– 32, 245– 50)

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While it would be a mistake to take the Chorus’s judgment here as either authoritative or unequivocal, its disapproval of Mariam’s “public language” implies a broader critique of “public language” itself that is borne out by the plot.31 According to the Chorus, Mariam’s speech is blameworthy not because it is false or foolish but because it is bound to be misconstrued. They are right on this count. Salome will use Mariam’s “beauteous language” to paint her as a seductress whose “world-amazing wit” (Herod’s phrase) is employed to “allure the auditors to sin” (4.7.428– 31). Herod, in turn, will take Mariam’s eloquence as proof of Salome’s accusations: “nay ’tis so: she’s unchaste, / Her mouth will ope to ev’ry stranger’s ear, / Then let the executioner make haste, / Lest she enchant him, if her words he hear” (4.7.433– 36). Clearly, the problem here is not simply Mariam’s indecorous speech but also language’s enormous capacity for abuse. The analogy at work here between this quality of language and the equally dangerous “capacities” of the female body is familiar from Sidney’s Defence. For Cary, as for Sidney, the special, “incarnational” power of words to foster connection and communion is counterbalanced by their susceptibility to the frailties of the flesh. In Mariam, this potentially perverse relationship between “beauteous language” and desire is not surprisingly most clearly fleshed out in the female characters, whose speech, as we have seen, attracts all the traditional associations with wanton, female sexuality.32 In Mariam’s case, this relationship does violence to her, but the play makes it painfully clear that the trajectory is readily reversible. Salome, for example, really does “allure . . . auditors to sin” in a rhetorical tour de force that is in equal parts seductive and seditious. When the play opens, she has killed one husband and is attempting to divorce another so that she can marry her new lover. The masculine bias of Jewish law (which reserves the right of divorce to men) is the raw material of her elegant (mis)construal of her position as one of principled resistance. By modern standards, her logic is impeccable. The play, however, invites us to read Salome’s argument for legal parity as purely (if not exactly straightforwardly) wicked. Rather than being framed as an understandable if ultimately illegitimate response to an unjust law, it stands as the sign of an anarchic, feminine willfulness that privileges desire over order. Salome herself confirms this interpretation when she announces to her would-be ex-husband, Constabarus,

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“I mean not to be led by precedent, / My will shall be to me instead of Law” (1.6.453– 54). His horrified response articulates the threat such an attitude poses to the world of the play. In Constabarus’s view, Salome’s out-of-control desire undermines the entire natural order: Are Hebrew women now transformed to men? Why do you not as well our battles fight, And wear our armour? Suffer this, and then Let all the world be topsy-turved quite. Let fishes graze, beasts [swim], and birds descend, Let fire burn downwards whilst the earth aspires: Let winter’s heat and summer’s cold offend, Let thistles grow on vines, and grapes on briars. (1.6.421– 28) While Constabarus’s antifeminism is not presented as beyond the reach of criticism (he will feature later in a misogynistic rant that is abusive even by early modern standards), his position here provides some additional ideological scaffolding for the link already established between the “beauteous” feminine form and the seductive/seditious potential of “public” eloquence. This kind of apocalyptic, world-upside-down scenario would have called to mind for its early modern readers the cultural counterfantasies of structural inversion shown by Michael Questier and Peter Lake to have featured so prominently in the “public” sermons, scaffold speeches, scandal sheets, and theatricals of the popular press.33 Here, however, the considerable traditional subversive/seductive powers of the feminine principle are primarily assigned to the processes of language itself. It is not Salome’s sex but her speech that ultimately betrays five people to their deaths, all of them related to her through bonds of kinship or hospitality. Significantly, it is Herod, not Salome, who is the most egregious offender in this regard. Indeed, his disordered desire and concomitant abuse of language is the prime mover of the play. His tyranny has so seriously undermined the relationship between words and reality that all “public” speech, male and female, is radically unstable. Indeed, Herod, who

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“will not speak, unless to be believ’d” (4.3.139), is the arbiter of meaning for his subjects. His oaths transform Mariam’s falsely executed grandfather into a traitor and her murdered brother into the victim of a tragic accident. Such “truths” are not only imposed on Herod’s subjects but coerced from them as well. Sohemus is forced to vow that he will kill Mariam if Herod dies, and the Butler is persuaded to “confess the truth” of Mariam’s adultery under threat of torture (4.4.163). It is little wonder that Salome is a liar, Mariam’s mother a hypocrite, and Sohemus a bearer of tales. Herod’s abuses have a ripple effect that makes such behavior almost impossible to avoid. Throughout the social hierarchy, false, malicious, and ill-timed words rupture the natural, “charitable” relationships between servant and master, mother and daughter, husband and wife, client and patron, king and subject. It is in this context that the Chorus’s critique of Mariam’s outspokenness should be understood. In the world of the play, the misuse of language is consistently linked to the absence of charity or properly directed desire. Such “uncharitable” speech weakens the web of mutual obligation holding society together. From this perspective, Mariam’s moral superiority to Salome, while considerable, is a matter of degree and not a difference in kind. This point is driven home by Herod, who confuses the two women in 4.2.84, and by the Chorus, whose first speech (a blistering critique of Mariam) comes immediately after the confrontation scene between Salome and Constabarus (1.6.493– 528). While these repeated (mis)takings of Mariam for Salome are at least as unflattering to Herod and the Chorus as they are to Mariam, they do serve to draw out the structural similarities between Mariam’s undisciplined tongue and Salome’s uncontrolled lust. Within the world of the play, both are expressions and instruments of misdirected desire. In the end, Mariam’s indiscretion is almost as destructive as Salome’s infidelity. Her open scorn for Herod and his family is both uncharitable and impolitic. By flouting the conventions of domestic and political decorum, Mariam contributes to her own destruction and to the eventual destruction of her sons as well. Despite her lack of discretion throughout much of the play, Mariam does embrace a more subdued persona in time to secure for herself a heroic, stoical death. As she prepares for her execution, she affirms the conventional (Choral) point of view that a woman’s virtue is composed of

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equal parts chastity and tact. Her withdrawal from “public” discourse allows her to forgive Herod and face death “free from adversary’s power” (4.8.570). She mounts the scaffold “unmov’d, with pleasant grace,” and answers taunts from her enemies with a smile (5.1.55). In her last moments, she paradoxically gains total autonomy, even the ability to “loose” her own breath in a final (private) communiqué so powerful that it later drives Herod at least temporarily mad with grief when it is reported to him by a messenger: “Tell thou my lord thou saw’st me loose my breath / . . . / If guiltily, eternal be my death— / . . . / By three days hence, if wishes could revive, / I know himself would make me oft alive” (5.1.73– 78). Mariam’s arrival at self-resignation and trust in God as the proper response to domestic tyranny typifies the thematic concerns of Sidnean closet drama.34 Modeled on the French neo-Senecan tragedies of Robert Garnier, who adapted Stoic models of virtue to the political situation of sixteenth-century France, these plays use the discourse of Christian neoStoicism to explore the obligations of subject to sovereign, particularly when that sovereign is unjust or illegitimate.35 As we saw with Mustapha, these plays are emphatically, sometimes sharply “political.” However, they are also categorically “privatizing” in that their primary concern is not the overthrow of the bad sovereign but the education of the heroic (implicitly aristocratic) subject in the difficult but at least potentially salvific art of self-control.36 Because of their historical association with such antiStoical qualities as overemotionalism, sensuality, changeability, and cowardice, women often function in this genre as negative exempla. The tragic consequences of their feminine willfulness map the private-to-public trajectory of the tyranny of misdirected desire (Salome is typical in this sense). When female characters manage to transcend this bit of typecasting, their “heroic” behavior works to reinscribe rather than call into question traditional gender roles. The ideological limits of the genre tend to restrict their heroism to the “private” sphere of romantic and domestic relationships.37 As Straznicky has noted, the character of Mariam occupies an unusual position between these two extremes.38 According to generic convention, her outspoken defiance of her husband is both unheroic and improper. However, it is also the very thing that earns her a martyr’s death, one that would have been typologically marked for Cary’s original readership as

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the harbinger of the imminent culmination of the “old” (corrupted) covenant of Jewish nationalism in the quasi-mystical imperium of Christ.39 It seems to me that Mariam’s unconventionality in this respect is best understood in terms of its hagiographic subtext: more specifically, in light of contemporary renegotiations of that genre by and for Catholics living in Protestant England, who must find a way to live ethically in the “now” of Protestant England while awaiting the “not yet” of a faithfully anticipated reconciliation with Rome. Particularly in the last two acts of the play, generic traces from hagiography and martyrology contextualize Mariam’s neo-Stoical education within a broader set of concerns about the reliability and appropriateness of “public” language as a medium of transcendent reality. From this perspective, Mariam’s emergence in the last act as a silent, Stoical heroine can be seen to take the measure of the Sidnean speaking picture, aligning the “incarnational” poetics of literary “making” with the brutal transformational processes of English Catholic martyrdom. In both cases, the conversion of a fleshly, potentially seductive surface into a rehabilitated, potentially salvific sign requires heroic self-discipline. To be more precise, it requires the sublimation of the “feminine,” improperly desiring “flesh” in the service of a divinely authorized (if always imperfectly realized) corporate body that stabilizes meaning even as it invites and indeed requires ongoing re-formation. An examination of Mariam’s personal/ poetic transformation in light of the conventions and confessional controversies associated with both Reformation and Counter-Reformation biography will clarify the implications of this move on Cary’s part for our understanding of post-Reformation imitatio. Mariam the (English Catholic?) Martyr Mariam’s refusal to break her “solemn vows” of chastity or to “frame disguise” in order to retain Herod’s affection is based on her understanding of language as an instrument of truth. Convinced that the fact of her innocence will prevail over Salome’s seductive, “feminine” speech, Mariam struggles to realign the corrupted world of “public” speech with her own “private” conscience. In Mariam’s particular case, this entails her rejection of the more traditionally “feminine,” conciliatory rhetoric of a queen con-

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sort in favor of the “masculine,” overtly political idiom of a queen regnant. As she puts it, I know I could enchain him with a smile: And lead him captive with a gentle word, I scorn my look should ever man beguile, Or other speech than meaning to afford. (3.3.163– 66) Her confrontation with Herod is the culmination of this (not particularly successful) effort.40 She refuses to play the loving wife on his return, and when he attempts to soothe her with promises of wealth and power she rather tactlessly confronts him with the superiority of her own patrimony on both counts (4.3.109 – 16). As if this weren’t enough, Mariam refuses to quietly pass over the transparent falsehood of Herod’s “official” word on her brother’s death, engaging him in a battle of wits that exposes him as a murderer and a capricious tyrant. Mariam is bound to lose this confrontation, and her defeat will ultimately convert her to the Chorus’s point of view that “Had I but with humility been grac’d, / As well as fair I might have prov’d me wise” (4.8.559– 60). However, the structural resemblance of this scene to the confrontation scenes between believer and magistrate in both traditional and Reformation hagiography introduces into the play an alternate set of conventions that disturb this view. Mariam’s very vocal defiance of Herod and her refusal to “pay” him “her love” connect her not only to a significant number of eloquent pre-Reformation female martyrs who died to protect their sexual purity but also to the Protestant heroes and heroines of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments.41 John R. Knott has pointed out the heightened importance of bold speech in English Protestant martyrology.42 Although, as we have seen, these accounts do not in any way downplay (and in fact go to some lengths to heighten) the traditional emphasis on physical suffering, the martyr’s eloquence under examination (itself a traditional hagiographical motif ) emerges in Protestant martyrology as a confessionally distinctive component of the Protestant agon.43 Foxe’s accounts, for example, typically feature lengthy reconstructed dialogues in which plain-speaking, scripture-quoting

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believers — a not insignificant number of them women and low-status males— expose the error and hypocrisy of the authorities through debate, sarcasm, and when all else fails, name-calling.44 In any case, as early as the 1550s, well before the earliest publication of Foxe, bold speech was such a recognizable trope of Protestant martyr accounts that English Catholics pointed to it as one of the chief distinctions between true (Catholic) and false (Protestant) martyrs. In The Displaying of the Protestantes, for example, Miles Huggarde complains, “Where is their modestie, their pacience, their charitie, their love, that is required of a martyr?” According to Huggarde, true martyrs are like Paul and Stephen, who “used no taunting wordes” against the magistrates but bore witness to their sanctity primarily through their “milde countenance.”45 A generation later, Robert Persons describes the ideal Catholic martyr as orthodox, meek, and forgiving.46 Unlike the Protestant martyrs, who “upon toyes became protestants, & of meer ignorance and obstinacy went to the fire for the same,” true (Catholic) martyrs do not deliberately provoke the magistrate or disturb the peace with violent speech.47 According to Persons’s contemporary, William Allen, their quiet, respectful behavior makes Catholics superior to Protestants as citizens: in contrast to their contentious neighbors, English Catholics are more sad, grave, honest, and quiet-natured men, consisting of devout and aged persons and of godly women; whereas the Protestants now in possession of state, goods, and government are risen (most of the principal) by alteration, spoil, and faction; their chief followers youthful persons, venturous and desperate; and the rest, both of laity and specially clergy, entangled by the present commodities and pleasures (which this new religion yieldeth in all fleshly lusts and turpitude) are impatient, vindictive, restless, and furious; and in a very few (in comparison of Catholics and quiet men) make a great show and a terrible muster in the sight of quiet, honest, and peaceable persons.48 Of course this distinction between “quiet” Catholics and “bold” Protestants is more than a little exaggerated. As several recent studies have shown, English Catholic and Protestant martyrological models had much more in common than either party could well afford to admit, includ-

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ing shared (strategic) resort to the traditional motifs of silent suffering and heroic eloquence.49 However, the peculiar nature of the English case against Catholicism— which construed it as seditious or potentially seditious behavior rather than as heretical belief — lent special significance to “quietness” in English Catholic apologia and biography, both of which took pains to correlate Catholicism with exemplary citizenship.50 This departure from the fierier Foxean/Balean paradigm reflects the raised hermeneutic bar for would-be Catholic heroes, whose claim to speak from “conscience” (generally accepted for the heretic) was itself suspected as a falsehood, a seductively pious facade for what was in fact bad political faith. In this charged religio-political context, the signifying power of the traditional martyrological motif of “bold” speech is seriously compromised not only, as Susannah Monta points out, by the prerogative of Protestant authorities to silence and distort it, but by its near inextricability from the “public” or “political” matrix Catholic speakers were so anxious to escape.51 As a tactical response, Catholic “quietness” does more than merely evade (or at least attempt to evade) the opprobrium of “politics”; it also asserts the doctrinally distinctive transparency of Catholic religious heroism as a medium of truth.52 In the agonistic discursiveness of Protestant “public” culture, the “quiet” Catholic subject speaks for and from charity, transforming words and body alike into a “spectacle” (per 1 Corinthians 4:9) that imitates and perpetuates the miracle of the Passion. Whatever its spiritual roots, the idealization of “quietness” in English Catholic biography links the genre to a whole complex of cultural ideals also associated with Sidnean closet drama. In both genres, exemplarity is contingent upon respect for natural hierarchies and an ability to work within rather than against the established social order. This generic affinity offers us one way to make sense of the tension between the play’s critique of Mariam and the martyrological imagery surrounding her. A closer look at the models of heroic resistance available in English Catholic spiritual biography and martyrology suggests how Mariam’s martyrdom can be read as a marker of her successful transformation from a polemical “Foxean” heroine into a poetical “c/Catholic” one.53 Thomas Alfield’s account of Edmund Campion’s execution for missionary activity is arguably the locus classicus for English Catholic martyrology. Printed in 1582 at the very height of the Elizabethan persecutions,

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it exemplifies the passive ethic of resistance that would figure so prominently in Catholic biography throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Read in light of Campion’s well-known backstory, it also makes for an intriguing companion piece to Mariam. Like Cary’s Maccabean princess, Campion is presented as an instrument of divine providence set within a falsifying narrative of political conspiracy fatally disposed toward the straightforward exercise of his remarkably eloquent “voice.” Alfield picks up this story at what would seem to be its tragic end, after Campion’s “voice” — made public against the explicit directive of the Jesuit general via a widely circulated letter to the queen and Privy Council, an equally sensational printed follow-up, and no fewer than four governmentsponsored disputations—has predictably failed to reverse the official Protestant (mis)reading of “religion” as “rebellion,” “faith” as “faction.” The intraconfessional politics of this tableau are obscure. Possibly, it was staged from the start. Also possibly, Campion was precisely who he consistently portrayed himself to be, an unwilling polemicist, pushed into public debate by (providential) forces beyond his control.54 In any case, what is important about Alfield’s account for our purposes is the opposition he sets up between this highly interpretable prior history and the “lively Image” of martyrdom, presented to the reader as privileged testimony (if not irrefutable proof ) of Campion’s doubly good faith as both a loyal subject and a true (Catholic) Christian.55 Whereas one can easily imagine Foxe making the most of this exceedingly articulate subject, Alfield seems to go out of his way to do just the opposite, giving center stage to Campion’s humility, patience, and tact. Although Campion does speak eloquently (if somewhat formulaically) in defense of Catholic doctrine, the authenticity of his martyrdom is most convincingly portrayed in what he does not say and do: in his refusal, for example, to betray the names of co-religionists or the secrets revealed under the seal of confession, and in the quiet composure with which he allows himself to be drawn through the streets wearing a placard that identifies him as a traitor. For Alfield, it is clearly these scenes of patient suffering that substantiate and proliferate the living truth of Campion’s words. His tortured body transcends the powers of even his own polemic, making a speaking, self-perpetuating picture of piety: a Campion, if you will, to make many

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Campions. As the best-known of the poems appended to Alfield’s account puts it, You thought perhaps when lerned Campion dyes, his pen must cease, his sugred tong be still, but you forgot how lowed his death it cryes, how farre beyond the sound of tongue and quil, you did not know how rare and great a good it was to write his pretious giftes in bloode.56 The likely author of these lines is Henry Walpole, who converted to Catholicism after witnessing Campion’s death and devoted the rest of his short life to following his hero’s example. Ordained to the priesthood in 1588, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1596. Needless to say, Campion’s “lively Image” inspired more than one interpretation, many of them far less favorable to Campion and his cause.57 The point here is not that his martyred body was somehow proof against polemic but that it represented for Alfield and others the hope of a less alienated and alienating public discourse, one rooted in the charitable poetics of the Incarnation. If Foxe’s Actes and Monuments is not unsympathetic to this hope (and it certainly is not), neither is it as fully awake to it.58 In the first century of often violent unrest following the not-so-settled English Settlement, it was English Catholics who most poignantly felt the need for creative rapprochement with the prevailing “public voice.” In the case of Catholic women, this propensity for privileging poetical “body” over polemical “word” is even more marked. Unlike their outspoken counterparts in the Golden Legend and Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, the women of recusant hagiography and biography seldom appear in the thick of public debate.59 When they come into view, the focus is on their humility and piety rather than their eloquence and zeal.60 If the eloquent Anne Askew is the paradigmatic “godly woman” of Protestant martyrology, Margaret Clithrow is her retiring Catholic counterpart.61 Although religion is hardly the only variable differentiating these two figures, separated as they are by place, time, and social status, their parallel function as models of female piety within the Protestant and Catholic

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communities justifies the comparison.62 While Askew was punished for doctrinal disputation and public Bible reading, Clithrow’s crime was her silence, her refusal to plead to a charge of priest-harboring.63 While Askew’s story is primarily a first-person account of her verbal contest with the magistrates, Clithrow’s story is told entirely by her confessor and emphasizes her humble, Christlike behavior rather than her learning or skillful speech. Both women refuse to give up coreligionists and both endure their torments with heroic dignity. Unlike Askew, however, Clithrow bears witness almost entirely through her body with pious activities such as self-mortification, almsgiving, keeping vigil, and fasting. Much is made of even her smallest gestures: the hat she sends to her husband as a token of her submission, the special tapes she sews to her garment in order to ensure that her arms will remain outstretched (as if on a cross) throughout her execution. As Megan Matchinske has put it, “There is no quoting of scripture here, no elucidation; Clithrow, in fact, performs in mime.”64 This silent, almost iconic feminine ideal recalls the recusant meditative tradition, in which passive, weeping, or meditating female figures like the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene model the proper attitude of the soul toward Christ.65 It is this kind of “lively Image” that Mariam finally learns to become just before her execution. Throughout the play, she struggles to maintain a legible, ethical coherence between inside and outside, between the ineffable truth of her moral purity and the powerful but morally ambiguous impact of her legendary beauty and “world amazing wit.” The problem here is not, as she originally imagines it, simply a matter of style versus substance, the seductive stratagems of Cleopatra and Salome versus her own sincerity.66 What Mariam is missing is decorum, the skill and selfdiscipline to “figure forth” the truth she quite literally embodies in a fashion that is appropriate to her status as a wife and a subject. “Had I but with humility been grac’d,” she admits toward the play’s end, “as well as fair I might have prov’d me wise” (4.8.559– 60). While this realization comes too late to literally save her skin, it does work to redeem it literarily, translating her voluble, feminine “fleshliness” into a powerful medium of both political and spiritual significance. If this is classic English Catholic imitatio, it is also definitively Sidnean. Like Campion’s, Mariam’s capacity to move ultimately has less to do with

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her celebrated eloquence than with her spectacular display of self-control. When her mother publicly berates her on her way to the place of execution, Mariam makes no answer. According to the Nuntio, she approaches the scaffold, “unmov’d, with pleasant grace, / As if to triumph her arrival were: / In stately habit, and with cheerful face” (5.1.55– 57). When Mariam finally does speak, it is not to address the crowd but to send a discreet declaration of her innocence and loyalty directly to Herod, a gesture that drives him mad with grief and portends the ultimate extinction of his dynasty in the coming reign of Christ. Clearly, Mariam’s “quietness” does not rule out resistance. She maintains her innocence until the end, and her final words and deeds will go down in sacred as well as secular history. However, she is heroic only insofar as her resistance nurtures the bonds of charity that make speech and symbolic action meaningful. By acting and speaking within her proper role as a dutiful and faithful wife, Mariam— like Lucretia—brings down a tyrant and heralds a new, emancipatory age. However, if Mariam’s “Catholic” martyrdom defines the outer limit of “Sidnean” incarnational poetics, it does not rule out less spectacular, more explicitly literary modes of good imitatio. In the character of Graphina, Cary goes out of her way to offer an alternative model of female heroism that foregrounds the persistent, implicit association between “privacy,” authorship, and heroic imitatio in Sidnean poetics. A brief summary of the Graphina-Pheroras subplot will clarify my point. Dismissed by early critics as a flat personification of conduct-book virtues, the chaste, silent, and obedient Graphina has attracted renewed attention in recent years for her strategic “quietness.”67 Her properly “feminine” reserve, while “dramatically insipid,” is patently expedient, allowing her to protect her virginity while conducting a forbidden love affair with Herod’s brother. Given her low status and her lover’s uncertain future, Graphina’s initial silence in response to Pheroras’s hasty marriage proposal (inspired by false rumors of Herod’s death) is as shrewd as it is submissive. Her eventual reply, her only speech in the play, suggests that she views her silence not simply as a gesture of respect but also as a tactical response to the precariousness of her position: I have admired your affection long: And cannot yet therein a reason find.

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Your hand hath lifted me from lowest state, To highest eminency wondrous grace, And me your handmaid have you made your mate, Though all but you alone do count me base. You have preserved me pure at my request, Though you so weak a vassal might constrain To yield to your high will: then last not best, In my respect a princess you disdain; Then need not all these favours study crave, To be requited by a simple maid? And study still, you know, must silence have. (2.1.55– 67) Although Pheroras is predictably flattered by this argument, its potential self-interestedness does not go entirely unnoticed. Salome later cautions her brother that the “porter” that bars “wicked words” from escaping Graphina’s lips may not so carefully police the thoughts that enter her head (3.1.25– 38).68 Salome’s point is well taken. It is indeed unlikely that a woman of Graphina’s much-vaunted “wit” could be as guileless as she seems. Whatever her underlying motivation, however, Graphina’s discretion serves her well. By stage-managing her “voice” she manages to remain on the periphery of Salome’s and Herod’s interest, safely riding out a palace intrigue that could have easily swept her up in its wake. Unlike Mariam, she lives to speak (or not) another day.69 Graphina’s name, which does not appear in Cary’s source texts or in other contemporary retellings of the story, invites us to consider the relevance of her storyline to the concern with privacy that characterizes Sidnean imitatio, particularly as that concern relates to the predicament of English Catholics. As Margaret Ferguson has pointed out, the name puns on the Greek word for writing, graphein, which in light of Graphina’s characterization, can plausibly be read as an allusion to the ancient notion of writing as “silent speech,” or, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the “handmaid” of speech.70 To interpret Graphina allegorically in this way is to call simultaneously and somewhat contradictorily on the play’s Catholic and Sidnean contexts. The effect, as we will see below, is to establish authorship

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as an alternative model of Christian heroism, on a par with martyrdom in its capacity to imitate and participate in the saving eloquence of sermo. This argument is most easily approached from the Catholic angle. While there is nothing exclusively “Catholic” about Graphina’s plea for “silence,” it is one that would have been difficult to dissociate from Catholicism in early seventeenth-century England. If the character of Mariam rehearses the ethical case for Catholic “quietness,” Graphina calls to mind its strategic value. Throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, “quietness” functions for Catholics both as a sign of their loyalty to the state and as a screen for all manner of proscribed religious practices. As one might expect, this paradoxical (or, in the Protestant view, hypocritical) construal of the “private” Catholic subject generated a good bit of public debate on both sides of the confessional divide. More importantly for our purposes, it focused especially on women (more specifically, on wives), a fact attributable to the central role of the household in recusant piety. Wives’ ambiguous legal identity as extensions of their husbands’ persons rather than fully independent citizens, combined with the law’s recognition of the home as a private or at least not entirely public space under his jurisdiction, established the domestic sphere as the center for all manner of clandestine Catholic activities.71 This was especially true in Elizabethan England. However, even after Jacobean statutes somewhat tightened the loopholes protecting recusant wives, Catholic piety continued to be associated with women’s work. While their husbands sought accommodations with the Protestant establishment through court and local contacts, recusant women harbored priests, catechized children, held private masses, and hid forbidden books and objects, all under the banner of dutiful housewifery.72 This fact of history arguably makes Graphinas (rather than Mariams) the MVPs of English Catholic spiritual biography. As Alison Shell has noted, the central problem of recusancy, the problem of divided loyalties, finds its clearest and most poignant expression in narratives by and about married women.73 In these vitae, as Frances Dolan has pointed out, survival, rather than spectacular martyrdom, is more often than not the major theme and purpose.74 Women play off one obligation against another, using their wifely duties to elude the law and their spiritual duties

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to circumvent the authority of their Protestant husbands. Margaret Clithrow, for example, conceals her priest-harboring activities from her Protestant husband in order to protect him from being an accessory to her crime.75 In almost all such instances, what is emphasized is the submission of the woman to a higher authority (usually that of a priest) and the tact with which she negotiates competing obligations. Recusant women seldom deny or actively resist the authority of magistrates or husbands. Like Graphina, they simply act out their roles in quiet, eliding (with greater or lesser success) the tensions between “private” and “public” duty. Graphina’s strategic resistance rehearses the shared ethical and epistemological quandary of Sidnean poetics and English Catholic heroics. On the one hand, she brings to mind the quiet, “feminine” culture of Catholicism, in which women much like her played key roles not only as readers, writers, and disseminators of Catholic texts but also — as we have seen — as subjects of exemplary lives.76 In this sense, Graphina, rather than Mariam, is the true “Catholic” hero of the play. On the other hand, she also allegorizes the private/public status of elite literary culture, particularly those parts of it open to women authors, like the Sidnean genre within which Cary herself is writing. In any case, whether it is read as “Catholic” or “Sidnean,” Graphina’s allegorical identity as “writing” lays bare the liminal, “domestic” politics of Mariam’s poetical transformation. In the character of Graphina, the Sidnean speaking picture is seen to serve at the pleasure of a princely “public voice” primarily concerned with the procurement of its own “private” desires. All is not lost, however. On Graphina’s “study” and skill turns the all-important difference between “handmaid” and “mate.” If the powers of the latter are neither properly autonomous nor fully “public,” neither are they insignificant or politically inconsequential.77 Indeed, the entire arc of the play can be said to bend toward the celebration and promulgation of Graphina’s “private,” literary proficiency. As character after character rushes from judgment to speech to action to destruction, we are exhorted to “study,” to “weigh the circumstances our ear receives” (2.4.410), to “try before we trust” (2.4.406).78 This kind of interpretive practice ultimately imposes a textual perspective on the politics of the play. Indeed, the Chorus’s last speech translates the present day’s events into a future

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proverb, a “warning to posterity” on par with the biblical Book of Wisdom.79 Only in the “literary” distance can Mariam’s martyrdom be authenticated. What looks on the ground like a pointless waste can be read by the discerning Christian of after years as a prophetic sign of the imminent triumph of Christ’s kingdom and by the even more discerning English Catholic as proof of that kingdom’s Catholic pedigree.80 Taken together then, Mariam and Graphina can be said to plot the trajectory of literary imitatio as practiced within the Sidney circle: from “silent” speaker to speaking picture. The resulting image is of an art operating on the frontier between the “private” call of conscience and the prior claims of collective bodies, be they marital, ecclesiastical, or political. The real-life stakes of this negotiation are reflected in Mariam’s religious and domestic politics, both of which register with particular clarity the pressures shaping early modern English literary culture, the urgently felt need for a common discourse capable of speaking truth to power without fatally rupturing the charitable bonds connecting individual “speakers” within a transcendently significant whole. While there is nothing uniquely Catholic or feminine about this dilemma, its exceptional intractability for Catholics and women— and most especially for Catholic women— reflects the residual sacramentalism of the broader “public sphere” that Sidnean imitatio seeks to provocatively and charitably engage. In this post-Reformation, pre-Enlightenment literate culture, the possibility of shared meaning is contingent not on the pursuit of objectivity but on its opposite, on the charitable interrelation of speaking and writing subjects within authorized and authorizing social bodies. The overlap in Cary’s play between “literary,” “domestic,” and “Catholic” strategies of representation and resistance suggests the degree to which all three are embedded within this broader cultural poetics of incarnation: a state of affairs that brings us full circle to the questions at the opening of this chapter. Can the Sidnean speaking picture live up to its soul- and society-transforming promise, or does it simply reinscribe author and reader alike in the fallen, fleshly structures it seeks to reform? Put another way, if Graphina lives to write another day, what kinds of imitations does she inspire? Cary’s own life, as depicted in her biography, offers a ready starting point for these questions.

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Cary the (Heroic) Author If Mariam can be said to lay bare the martyrological makings of a “speaking picture,” then the Life takes the spiritual measure of a “silent” speaker. Elizabeth Cary’s biography celebrates the legacy of a real-life, would-be Graphina, whose internationally fêted literary eloquence is folded almost seamlessly into a remarkably conventional narrative of heroic Catholic housewifery.81 Given the sensational details of its subject’s domestic history, this accomplishment would be remarkable had Elizabeth Cary never published a word. Quite apart from her powerful (if not exactly public) authorial “voice,” Cary could have served nicely as the original for her Mariam. Born Elizabeth Tanfield in 1585 or 1586, she entered into an arranged marriage with Sir Henry Cary, later Viscount of Falkland, in 1602.82 Never a love match, the union dramatically disintegrated after Cary’s highly publicized formal conversion to Catholicism in 1626 scandalized the court and resulted in her house arrest in London. Humiliated, Sir Henry (then lord deputy of Ireland) cut off Cary’s financial support in an attempt to bring her into submission. After months of acrimonious letters and personal appeals from both parties, the Privy Council forced Sir Henry to grant his wife a meager allowance on which she survived until they were briefly reconciled (through the mediation of Henrietta Maria) before Sir Henry’s death in 1633. Following the death of her husband, Cary fought for custody of her six youngest children, from whom she had been separated at the time of her conversion. She gained custody of her four daughters soon after Sir Henry’s death and in 1636 had her two youngest sons abducted from the home of their elder brother, Lucius, and secretly transported to Catholic schools on the Continent.83 At the time of Cary’s death in 1639, all but one of her surviving children had converted to Catholicism. Her four daughters were nuns, and both of her youngest sons were studying for the priesthood. True to English Catholic hagiographic form, the Life deftly shapes this potentially “political” conflict into a narrative of heroic self-subjugation. Shifting the focus from Cary’s considerable derring-do to her fierce internal struggle to master her sharp tongue and formidable will, the Life is reminiscent of Mariam in its attentiveness to the internal drama of divided loyalties. Like Mariam, Cary must find a way to reconcile the voice of

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conscience with the call of social duty, represented in this case not only by her husband (the “very absolute” Sir Henry) but by a whole cast of religious and social “betters”: her parents, her mother-in-law, her early mentors in the Protestant clergy, her Catholic “ghostly fathers,” her king, even (briefly) her know-it-all, heretical houseguest William Chillingworth. Given Mariam’s well-established Catholic and hagiographic subtexts, this overlap is neither surprising nor particularly promising of fresh critical perspectives on the Life. However, if the affinity of the Cary persona with Mariam has been thoroughly exploited, its relationship to the character of Graphina remains rewarding of further consideration. In light of the Life’s thematic concern with domestic and political decorum, its unapologetic approach to Cary’s literary career seems more than a little marked. Cary’s biographer barely bats an eye at her youthful foray into print, only briefly mentioning some recalled “verses” presumed by modern-day readers to be Mariam. What’s more, she positively takes pride in her mother’s religious oeuvre, including her controversial works: a manuscript rebuttal of an anti-Catholic letter circulated by her Protestant son, Lucius Cary (214), and a printed translation of The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron, to the Answeare of the Kinge of Great Britaine (1630), which, though recalled in England, won Cary praise in Rome and is credited in the biography for the possible deathbed conversion of her husband (151).84 None of these literary activities is portrayed as in any way at odds with the Life’s characterization of Cary as a dutiful, “quiet” Catholic wife and subject. Graphina’s allegorical identity as “silent speech” both offers an ethical framework for assimilating Cary’s authorial “voice” to her hagiographical persona and brings into clearer focus the Life’s engagement with the epistemological anxieties to which that voice spoke. Indeed, it would seem that Cary’s Life is as attentive as her literary work to the all-important nuances of “voice”: to the urgent need for decorous, charitable modes of address, capable of sustaining and when necessary reshaping the collective bodies that imbue fallen human signs with significance. In this sense, the Life is a literary as well as a spiritual biography, an anatomy of the religiopolitical pieties that authorized a real-life Graphina. Here, her “silent speech” is contextualized as part of a much broader, “incarnational” hermeneutic centered on charity as both the stabilizer of meaning and the

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catalyst of authentic conversion. The Life explores the epistemological and expressive outer limits of this cross-confessional, post-Reformation vision of imitatio Christi, not only for Cary, but also for the biographer who is her literary and spiritual heir. This “incarnational” hermeneutic comes most clearly into view in the Life’s “privatizing” approach to language. From start to finish, Cary’s piety is enacted and authenticated almost entirely through the careful, charitable management of her exceptionally articulate “voice.” One of the opening anecdotes from Cary’s childhood, for example, is a much-cited little parable on the relative epistemological value of “public” versus “private” speech. In this tableau, an old peasant woman is bullied by a mob into a false confession of witchcraft, which ten-year-old Cary disproves by whispering a clever question into the ear of her lawyer father. Here, private (and aristocratic) speech, rooted in the bond of affection between father and child, is shown to work in striking contrast to the corrupt processes of public (socially mixed) debate, which render truth and falsehood virtually indistinguishable. This scene captures the essence of Cary’s childhood as depicted in the Life. The young Elizabeth Cary argues points of theology, translates Seneca, and speaks French, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew — all as part of the domestic routine of a highly literate, aristocratic household (106). An only child with no playmates or access to childish conversation, she develops her considerable wit in private exchanges with her father and, indirectly, with the intellectual and cultural authorities to whom he grants her access (108). Indeed, the Life portrays Cary’s relative freedom of speech and thought during these early years as an extension of the father-daughter bond. Cary’s adult persona in the Life can be summed up by the motto she had engraved on her eldest daughter’s wedding band, “BEE AND SEEME” (118). As her biographer puts it, “She did allways much disapproue a the practice with of satisfying ones self with their conscience being free from fault, not forbearing all that might have the least show, of vnfitt or suspicion, of vncomlynesse, or vnfittnes” (Life, 117– 18). This ethos is clearly at work in the Life’s treatment of Cary’s “voice,” which features as a particularly tricky species of “seeming.” Cary’s exemplarity is heavily contingent upon the skill with which she shapes her words, not only with respect to her conscience, but also with regard to the divinely ordained

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hierarchies that interpolate her as a dutiful aristocratic subject, daughter, wife, and mother. Deference and discretion are the chief marks of her preconversion piety. She speaks respectfully of and to her husband, teaching her children “to love him better than herself ” and observing silence on topics that displease him (115). She habitually addresses her mother on her knees (122) and teaches her own daughter “THAT WHERSOEVER CONSCIENCE AND REASON WOULD PERMITT HER, SHE SHOULD PREFERRE THE WILL OF ANOTHER BEFORE HER OWNE” (115). Perhaps the most important marker of her piety is the tact with which she undertakes the religious education of her children. By privileging rightly oriented desire over doctrinal precision, Cary elides the problem of divided confessional loyalties. Neither Protestant nor explicitly Catholic, her spiritual teachings forgo the abstractions of dogma for homely analogies that figure religion in relational terms. Cary’s pious household pedagogy offers us an especially clear view of the Life’s incarnational epistemological underpinnings: Her first care was . . . to have them soone inclined to the knowledge, loue, and esteeme of all moral virtue; and to have them according to their capacitys instructed in the principles of christianity, not in the maner of a catichisme (which would have instructed them in the particular protestant doctrines, of the truth of which she was little satisfied), but in a maner more apt to make an impression in them (then things learnt by roat and not vnderstood) as letting them know, when they loved any thinge, that they were to love God more than it, that he made it, and them, and all thinges; they must love him, and honor him, more then their father; he gave them their father, he sent them every good thinge, and made it for them; the King was his servant, he made all Kings, and gave them their Kingdom. If they would be good, he would give them better things. (113) Here and throughout the Life, love — as made manifest in and through earthly bodies— is both the test of truth and the guide of speech. Cary’s proto-Catholic piety emerges, not in conflict with her “natural” duties to king, country, and family, but as an outgrowth of her particular reverence for

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the same. This budding faith is further nurtured by her decorous devotion to prevailing aristocratic models of “private” household piety.85 For example, it is through private devotional reading that she first “grew into much doubt of her religion.” Upon reading Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, “it seemed to her, he left her hanging in the aire, for having brought her so far (which she thought he did very reasonably), she saw not how, nor att what, she could stop, till she returned to the church from whence they were come” (111). Her doubts are strengthened by a brother-in-law, who becomes something of a mentor for Cary. He takes up where her father left off, recommending books and engaging her in conversation. These Protestant-style “family devotions” eventually lead Cary to her first period of recusancy. What is worth noting about these early episodes from the Life is that Cary’s intellectual engagement with Catholic doctrine emerges within the intimacy of the aristocratic household, where its ethical appeal can be tested and verified. Cary’s respect for her brother-in-law is eventually transferred to the church fathers, whose status as fathers lends their words a similar kind of ethical appeal. Not surprisingly, her early decision to return to Protestantism is also motivated by quasi-familial loyalties, this time to the Anglican priestly hierarchy, to which she defers out of respect for its historic links to the fathers. The Life’s account of her return is explicit on this point. Indeed, it portrays her most lengthy period of reconciliation with the Anglican Church as an outgrowth of her direct participation in the household piety of the bishop of Durham.86 In this emphatically embodied epistemological context, Cary’s conversion is celebrated as the culmination of an intellectual and spiritual quest for the ever-more perfect union of BEE and SEEME. Once Cary finally meets some Catholics, she simply recognizes how much more fully they incarnate this ideal. Her husband’s tenure as lord governor of Ireland affords her the first of several opportunities to observe Catholic piety firsthand. The Life records the profound impression made by the first of these encounters: “In Ireland she grew acqvainted with my Lord Incheqvin an ea exceeding good catholike and the first (att least knowing one) she had yet mette; she highly esteemed him for his witt, learning, and judgment. . . . Her lord did the same, admiring him much as a man of so sincere and vpright a conscience that he seemed to look on whatsoever was not lawfull as not possible: he did somewhat shake her supposed secu-

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rity in esteeming it lawful to continve as she was” (123– 24). Meanwhile, the Life portrays Cary as increasingly disenchanted with individual representatives of Protestantism, who, unlike Lord Inchequin, seem to be willfully intent on dictating the terms of the “possible.” The Life’s account of Sir Henry’s chaplain (a former Jesuit) is typical in this regard. He converts not because of any genuine crisis of conscience but in order to avoid so “hard (as it seemed to him) an obedience” of a dangerous posting to Scotland (124). The conversion of Cary’s children is likewise effected through repeated first-person experience of Catholic integrity. She transforms her home into something of a salon, where religious debate is intermingled with witty conversation on other topics. In this intimate setting, where religion is not an abstraction but a medium of relation between embodied speakers, salvation is less a matter of intellectual persuasion than of ethical appeal. Like Cary herself, Cary’s daughters eventually come to faith through their faith in particular Catholic friends, whose learning and piety prove consistently superior to those of their Protestant counterparts. The Life’s distrust of pure abstraction is most clearly evident in its treatment of William Chillingworth, whose dry intellectualism temporarily undermines the faith of Cary’s newly converted daughters. “Deceaving them with St. Pauls Peter saying, everyone aught to be able to give a reason of his faith,” Chillingworth convinces the daughters that “it was not enough to beleeve the right, vnlesse they could defend the reasonablenesse of it” (170). The Life dismisses this idea as an obvious falsehood: “They [Cary’s daughters], not discerning how easyly they might (-and how many things they did-) know for certaine, which they were not capable of could not proveing did were the sooner deceaved by him” (170). It does not, however, offer a logical counterargument. Instead, Chillingworth’s position is invalidated by his own bad character, by the “numerous contradictions” and “unsincere dealings” that destroy his credibility within the Cary circle (170). Significantly, the progress of Chillingworth’s alienation from the Cary family is the longest single incident recounted in the Life. The attention devoted to this seemingly peripheral event reflects the work’s preoccupation with the epistemological value of language as it correlates to the ethical appeal of particular speaking persons. It is perhaps worth noting that Chillingworth made his literary reputation by debating this same issue in a more public forum with another

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Catholic. In The Religion of Protestants (1638), Chillingworth responds to Matthew Wilson’s claim in Mercy and Truth, or Charity Maintained by Catholics (1634) that scripture alone is incapable of revealing divine truth. In Wilson’s view, language (even sacred language) is a mode of relation between persons, with no independent epistemological value: That the Scripture alone cannot be judge in controversies of faith, we gather very clearly from the quality of a writing in general. . . . The name, notion, nature and properties of a judge cannot in common reason agree to mere writing, which, be it otherwise in its kind never so highly qualified with sanctity and infallibility, yet it must ever be, as all writings are, deaf, dumb, and inanimate. By a judge, all wise men understand a person endued with life and reason, able to hear, to examine, to declare his mind to the disagreeing parties. . . . There is a great and plain distinction between a judge and a rule: for as in a kingdom the judge has a rule to follow, which are the received laws and customs; so are they not fit or able to declare or be judges to themselves, but that office must belong to a living judge. The Holy Scripture may be and is a rule, but cannot be a judge.87 For Chillingworth, however, the epistemological value of language transcends the matrix of human relations. Words themselves can and do reveal truth, quite apart from the ability of human interpreters to recognize it as such: “For if you will stand to what you have granted, that Scripture is as perfect a rule of faith as a writing can be, you must then grant it both so complete, that it needs no addition, and so evident, that it needs no interpretation: for both these properties are requisite to a perfect rule, and a writing is capable of both these properties.”88 The Life’s evaluation of Chillingworth offers a real-life illustration of Wilson’s point that language is meaningful only insofar as it reflects and facilitates charitable relationships between persons. Chillingworth’s inability to move Cary’s daughters illustrates the impotence of eloquence apart from charity and the central role of the household as a setting where the link between the two can be readily observed. It also highlights the Life’s tendency to privilege the often inarticulate affect — figured here as the daughters’ intuitive grasp of Catholicism— over abstract argumenta-

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tion as a guide to absolute truth. In its most extreme manifestation, this tendency appears as a retreat from language altogether in favor of an affective piety that transcends (if only temporarily) the limitations of discourse and the dictates of discursive authorities, Protestant and Catholic alike. For example, Cary’s quiet confidence in the eventual conversion of her adolescent children authorizes her to compromise the orthodoxy of her household in spite of criticism from her Catholic friends and against the advice of her priest, who implicitly forbids her to make dietary concessions for them on fasting days (154). Similarly, her belief that her husband is more likely to convert without the added pressures and penalties of a public confession convinces her to collude with him in obscuring a possible deathbed confession (150 – 51). In both of these instances, the subversive potential of Cary’s attentiveness to the voice of conscience is counterbalanced by a strategic silence that marks and maintains her participation in an interpretive community defined by its commitment to charity as the guarantor of meaning. Such episodes offer a useful structural analogy for Cary’s “silent,” literary “speech,” which is both legitimized and kept in check by its careful conformity to the “charitable” conventions of aristocratic and feminine authorship.89 They also suggest to us something of the expressive limits of her incarnational religio-political aesthetic; for if the Life is a celebration and commemoration of Cary’s remarkable “voice,” it is finally the model and medium for an ongoing journey toward silence: one begun by Cary in her gradual withdrawal from the politics of the court and the pleasures of the playhouse and continued by her Benedictine biographer-daughter. For mother and daughter alike, “privacy”— understood here as the decorous disposition of the speaking self within a transcendentally significant whole — comes to figure as the necessary condition of a potentially subversive piety that transcends the confines of language but is rendered authoritative (and therefore imitable) through the conventions of hagiography and spiritual biography. The Life’s preoccupation with the relationship between “privacy,” piety, and the incarnational processes of language makes sense when considered in light of its author’s vocation. Four of Elizabeth Cary’s daughters (Anne, Elizabeth, Lucy, and Mary) were nuns at the Benedictine convent in Cambray, where the Life was written sometime between 1643 and

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1650. Although the manuscript does not give a name, Georgianna Fullerton’s 1883 biography of Cary identifies the author of the Life as Anne, a position supported by Donald Foster in 1993.90 More recently, Heather Wolfe has made a compelling case for Lucy’s authorship based on her analysis of manuscripts known to be in Lucy’s hand.91 In any event, the Life’s association with the Benedictine convent at Cambray links it to the teachings of Augustine Baker, a pivotal figure in the history of English Catholicism whose major mystical treatises were originally written for the nuns he served there as spiritual director.92 Baker’s writings typify a contemplative strain of Counter-Reformation spirituality that was widely influential among recusants in spite of its uneasy relationship to the Jesuit spirituality that so dominated the English mission and continues to dominate historical treatments of English Catholicism.93 Unlike the Ignatian meditative paradigm, which emphasizes the power of the discursive intellect to redirect the fallen will, Baker advocates a form of affective prayer that privileges the will’s wordless aspiration toward God.94 For Baker, the pursuit of ideal Christian subjectivity is marked by the gradual, but steady, transcendence of logic and discourse via the experience of divine presence.95 In Baker’s teachings, texts play a paradoxical, mediatory role in the progress of the soul to wordless plenitude. “Father Baker’s Way,” as the nuns at Cambray called his method, advises a particularly affective approach to lectio divina, one that privileges the charitable disposition of the will over the illumination of the intellect.96 For the nuns at Cambray, in other words, devotional texts work much the same way as literary ones do in Sidney’s Defence, through an “incarnational” poetics that makes transcendent truth immediately present to the individual (imitative) reader. Nancy Warren has carefully traced the self-replicating power of this distinctively “incarnational textuality” within the Cambray community, “the breaking down of the boundaries separating individual bodies, communal bodies, Christ’s body, and the textual corpus” that folds literary into lived lives.97 This incarnational hermeneutic is not without political resonance. As Warren indicates, by creating “a chain of explicitly English reincarnations of Christ’s suffering” the Cambray nuns not only asserted the essential Englishness of their own spirituality but also staked a claim for their heretical homeland as a living member of the body of Christ.98

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As one might imagine, this remarkably unmediated model of spiritual excellence was also not without controversy. Baker’s emphasis on silent prayer and private reading came at the expense of the priestly role. This orientation put Baker’s “way” in direct competition with its more hierarchical Salesian and Ignatian counterparts, both of which encouraged heavy reliance on priestly guidance. Like the contemplative teachings of his contemporaries Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Baker’s “privatizing” spirituality eventually came into direct conflict with the centralized authority of the post-Tridentine church. Accused of quietism and illuminism, Baker was formally cleared of suspicion at a chapter held in 1633 but remained a controversial figure until well after his death in 1641.99 His writings did not receive the endorsement of the church until 1653, when the superiors of the Benedictine congregations commissioned a digest of his teachings; and their application at the convent at Cambray remained a matter of controversy until at least as late as 1655, when the nuns successfully resisted an effort to confiscate his manuscripts.100 Around the time the Life was written (most likely in 1645), the nuns at Cambray, Dame Clementia (Anne) Cary among them, were deeply engaged in the project of copying, defending, and circulating Baker’s works.101 Indeed, it has been suggested by modern scholars that the women of the Cambray community, who early on began referring to their famed former confessor as the Venerable Father Baker, administered Baker’s literary legacy with an eye to his eventual canonization.102 Whatever its intended effect, it seems clear that Anne Cary played a central role in the defense and dissemination of Baker’s ideas. She wrote a biography of Baker (1650) and translated his works into French for the neighboring convent of St. Lazare, where she was temporarily posted on a reforming mission in 1642. Her skills as a translator of Baker’s works were also instrumental in the foundation of Our Lady of Good Hope in Paris in 1652.103 In this context of religious controversy and conventual reform, Elizabeth Cary’s Life may well have served to second Baker’s ideas about the reliability of the will (particularly the female will) as a vehicle of divine grace and the importance of reading and writing in the cultivation of its charitable disposition.104 After all, if a Protestant wife and mother can come to God almost entirely through private reading and personal conversation and then effect the conversion of her estranged children through

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the same, surely a cloistered community of avowed female religious can be safely trusted to self-administer Baker’s devotional legacy. However, whatever its potentially subversive “political” resonances, the Life’s end is the silencing of its author and primary audience in the mystical body of Christ. As a preparative for this state, Cary’s Life follows a particular style of life-writing strongly associated with Baker and his circle. Cary’s biographer is not merely engaged in the making of an exemplar but also at work on her own self-erasure. Like other contemporary biographies associated with Baker, the Life provides an occasion for its author to discover her own shortcomings in the not-always-flattering portrait of her subject. Heather Wolfe has pointed out the ways Cary’s Life might well have served as a special spiritual discipline for its probable author, Lucy (Dame Magdalene). Lucy’s “jeering wit” is woven into both the story and the style of the Life. Likely written as a Lenten exercise, it would have killed two spiritual birds with one stone, allowing Lucy to confess her sharp tongue before God and her sisters while also commemorating and giving thanks for her (equally sharp-tongued) mother. In this sense, the Life is a “speaking picture” of redemption itself, a “useful text,” as Wolfe puts it, composed “out of the fragments” of Lucy’s “own sinful past.”105 Elizabeth Cary’s devotion to the Benedictine order and her own interest in contemplative prayer (she was translating the mystical writings of Blosius at the time of her death) suggest that she would have appreciated the spiritual milieu that inspired her biography (Life, 264).106 Indeed, it seems more than coincidental that the female author of a closet drama about the power of martyrdom and “silent speech” over tyranny is memorialized in the private papers of a Benedictine convent controversial for its devotion to wordless prayer. For Elizabeth, as for her daughters at Cambray, the “private” rather than the “public” voice emerges as the proper medium of a religious heroism centered on the ineffable experience of divine love and therefore finally beyond the reach of an alienated and alienating public discourse. Despite the ambivalence surrounding “public” speech in these texts, it is worth noting that their very existence implicitly asserts not only the capacity of words to gesture toward the divine but the vital contribution of reading and writing to the miraculous re-formation of individual and corporate bodies. In both of these texts, the written word works to restore

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the integral relation of spirit and flesh, BEE AND SEEME — not only by speaking to individual hearts and minds but by nurturing, repairing, and extending the charitable bonds that are themselves constitutive of Christian truth. Far from an impediment, the close confines of the coterie circle and the cloister are for these two texts a raison d’être. Like the Latin words of the Mass and the monastic vow, they function not simply to signify but to define and sustain a community that is itself significant: a living, self-replicating icon of Christian charity. If the Carys’ capital-C Catholicism helps us count the high cost of this incarnational religio-political poetics, their shared reliance on paradigmatically “Protestant” religious and secular literacies should make us cautious of overly neat distinctions between Protestant and Catholic practices of good imitatio in early modern England. As we have seen, the “privatizing” aesthetic that characterizes these texts is not so much a special feature of Counter-Reformation English Catholicism as a function of a widely held post-Reformation hermeneutic that makes meaning primarily (if not exclusively) from within divinely authorized and authorizing corporate bodies. For all but the most “princely,” such a hermeneutic requires heroic self-erasure. From this perspective, the topic of our next chapter — the war of words waged over the “Catholic” aesthetic of the Carolinian court and church, which finally erupted into physical violence in the decade of the Life’s composition — looks less like a conflict between competing habits of mind (Catholic vs. Protestant, or medieval vs. early modern) than like a confrontation with the founding paradoxes of Protestant Logocentrism. As possibly Sidney’s sincerest and certainly his most “princely” imitator, Charles I calls for a final judgment on the promise implicit in Rogers’s and Sidney’s heroic vision of the English Church Militant: “Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness.”

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C ha p ter 3

 “  ” Reading the Royal Body in The New Arcadia and Eikon Basilike

Let us begin with a literary miracle tale. Shortly after Charles I’s January 30, 1649, beheading outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, he was resurrected — not in his mundane human form, but in a glorified textual body, a compendium of political commentary and pious meditations purportedly authored during his imprisonment and published posthumously as Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraiture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings.1 Unlike the mere mortal, who during his lifetime seems to have possessed remarkably little talent for public relations, the Charles of the Eikon worked wonders of what would now be called “spin.” Running to over thirty-five English editions in the first year alone, the Eikon went on to be translated into Latin, French, German, Dutch, and Danish. Within a decade, it had inspired countless sermons, poems, and illustrations, been rendered into verse, and even been set to music.2 This bookseller’s bonanza was merely the “outward and visible sign” of an even greater literary marvel: the transformation of a polarizing political figure into a beloved national martyr, whose religio-political cult would thrive well into the eighteenth century. As Douglas Bush put it over fifty 107

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years ago in his landmark literary survey of the seventeenth century, Eikon Basilike, “if judged by its positive effect, might rank as one of the greatest books ever written in English.”3 More recently, Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler has expanded upon Bush’s terms, calling the Eikon a “phenomenon of true collective authorship,” less a single stable text than “a cultural event that signaled a rupture with past discourses of kingship” by enabling “its readers to become participants in a political culture that it helped redefine.” “A modern branch manager,” she quips, “would call it ‘the King Charles experience.’”4 I would like to raise some questions about this story, or, to be more precise, about the mystifying critical impulses behind it, by which I mean the tendency of commentators past and present to treat the Eikon as both something more and something less than an ordinary text: not so much a book as the extension of a body read (or, to our way of thinking, misread) by its original public as sacred. In this sense, I would suggest, modernday analysis of “the King Charles experience” might be more aptly characterized as “the John Milton experience of the King Charles experience.” As Andrew Lacey has pointed out in his recent study The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, scholarly treatments of the Eikon Basilike tend to center on its relationship to the development of Milton’s iconoclastic aesthetic, which arguably finds its earliest full articulation in his 1649 attack on the Eikon, Eikonoklastes.5 It is not hard to understand why Eikonoklastes casts such a long shadow. In Milton’s devastating rereading, the Eikon’s portrait of the king as a Foxean martyr and Christ figure is decried as a clever pastiche of devotional and literary commonplaces “clapt together and quilted out of Scripture phrase” (CPW 3:360) and “begg’d from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment” (CPW 3:343) for the purpose of deceiving an all-too-gullible populace, “prone . . . not to a religious onely, but to a civil kinde of Idolatry” (CPW 3:343).6 The Eikon’s emphasis on the king’s bodily piety and suffering (epitomized for Milton by its frontispiece, which features the soon-to-be martyred king kneeling before an altar surrounded by religious and royal emblems) is particularly up for critique as evidence of the text’s “idolatrous” privileging of style over substance, surface over essence (figure 2). In short, Milton represents the Eikon Basilike as the embodiment of bad imitatio, a literary relic of secondhand words and images whose seductive human simulacra

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Figure 2. William Marshall, Frontispiece, Eikon Basilike. The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings (London: Reprinted for James Young, 1648 [1649]). (c) The British Library Board. C.118.d.136.

of divine presence and power distract readers away from the hard work of using their God-given reason. Over three hundred years later, Milton’s analysis of the Eikon as a deliberately contrived invitation to idolatry continues to define the terms of its critical reception. Thomas N. Corns, for example, reads the Eikon as the frontispiece brought to life, a tour de force of biblical and literary imagery that establishes “the King’s book” as “an object to be revered” rather than a text to be interpreted.7 Similarly, Lana Cable’s book-length study of Milton’s iconoclastic aesthetic assumes that the Eikon’s effectiveness rests in its strategic manipulation of “traditional and popular iconic associations of the king with father and God.”8 Even treatments of the Eikon

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apart from Eikonoklastes tend to attribute its effectiveness to habits of interpretation (or rather, noninterpretation) that Milton would have regarded as superstitious. Both Andrew Lacey and Robert Zaller, for example, root the Eikon’s popularity in its appeal to traditional notions of divine right monarchy and popular folk beliefs regarding the sacredness of the king’s blood.9 Many insights emerge in these readings, and I do not wish to deny the Eikon’s essential iconicity or its reliance on traditional beliefs about the sacredness of bodies (monarchical and otherwise). However, I would like to call into question the widely shared assumption that such an aesthetic’s success is incompatible with genuine literacy: that the Eikon “works,” in other words, only insofar as it succeeds in fashioning itself into a textual idol. It seems to me unlikely, given the nearly twenty years the Carolinian establishment had spent vigorously defending its aesthetic against charges of idolatry and crypto-popery, that Charles and his literary executors would have countenanced such a heavy-handed approach, and even more unlikely, given their ready access to popular critiques of Carolinian ceremonial, that the Eikon’s original readership would have fallen for it in such large numbers. Indeed, I would maintain that the numbers suggest something quite different: that there were many possible ways of reading Eikon Basilike in seventeenth-century England, some of which actually might have involved reading. This chapter asks what happens when we take the Eikon seriously as a text. I will argue that the Eikon Basilike represents an important late development of the Protestant notion of literary imitatio Christi outlined in chapter 1 and problematized in chapter 2, one that attempts to answer the questions implicit in both Sidney and Rogers, and laid bare in the C/catholic emphases of the Carys, about the proper role of bodies (both literal and metaphorical) in Protestant poetics and devotion. As we have seen, these questions tend to center on the maintenance (or not) of social and institutional stability. If human eloquence, modeled on the eloquence of Christ as Word, is a building block of an authentic Christian piety and polity, what is its proper relationship to the individual and corporate bodies from which that eloquence emerges and which it attempts to create and recreate in the image of Christ? How does one tell the difference between the sometimes radical but ultimately redemptive power of sermo

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and the purely destructive impulses of its carnal counterfeits, seduction and subversion? Such questions must have seemed more urgent than ever in 1649, after nearly fifteen years of heated conflict about the place of set prayers and bodily “ceremonies” in reformed worship had destroyed the fragile consensus of the Elizabethan and Jacobean settlements, contributing in no small part to the fall of the state church, the monarchy, and finally the king himself.10 Reading the Eikon alongside two of its best-known contemporary epitexts, one devotional and one literary, brings to light its significance within this wide-ranging, long-running conversation in early modern England. Far from simply a cynical throwback to an earlier, iconophilic era, the Eikon sharpens its focus in this context as the culmination of a broadly (though variously) employed Protestant strategy for safeguarding reformed imitatio from the vagaries of misdirected desire. Although deeply distrustful of the body as the source of sin, this broad Protestant aesthetic also privileges bodies, both individual and corporate, as catalysts for and signs of good, properly oriented imitatio. Seeing it at work in other contexts, in texts affiliated with the Eikon since its early publication, suggests how the king’s book (and, by extension, his martyred body) could have been interpreted by at least some of its many readers: not as an idol, but as a heuristic for judging and properly performing their own personal imitations of the Word. The two texts in question are excerpted in the Prayers, a set of four meditations supposedly used by the king during his captivity and delivered to Bishop Juxon for safekeeping just prior to his execution. First appended to the Eikon in Dugard’s twenty-second edition (issued on or about March 15, 1649), the Prayers achieved a popularity second only to the Eikon itself, appearing in most editions thereafter and also on their own.11 Of these four prayers, the king’s unattributed, nearly word-for-word borrowing of Pamela’s prayer from Sidney’s Arcadia, is far and away the most famous (or infamous), thanks to its pivotal role in Eikonoklastes. According to Milton, the king’s religious repurposing of Pamela’s prayer is proof positive of his intellectual dishonesty and religious hypocrisy: This King, not content with that which, although in a thing holy, is no holy theft, to attribute to his own making other mens whole Prayers,

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hath as it were unhallow’d and unchrist’nd the very duty of Prayer itself by borrowing to a Christian use Prayers offer’d to a Heathen God. Who would have imagin’d so little feare in him of the true allseeing Deitie, so little reverence of the Holy Ghost . . . as immediately before his death to popp into the hand of that grave Bishop who attended him, for a speciall Relique of his Saintly exercises, a Prayer stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction praying to a Heathen God; and that in no serious book, but in the vaine amatorious Poem of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, a Booke in that kinde full of worth and witt, but among religious thoughts and duties not worthy to be nam’d. (CPW 3:362) Needless to say, Milton’s remarks have drawn much critical attention over the years. Cable’s reading of this passage is typical, locating the offense of the “stolen” prayer in its appeal to a “thoughtless and spiritually indolent” hermeneutic.12 There is, however, another way to read this borrowing, one that is supported by the appearance of Pamela’s prayer alongside another “stolen” prayer, this one from Bishop Lewis Bayly’s 1612 devotional best-seller The Practice of Pietie.13 By 1649, nearly twenty years after its author’s death in 1631, it was a bona fide devotional classic, easily on a par with the Arcadia in terms of popularity, influence, and international reputation. Having circulated in over forty editions in England alone, it was beloved by an unusually wide range of readers, of all social ranks and Protestant persuasions. John Bunyan, just to offer one example from the opposite end of the Protestant spectrum, would eventually give it credit for his conversion.14 Bayly himself, much like Sidney in his own day, was both a courtier and a sometime critic of the religio-political status quo. Although he was a Calvinist and a strict Sabbath-keeper who on occasion denounced popery in high places and is alleged to have ordained ministers who refused to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, he nevertheless enjoyed the king’s consistent patronage.15 The Practice was dedicated to Charles from his minority and seems to have factored throughout his life in his own religious reading. Indeed, a slightly altered copy of the very prayer that would eventually be appended to Eikon Basilike exists in the king’s own hand.16 Bayly’s own vision of the Practice helps makes sense of its unusually wide appeal.

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In his dedication to the king, he offers his text as an antidote to religious controversy: “In my desire therefore of the common salvation; but especially of your Highnesse everlasting welfare,” he asserts, “I have endeavorred to extract (out of the Chaos of endlesse controversies) the old practice of true Piety, which flourished before these controversies were hatched” (A4).17 Judging by the work’s spectacular success, not only in Jacobean and Carolinian England but throughout Europe and in North America, and well into the following century, it would seem that Bayly succeeded. If there is such a thing as “the basics” of English Protestant piety, Bayly’s Practice is probably it.18 My point here is not that the Arcadia and the Practice are of a piece, aesthetically, politically, or theologically (even this barest-bones description of the Practice would suggest that they are not). Nor do I mean to imply that all or even most of the Eikon’s earliest readers would have been able to identify the provenance of these two unattributed borrowings, although it is also not impossible or even improbable, given the popularity of the two works in question, that readers less learned and motivated than Milton and Richard Royston (the printer who first identified Bayly’s prayer) could have recognized at least one or the other of them. My point is rather that when triangulated with the Eikon, Pamela’s and Bayly’s prayers map an important middle ground in early to mid-seventeenthcentury England between the extremes of iconophilia and iconophobia staked out by Eikonoklastes and reproduced in the sacred/secular binary that structures our own critical discourse. In this broad and broadly Protestant discursive space, the body is anything but illegible. It is, in fact, a popular point of entry into a cluster of interrelated and fundamentally “religious” conversations about the proper (Protestant) relationship of insides to outsides, bodies to souls, and signs to referents. While there is no way to chart all the possible perspectives such conversations might offer on the Eikon, reading these three works with an eye to their shared theological concerns, rather than with respect to their generic classification as “secular” or “devotional” literature, suggests how at least one circle of readers (presumably very close to and possibly including the king himself ) imagined the Eikon’s relationship to other Protestant discourses of embodiment. By positioning the king’s suffering body as the literary descendant of two widely influential “speaking pictures” of idealized Protestant

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piety, they suggest a more nuanced, less anachronizing approach to Milton’s caricature of the Eikon’s theology as nothing more than “tyranny and popery, drest up, the better to deceive” (CPW 3:339). We will begin with Bayly and the “basics” of Protestant piety as he defines them.

Reading the Body Natural in The Practice of Pietie The first thing to be noted about The Practice of Pietie is just how much of it is taken up with “bodily exercise.” Bayly devotes whole chapters to the nuts and bolts of morning and evening prayer, the proper procedures for fasting, feasting, and singing the Psalms, and the staging of family devotions and mealtimes. There are three chapters on how to conduct oneself before, during, and after church and three more on how to receive the sacraments worthily. Perhaps most striking in this regard are chapters 27 through 41, which are entirely concerned with the pious performance of sickness and death. There are prayers to be said before taking medicine, after recovery, and as death approaches. There are instructions for making a good will, being a considerate bedside visitor, and warding off despair. There is an exemplary last speech of a godly man, an extended argument for offering priestly absolution and last Communion to the dying, and— should one find oneself so called— even a meditation on martyrdom. But what is really remarkable about this text is not so much its focus on embodied practices of piety — which, as Ian Green has pointed out, is in fact pretty standard fare for best-selling Protestant devotional manuals— but the clarity with which Bayly articulates his understanding of the (broadly Calvinist) theology underlying them.19 Whatever might be said of the Eikon Basilike, The Practice of Pietie is no patchwork of “Scripture phrase” (Milton, Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:360), preying on the popish inclinations of simple folk in pursuit of a profit. It is a serious working out of a popular Protestant theology of embodiment, one that privileges the body as a site and sign of divine intervention even as it facilitates and celebrates the destruction of the flesh. As such, it is an important site for recovering the religious sensibility that found Eikon Basilike so appealing. At the most basic level, the body’s role in The Practice of Pietie is as a sign of election. While Bayly is emphatic that “good works are not neces-

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sary to justification,” he is equally emphatic that only a “carnall Christian gathereth, That good works are not necessary” (98). According to Bayly, the faith “which only [solely] justifieth, is never only [sole].” It is “ever accompanied with good works, as the tree with his fruits, the sun with his light, the fire with his heat, and water with his moisture” (98– 99). In this schema, reminiscent of Rogers’s, the body is important not for its own sake but as a marker of one’s internal spiritual state. For Bayly, clean living, charitable giving, and the due observance of “externall reverence” are the natural, necessary outgrowths of justification. Given the controversial status of “externall reverence” in the early Stuart church, it is worth noting the special care Bayly takes to argue for the inclusion of bodily gestures like kneeling and bowing under the rubric of “good works”: “And as God detests the service of the outward man without the inward heart, as hypocrisie; so he counts the inward service, without all externall reverence to be meere prophanesse: he requireth both in his worship. In prayer therfore bow thy knee, in witness of thy humiliation: lift up thine eyes and thy hands in testimony of thy confidence: hang down thy head and smite thy breast, in token of thy contrition” (104). Bayly is not naive about the possibility of slippage between earthly sign and spiritual referent. Indeed, he readily acknowledges the inevitability of such gaps (hypocrisy and “prophanesse”). However, unlike Cary, he is relatively untroubled by the prospect of public illegibility. For Bayly, the signifying power of “works” (bodily and otherwise) is contingent not upon their public interpretability but upon their capacity to bring pleasure to God and spiritual comfort to the individual elect. Within this interpretative community of two, “works” can and do work perfectly — if the believer will only learn to read. Bayly’s role is to teach this spiritual literacy: “If therefore thou conformest thyself to the Word and example of Christ thy master, and obeyest the good motions of the holy Spirit, in leaving sin and living a godly life: then assure thy selfe that thou art one of those, who are infallibly predestinated to everlasting salvation” (99). Moreover, the benefits of right reading go well beyond reassurance. The body is not merely a sign of salvation for Bayly; it is also a means of sanctification, salvation’s inevitable effect. Throughout the text, the believer is encouraged to surveil his or her embodied experience, not only for traces of sin and signs of regeneration, but also for potentially edifying

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metaphors. Bayly admonishes the reader upon rising from sleep to consider the miracle of the Resurrection and the imminence of the last day, when Christ will “as easily raise up thy body out of the grave, from the sleep of death; as he hath this morning wakened the in thy bed” (126). While getting dressed, the believer is encouraged to “meditate . . . that as thine apparel serves to cover thy shame, & to fence thy body from cold: so thou shouldst be as carefull to cover thy soul with that wedding garment, which is the righteousnesse of Christ” (128). During the Eucharist, Bayly suggests visualizing the processes of digestion as an aid to more fully experiencing the operation of the Holy Spirit: “As thou feelest the sacramentall wine which thou hast drunk warming thy cold stomack: So endeavour to feel the holy Ghost cherishing thy soul” and “after thou hast eaten and drunk . . . labour that as those Sacramentall signes doe turne to nourishment of thy body, and by the digestion of heat become one with thy substance, so by the operation of Faith, and the holy Ghost, thou mayest become one with Christ” (311– 12). Finally, the processes of disease and death provide the reader with a template for exploring the twin mysteries of sin and salvation. For example, in a “Sweet Soliloquie to be said betwixt the consecration and receiving of the Sacrament,” the believer is encouraged to imagine the state of sin as a composite of all the maladies Jesus healed in his earthly ministry: “I am more leprous then Gehazi, more uncleane then Magdalene, more blinde in soul then Bartimeus . . . my soul runs with a greater flux of sin, then was the Hemorisse issue of bloud. . . . Cure me, O Lord, and thou shalt do as great work as in curing them all” (306– 7). In this scenario the body is both the sign and the source of “contagion” (351). However, it is also the sign and site of ongoing sanctification, which is frequently imagined by Bayly as a kind of death and rebirth: “Oh let us feele the power of Christ’s death, killing sin in our mortall bodies,” he exhorts the reader, “and the vertue of his resurrection, raising up our souls to newnesse of life” (194). There is nothing original about Bayly’s choice of imagery here or the theology underlying it. Bayly understands sanctification as an extension of the divinely ordained process of salvation, whereby those whom God has “predestinated to be saved, which is the end,” are gradually “made conformable to the image of his Sonne, which is the means” (99). This is a standard reformed variation on the traditional imitatio Christi trope.20

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What makes it interesting here is how thoroughly and explicitly it informs Bayly’s framing of “bodily exercise.” For Bayly, the body is a privileged locus of meaning not only because it is the primary sign and site of divine intervention for the individual believer (as outlined above) but also because it is the organizing metaphor for his or her assimilation to the divine nature and incorporation into the community of faith. In this scenario, sanctification plays out like a species of signification, or rather resignification, in which the believer learns to read his or her sinful body and revise it into conformity with the divine image. In this literary rather than literal understanding of the imitation of Christ, the believer enacts a kind of reverse incarnation, a gradual translation from flesh to Word in which the body is transformed from a sinful, self-referential surface into a sacred signifier. The “practice of pietie” is thus a reorientation rather than a rejection of the body, a realignment of the senses to reflect their original (unfallen) relationship to transcendent reality. Bayly represents this process as a reversal of the Fall, which he imagines in strikingly literary terms. Not content to be mere images of God, Adam and Eve chose to take “the devil’s word before the Word of God.” In their pride, they trespassed God’s command, the “signe of their subjection,” and “affect[ed] blasphemously to bee gods themselves,” thereby making God out to be “a lyar” and themselves “like unto the devill” (34). These acts of willful misinterpretation and misrepresentation fatally obscure humanity’s natural relation to the divine. Bayly’s description of this fallen state is as follows: “The felicity lost, was first the fruition of the image of God, wherby the soule was like unto GOD in knowledge, enabling her perfectly to understand the revealed will of God. Secondly, true holinesse, by which she was free from all prophane errour. Thirdly, righteousnesse, wherby she was able to encline all her naturall powers, and to frame uprightly all our actions proceeding from those powers. With the losse of this divine image, she lost the love of God, and the blessed communion which she had with his Majestie” (39 – 40). The implications of the Fall for the body are dramatic. If original sin is a refusal of referentiality, a rejection of the divine image within, its consequence is a nightmare of reflexivity in which the body becomes a “living prison of thy soul” (349). As Bayly puts it in his “Meditation of the miseries of Man-hood,” “What are thine eyes, but windowes to behold vanities? what are thine eares

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but floud-gates to let in the streames of iniquitie? What are thy senses, but matches to give fire to thy lusts; what is thine heart but the anvill whereon Satan hath forged the ougly shape of all lewd affections . . . ?” (37). Indeed, Bayly goes so far as to portray the state of sin as a state of ever-encroaching bodiliness, a gradual incursion of flesh into the realm of spirit, culminating in the Last Judgment, when damned souls are reunited with their bodies “to be tormented together” in the unremitting bodily suffering of Hell: “There thy lascivious eyes shall be afflicted with sights of ghastly spirits: thy curious ears shal be affrighted with hideous noise of howling devils, and the gnashing teeth of damned reprobates: thy dainty nose shal be cloyed with noysome stench of sulphur: thy delicate taste shall be pained with intolerable hunger: thy drunken throat shall be parched with unquenchable thirst: thy mind shall be tormented to think how for the love of abortive pleasures which perished ere they budded, thou so foolishly lost heavens joyes and incurredst hellish paines, which last beyond eternitie” (55– 56). It is important to emphasize here that Bayly does not understand the problem of sin to be bodiliness per se. The reprobate body is a privileged sign of the literal insignificance of the human person outside a proper state of relation to Christ. Conversely, the sanctified body epitomizes the human capacity to receive and reflect emanations of divine love. Bayly’s descriptions of heaven suggest how this process works in the ideal. In heaven, the glorified bodies of the saved “shall shine as bright as the Sun in the firmament . . . being made transparent, their souls shall shine through” (68), and later, “their bodies shall shine as the brightness of the sun in the firmament, like the glorious body of Christ” (83– 84). In heaven, however, the body doesn’t just reference the “glorious body of Christ”: it participates in the plentitude of the Trinity. Its final end is as a pleasurable vehicle of communion with the divine. As Bayly explains it, God “himselfe will be salvation and joy to our souls, life and health to our bodies, beauty to our eyes, musick to our ears, hony to our mouths, perfume to our nostrils, meat to our bellies, light to our understanding, contentment to our wils and delight to our hearts: and what can be lacking where God himselfe will be the soul of our souls?” (81). On earth, of course, this state of plentitude is impossible, but Bayly’s description of the soul’s reunification with the resurrected body on the

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Day of Judgment shows just how integral the body is to the earthly process of sanctification: Oh, well met again my dear sister! . . . Thou art indeed an habitation fit not only for me to dwell in; such as the holy Ghost thinks meet to reside in, as his temple for ever. The winter of our affliction is now past: the storm of our misery is blown over, and gone. The bodies of our elect brethren apear more glorious then the Lili-flowers on the earth: . . . Thou hast been my Yoke-fellow in the Lords labour, & companion in persecutions & wrongs for Christ and his Gospels sake, now shall we enter together into our Masters joy. As thou hast born with me the crosse, so shalt thou now wear with me the crown. As thou hast with mee sowed plenteously in tears, so shalt thou reap with me abundantly in joy. O blessed, aye, blessed be that God! who (when yonder reprobates spent their whole time in pride, fleshly lust, eating, drinking, and prophane vanities) gave us grace to joyn together in watching, fasting, praying, reading the scripture, keeping his Sabbath, hearing sermons, receiving the holy communion, relieving the power, exercising (in all humility) the works of piety to God. (70– 71) “Repentance,” says Bayly, “must be of the whole man” (44). Salvation is a new birth, in which the believer is “conceived of the Spirit in the wombe of his mother the Church . . . born, not of bloud, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man but of God who in Christ is his father, so that the Image of GOD his father is renewed in him every day and more” (58). The body is thus a partner with the soul in the reorientation of the human sensorium, away from self-enclosed “flesh” and toward the pleasurable mutuality of the body of Christ. The end result of this process is a far cry from the credulous, iconophilic reader caricatured by Milton in Eikonoklastes. Bayly’s ideal believer is nothing if not a critical reader. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that critical reading is the “practice” in The Practice of Pietie: every recommended meditation, exercise, and rule of life is calibrated to teach the believer to tell the difference between “fleshly” exteriors and the internal spiritual realities that, at least for the elect, lie hidden behind them. That is not to say that Milton would have no grounds for critique of Bayly. While

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self-examination and bodily discipline are integral to his hermeneutic, so is a particular kind of bodily pleasure, one with implications that go straight to the heart of Milton’s quarrel with Eikon Basilike. This aspect of Bayly’s hermeneutic is easiest to spot in his instructions on preparing for and worthily receiving the Lord’s Supper, which, for their cumulative effect, are worth recounting at some length. During the portion of the service leading up to the administration of the sacrament, Bayly advises the communicant to meditate on the contrast between his or her fallen body and the body of Christ made available in the bread and wine: Myditate with thy self, how precious & venerable is the body and bloud of the Son of God who is the ruler of heaven & earth, the Lord at whose beck the angels tremble, and by whom both the quick and the dead shall be judged at the last day, and thou amongst the rest. . . . On the other side, consider how sinful a creature thou art, how altogether unworthy of so holy a Guest: how ill deserving to taste of such sacred food having been conceived in filthinesse & wallowing ever since in the mire of iniquity; bearing the name of a Christian, but doing the works of the devil, adoring Christ with an Ave Rex in thy mouth, but spitting oaths in his face & crucifying him with thy gracelesse actions. . . . Ponder then with what face darest thou offer to touch so holy a body with such defiled hands? Or to drink such precious bloud with so lewd and lying a mouth, or to lodge so blessed a Guest in so unclean a stable? For if the Bethshemites were slain, for but looking irreverently into the Ark of the Old Testament, what judgement mayest thou justly expect, who with such impure eyes & heart art come to see and receive the Ark of the new Testament, in which dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily? . . . If John Baptist (the holiest man that was born of a woman) thought himselfe unworthy to beare his shoes; O Lord, how unworthy is such a prophane wretch as thou art, to eat his holy flesh and to drink his precious bloud? . . . If the Centurion thought that the roof of his house was not worthy to harbour so divine a guest, what room can there be fit under thy ribs for Christs holinesse to dwel in? (302 – 3)

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The emphatic physicality of this scene is all the more striking for its equally emphatic insistence on being taken figuratively. The believer’s lying mouth and unaccommodating ribs, real though they are, are not literal sites of divine presence but metaphors for the “miraculousness” of the elect’s indwelling by the Holy Spirit. Even Christ’s literal, historical body, graphically fed upon in the culminating meditation, is merely a sign for the “real” body and blood made available to the believer spiritually through the sacraments: And in the instant of drinking settle thy meditation upon Christ as he hanged upon the crosse; as if like Marie & John, thou didst see him nailed, and his bloud running down his blessed side, out of that ghastly wound which the speare made in his innocent heart; wishing thy mouth closed to his side, that thou mightest receive that precious bloud before it fell to the dusty earth. And yet the actuall drinken of that reall bloud with thy mouth would be nothing so effectuall as this sacramental drinking of that bloud spiritually by faith. For one of the Souldiers might have drunk that and have been still a reprobate, but whosoever drinketh it spiritually by faith in the sacrament, shall surely have remission of his sins. (310 – 11) Here, real presence inheres in the sacramental sign, not the transubstantiated or even the incarnate body. For the elect communicant, Christ is not so much the Word made Flesh as the Word made Flesh made Word. This is orthodox reformed theology and of a piece with the (Erasmian) Christology outlined in Bayly’s opening chapter.21 However, Bayly’s emphasis on Christ’s body as a sacred signifier alongside — and, to a certain extent, through — his vivid depiction of the communicant’s fallen flesh draws attention to the way that signification, particularly bodily signification, is bound up with the process of sanctification in his thought. If, as Bayly asserts throughout, the person of Christ is the Word of the Father (“The conception of a word in mans minde, is the nearest thing that in some sort can shaddow unto us the manner how hee [Christ] is eternally begotten of his Fathers substance,” 5), then to imitate or assimilate to the body of Christ is to literally become a signifier.22

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The promised effect of these meditations clarifies how the body participates in this process. Bailey’s survey of the fallen flesh incites in his model communicant, not disgust, or despair, or even reform (although reform is presumed to come later), but awed delight: “Is it true indeed, that God will dwell on earth? Behold the heaven, & the heaven of heavens are not able to containe thee: how much more unable is the soul of such a sinfull caitiffe as I am to receive thee?” (306). To such a miracle there is only one possible response: Knock, thou, Lord, by thy Word and Sacraments, at the doore of my heart and I will, like the Puolican, with both my fists, knocke at my breasts, as fast as I can, that thou mayest enter in: and if the doore will not open fast enough, break it open, O Lord; by thine almighty power, and then enter in, and dwell there for ever, that I may have cause with Zacheus to acknowledge that this day salvation is come into mine house. And cast out of mee whatsoever shall be offensive unto thee: for I resigne the whole possession of my heart unto thy sacred Majestie intreating that I may not live henceforth, but that thou mayest live in me, speak in me, walke in me; and so governe me by thy Spirit, that nothing may be pleasing unto me, but that which is acceptable unto thee. (308– 9) Here, the fallen flesh of the elect functions analogously to the Word, as a nearly (but not absolutely) irresistible catalyst of integration into the mystical body of Christ. For Bayly, this is the final aim of spiritual literacy: not to read merely against or through the fallen flesh but in the Spirit, such that even the flesh gestures toward and indeed participates in God’s ineffable goodness and glory. As the flesh can signify only to the degree that it is emptied of all pretensions to independent meaning, such a hermeneutic requires nothing less than the total submission of the believer to divine and divinely appointed authority. In other words, if Bayly’s ideal believer is a critical reader, he or she is also ultimately a conformist one, trained to sublimate the sinful desires of the fallen flesh in the pleasures of the corporate body. The this-worldly implications of such a hermeneutic are in evidence throughout The Practice of Pietie. The analogy quoted above, by which

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God is “sacred Majestie” and sin is “high treason” (33), also establishes the ruler as God’s “Vice-regent” (161) and subjection to “their Emperors, Kings, and Magistrates” as one of the twenty-six markers of a true church (399). All morning, evening, family, and Eucharistic prayers include petitions for protection against the “tyranny of the World and of Antichrist” (144) and for intercession by name for the king and all the members of the royal family. More generally, subjection to divine and divinely ordained authority is a running theme throughout the text. “God is the God of order,” Bayly declares, and that includes the social order (243). This principle structures his teachings on the church, family life, and civil society. Bayly charges heads of households with the religious training of their dependents (177– 78) and “great persons” with the spiritual welfare of all who stand to gain or lose by the preeminence of their example (106 – 7). He reminds his readers that the sacraments are “seals” of “service and obedience” as well as of grace, and he models for them a pre-Communion confession that includes lengthy self-examination for lapses in “all due reverence to my naturall, Ecclesiasticall and politicke parents” (293). Bayly’s advice in response to the ongoing debates surrounding church ceremony is to pray “when the church prayeth sing when they sing, and in the action of kneeling, standing, sitting and such like indifferent ceremonies (for the avoiding of scandall, the continuance of charity, and in testimony of thy obedience) conform thy selfe to the manner of the church wherein thou livest” (243). In short, says Bayly, “obey thy betters, observe the wise, accompany the honest, and love the religious, and seeing the corupt nature of man is prone to hypocrisie beware that thou use not the exercise of religion, as matters of course and custome, without care and conscience to grow more holy & devout thereby” (160). The link Bayly establishes above between authentic piety, conservative politics, and true (i.e., sincere) signification suggests how at least some of its readers might have interpreted the Eikon Basilike and its auxiliary prayers, the operative word here being interpreted. In Bayly’s hermeneutic, the king is sacred less because of some mysterious property inherent in his anointed flesh than because of the “natural” association of his public office with supernatural presence and power. Like the Word and the body of Christ made available in the bread and wine, his royal person is an authorized image of transcendent reality, a catalyst by which individuals are

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incorporated into the body politic, itself an image of the body of Christ. To read him properly (that is, submissively) is thus to corporeally authenticate one’s own sanctification/signification. Moreover, the king’s public role as a kind of supersignifier for the divine order lends his pious personal example unique efficacy as a means of sanctification. As both a special sign and a subject of God’s authority, he is particularly well positioned to inspire imitation in the careful reader. For Bayly, this second role as a “true Patron and patterne of Piety” is a king’s highest calling and “truest honour”: “Piety made David, Salomon, Jephosephat, Ezechias, Jesias, Zerubabel, Constantine, Theodosius, Edward the Sixth, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Henery and other riligious Princes to be so honoured: that their names (since their deaths) smell in the Church of GOD like a precious ointment, & their remembrances, as sweet as honey in all mouthes, and as Musicke at a banquet of Wine, when as the lips of others, who have been godlesse and irreligious Princes, doe rot and stinke in the memory of Gods people” (A4r). In this view, reminiscent of the vision of monarchy promulgated by James I in Basilikon Doron, the king is not so much a “politic idol” as a national, autodidactic devotional aid, whose piety (or lack thereof ) can and should be “read,” remembered, and appropriated by his subjects for their own spiritual edification.23 It should be pointed out here that in neither his structural nor his exemplary role is the king’s signifying power different in kind from that of other Christians. Throughout the text, Bayly celebrates submission to one’s betters (be they parents, priests, employers, lesser magistrates or the king himself ) as a sign of election, and he takes great pains to outline the special responsibilities of all those in authority (particularly householders) to provide their charges with godly examples. However, if the king does not signify differently from, say, a priest or a father, his proximity to God in the Great Chain of Being does ensure that he signifies more powerfully and perfectly (though not as powerfully and perfectly as the Word or the Sacraments). Drawing upon a biblical image that Charles I will also employ in the Eikon Basilike, Bayly compares the effect of the king’s piety to the supernaturally shining countenance of Moses descending from Mt. Sinai. Just as Moses’s “often talking with God” caused his face to shine “in the eyes of men,” so piety “embalmes a Prince his good name and

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makes his face to shine before the people” such that they too “by frequent praying (which is our talking with God) and hearing the Word (which is Gods speaking unto us) . . . shall be changed from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord, to the Image of the Lord” (A4r). This hierarchical, embodied vision of socio-spiritual transformation is epitomized by the frontispiece associated with the Practice throughout the seventeenth century (figure 3). Although it is notably absent from many of the versions of the text printed in the mid- to late 1640s, readers of the Eikon would have undoubtedly been familiar with this other image of a political leader at prayer. Here, in an allusion to the story of Joshua’s defeat of the Amalekites in Exodus 17, Moses kneels at a hilltop altar (labeled “Christ”), flanked by Aaron and Hur. Their prayers ensure the victory of the host labeled “Joshua”/“Spirit” over that of “Amalek”/“Flesh” in the pitched battle taking place in the valley below. This image is balanced by another at the top of the page, of an exemplary believer in private prayer. Like Moses, “Pious Man” kneels before an altar, this one labeled “Prayer” and aflame with the sacrifice of his heart. Behind him is a table, labeled “Read,” upon which lies an open book. It is not hard to imagine that what we are being offered here is really two perspectives on the same scene. “Pious Man” participates in the battle below by patterning himself after the model of Moses, made available to him in the Word and in the shining example of his own divinely ordained ruler. Taken together with its accompanying epigraph, “Piety hath the promise” (an allusion to 1 Timothy 4:8, which was, incidentally, retained on the “reformed” frontispieces printed in the 1640s), this doubled image reads like an advance counterargument to Milton’s critique of the image of the praying king on the frontispiece of Eikon Basilike. The caption implicitly defines “pietie” as an internal phenomenon, the opposite of the “bodily exercise” that at best “profiteth little” and at worst leaves one dangerously vulnerable to the forces of darkness stalking verses 1 through 7: the “seducing spirits and doctrines of devils” that substitute “profane and old wives tales” about abstaining from meat and marriage for the rigors of true religion.24 This speaking picture of the ideal leader/believer at prayer is not an idol to be adored but a model of penitence that invites

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Figure 3. Lewis Bayly, The Practice of Pietie . . . . (London: Printed for Philip Chetwinde, 1654). Reproduced courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

its reader to imitate the speaker’s self-examination, reformation, and subsequent sanctification/signification. It is, in other words, a model for right reading — though not of words and images on a page. The “text” here, as throughout The Practice of Pietie, is the self, specifically the believer’s disciplined flesh, which the reader is encouraged to interpret both as a sign of and as a catalyst for genuine transformation.

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Both of these operations are in evidence from the opening images of the Prayers’ adaptation of Bayly’s “Prayer for Morning,” which calls attention to the model speaker’s “fallen” fleshliness while simultaneously interpolating it into a religio-political hierarchy that reclaims it as a site of encounter with the divine: Almighty and most merciful Father, look down upon Me Thy unworthy Servant who here prostrate My self at the Foot-stool of thy Throne of Grace; but look upon Me, O Father, through the Mediation and in the Merits of Jesus Christ, in whom Thou art only wellpleased; for, of My self I am not worthy to stand before Thee, or to speak with My unclean lips to Thee, most holy and Eternal God; for as in sin I was conceived and born; so likewise I have broken all Thy Commandments by My sinful motions, unclean thoughts, evil words, and wicked works.25 While the polemical thrust of this prayer is not immediately apparent to a modern reader, historical context suggests that its inclusion in the Prayers appended to the Eikon might well have been initially interpreted as a polemical gesture. Bayly’s image here of the earth as God’s footstool was common currency in the debates surrounding church ceremony in the 1630s and ’40s. In imitation of the Christian protomartyr, Stephen, who used the phrase in Acts 7:49 to defend himself before the high priest against the charge of blaspheming the law and the Temple rites, anticeremonialists like William Prynne invoked the term as an argument against practices like kneeling before the altar and bowing at the name of Jesus. Meanwhile, ceremonialists used the same image to make the case for the complementarity of earthly and heavenly hierarchies.26 Although omitted from the version that appears with the Eikon, the final section of the original prayer makes explicit Bayly’s moderate Calvinist view that right worship necessarily entails integration of the individual into a divinely ordained social structure. It moves the reader from adulation of the divine majesty to intercession for the king, his family, and his representatives, all of whom are charged by God with the maintenance of “true religion” and social order.27

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However, even without benefit of this final section, the readers of the Prayers would have had reason to read Bayly’s footstool as a support for the corporal ceremonies of the state church. The essential embodiedness of right worship is subtly asserted in the reference at the beginning of both the original and the adapted prayer to “unclean lips.” The phrase alludes to Isaiah 6:5, in which the young prophet’s humility marks the beginning of his prophetic career. Visited by a vision of God on his throne surrounded by seraphim, Isaiah learns to properly read his fallen flesh: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” God’s response to Isaiah’s abjection is to send an angel to purify Isaiah’s lips with a hot coal, transforming him, body and soul, into a mouthpiece of the Lord.28 This passage would have been familiar to the readers of The Practice of Pietie and Eikon Basilike. In the years preceding the Civil War, Isaiah’s “coal from the altar” was a trope in the escalating debates about church ceremony. In his 1636 treatise, Laudian apologist Peter Heylyn uses it as the title in his elaborate defense for erecting east-west altars (as opposed to the north-south “tables”) in the chancels of English churches, thereby inciting a “Quench-coale” from William Prynne, whose incendiary reply set off a full-scale pamphlet war on the topic.29 In the body of Eikon Basilike, Charles I invokes Isaiah’s coal to justify his refusal to sell off church lands in concession to the Presbyterian Covenanters. Likening them to the “Golden Calves” of the wicked king Jeroboam, who “enriched themselves with the Church’s Patrimony,” he represents their behavior as the epitome of carnality (Eikon Basilike, 119). To consent to it would be to risk a reversal of the process by which his “throne and conscience” have been consecrated to God: “Though My Treasures are Exhausted, My Revenues Diminished, and My Debts Increased, yet never let Me suffer to be tempted to use such profane Reparations least a coal from thine Altar set such a fire to my Throne and Conscience as will be hardly quenched” (120). It is hard to imagine that in the superheated political climate of 1649 anyone affiliated with Dugard’s edition of the Eikon would have been deaf to these polemical resonances in “Prayer for Morning” or insensitive to the impact of putting such a prayer in the mouth of a recently executed

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king. If the properly disciplined flesh is the guarantor of one’s ability “to speake” meaningfully, not only to God in prayer, but also to one’s fellow Christians, then the king’s submission to God (rather than the “Golden Calf ” of Parliament), like the people’s submission to his altar policies, is the sign and site of his true sanctification/signification.

Reading the Royal Body in Eikon Basilike The context established above does not fully account for the popularity of the Eikon Basilike. Neither does it explain away some of the more sensationally “embodied” expressions of royalism it inspired, many of which would have probably scandalized significant swaths of Bayly’s varied readership. Rereading the Eikon Basilike in light of Bayly’s Practice of Pietie does not offer insight into the idiosyncrasies of Charles I’s vision of sacramental kingship, nor does it shed any light on the folk practices and beliefs that might have made his self-representation as a Christ figure attractive to the most “fatally stupefied and bewitched” (27) elements of Milton’s ungodly, unlearned “rabble.” It does, however, help us make more sense of the Eikon’s massive middle-of-the-road appeal. How might a reasonably pious, churchgoing, scripture-reading, prayer-book-conforming moderate Calvinist ( just to take one example) interpret Charles I’s imitation of Christ? Reading the Eikon through Bailey’s hermeneutic offers some important clues. The first can be found on the title page, directly preceding the image of the praying king that so exercised Milton and his Commonwealth contemporaries. Milton reads the image as an icon of the Eikon itself, a dazzling surface of “faire and plausible words” calibrated to “befoole the people” (224). But the epigraph suggests a different interpretation for that image (and by extension for the work as a whole), one that resonates powerfully with the themes of Bayly’s Practice. Just underneath the title of the work is the phrase “more than Conquerour, & c.” This is an excerpt from Romans 8:37, a Pauline exhortation to martyrdom, which is referenced only by chapter in the accompanying citation.30 It would be easy (and not entirely inaccurate) to read this phrase as a simple gesture of generic affiliation. As many critics have pointed out, the Eikon masterfully exploits the

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tropes of Protestant martyrology to reframe the king’s civil trial and execution as a Foxean-style agon.31 In this interpretative context, Romans 8:37 functions straightforwardly as a declaration and celebration of Charles I’s martyrdom. However, taken in the context of Romans 8 as a whole, as the chapter citation suggests, and in light of contemporary debates surrounding Charles I’s religious policies (particularly the “popish” ceremonial “innovations” introduced by his archbishop, William Laud), this epigraph does something a bit more specific. It goes straight to the heart of the Puritan argument against the king, reversing its terms to recast the ceremonialist Charles I as a champion of the “spirit” and his antiritualist Puritan adversaries as agents of “superstitious” and self-serving carnality. A closer look at Romans 8 clarifies how this counterargument works. The overarching theme of the chapter is not martyrdom per se but the imitation of Christ and the complicated interaction between “flesh” and “spirit” that constitutes it in Paul’s thinking. To follow Jesus, Paul says, is to “walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (8:1). This feat is made possible through the miracle of the Incarnation, which fulfills the requirements of the law “in the flesh” (8:3), thereby restoring fallen humanity to its original relationship with God as an image of his goodness and glory. This transformation, while gradual and incomplete here on earth, has profound implications for the mortal body of the believer. Enabled “through the Spirit” to “mortify the deeds of the body” (8:13), the elect perform a powerful, if imperfect, imitation of Christ’s bodily death and resurrection whereby the sinful flesh is incrementally killed off and reanimated by the indwelling Holy Spirit. In this context, martyrdom is the ultimate thisworldly manifestation of the transcendent realities of salvation and sanctification. It is not, however, exempt from the limitations of the flesh. Indeed, Paul’s celebration of martyrdom takes place within a much broader discussion of the distance and difference between earthly signs and their heavenly referents. In Romans 8, to walk “after the spirit” is to walk in a fallible body through a fallen world, where only God, “who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit” (8:27). Martyrdom, like the other “firstfruits of the Spirit,” is thus merely an interpretable sign of a redemption that must be hoped for but cannot yet be seen. What is important about Romans 8 for our purposes is its emphasis on the embeddedness of martyrdom and indeed all of the Christian life

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in the fallible, fleshly processes of human signification. To raise this point on the frontispiece of a text that is bound to be read by its critics as a “Romish gilded Portraiture” (Milton, Eikonoklastes, CPW 3:498) cynically crafted to dazzle the vulgar is hardly to elide textuality. It is in fact to invite close reading, not only of the Eikon itself, but of the rival Puritan hermeneutic that would (mis)read it as a relic, thereby (mis)taking royalism for “a civil kind of Idolatry” (3:343). In the Eikon, it is the Puritans whose eyes are dazzled. Having deified their own fleshly passions and prejudices, they incorrectly assume “all is gold of piety, which doth but glister with a shew of Zeal and fervency” (78). There is nothing particularly novel about the Eikon’s resort to turnabout here. As we will see in chapter 4 below, defenders and critics of the king’s ceremonialist policies took turns calling each other carnal throughout the 1630s and ’40s, a shared bit of polemical posturing that suggests the degree to which both camps were invested in a broadly Protestant notion of bodily literacy. The Eikon Basilike, however, is more than a simple exercise in name-calling. It is a meditation, à la Romans 8, on the dangers and difficulties of naming at all. The king’s personal passion narrative unfolds against a backdrop of biblical poetry and history in which the people of God repeatedly demonstrate their utter incapacity to recognize (much less apply) even the most spectacularly clear instances of divine revelation. In such a context, it is hard to imagine how anyone could be expected to tell the difference between flesh and spirit, king and tyrant, a real martyr and a fraudulent imitation of one. The Eikon’s solution to this problem is to deploy a Baylian-style hermeneutic that foregrounds the king’s special status as a divinely sanctioned sign. This strategy shifts the burden of proof from the words on the page to the reader, whose fallen flesh is the primary site of interpretive instability. Much like the prayers and meditations of Bayly’s ideal believer, the king’s rereading of his political downfall as a private victory over his flesh functions as a kind of prompt that teaches his subjects to properly interpret and discipline their own fleshly appetites. This is the case for divineright monarchy in its most broadly appealing, Baylian terms. The point of the Eikon is not the sacredness of Charles’s blood or the magical efficacy of his anointing but his transparency as a sign of divine order and his consequent efficiency as a catalyst of signification/sanctification for the true

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subject/Christian (always one and the same in the Eikon). Amid a cacophony of “lying tongues,” all of them enticing the public to one form of idolatry or another, Charles’s persecuted and finally martyred monarchical flesh reliably shows the reader where and how to bow. The lesson begins in chapter 1 with the calling of the last parliament, which Charles reads as a glaring example of the spiritual illiteracy underlying the current political crisis. Blinded by “passion and prejudice” (Eikon, 51), Parliament refuses his concessions, many of which Charles recognizes in retrospect as concessions to his own fleshly weakness for approval rather than accurate reflections of his “Reason and Conscience” (52). Charles’s understanding here of himself as implicated along with his adversaries in the breakdown of civil discourse and his subsequent prayer of confession on everyone’s behalf establish the thematic engagement of the Eikon Basilike with the difficulties of right reading. The real conflict here and throughout the narrative is not between king and Parliament but between flesh and spirit, which, as the king’s own example demonstrates, can be devilishly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. Indeed, one could argue that the Eikon’s overarching theme is the tragic consequences of mistaking the “partialities of private wills and passions” (72) for the inner light of “Reason and Conscience” (70) and that it is worked out both at the level of narrative and in the intricately connected network of biblical references that echo and comment upon the main action. The Puritans are obviously the most tragic of the Eikon’s tragically mistaken readers. Alternately portrayed as deceived and depraved, they consistently privilege flesh over spirit, outside over inside, surface over essence. In the name of “reformation,” they have refashioned the church into their own image, replacing the organic hierarchies of episcopacy and monarchy (both of which Charles characterizes as extensions of “natural” familial hierarchies) with the “artifice of a Covenant” (114), and the “constant Forms” of the prayer book with the “vain affectations” of extemporaneous prayers (132). In both cases, the root problem is a diabolical creativity that substitutes human inventions for the “divine and holy pattern” (137) set down in scripture and, “where the Scripture is not so clear and punctual in precepts,” in “the constant and Universal practice of the Church, in things not contrary to Reason, Faith, good Manners, or any positive Command” (156). Such “popular, specious, and deceitful

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Reformations” (157) are a species of idolatry no less barbaric than the riotous false worship of the Israelites in the wilderness: “But some men thought, that the Government of this Church and State, fixed by so many Laws and long Customes, would not run into their new moulds, till they had first melted it in the fire of a Civil War; by the advantages of which they resolved, if they prevailed, to make My self and all My subjects fall down, and worship the Images they should form and set up” (157). The violence associated with idolatry here is a running theme of the text. In the Eikon, the making of idols requires the breaking of laws, institutions, and people. Indeed, a defining mark of false religion, according to Charles, is its penchant for “secular violence” (110), which he defines as a fleshly substitute for the spiritual discipline of self-sacrifice: If Presbytery in such a supremacy be an institution of Christ; sure it differs from all others; and is the first and only point of Christianity, that was to be planted and watered with so much Christian blood; whose effusions run in a stream so contrary to that of the Primitive planters, both of Christianity and Episcopacy, which was with patient shedding of their own blood, not violent drawing other men’s; sure there is too much of Man in it to have much of Christ, none of whose institutions were carried on, or begun with the temptations of Covetousness or Ambition; of both which this is vehemently suspected. (110 – 11) Charles’s controversial appropriation of Christ imagery is best understood in terms of this broader thematic engagement with the radical, potentially violent instability of human signification and the special status of disciplined bodies (individual and corporate) as a guarantor of correct interpretation and imitation. Contrary to its characterization by Milton as a cynical concession to popular popery, it appears here less as a manipulation of residual devotion to Christ’s suffering body than as a strategic appropriation of that body’s signifying power as the Word made Flesh made Word. By utterly surrendering himself to the divinely appointed sign of kingship, Charles performs a uniquely literal and therefore uniquely legible imitation of the Word: one that interpolates him, and by extension the English people, into a history of progressive revelation going all the

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way back, as we have seen, to Moses. In the Eikon, to be a Christ figure is to be the opposite of an idol. It is to be a properly functioning sign, an image of the image of God working (or not working) “naturally” to draw its readers into a state of right relation with each other and with their divine original. This broad and broadly Protestant definition of imitatio Christi is at the heart of Charles’s passion narrative. Not surprisingly, that narrative is largely a history of reading, one that begins, in fact, with a tragic act of misreading by Charles himself. In chapter 2 he portrays his consent to the execution of the Earl of Strafford as a failure to distinguish between the expediencies of the flesh and the law of the spirit, which privileges the “inward exactness” of one’s “Conscience before God” over the “outward peace” of earthly kingdoms (54). This story is subtly superimposed onto the story of Christ’s trial and execution, with Charles playing the role of Caiaphas, the high priest of the Sanhedrin who reasons, “Better one man perish (though unjustly) than the people be displeased, or destroyed” (55). The link established here between martyrdom and misreading and the fact that Charles is shown here to be as capable of the latter as he is of the former typifies the thematic emphasis of Charles’s imitatio Christi. The point of it is not the uniqueness of Charles’s moral heroism but the relevance of the Incarnation to the fundamental “fallenness” of human signification. What Christ (and by extension, Charles) represents in this context is the incursion of transcendent reality into the realm of the flesh. To imitate him is to act on the promise that human words and bodies can and do participate in that reality. However, Charles’s failure here to recognize such a moment when he sees it foregrounds the inextricability of imitatio Christi from the human act of interpretation and the mysteries of election and divine providence. If to imitate Christ is to become a sign, it is also to risk, even to court, misreading. This inevitability is, in fact, the subject of the verses leading up to Romans 8:37: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he

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called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified. What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. (Rom. 8:28– 36) Of course, it is the Puritans who commit the most serious acts of misreading in this rewriting of the Passion narrative. For example, their dealings with Charles concerning the calling of triennial parliaments in chapter 5 is construed as evidence of a diabolical hermeneutic that conflates truth with spectacle. Like Satan, who attempts to persuade Christ to prove his divinity by jumping from the pinnacle of the temple, Charles’s adversaries attempt to cast him down “head-long” from the pinnacle of personal rule, “concluding, that without a miracle, Monarchy it selfe, together with Me, could not but be dashed in pieces” (68). What the Puritans imagine as an attempt to bring earth into closer alignment with heaven reads here as a failure to recognize and respect the difference and distance between heaven and earth and the mysterious ways of divine providence, which can work just as easily through a fallible king as through a humble carpenter. Like Satan, they are blinded to the sometimes subtle workings of the spirit by their own lust for earthly power. “Make them see at length,” Charles prays, “That as many Kingdoms as the Devil showed our Savior, and the glory of them . . . are not worth the gaining, by ways of sinful ingratitude and dishonour, which hazards a Soul worth more Worlds than this hath Kingdoms” (68). Charles’s evocation of the protomartyr Stephen’s last words in chapter 7 (“I pray God lay not their sin to their charge,” 75), itself an echo of Christ’s words on the cross, expands on the theme of misreading, pushing it back to the very beginnings of Jewish history. Stephen’s speech before

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the temple officials in Acts 7 couches his defense of Christ’s teachings within a narrative of God’s dealings with his “living oracles,” the patriarchs and prophets, all of whom were initially rejected by the children of Israel. His conclusion sums up the Eikon’s case against Charles’s opponents: “You stiff-necked uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? And they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers” (Acts 7:51– 52). The implicit identification here of Charles’s enemies with the misreading and misleading Jews is made explicit elsewhere. In chapter 12 he blames the Irish rebellion on Presbyterian propaganda: “Therefore with exquisite malice they have mixed the gall and vinegar of falsity and contempt, with the cup of my Affliction; Charging me not only with untruths, but such, as wherein I have the greatest share of loss and dishonour by what is committed; whereby . . . I might be represented by them to the world the more inhumane and barbarous: Like some Cyclopic monster, whom nothing will serve to eat and drink, but the flesh and blood of my own Subjects” (102– 3). Later, the deceiving Scots will play the role of Judas, delivering Charles up to the English for a fee. “I never trusted to them further, than to men,” says Charles. “If I am sold by them, I am only sorry . . . that my price should be so much above my Saviour’s” (165–66). Charles’s response to this betrayal exemplifies his understanding of the alternative hermeneutic his passion embodies: “These are but further Essays, which God will have me make of man’s uncertainty, the more to fix me on himself; who never faileth them that trust in him; Though the Reeds of Egypt break under the hand of him that leans on them: yet the Rock of Israel will be an everlasting stay and defence” (166). The “Reeds of Egypt” Charles refers to here are found in 2 Kings 18, where King Hezekiah, the righteous Judaean king best known for cleansing the Temple of idols, is besieged by the Assyrian army. Falsely assuming Hezekiah’s resistance to be rooted in his reliance on a promise of Egyptian protection, Rabshakeh, an Assyrian commander, taunts Hezekiah’s men for their political naïveté: “What confidence is this wherein thou trustest? Thou sayest, (but they are but vain words), I have counsel and strength for the war. Now on whom dost thou trust, that thou rebellest against me? Now, be-

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hold, thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand and pierce it” (2 Kings 18:19 – 21). In fact, King Hezekiah is relying solely on a word from the Lord, delivered to him by the prophet Isaiah. He instructs his men to remain silent, prostrates himself in the “house of the Lord,” and sends word to Isaiah, who sends word back to him that he should not be frightened by empty rhetoric. Then God stirs up a false rumor that sends Rabshakeh to his own land. Charles’s pairing of the phrase “Reeds of Egypt” with the epithet “Rock of Israel” links Hezekiah’s passive heroism to the oracular performance of his forefather David, whose deathbed speech celebrates the special power of kings to manifest divine justice and order: Now these be the last words of David. David the son of Jesse said, and the man who was raised up on high, the anointed of God, of Jacob, and the sweet psalmist of Israel, said, The spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue. The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain. (2 Sam. 23:1– 4) Taken together, the point of these two passages isn’t simply that kings are instruments of divine guidance. It is that the reliability of all human signs is contingent upon their participation in God’s ongoing self-revelation. Charles’s renunciation of the “Reeds of Egypt” for the “Rock of Israel” situates both his kingship and his loss of it within a broader biblical narrative in which kings, prophets, and saints struggle alongside ordinary people to “hear the Word of God and do it” (to borrow a phrase from Luke 11:28). In this context, his martyred monarchical flesh— like Hezekiah’s praying body and David’s penitent one — is doubly significant. It is, at one and the same time, a “natural” sign of the supernatural order and a model of the reader’s appropriate (submissive) response to that order. The royal sign’s uniquely doubled capacity to cut through the static of potentially misleading human voices is the argument of the Eikon and the theme of the Christ imagery scattered throughout Charles’s meditations

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on martyrdom. Charles’s appropriation of a crown of thorns in chapter 6 is a case in point: “I will rather choose to wear a Crown of Thornes with My Saviour, then to exchange that of Gold (which is due to Me) for one of lead, whose embased flexibleness shall be forced to bend, and comply to the various, and oft contrary dictates of any Factions; when instead of Reason, and Publick concernments, they obtrude nothing but what makes for the interest of parties, and flows from the partialities of private wills and passions” (72). The spectacle here of Charles exchanging his earthly crown for a crown of thorns does more than play on popular sympathies. It also appeals to better (i.e., sanctified) judgments, in which the crown of thorns reads as an earthly sign of the heavenly crown (here “of Gold”) promised to the saints. That crown is associated, both here and in the New Testament passages it evokes, with opposition to the fallen realm of false words and fleshly passions. The second epistle to Timothy (4:3– 8) sums up the basic idea: For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day; and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing. Even Charles’s most spectacular appropriation of Christ imagery, his identification with the saving power of Christ’s blood in chapter 9, can be read as an extension of his Protestant-style imitatio of Christ-asWord. In the passages leading up to the prayer in question, Charles offers his blood as a substitute for his words, which have been misconstrued and finally drowned out by the superstitious violence of his opponents “who chose rather to contend by Armies, than by Arguments” (81). His prayer begins, appropriately enough, as an imitation of David, who is likewise surrounded by slanderous and violent enemies. His opening words are a

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pastiche of Psalms 86 and 25: “O my God, the proud are risen against me, and the assemblies of violent men have sought after my soule, and have not set Thee before their eyes. Consider My enemies, O Lord, for they are many, and they hate me with a deadly hatred without a cause” (86). Driven to “cross David’s choice . . . rather to fall into the hands of men, by denying them . . . than into thy hands by sinning against My Conscience and in that against thee, who art a consuming fire” (87), Charles chooses the path of martyrdom: If nothing but My blood will satisfie My Enemies, or quench the flames of My Kingdoms or thy temporal Justice, I am content, if it be thy will, that it be shed by Mine own Subjects’ hands. But O let the blood of Me, though their King, yet a sinner, be washed with the Blood of My Innocent and peace-making Redeemer, for in that thy Justice will find not only a temporary expiation, but an eternal plenary satisfaction. . . . O Remember thy great mercies toward them, and forgive them! O my Father, for they know not what they do. (87– 88) Charles’s reference to God as a “consuming fire” suggests that his prayer to participate in Christ’s work of redemption is at least partly informed by his understanding of martyrdom as a special kind of signification akin to that enacted by Moses upon his descent from Mt. Sinai. The phrase “consuming fire” appears in Deuteronomy 4:24 and is repeated in Hebrews 12:29 as the culmination of a long passage reminding the Christians in Jerusalem that they are bearers of a “new covenant” of the spirit. This new covenant is sealed by Christ, whose blood is imagined as a form of speech analogous to the words of the Old Law: For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest, And the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that the word should not be spoken to them any more. . . . But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels. . . . And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to

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the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel. See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. For if they escaped not who refused him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven. (Heb. 12:18– 19, 22, and 24 – 25) Charles invokes this same passage in the penitential prayer that follows his meditation on the Earl of Strafford’s execution in chapter 2. That prayer, which is largely a petition for “Truth in the inward parts, and Integrity in the outward expressions,” calls upon Christ’s blood, “which speaks better things” to “make me, and my People, to hear the voice of Joy and Gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken, may rejoice in thy salvation” (57). Charles’s understanding here of salvation as a transformative encounter with the living Word suggests how his more scripture-centered readers might have understood his body and blood to participate in the process of salvation: not as a literal expiation for sin (like the blood of Abel), but as a sign of the “better word” made available in the Gospel. Fittingly, one of Charles’s most explicit formulations of his martyrdom as an imitation of and participation in the Word is found in a final reference to Romans 8, which closes the last chapter: “I shall be more than Conquerour through Christ enabling me; for whom I have hitherto suffered: as he is the Author of Truth, Order, and Peace; for all which, I have been forced to contend against Errour, Faction, and confusion” (201). In this formulation of the imitatio Christi, Charles’s suffering body is not an “idolatrous” appeal to the senses or the emotions at the expense of reason but an invitation to careful (correct) interpretation. Its power, like the power of the Protestant Eucharist and the Protestant notion of Christ-as-Word, is the power of metaphor recognized as metaphor, a (relatively) stable sign of divine presence and power that can be read, internalized, and imitated.

Pamela, Charles, and the Royal “Book of Virtue” In this context, the Eikon’s appropriation of Pamela’s prayer can be read as something more than simple plagiarism. Like Bayly’s “Prayer for Morning,” it is a “speaking picture” of exemplary personal piety, one that even

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more explicitly than Bayly’s prayer anticipates Milton’s critique of the king’s Eikon as idolatrous. To read or write the Eikon with Sidney’s Arcadia in mind (as at least one of the text’s earliest readers obviously did) is to proceed with acute awareness of the antagonism of the fallen flesh to careful, correct interpretation and imitation. More importantly for our purposes, it is to hold up for critical examination the royalist thesis that both processes could be stabilized through the allure of properly disciplined (i.e., signifying) surfaces. Reversing this trajectory, reading Pamela and her prayer with the Eikon in mind, allows us to ask new questions of the Eikon, ones less inflected, or infected, with Miltonic cynicism. Assuming that Charles and his literary executors were operating with at least a modicum of sincerity and critical acumen, we must pause to reconsider: How and why might the best-known fiction of the best-loved icon of sixteenth-century progressive Protestantism come to be the purported private devotional material of a king deposed for tyranny and crypto-popery? Taking Pamela and her prayer seriously as an expression of royalist piety allows us to map, at least provisionally, some important and underappreciated areas of overlap between Charles I’s controversial imitation of Christ and Sidney’s imitative ethos. Like the Eikon, Sidney’s Arcadia is concerned with the slippage between earthly signs and heavenly referents. Perhaps more to the point, it is deeply engaged with the possibilities and predicaments posed by the essential embeddedness of language in fallen, desiring bodies (both natural and politic) and with the consequent “authorial” power of royal and aristocratic personages to fashion themselves into “books of virtue” and vice that inspire personal and political transformation. This shared preoccupation with the “literary” potentiality of the fallen flesh (particularly royal and aristocratic flesh) helps us make more sense not only of Charles’s purportedly devotional reading of Pamela but also of his court’s much-noted fascination with Arcadia and Arcadianism.32 From this perspective, the royalist predilection for all things Sidney looks like something more than a self-serving appropriation of relics from the Protestant Golden Age, although it arguably does look like that as well. As we have seen, in the Eikon the solution to the problem of the desiring, destabilizing flesh is the spectacle of the disciplined (properly desiring) royal body.

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Reading (or misreading) Pamela as another such body helps us recover a Protestant genealogy for the king’s imitation of Christ, one that privileges the flesh not so much as a vehicle of the Incarnation or the Passion but as a visual analogue for the mediating power of language. From a royalist perspective, the structural similarities between Charles’s imitation of Christ in the Eikon and Pamela’s prayerful performance in the famous scene from the third book of the revised Arcadia are obvious and striking. Like Charles, Pamela is a would-be royal martyr whose humble submission to divine providence makes her (also like Charles) an especially affecting symbol of the sometimes mysterious but always triumphant transcendent order represented by her person. Unsurprisingly, given the charge of plagiarism, the likeness between Pamela and Charles extends to matters of style as well. Apart from a brief intercession on behalf of her lover Musidorus (excluded from the version appended to the Eikon), her petition to the “all-seeing light and eternal life of all things” could easily stand in for any number of Charles’s meditations. Trusting her seemingly hopeless situation to God’s “eye of mercy” (464), she offers up her sinful (indeed, pagan) flesh for divine inspection and correction: Let not injury, O Lord, triumph over me, and let my faults by Thy hand be corrected, and make not mine unjust enemy the minister of Thy justice. But yet, my god, if in Thy wisdom, this be the aptest chastisement for my unexcuasable folly; if this low bondage be fittest from my over-high desires; if the pride of my not-enough humble heart be thus to be broken, O Lord, I yield unto Thy will, and joyfully embrace what sorrow Thou wilt have me suffer. Only thus much let me crave of Thee . . . that Thou wilt suffer some beam of Thy majesty so to shine into my mind, that it may still depend confidently upon Thee. (464)33 Approaching this prayer’s appearance in the Eikon as an instance of intertext rather than an act of plagiarism brings into focus the thematic affinities between its primary (Arcadian) and secondary (royalist) settings. In the original scene, Pamela’s power, like that of Charles in the Eikon and indeed of sermo itself, is the power of representationality. In this sense,

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she is the epitome of Protestant imitatio. Her “majesty of virtue” (465) and later her “majesty of unconquered virtue” (492) expose the materialist egotism of her nemesis, Cecropia, guiding her admiring author (and by extension his readers) to a more integrative reading of surface and essence, flesh and spirit. Moreover, and more importantly, Pamela’s career as a monarchical supersignifier is contextualized within a larger narrative about the difficulties of right reading. Although Cecropia’s villainy is marked from the outset for the reader by generic signals and copious authorial commentary (much of which associates her with Catholic-style despotism), it is harder to spot within the world of the text itself.34 For their fellow characters, the critical difference between the pious quasi-Protestant princess and her usurping quasi-Catholic aunt is at least potentially obscured by their remarkable superficial similarities. Like Pamela, Cecropia is of royal blood, a would-be ruler of Arcadia, whose person commands awe and deference. Also like Pamela, she is beautiful, strong-willed, eloquent, and inclined to the sin of pride. However, whereas Pamela’s regality refracts the “beam” of divine majesty, Cecropia’s gestures toward nothing but itself. It is this failure to respect the inevitable gap between earthly sign and heavenly referent that defines the subtle but all-important difference between the two women as monarchal signs. A close reading of their interactions leading up to and following Pamela’s famous prayer will clarify the relevance of this adversarial, but nevertheless intimate, relationship to the religio-political aesthetic of royalist imitatio celebrated in the Eikon. Cecropia’s idolatrous, self-aggrandizing hermeneutic is on prominent display in the family history she rehearses for Amphialus just prior to her encounter with the praying Pamela. The daughter of the king of Argos, Cecropia was married to Basilius’s younger brother, who because of Basilius’s advanced age and unmarried status was believed to be the “undoubted successor” to the Arcadian dukedom (445). According to Cecropia, this belief was the only reason she and her father consented to the marriage, “for else, you may be sure, the king of Argos nor his daughter would have suffered their royal blood to be stained with the base name of subjection” (445). For Cecropia, “royal blood” is the source rather than a sign of royal power. It works like magic to elicit slavish devotion from her people and even from the land itself. “In my presence,” she boasts,

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their tongues were turned into ears, and their ears were captives unto my tongue. Their eyes admired my majesty, and happy was he or she on whom I would suffer the beams thereof to fall. Did I go to church, it seemed the very gods waited for me, their devotions not being solemnized till I was ready. Did I walk abroad to see any delight, nay, my walking was the delight itself, for to it was the concourse, one thrusting upon another who might show himself most diligent and serviceable towards me. My sleeps were inquired after, and my wakings never unsaluted. . . . And in this felicity wert thou born, the very earth submitting itself unto thee to be trodden on as by his prince. (445)35 Cecropia’s quasi-supernatural hold on the minds and hearts of her subjects here (whether real or merely imagined) is entirely at odds with the “strange working power” (464) of Pamela’s prayer, described in great detail only a few scenes later: This prayer sent to heaven from so heavenly a creature, with such a fervent grace as if devotion had borrowed her body to make of itself a most beautiful representation; with her eyes so lifted to the skyward that one would have thought they had begun to fly thitherward to take their place among their fellow stars; her naked hands raising up their whole length and, as it were, kissing one another, as if the right had been the picture of Zeal, and the left of Humbleness, which both united themselves to make their suits more acceptable; Lastly, all her senses being rather tokens than instruments of her inward motions — altogether had so strange a working power that even the hardhearted wickedness of Cecropia, if it found not a love of that goodness, yet it felt an abashment at that goodness; and if she had not a kindly remorse, yet had she an irksome accusation of her own naughtiness. (464) In striking contrast to Cecropia’s coercive glamour, Pamela’s piety invites and indeed requires close reading. Her relationship to the heavenly virtues she represents here is mediated for the reader by similes and conditional phrases that emphasize the interpretability of the scene. If Cecropia’s majesty works like magic, Pamela’s works like rhetoric. Its power is not literal,

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but literary, and therefore contingent not only upon the virtue and skill of the ruler/rhetor but also upon the collaboration of the reader/subject who would imitate her virtue.36 Sidney’s decision to offset his own “right” reading of Pamela’s prayer with Cecropia’s faulty and ultimately inconsequential reception of the same scene is testament to the powerful analogy at work in this text between literary acumen and the religio-political discernment requisite to good imitatio. Cecropia’s imperviousness to Pamela’s piety is of a piece with her tyranny and her atheism, both of which can be traced back to willful habits of misreading.37 While the former is the outgrowth of a superstitious hermeneutic that conflates rulers with gods, earthly signs with heavenly referents, the latter is the product of a suspicious one that refuses to credit heavenly causes for earthly effects. In both cases, the result is the same. Cecropia is blind to the transcendent order at work in the kingdom of Arcadia, not least through the combined eloquence and beauty of Pamela. The inevitable results of such illiteracy are irreligion and lawlessness.38 The debate between Pamela and Cecropia about the existence of God, widely recognized as the thematic climax of the unfinished work, is actually part of a much longer conversation, one that arguably “figures forth” the shared religio-political matrix of Sidnean and Carolinian imitatio.39 Following close on the heels of her prayer, it is chiefly concerned with the proper interpretation of Pamela’s beauty, which Cecropia continues to read divorced from its spiritual referent. Pamela’s dispute with her (which climaxes in her refutation of Cecropia’s speech cited above) suggests how the spectacle of Pamela’s praying, pagan, royal, and female body could be imagined to work in the prayer and indeed throughout book 3 to help the reader map out an interpretative middle ground between the literalizing and the mystifying hermeneutics championed by Cecropia. The scene opens with Pamela at her sewing. Misreading Pamela’s “dainty dressing of her self ” as “a sign of unrefusing harbor” (484), Cecropia attempts to persuade Pamela to marry her son, Amphialus, by flattering her feminine pride. She proceeds by way of an elaborate analogy between Pamela’s desirability as a royal wife and mother and the beauty of the purse Pamela is at that moment embroidering with flowers. “Fully happy is he,” she argues, “to whom a purse in this manner, and by this

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hand wrought, is dedicated. In faith he shall have cause to account it not as a purse for treasure but as a treasure itself, worthy to be pursed up in the purse of his own heart” (484). Promptly recognizing this inverted reading of her purse/person as a cynical attempt to exploit its potential for “treasure,” Pamela counters with a reading of her own, one that insists on the instrumentality of externals: “Think you so indeed?” she replies, “I promise you I wrought it but to make some tedious hours believe that I thought not of them; for else I valued it but even as a very purse” (484). Cecropia’s response confirms the coercive impulse underlying her habitual conflation of surface with essence. “It is the right nature of beauty,” she argues “to work unwitting effects of wonder” (484). Dropping the fiction of the purse, she continues: “How do men crown, think you, themselves with glory for having either by force brought others to yield their mind, or with long study and premeditated orations persuaded what they would have persuaded! And see, a fair woman shall not only command without authority but persuade without speaking” (485). At first glance, Pamela’s alternative interpretation of her artfully composed person/purse seems as dismissive as Cecropia’s is superstitious. “I never thought til now,” she argues just before the speech above, “that this outward gloss, entitled beauty, which it pleaseth you to lay to my . . . charge, was but a pleasant mixture of natural colours, delightful to the eye as music is to the ear, without any further consequence, since it is a thing which not only beasts have, but even stones and trees” (485). However, her later defense of divinity suggests just how integral her disciplined beauty is to her epistemology: “But what mad fury can ever so inveigle any conceit as to see our mortal and corruptible selves to have a reason, and that this universality (whereof we are but the least pieces) should be utterly devoid thereof; as if one should say that one’s foot might be wise, and himself foolish?” (491). If the human person is not a god unto him- or herself here (after the fashion of Cecropia), he or she is far from insignificant. For Pamela, the embodied soul is a synecdoche for the transcendent order, one of the “least pieces” that both signifies and participates in the existence of the whole. This essentially Augustinian reading of created nature as “naturally” connotative of its Creator has implications for the pagan Pamela’s understanding of human-made signs as well.40 As she puts it to Cecropia,

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This heard I once alleged against such a godless mind as yours, who being driven to acknowledge this beastly absurdity that our bodies should be better than the whole world, if it had the knowledge whereof the other were void, he sought . . . to shift if off in this sort: that if that reason were true, then must it follow also that the world must have in it a spirit that could write and read too, and be learned, since that was in us commendable. Wretched fool, not considering that books be but supplies of defects and so are praised because they help our want, and therefore cannot be incident to the eternal intelligence which needs no recording of opinions to confirm his knowledge, no more than the sun wants wax to be the fuel of his glorious lightfulness. (491) The implications of this context for our reading of the religio-political aesthetic celebrated in the Eikon are far-reaching. Pamela’s prayerful, persecuted royal flesh appears in book 3 of the Arcadia as a corrective to two equally dangerous and fallacious hermeneutics, both of which destabilize earthly signs by divesting them of their true spiritual significance. Her capacity, despite her paganism, to rightly orient the reader is the combined effect of her natural “majesty” and spiritual “virtue,” the latter of which is signaled throughout book 3 by her attention to bodily discipline.41 In this sense, Pamela’s “purse” works as a kind of key to her prayer. Her intricate needlework and careful self-presentation, like Charles’s resort to elaborate church ceremonial and set prayers in the Eikon, are not symptoms of superficiality but legible (and therefore inspirational and imitable) signs of a disciplined interior.42 Sidney’s description of the scene is as follows: Pamela, who that day . . . was working upon a purse certain roses and lilies, as by the fineness of the work one might see she had borrowed her wits of the sorrow that then owed them, and lent them wholly to that exercise. For the flowers she had wrought carried such life in them that the cunningest painter might have learned of her needle, which with so pretty a manner made his careers to and fro through the cloth, as if the needle itself would have been loth to have gone fromward such a mistress but that it hoped to return thitherward very

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quickly again; the cloth looking with many eyes upon her, and lovingly embracing the wounds she gave it. The shears also were at hand to behead the silk that was grown too short: and if at any time she put her mouth to bite it off, it seemed that where she had been long in making of a rose with her hands, she would in an instant make roses with her lips, as the lilies seemed to have their whiteness rather of the hand that made them than of the matter whereof they were made, and that they grew there by the suns of her eyes, and were refreshed by the most in discomfort-comfortable air which an unwares sigh might bestow upon them. But the colours for the ground were so well chosen— neither sullenly dark nor glaringly lightsome, and so well proportioned as that, though much cunning were in it, yet it was but to serve for an ornament of the principal work — that it was not without marvel to see how a mind which could cast a careless semblant upon the greatest conflicts of fortune could command itself to take care for so small matters. Neither had she neglected the dainty dressing of her self; but as if it had been her marriage time to affliction, she rather seemed to remember her own worthiness than the unworthiness of her husband. (483– 84) Like the “strange working power” of her prayer, the beauty of Pamela’s purse/person is indicative of and contingent upon her ability to convert her potentially unruly “senses” into “tokens rather than instruments of her inward motions” (464). This translation of bodily sense into symbol is analogous to the literary notion of imitatio Christi at work in The Practice of Pietie and Eikon Basilike. Significantly, it is correlated here and in Pamela’s later defense of theism (quoted above) to the processes of literary and artistic imitation, both of which, according to Pamela, have the power to “help our want” of direct access to the divine intelligence simultaneously beyond and behind all of created nature (491). Pamela’s gender is not insignificant. First of all, the moral legibility of Pamela’s bodily beauty and feminine artistry defends the analogously beautiful surface of Sidney’s text from charges of seduction and “feminine” frivolity.43 Second, the analogy of purse to womb makes explicit the participation of “natural” (even non-Christian) signs in supernatural realities. Pamela’s fertile, royal, pagan body is both “a very purse” for “treasure” (484)

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and of a piece with the treasure itself (484). While human-made signs cannot perfectly imitate this organic relation between outside and inside, surface and essence, heaven and earth, the quasi-erotic nature of Pamela’s connection to her “feminine” needlework suggests just how closely they can approximate it. In such a context, Sidney’s fictional representation of Pamela’s prayer can be read as an icon of the Eikon itself, a human work of art in imitation of the supernatural work of sanctification/signification enacted on the exemplary flesh of a “natural” sign of transcendent order and power. Indeed, Pamela and her prayer can be read as an icon of the entire royalist-ceremonialist aesthetic. Everything about her, from her paganism to her pedigree to her feminine beauty and (re)productivity, makes Pamela the perfect poster girl for the king’s faith in the capacity of “natural” hierarchies and human inventions (including ceremony) to reflect and indeed participate in the transcendent order.44 However, if to read Pamela’s prayer with the Eikon in mind is to (re)discover a shared stratum of aesthetic assumptions linking Sidnean to Carolinian imitatio, then to read or write the Eikon with Pamela’s prayer in mind is to subject those same assumptions to some rather serious probing. For even the most cursory contemporary reader of both texts, the Eikon’s nearly absolute faith in the signifying/sanctifying powers of the royal body would necessarily be complicated by the ugly realities of politics, both as depicted by Sidney in the Arcadia and as confirmed by the day-to-day realities of Civil War England. On the one hand, the Arcadia is as committed as the Eikon to the literary value of the royal body natural. While Sidney would make a poor apologist for Charles’s personal vision of sacramental kingship, he does seem to have shared the broader, “Baylian” view that a ruler’s a priori status as a sign of the transcendent order makes him or her (for better or for worse) a particularly powerful exemplar.45 “The art of government” (254) as Sidney defines it is thus a species of the art of Christian imitation, by which the ruler — through his or her uniquely catalytic example — draws the people into a state of willing conformity to that order. Euarchus is the best example of this ideal at work. His “principal care . . . to appear unto his people such as he would have them be, and to be such as he appeared; making his life the example of his laws” shapes his kingdom into a harmonious body governed through mutual care and affection rather than force. As Sidney puts it,

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his “delight” in their welfare “brought that to pass that, while by force he took nothing, by their love he had all” (256). On the other hand, the similarity between the “art of government” as described above and the art of seduction as anatomized by Cecropia in her later speech to Pamela is striking and not a little troubling. Just as the beautiful woman “need not seek offensive or defensive force, since her only lips may stand for ten thousand shields and ten thousand unevitable shot go from her eyes” (485), so the successful ruler can effect through “love” what the less skillful one must accomplish through coercion. Whereas the Eikon unequivocally celebrates this “natural” quasi-erotic connection between the ruler’s body natural and his or her body politic, in the Arcadia it is as problematic as it is powerful. Indeed, much of the main plot (to say nothing of the narrative digressions) is devoted to the ripple effects of poor royal exempla. To complicate the matter even further, seduction seldom rules out coercion, as Euarchus’s example might imply. More typically, in the world of this text, the two go hand in hand. The Arcadia’s clear-eyed exposition of the common dangers attendant upon the “fleshly” pursuits of poetry, sexual politics, and politics proper could hardly have escaped its Civil War– era readers, none of whom (least of all the king himself ) could have been insensitive to the fact that Charles stood accused of abusing both his material and his symbolic power to prop up a corrupt, Cecropian-style state. To read the Eikon with Pamela in mind, or vice versa, is thus to come face to face with the proximity of even Sidneian (to say nothing of Carolinian) imitatio to its Cecropian antithesis. Pamela is both a beautiful woman and a future queen regnant, the heir of Basilius and the beloved of the shepherd poet Musidorus, “Gift of the Muses.” She is, in other words, the very embodiment of the line of argument linking monarchy to poetry to seduction in Milton’s Eikonoklastes. However, as we have seen, Pamela also points the way toward the recovery of a more moderate contemporary interpretation of the Eikon, one that embraces the similarly signifying powers of monarchy and poetry without smoothing over the very real dangers inherent in their shared affiliation with desiring, earthly bodies. If, as Milton claims in Eikonoklastes, the Eikon is nothing more than a “peece of poetry” (CPW 3:50), Pamela and her prayer suggests how it might also be profitably reimagined as nothing less, bringing to bear on the Eikon the whole of the Arcadia’s consid-

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erable critical apparatus for negotiating the difficult post-Reformation dynamic between always embodied desire and “true” signification/Christian imitation. In the fictional kingdom of Arcadia, just as in the England of the Eikon, the primary obstacle to correct interpretation (and therefore to properly directed desire/imitation) is idolatry: the alienation of human affections from their appropriate orientation toward divine love by inordinate self-love, often masked as devotion to earthly things.46 Here, as in the Eikon, idolatry is an equal-opportunity menace, confounding peasants and princes, heroes and villains alike.47 Much of the satiric bite of the narrative derives from the ironic juxtaposition of high- and low-status characters swept up in the same basic error. If the Helots are gently mocked for idolizing Pyrocles, “kissing the places where he stepped, and after making temples to him as a demi-god” (103), Pyrocles himself is hardly less laughable. The savior of the Helots is no sooner across the border into Arcadia than we find him wandering about the countryside in drag, protesting the divinity of Philoclea to the trees (110). Of course, Arcadia is no more a paradise than Philoclea is a goddess, a fact the scandalized Musidorus knows all too well — that is, before he too (only a few scenes later) is ensnared by Venus. The errors in judgment precipitated by the princes’ respective passions are not always so harmlessly humorous. Just as the Helots’ “fickle . . . eye-sight” (103) sometimes leads them to rally around unworthy champions, often to tragic effect, so too Pyrocles and Musidorus are led into tragic error by their loves. They abandon their royal duties, precipitate a bloody civil war, and collude in the corruption of the royal household and the humiliation of the king, all in the name of love — and they are the good guys. The countless villains of the piece offer even more disturbing demonstrations of the evils attendant upon misdirected desire. It is not just that erotic desire is potentially sinful. The considerable havoc wreaked by lust in the Arcadia is merely a symptom of a much larger epistemological and ethical problem up for examination throughout the text: if welldoing and well-knowing are contingent upon the human capacity for love, then they are also (at least here on earth) inextricably rooted in the matrix of the body, with all of its fallen, fleshly appetites. As Pyrocles puts it in his defense of romantic love, “If we love virtue, in whom shall we love it

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but in a virtuous creature — without your meaning be, I should love this word ‘Virtue’ where I see it written in a book!” (136). Pyrocles has a point. If the body’s frailties limit and distort the human experience of love in the Arcadia, the body is also the vehicle through which love is experienced at all. For all of its dangers, erotic love imitates and participates in “that great work” of divine love that governs the universe and will presumably move the plot to its happy conclusion (136). If Pyrocles’ love for Philoclea figures forth the underlying theory of the Arcadian aesthetic, Pamela epitomizes its best practice. Throughout her ordeal at the hands of Cecropia, Pamela’s beautiful and beautifully disciplined royal flesh embodies the sought-after “organic” connection between heavenly and earthly love. It is, quite literally, “a living book of virtue” (558), through which the careful reader can catch a potentially transformative glimpse of the divine. However, as Cecropia’s recalcitrance demonstrates, such a vision is by no means guaranteed. The persuasive power of Pamela’s “book” is real, but it is a collaborative rather than a coercive power, contingent upon the willingness and capacity of readers to read rightly. That it is often read improperly is not an argument against Pamela or the earthly principalities and pleasures she represents. There is, after all, no escape from the body, and, in the world of the Arcadia at least, no viable alternative to monarchy. If Pamela’s role, like Charles’s in the Eikon, is to fashion her fallen flesh into a beautiful, legible, imitable sign of divine love, then the reader’s is to learn to see it from something like God’s perspective. That such a poetics of the flesh is not only possible (if difficult and imperfect) but necessary is the argument of both the Arcadia and the Eikon. In both texts, the alternative is a literalizing hermeneutic that by denying the flesh leaves interpretation (and therefore imitation) more, not less, vulnerable to the vagaries of misdirected desire. In the Eikon, the iconoclastic zeal of the Puritans blinds them to their own greed and will to power. In the Arcadia, Basilius’s superstitious reliance on oracles and the plain-speaking but foolish Dametas allows him to indulge his weaknesses as a parent, husband, and king. In both cases, what is missing is faith in the improvisational creativity of divine providence to fashion “a new creation” from the raw materials of human error. That faith is, of course, at the very heart of the Arcadian aesthetic. If the body, as Plangus laments in book 2, is “a book where blots be rife”

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(296), it is nevertheless a book worth reading, not only as a valuable tool for self-examination and self-regulation, but also as evidence of fallen humanity’s ultimate participation in the machinery of divine comedy. Assuming the conclusion of the Old Arcadia bears some resemblance to the intended resolution of the revised version, we can project that the happy ending in store for most of the main characters will be achieved both in spite of and because of their many human frailties. Basilius’s foolish withdrawal from the court will be the means by which he finds suitable matches for his daughters. The two young couples’ intemperate love affairs will provide the occasion for the culmination of their moral educations. Even Amphialus may not be beyond rehabilitation. Perhaps his obsession with Philoclea will teach him some sympathy for Helen, whose love (and magical elixir) may heal him, body and soul.48 Sidney’s optimism about the capacity of the fallen flesh to play a part in the divine design is not an isolated phenomenon. Steve Mentz has shown how Arcadia’s long-recognized debts to Heliodorus’s late antique romance, the Aethopian History (first translated into English by Thomas Underdowne in 1569), integrate it into a broader “Heliodoran” movement in early modern England. According to Mentz, the Elizabethan Heliodoranists found in the Greek author’s emphasis on Tyche, typically translated “chance” or “good fortune,” a narrative model compatible with Protestant understandings of Providence and original sin (61).49 What is important about this model for our purposes is its “literary” attitude toward the flesh and the fallen world. In stark contrast to both the “epic martialism” glorified in the chivalric tradition and the decadence on display in the novella, Heliodoran romance celebrates a uniquely hermeneutic mode of heroism, one that reimagines the hero primarily as a reader and a writer (or reviser) rather than as a lover or a fighter. In these stories, what looks like passivity in the face of countless trials and tribulations is in fact a strategy by which the hero recognizes and incorporates him- or herself into the larger providentially ordered narrative. The defining quality of the hero, in other words, is not action, but literacy. “In a world where divine control is never doubted,” Mentz explains, “humankind has two central tasks: to recognize supernatural control and collaborate with it” (52). Mentz shows how the Heliodoran aesthetic is useful for mediating both Protestant anxieties about free will and authorial anxieties about the

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increasing diversity of early modern readerships. By foregrounding acts of interpretation and misinterpretation within a providentialist plot, Heliodoran romance offers a framework for accommodating human creativity to the inevitability of human ignorance and error. In this sense the Heliodoran hero is the analogue of the Heliodoran author. Both are called upon to cooperate with the creator in the redemption of a tragically fallen world, keeping faith that their choices, both good and bad, will somehow be incorporated into the divine design. Mentz’s thesis offers important clues about how the Eikon’s authors/ editors might have understood the role of Pamela’s prayer among the more overtly “religious” prayers and meditations of a purportedly martyred king. Its presence in the Prayers makes explicit their sense of the literary character of Charles’s imitatio Christi, grounding his passion in a broader Protestant aesthetic that affirms the power of the properly disciplined flesh to gesture toward and even participate in the Word. Like Pamela, Charles is positioned as an especially transparent and therefore especially alluring sign of the transcendent order, whose “book of virtue” inspires love and imitation. Even more importantly, Pamela’s credentials as a Heliodoran heroine, arguably the most perceptive character in the whole of the revised Arcadia, reinforce a sympathetic reading of Charles’s iconic passivity as a mark of and catalyst for spiritual literacy rather than as an effeminate and effeminizing lure to superstition.50 Such a reading doesn’t end with Charles’s suffering and death. The arc of Heliodoran romance supports a providentialist interpretation of the events of the Eikon as an episode within the grand narrative of Christian history, which is after all, as Mentz puts it, “a massive romance with salvation at the end” (63). In this sense, Pamela’s final words to Cecropia, just before what she believes to be her execution, could just as easily be Charles’s own: “Follow on, do what thou wilt and canst upon me, for I know thy power is not unlimited. Thou mayest well wreck this silly body, but me thou canst never overthrow. For my part I will not do thee the pleasure to desire death of thee: but assure thyself, both my life and death shall triumph with honour, laying shame upon thy detestable tyranny” (553–54). Read in this “Heliodoran” context, the Eikon’s frequent resort to literary and theatrical metaphors (itself reminiscent of the Arcadia) looks less like cynical “stage-work,” as Milton would have it, and more like a

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surrender of the authorial self to the superior artistry of the divine maker: a literary martyrdom on par with the literal one. In this sense, Charles can be read as an imitator of Sidney himself, whose death after the Battle of Zutphen made him a martyr for the Protestant cause and left the New Arcadia unfinished. The Eikon’s appropriation of Pamela’s prayer thus lays quiet claim to Sidney’s legacy, both as an ideal reader and writer and as a superlative sign. Indeed, insofar as Charles’s royal, martyred body makes “real” Sidney’s vision of royal exemplarity, the Eikon can be said to surpass its Arcadian original to become the culmination of the moderate, Protestant imitatio celebrated by the Arcadia and the Defense of Poetry. That Charles’s “book of virtue” might well have been illegible to Sidney had he lived to read it, and that it was interpreted by many of the king’s subjects as the epitome of Catholic-style idolatry, is a reflection of just how problematic post-Reformation imitatio could be and indeed had become by 1649. To Charles’s supporters, his martyred, royal body represented the dream of organic connection between body and soul, inside and outside, fallen human signifier and divine referent. For his critics, it conjured up the nightmare of an endless, idolatrous facade. From our modern-day perspective it is easy to misread this conflict as one of competing hermeneutics, a final showdown between the late medieval notion of imitatio Christi centered on the body and an emergent Protestant piety that privileged the Word as the primary site of divine revelation and human imitation. However, as we have seen, the Eikon’s borrowings from Bayly and Sidney suggest a more nuanced interpretative dilemma, one in which the king’s body serves as a flashpoint for tensions intrinsic to the project of Protestant (and indeed all post-Reformation) imitatio itself. The significance attached to Charles’s body, both within the Eikon proper and in the debate surrounding it, exposes once and for all the “fleshliness” of language, its inescapable affiliation with the fallen world of alluring surfaces. In this sense the Eikon represents both the culmination and the crisis of English post-Reformation imitatio. The debate surrounding the correct interpretation of Charles’s imitation of Christ-as-Word calls into question the Sidneian and Baylian visions of the flesh as a potential, if problematic, site of collaboration with divine providence in an epic romance where “in mean caves oft treasure abides. . . . And . . . behind foul clouds full oft fair stars do lie hidden” (Arcadia, 196). Moreover, it

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calls attention to the precarious, potentially idolatrous dynamic between inside and outside, surface and essence, bedeviling even the most conservative habits of biblical interpretation and imitation. As we have seen, this radical epistemological instability is a powerful undercurrent in both religious and literary discourses of imitatio in the period (Catholic and Protestant alike), one that frequently manifests itself in a preoccupation with the body: not merely as a material aid or an impediment to virtue (although that is important as well), but as a metaphor for all manner of hopes and fears about the powers and limits of human signs. What the Eikon and its controversial appropriation of Pamela’s prayer finally do, then, is make painfully explicit the tacit conditions of Protestant imitatio: if it is centered on the Word, it remains dependent upon the desiring body, not only as the source of human words, but as the subject and the sign of all that human language can accomplish both for good and for evil. This structural analogy between words and bodies— as surfaces with ambiguous relationships to otherwise inaccessible interiors — is a common and thoroughly studied motif in early modern literary debates about the ethical value of poetry and playacting.51 However, its theological underpinnings are most evident in the religious debates leading up to and informing the Eikon’s representation of Charles as a champion of the established church and prayer book. Read in light of the heated controversies of the late 1630s regarding the proper ordering of public prayer and worship, Charles’s pious, persecuted persona appears as the last in a long line of bodies marshaled for and against the cause of church ceremony. In the next chapter, these bodies will provide the background for a reading of Eikonoklastes that reframes its rhetorical assault on the triple threat of royalism, romance, and ceremony as a radical revision to the deep structures of post-Reformation English imitatio.

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Cha pt er 4

  () Breaking the Body Visible in Eikonoklastes

Charles’s bid for martyrdom may have precipitated Milton’s break with the “Sidnean” aesthetic of Protestant imitatio, but the breadth and depth of that rupture are perhaps better appreciated by way of an earlier Puritan Passion narrative. On June 30, 1637, John Bastwick, William Prynne, and Henry Burton were pilloried in the palace yard at Westminster for libel and sedition. Linking these three rather disparate religio-political dissidents, in both the authorities’ and the public’s imagination, were two pamphlets: Newes from Ipswiche (1636), a seven-page argument attributing the persistence of the plague to recent revisions to the prayer book that privileged high ceremonial over preaching; and the self-explanatory A divine tragedie lately acted, or A collection of sundry memorable examples of Gods judgements upon Sabbath-breakers, and other like libertines, in their unlawfull sports, happening within the realme of England, in the compass only of two yeares last past, since the booke was published worthy to be knowne and considered of all men, especially such, who are guilty of the sinne or arch-patrons thereof (1636). For the crime of collaborating on these works while in prison for individual offenses (a charge all three denied until their deaths), Bastwick, Prynne, 157

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and Burton were sentenced to be pilloried together.1 Their ears were to be cropped (Prynne’s for the second time), and Prynne’s cheeks were to be branded with the initials SL for “seditious libeler.” For Archbishop William Laud, it should have been a moment of triumph, a public demonstration of strong state support for his controversial program of tightened ecclesiastical oversight and heightened ceremonial observance. As it turned out, it was the beginning of the end of Laud’s ascendancy. By the appointed day of punishment, both the prisoners and a healthy percentage of the vast crowd that had gathered to witness their sufferings on the scaffold were in full-on Foxean martyrological mode. All three men comported themselves with the requisite heroic patience and bravado — Bastwick going so far as to produce his own scalpel— despite the unusual brutality (or carelessness, depending on the account) of the executioner, who sheared Burton’s ear so close as to nick his temporal artery, shaved off a chunk of Prynne’s cheek along with what was left of his ears, and branded him twice on one side of his face. Fittingly, it was Burton who most explicitly invoked the inevitable Christological comparisons. “Me thinkes,” he declared upon surveying the pillory from a window, “I see Mount Calvary, where the three Crosses (one for Christ, and the other two for the two theeves) were pitched: And if Christ were numbred among theeves, shall a Christian (for Christs cause) thinke much to be numbred among Rogues, such as wee are condemned to be? Surely, if I be a Rogue, I am Christs Rogue, and no mans.”2 Much to the authorities’ dismay, a good portion of the crowd seems to have been disposed to accept this interpretation. The path of the prisoners was strewn with flowers, their speeches were met with applause, and their sufferings were punctuated by audible expressions of sympathy. One observer wrote that “at the cutting of each eare there was such a roaringe as if every one of them had at the same instant lost an eare.”3 Rumors circulated among the faithful that God had miraculously regenerated Prynne’s previously shorn ears for the occasion, and souvenirs (not to say relics) were made of the bloody sponges and handkerchiefs that the hangman had used to do his duty.4 Perhaps even more distressingly from a bureaucratic standpoint, the decision to exile the prisoners post-pillorying turned out to be a public relations disaster. Prynne’s departure in particular (to lifetime imprisonment on the Channel Islands) became something of a prog-

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ress, with well-wishers lined up all along the route. This scene was repeated to even greater effect in 1640, when Burton and Prynne triumphantly reentered London carrying sprigs of rosemary and followed by a crowd estimated by one contemporary account to be ten thousand strong.5 Of course, there were other ways of telling the story. Looking back on the long lead-up to Civil War from the vantage point of 1655, Stuart historian Thomas Fuller offers a fascinating contemporary perspective on the radical interpretability of the day’s events. Reporting Burton’s “manfull” deportment on the scaffold, he recalls that “of such who measured his minde by his words, some conceived his carriage farre above: others (though using the same scale) suspected the same to be somewhat beside himself .”6 The performances of Bastwick and Prynne are portrayed as subject to a similar interpretative instability. Although, says Fuller, Bastwick’s friends “much admired and highly commended the erection of his minde triumphing over pain and shame . . . and imputed the same to an immediate Spirituall support,” “others conceived that anger in him acted the part of patience, as to the stout undergoing of his sufferings, and that in a Christian there lyeth a reall distinction betwixt Spirit and Stomach, Valour and Stubbornnesse.”7 In Fuller’s retelling, even (or perhaps especially) Prynne’s brand is up for grabs: “So various were mens fancies in reading the same letters, imprinted in his face,” he says, “that some made them to spell the guiltinesse of the Sufferer, but others the cruelty of the Imposer.” He goes on to record Prynne’s own famous (and famously multivalent) rereading: stigmata laudis.8 For all its interpretability, one thing can be said with certainty of the passion of Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne: the body mattered—intensely — to everyone involved. The events of 1637 can serve as something of a key not only to the stakes but also to the terms of the hermeneutic contest over the dead body of the king in 1649. Here, one can see at work the same habits of reading that were to make Eikon Basilike such a religio-political and aesthetic watershed. The centrality of the body to both parties, in terms of both the questions up for dispute and the strategies through which they are settled (or not), offers a powerful heuristic for rereading the controversy surrounding the Eikon as something more than a symptom of Catholic nostalgia on one side and anti-Catholic hysteria on the other (although I would not diminish the historical and literary significance of either impulse). Viewed through a literary rather than a doctrinal or a political

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lens, Laud and his variously positioned opponents can be seen to be fighting on the same side: for the survival of an epistemology centered on the imitability of the Word’s signifying power. Their shared anxieties about the proper disposition and interpretation of visible bodies (both individual and corporate) foreground the body’s function in early modern English discourses of imitatio as a deeply vexed sign of the morally ambivalent potential of signification itself. In this scenario, the body’s affiliation with “flesh” registers both the promise of the Incarnation and the tragic inevitability of slippage between human representations and divine referents. This chapter reads Eikonoklastes through the lens of 1636– 37, a year that marks the peak of the debates about ceremonial reform that were to define Laud’s career and set in motion the events that led from the pillorying of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne to Laud’s own trial and execution in 1644 – 45, and ultimately to the death of the king.9 While these debates address many long-running, interrelated questions— everything from the proper observance of the Sabbath to the necessity of bowing at the name of Jesus— in these final years of Laud’s regime, before his imprisonment by the Long Parliament in 1641 effectively ended his tenure, they came to converge on the altar as the site and sign of two rival conceptions of Christ’s body visible, each rooted in a different reading of the central ritual of Christian communion as recounted in the Gospels. Prynne’s 1637 Quench-Coale participates directly in this important subset of the ceremonialism debate, while Bastwick’s and Burton’s most notorious singly authored antiprelatical works of 1636– 37 (Bastwick’s prayer book– parodying prison letters, The Letany, and the published version of Burton’s wideranging Guy Fawkes Day sermon, For God and the King, both used as evidence at the trial) address the debate about the altar, partake of its imagery and rhetoric, and share its concern with the ceremonial formation (and re-formation) of the properly disciplined Protestant body. While a full analysis of the altar controversy itself is beyond the scope of my argument, the celebrity of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick sets the parameters for a small case study focused on their readings of the main arguments.10 Taken all together, this relatively small cluster of hotly debated texts, centered on competing ceremonial expressions of the Church Militant and circulating just before and immediately after the most sensational religio-political spectacle of the 1630s, offers an important “literary” ge-

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nealogy for Milton’s public pillorying of the king’s highly ceremonious textual body roughly ten years later. There are many possible ways of tracing Milton’s anticeremonialist roots (anticeremonialist rhetoric being thick on the ground in the years leading up to the publication of Eikonoklastes). However, the altar debate has special relevance to my argument because of its explicit and persistent engagement with the issue of imitation. The emphasis placed on good imitatio by proponents of altar and table alike, I will argue, not only clarifies the stakes of a whole set of conflicts surrounding church ceremonial but also brings into clearer focus the intimate and deeply ambivalent relationship between words and bodies in the post-Reformation English imagination. Read in this context, Milton’s devastating, deconstructive analysis of the seductive “literary” mechanisms of royalist piety emerges as something more than a rhetorical takedown of the popular Protestant idols of king and prayer book. It also marks his definitive break with a much broader post-Reformation religio-political aesthetic, founded on the imitation of Christ as Word, but fallen (in Milton’s view) from the boundless creativity of the divine original into a debased and debasing concubinage to falsely authorized and authorizing bodies. For this reason, I conclude this study with Milton’s innovative imitation of sermo as the culmination of reformed imitatio in every sense of the word. His radical revisioning of the imitation of Christ brings into focus the beginning of the end of the unitive, socially and politically “incarnational” aesthetic envisioned by the likes of Sidney and Rogers and the emergence of new ways of imagining and channeling the constitutive capacity of language. As I have argued above, this transition has important roots in the controversies over ceremony that shaped the Elizabethan and early Stuart church and came to a head in the debate over the altar. A brief review of the altar debate with an eye to poetics (rather than politics) will clarify this point. Altars, Mothers, Fathers, and Martyrs: Reading the Body in Ceremonialist and Anticeremonialist Polemic Like most of what was contested about public worship during the early Stuart period, the dispute about where to put, what to call, and how to behave toward the altar had its roots in the sometimes deliberate ambiguities

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of the Edwardian and Elizabethan settlements, which had long been used to authorize a surprisingly wide variety of local practices. Its immediate catalyst, however, was the metropolitical policy instituted by Laud in 1635, which required all parishes in the southern province to rail in their communion tables and orient them north-south (or “altarwise”) at the east end of the chancel. This change was accompanied by an official push for greater reverence in the service in general and toward the altar in particular. Although not exactly an “innovation” (since some churches, including the chapels royal and some university chapels and cathedrals, had always maintained this traditional arrangement), the order did represent a dramatic change in the public worship of many local parishes, many of which celebrated communion gathered around unrailed tables (not altars) turned east-west (or “tablewise”) and positioned in either the body of the church or the middle of the chancel. While these new policies were accepted or at least tolerated by many parishioners, they were vehemently rejected by the stricter sorts of Calvinists, who regarded them as the ultimate symbolic distortion of what Protestant communion and indeed Protestant community meant.11 The first public blows in the ensuing war of words were delivered by Peter Heylyn. His Coale From the Altar (1636) defends the east-end altar as a thing indifferent, which, he argues, while not explicitly mandated by scripture, is truer to the spirit of the Lord’s Supper than a table turned family-style in the body of the church. He is responding to a “private” pastoral letter written a decade earlier by John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, and in wide circulation in the 1630s as a reasoned refutation of Laudian reforms.12 Reprinted at the end of Heylyn’s text, Williams’s letter denounces the east-end altar (set up in this case by an avant-garde vicar) as a point of entry for the “pernicious imposture” of the Popish mass.13 Taken together, as they are clearly meant to be, these two texts offer a striking illustration of the shared spiritual aesthetic by which ceremonialists and nonceremonialists alike made sense of themselves and each other. For both authors, the Eucharist is properly understood as a divinely sanctioned human sign, a commemoration and imitation of Christ’s passion, underwritten by the biblical injunction, “Do this in remembrance of me.” What they disagree about is precisely which part of “this” Jesus had in mind. Heylyn sees the altar as the proper vehicle for the “sacrifice of praise

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and thanksgiving” elicited by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.14 Williams sees the table as the appropriate site for celebrating the communion that that sacrifice makes possible.15 Each accuses the other of misreading the sacred source text and thereby missing the point of the sacrament. Missing the point is no “thing indifferent.” For both authors, the false commemorations and faulty imitations inspired by misinterpretation of the divine original in the Gospels are nothing short of disastrous. If the altar is a stalking horse for popery, as Williams would have it, the table is an invitation to disorder and irreverence (Heylyn, Coale, 31).16 Either way, the sin is the same. It is a species of idolatry, a fatal substitution of human for divine creativity that severs the essential connection between human sign and transcendent referent. Ultimately, for both Heylyn and Williams, the debate about church furniture comes down to a debate about words— more specifically, the Word— and its correct interpretation and imitation. The trick, according to both arguments, is distinguishing between substance and accident. Heylyn’s lengthy critique of Williams’s fixation on the necessity of a table suggests just what a trick that could be: For howsoever our Saviour instituted this holy Sacrament at a Table, not an Altar; yet is the Table, in regard of that institution, but an accessorie, and a point of Circumstance; nothing therein of Substance. . . . For if it were a matter of Substance, that it was instituted at a Table, then must the fashion of that Table, being, as it is conceived, of an ovall forme, be a matter of Substance also; and compassed round about with beds, as then the custome was, for the Communicants to rest upon whilst they doe receive. But herein is the Table no more considerable, than that it was first instituted after Supper, in an upper chamber, distributed amongst twelve only; and those twelve all men; and those men, all Priests: which, no man is so void of sense, as to imagine to be things considerable. (Coale, 44) For Heylyn, Williams’s literalism, his failure to penetrate beyond the material trappings of the divine ordinance, is evidence of will-worship. As Heylyn would have it, Williams is too in love with his own human “understandings” to grasp the essential correspondence between the altar and the awe and reverence Christ’s passion should inspire (Coale, 31).

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Prynne’s 1637 Quench-Coale turns the tables on this interpretation. For Prynne, it is Heylyn and company who cannot read. In his view, the real point of the sacrament, and thus of the table, is Christ’s continued spiritual presence “IN THE MIDDEST” (all caps his) of his people, a reading he derives not only from the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper but from a slew of scriptural promises to this effect found throughout the Old and New Testaments.17 Prynne lampoons ceremonialists’ weak attempts to find scriptural precedent for the east-end altar as ludicrous literalizations of passages that were obviously intended to be read metaphorically. Certainly, Christ is the light of the world and will return from the east, but is he not also a vine? Why not build an altar out of twigs?18 In the address to King Charles that prefaces the argument proper, Prynne reads the Laudian ser vice as a parody of the Passion. His account of a botched one in Durham is particularly illuminating on this count: “Mr. Burgin . . . erected an Altar in the East-end of the Chancle of his Parish-Church . . . Which Altar (made of a Gravestone) he layd upon a wall of stone, not a frame, adorning it with guilded hangings; Which done, he read Second Service at it, (though above halfe his Parishioners could neither heare nor see him;) and fell devoutly to adore it, till at last his foot hanging in his gowne, he unhappily fell downe against the Altar-steps, brake all his nose and face, so as he sacrificed his owne blood both upon the steps & Altar itself in stead of Christs.”19 For Prynne, this all-too-human drama points up the perversity of the Laudian hermeneutic, which always and everywhere confounds surface with essence, spirit with flesh. “Our Religion,” he laments, is “metamorphosed into externall Popish Pompe and Ceremonies, our Devotion into Superstition, our Holiness into professed prophanesse, our god[li]nes into imp[iet]y, our Preaching into Piping and Dauncing,” and “Gods Word . . . into a Fable.”20 Clearly, the divide between “Laudian” and “Puritan” positions on the altar, as on all other questions about public worship, goes more than skindeep, and it would be a mistake to minimize the real differences in theological and religio-political outlook that often (though not always) lie beneath them. Indeed, much good work has been done over the years on the precise relationship of ceremonialism (and anticeremonialism) to Arminian

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soteriology and Eucharistic theology, Charles I’s notion of sacramental kingship, and the politics of the Personal Rule.21 However, foregrounding the poetics (rather than the theology or politics) of the altar controversy suggests the degree to which the debate about bodily forms of worship in seventeenth-century England is not really (or not merely) about the body but about the continued survival of a whole system of signification centered on faith in and imitation of the living Word. In such a system, bodily ceremonies are not “things indifferent” but markers of the theoretically and theologically real but practically permeable boundary between surface and essence, signifier and signified. The questions raised in these debates about how and when and how much human signs should quite literally matter thus in turn raise deeper questions about their capacity to do something more, to transcend the idolatrous looking-glass world of profane surfaces, to point toward and even participate in the divine. This shared dream of Christian eloquence underlies all ceremonialist and anticeremonialist polemic: both camps position ceremony on the boundary between good and bad imitatio. If for Laud ceremonies are “the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities which profanes and sacrilege too commonly put upon it,” for his critics they are the breach that exposes religion to tyranny and popery.22 William Prynne’s argument for the plainer Puritan Eucharist in A Quench-Coale vividly illustrates the structural affinity between these two seemingly contradictory positions: When a Ciety is beleaguerd, whiles the . . . Outworkes are safe and defended, the Citty is in no danger of suprisall: But if the Enemies once get them, all is in danger to be lost: Our Lords-Tables, Ministers, Lords Supper, yea the very use and defence of these Titles as well as the things, are the Bulworkes and Outworkes of our Religion, as long as we maintained them, there was no feare of Mass nor open Popery; But since the Altars and the name of Altars invaded and thrust out our Lords-Tables and their names, Priestes our Ministers and the Title of Ministers and those other Massing Ceremonies prevayled, the Outworkes of our Religion are quite lost and taken, with many of the In-workes too.23

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Clearly, what is up for dispute here is not the centrality of the Word as the rule of Christian faith and practice but the role of human creativity in its interpretation and imitation. Nonceremonialists like Prynne are suspicious of composed prayers and bodily practices not explicitly sanctioned by scripture because they view them as concessions to the “fleshly” human propensity for surfaces. Ceremonialists, on the other hand, see such parascriptural apparatuses as divinely ordained disciplines that stabilize (though they do not guarantee) the vital link between human signs and heavenly referents. Real theological differences can and often do underlie these competing readings of ceremony, but what is important about them for our purposes is their shared reliance on the body as the primary metaphor for the vexed relationship between the holy and the human world of signs. As we have already seen in chapters 1 through 3, reformed imitatio, for all its emphasis on the special soul- and society-transforming power of words, tends to derive its authority from prior claims of blood, whether shed or (in the case of poetical princes and “princely” poets) shared. This persistent quality of “embodiedness” supplies not only the topic but also the terms of the ceremony debate, which paradoxically seeks to “flesh out” the body’s role in Protestant processes of biblical interpretation and imitation primarily through appeal to the rhetorical resources of martyrdom and biological parentage. Analyzing the interaction of these two motifs in the opening pro and contra altar arguments of Heylyn and Williams and in the subsequent anticeremonialist commentary of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick allows us to see more clearly the inner workings of the common aesthetic that made the Eikon so broadly appealing and Milton’s critique of it so innovative. In the altar debate, martyrdom is by far the dominant partner in the martyrdom-parenthood pairing. Indeed, one can read the inaugural debate between Heylyn and Williams in A Coale From the Altar as a battle for cultural custody of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, a new edition of which Laud had not insignificantly refused to license in 1637, prompting Milton to accuse him of attempting to censor the book.24 To be more specific, it is a contest over the correct interpretation of scattered accounts in Foxe of the implementation of ceremonial reforms under Edward VI and the defense of said reforms by Protestant martyrs in later confrontations with Marian officials. Williams appeals to Foxe to support his narrative of the

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English Reformation as a gradual process of ceremonial refinement in which the pre-Reformation altar is slowly but surely phased out by the more definitively Protestant table. The rhetorical effect is subtle but significant. By positioning Foxe as an authority alongside the Edwardian and Elizabethan Prayer Books, the Thirty-nine Articles (1563), and various Edwardian and Elizabethan acts of legislation relevant to the ceremonial of the English Church, Williams portrays the ascendancy of the table as a providential conjunction of politics and popular sentiment in the spirit of the early English Reformation as depicted by Foxe.25 More importantly, he implicitly authorizes its defense in the face of encroaching innovations as a principled act of resistance on par with the heroism of the Marian martyrs. Heylyn’s strategy is altogether less understated. In addition to passageby-passage refutations of Williams’s Foxean citations, through either reinterpretation of those citations or countercitation from Foxe, Heylyn explicitly invokes the English martyrs in support of the ceremonialist cause. “Not a few of those which suffered death for their opposing of the gross and carnall Doctrine of Transubstantiation, did not only well enough indure the name of Altar, but without any doubt or scruple, called the Lords Supper, sometimes a Sacrifice, and many times the Sacrament of the Altar” (Coale, 14). He goes on to offer a few examples, not least among them Archbishop Cranmer and Bishops Latimer and Ridley (Coale, 15– 16). The latter two figures appear later in Heylyn’s most provocative deployment of Foxe, a rereading of Williams’s argument against the eastend altar as confusing to “Countrey-people,” who are, according to Williams, likely to “suppose them Dressers rather than Tables.”26 Heylyn interprets this argument as an echo of the “blasphemies” committed by Ridley’s and Latimer’s Marian interrogators in the pages of Foxe: Just in that scornfull sort Doctor Weston, the then Deane of Westminster, did in a Conference at Oxford with Bishop Latimer, call the Communion Tables . . . by the name of Oyster-boards. . . . The like did Doctor White, the then Bishop of Lincolne, in a Conference with bishop Ridley, where he doth charge the Protestants in King Edwards dayes, for setting up an Oyster-table in stead of an Altar, p.497. The Church of England, is in the meane time, but in a sorry case.

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If shee appoint the Lords Board to be placed like a common Table, the Papists they will call it an Oyster-table: if like an Altar, the Puritans, and Mr. Prynne, will call it a Dresser-boord. A slovenlie and scornfull terme, as before was said, and such as doth deserve no other Answer, then what the Marginall notes in the Acts and Monuments, give in the one place to the Deane of Westminster, viz. The blasphemous mouth of Doctor Weston, calling the Lords Table an Oyster-board, pag. 85. or what they give in th’other place to the Bishop of Lincolne; viz. Bishop White blasphemously called the Boord of the Lords Supper, an Oyster table, pag. 497. I would there were no worse notes in the Acts and Monuments. (Coale, 21– 22) In comparison to this stunning rhetorical appropriation of the martyrdoms of Ridley and Latimer, Heylyn’s appeal to parental privilege seems so tame as to escape notice. In response to Williams’s point that the rule of law, rather than the example of royal chapels and cathedrals, is the proper guide for parish ceremonial, Heylyn holds up the latter as the natural source of authentic English Protestantism:27 For certainly the ancient Orders of the Church of England, have beene best preserved in the Chappells of the Kings Majestie, and the Cathedralls of this Kingdome; without the which perhaps, wee had before this, beene at a losse amongst our selves, for the whole forme and fashion of Divine Service. And therefore if it be so in the Chappells and Cathedrall Churches, as the Epistoler doth acknowledge; it is a pregnant Argument, that so it ought to be in the Parochiall, which herein ought to president and conforme themselves, according to the Patterne of the Mother Churches. (Coale, 26– 27) In the debates that followed, this seemingly innocuous image of maternity would prove nearly as productive (and at least as provocative) as the motif of martyrdom, and for a similar reason. What both sets of imagery offer is a conceptual framework for plotting the relationship between the externals of Protestant worship and the biblical realities they supposedly imitate and communicate. These frameworks are interconnected but not identical. If the motif of martyrdom (and would-be martyrdom) em-

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bodies the faith that exteriors can accurately point to ultimate realities, images of biological parenthood (and potential parenthood) rest on the hope that such correspondences are part of the God-given natural order. While these frames of reference sometimes work together, as they do here in Heylyn, they can also be prioritized one over the other, pitted against each other, and even parodied to suggest the perversion of their purported intent. Taken together, the suffering, permeable, reproductive bodies that people both ceremonialist and anticeremonialist discourse in the final years before the Civil War register the increasing strains on Protestant imitatio as a strategy for bridging the gap between the Word and the human world of signs. Not surprisingly, this strain is easiest to detect in the fallout over Heylyn’s single use of the word mother in the argument quoted above. As we have seen, the wife and mother is a favorite figure of ambivalence in the emerging early modern English public sphere, whose significance transcends the particular, by no means insignificant politics of gender in the period. In popular religious, didactic, and theatrical discourses, she serves as both “the most natural and affecting of all symbols of human ethical obligation and sentimental attachment” and the repository for “all sorts of contemporary fears and fantasies about the fragility of order in the face of human sin, religious and social change, pecuniary greed and social ambition.”28 Of course, in the case of Mother Church, this gendered ambivalence has a much longer history, going all the way back to the various virgin/whore dichotomies of the Bible. Following the Reformation, the prostitution of this figure in the persona of the Whore of Babylon was a staple of antipapal polemic.29 However, bridal and maternal images also figure powerfully in early Protestant propaganda as metaphors for the purity and (legitimate) religio-political authority of the English Church.30 More specifically, in the debates leading up to Heylyn’s tract, the ancient usage of the term mother in reference to cathedral churches was deployed as a rationale for the reordering of parish worship along ceremonialist lines.31 By the late 1630s it had become a standard ceremonialist trope, with (as we see in Heylyn) equal applicability to the chapel royal, which followed the king in progress in the summer months.32 Motherhood’s flexibility as both a metaphor for “natural” (i.e., divinely ordained) hierarchies and a means of exposing their perversion makes it an especially useful measure of the

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tensions inherent in Protestant imitatio in the 1630s and ’40s. On the one hand, it posits the disciplined body of Christ as the guarantor of stable signification. On the other, it interpolates the scandal of sin into even the most “sacred” of human signs. The dynamic between these two poles marks anticeremonialist and ceremonialist polemic alike. In ceremonialist discourse, motherhood functions as a primary metaphor for the ideal, “familial” relation between the Word and the world of human signs. In this scenario Mother Church presides over a chain of father-son relationships — stretching all the way back to Christ and the apostles — that propagates and authenticates the phenomenon of divine revelation. As the biological imagery would suggest, this ongoing miracle of progressive illumination is not at odds with the “natural” processes of human language and history, but rather the pledge of their consummation in the mystical body of Christ. As Christ’s spouse, the church fulfills the promise of his continued presence on earth through her maintenance of his designated “heirs” (the apostles and their successors, the fathers, the bishops, and the monarch, as head of the church). She is thus, paradoxically, both the source and the subject of apostolic authority, which is, in turn, concentrated on and legitimated by her bodily integrity as the bride of Christ. Anticeremonialists reject this argument as a dangerous deviation from the paradigm of the Gospels and the New Testament, which in their view is discontinuous with both the Mosaic covenant and natural law. As William Prynne puts it in his Quench-Coale, “All signes & types are ended in Christ.”33 Significantly, however, they do not reject maternal imagery wholesale. Rather than deny their filial obligation to follow Mother Church, they tend to portray themselves as loving sons trapped within a disordered family hierarchy. Quench-Coale’s prefatory letter to King Charles, for example, sets brother against brother, framing Prynne’s resistance to ceremonial reform as a heroic defense of “the bleeding and almost desperate Condition of the long established Doctrine and Discipline of the Church of England” against “those treacherous rebellious Sonnes of hers who have professedly both in their Sermons, practices, and printed Bookes oppugned them.”34 These “undutifull, perfidious Innovatours” have betrayed their natural mother to “dote upon the Whore of Rome” and her “abominations,” covering the tracks of their spiritual fornication by cor-

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rupting the “Records and Monuments of the Church of England.” In a second preface “To the Christian Reader,” Prynne will equate this outrage against filial piety to Judas’s betrayal of Christ, thereby framing his own (reluctant) response to it as a “natural” conjunction of family duty and Christian discipleship: “I am here constrained, (out of my loyall respects to my spirituall Mother the Church of England) publikely to speake to some treacherous seeming Sonnes of hers, who have almost stabbed her to the heart, under a specious pretence of fighting for her, in some late printed workes: O man, doe not murther and betray my Mother the Church of England (Even as Judas once did our Saviour with a kisse).”35 Prynne’s image of Laudian reformers as the secret lackeys/lovers of the Whore of Rome is more fully exploited by his pillory-mates, Burton and Bastwick, whose more wide-ranging anticeremonial and antiprelatical polemics of 1636– 37 mock the Laudian regime for its professed filial piety. For example, the first installment of Bastwick’s 1637 Letany deploys a literalizing strategy that lampoons the Laudian episcopate as faux fathers, far too busy philandering with Rome to have a care for the true children of Mother Church. Sarcastically soliciting his hostile jailer, Aquila Wykes, on behalf of his children and pregnant wife, he invites “Father William of Canterbury his holiness and William London, Magnificus Rector of the Treasury” to serve as godfathers to his unborn child. “My wife entreateth you,” he explains, to make them both acquaintend, with her miserable condition, and how great she is with child . . . and in what desolation, desert and wildernesse of trouble she is now In, not knowing how to get out of it, by reason that they have driven away all our Freinds and acquaintance; so that we cannot enjoy from them, the common lawes of humanity of ordinary entertainment and ayde. . . . I say therefore she desirs, that they would in this desertion of all our familiars and allies, be GODFATHERS to her Child. And if you can obtaine this favour at their hands, in her behalfe, that as they ex officio ruined her poore husband; so they would likewise ex officio mero do this good as to gratify here in yeelding to and granting her supplication. . . . I am most confident I shall procure the WHORE OF BABILON, their old Mistris, to be GODMOTHER, with whom they have so long

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committed fornication. And then we will have such a christning, as has not been in EUROPE, this many a blessed day.36 In the next letter, the allegorical role of Bastwick’s wife in this vignette is made explicit. He complains to Wykes that his imprisonment makes it impossible for him to properly attend to his wife, “who is now great with childe, and ready to lye downe not knowing where to get a place, to put her head in, except, I where with her; no man daring to entertayne her, the whole world standing wondring and affrayed of the Beast.”37 If Laud and company are the minions of the Whore of Babylon, Bastwick appears here as the loyal and loving husband of the Woman Clothed with the Sun, a favorite Protestant image of the true church as the chaste bride of Christ.38 The shift in gender dynamics here is significant. Bastwick’s portrayal of elaborate, extrabiblical ceremonies (in this case, a Catholic-style christening) as antithetical to normative, patriarchal family structures epitomizes the dangers associated with the imitative ethos at work in both ceremonialist and anticeremonialist discourse. In both cases, maternal, paternal, and matrimonial metaphors embody the conviction that genuine Christianity can be recognized by its essential “family” likeness with the living Word. However, the instability of the feminine principle in these texts suggests just how vulnerable this ideal was understood to be to the corruptions and seductions of the flesh. The printed version of Burton’s anticeremonial, antiprelatical sermon For God and the King (1636) is perhaps the clearest articulation of the epistemological anxieties at work here. Burton turns Heylyn and company’s matrilineal argument upside down (or, from his point of view, right side up), portraying spiritual motherhood as a distortion and interruption of the direct, father-son dynamic defining true Christian imitation. From his perspective, Laud and his incestuously mother-loving bishops usurp the authority of the king, an earthly standin for God the Father, whose laws function analogously to the Word as a divinely sanctioned juncture of top-down revelation and bottom-up interpretation.39 Implicit in this correspondence is a less mediated model of spiritual integrity, one that limits the interpretative authority of the institutional “mother church” (and her sons/fathers, the bishops) in favor of locally led congregations.40 “It is for beasts without reason,” he argues, “to

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yeeld a blind obedience to their Masters: but men, are of another stampe, who have not only reason, but religion to be the rule of their actions” (82 – 83). For Burton, this rule is to be found not in the decrees of the bishops but in the believer’s personal relationship with the Word. His answer to the “new Jesuiticall doctrine of blind obedience” is thus a careful and consistent attention to the Word’s commands. “We must therefore So obey God in the first place,” he exhorts the reader, “by guiding our selves in all things according to his word, as no commaund of man prevaile with us to crosse that” (82). When the Word of God is in conflict with the king’s laws (which are themselves open to interpretation), the true Christian’s course of action is clear: “otherwise to obey, or feare man before God, and so above or against God, is to make an Idol of man, in placing him in a throne above God” (76 – 77). Citing precedents from Daniel (82) to Tertullian (89), he advocates passive resistance in the face of religious and political persecution. Burton contrasts this more direct, “man-to-man” model of good imitatio with the rule of the prelates, who, as lovers of and procurers for the Whore of Rome, seek to seduce and control the king through flattery and his people through pageantry. To this end, they have supplanted the scriptures with “the Lumpe of the Communion Booke” (151) and the word of Christ “and the writings and examples of the holy Apostles, wherein they followed Christ,” with “the example of their owne lives, and the dictates of their writings” (156). The result is a religion of surfaces, “partly holy in an external forme of godlinesse, without the power thereof & partly in admitting, allowing, approving, applauding countenancing, and dispensing by Episcopall authority, of a heathenish kinde of life” (156). In Burton’s argument, motherhood (particularly illegitimate and incestuous motherhood) is a powerful metaphor for the illicit generativity driving this project. If the cathedrals and college chapels are mother churches, he argues, then they are mothers of idolatrous invention, the “nests and nurceries of Superstition and Idolatry, wherein the old Beldame of Rome hath nuzzled up her brood of Popelings” (159). Look closely, he argues, and you will see the family likeness: “Are they not the naturall Daughters of Rome? Do they not from top to toe exactly resemble her? Her pompous Service, her Altars, Palls, Copes, Crucifixes, Images, superstitious gestures, and Postures” (159 – 60). Such churches are not true mothers but “Step-Mothers . . .

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that cheat the children of their Fathers inheritance” (162). Later, he goes even farther, accusing the prelates of making “concubines” of the cathedrals, “whereon to begat a new bastard generation of sacrificing, Idolatrous Masse-Priests throughout the Land” (163). If Burton is suspicious of motherhood as a metaphor for good imitatio, he has not entirely lost faith in the genetic paradigm in which it participates. Like his ceremony- and episcopacy-supporting opponents, Burton has high hopes for some sort of essential, “natural” correspondence between human signs and their transcendent referents. Paternal imagery, as mentioned above, continues to play an important role in his rhetoric as a stabilizer of human signification. This is particularly true in his depiction of the ideal relationship between the subject, the king, and his laws, which Burton characterizes as the “most exact and perfect patterne” of the Christian’s interaction with God through his Word (38). The deference required of the true Christian/subject in these interactions is “not a feare with terror,” but a “filiall feare,” rooted in familial affection rather than abjection. We are not far off here from Milton’s early prose. As Burton puts it, “The name of a Father, is a name of love, and hath in it the bowels of a naturall affection, which is above all other kinds of humaine affections. Now a King is the Father of his Countrey, and all his loving and loyall Subjects are as so many Children into him. Hee is the Father of the great family of his Kingdome. Hee is the great Lord Steward, whom God hath set over his family to provide for them, and to protect them” (42). However, Burton’s hope for the possibility of some sort of meaningful correlation between the Word and the fallen world of human signs is expressed more often through martyrological than biological imagery and references. His enthusiasm for this particular framing of good imitatio centers on his experience and expectation of bodily persecution, which he celebrates as the guarantor of his and his like-minded colleagues’ sermons and writings. Unlike Laud and company, who pervert language, and even scripture itself, to serve their own ends, Burton and his coreligionists are prophets whose message is authenticated by their willingness to risk physical suffering and death. This contrast is established in Burton’s introductory letter to the king, in which he casts himself as an imitator and heir of Christ and the “Prophets of old,” whose divinely inspired words were

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subject to derision and distortion by the powers that be. “And if my stile seeme sharper than usuall,” he apologizes, be pleased to impute it to my Zeale and Fidelitie for God and for Your Majestie, when I am to encounter with those that be adversaries to both. And if any word have dropped from my pen, which malice may pervert and wrest to my prejudice, I beseech Your Majestie to be my Judge Your self, and to consider, as on the one side a weake man, so on the other a Minister of Christ, whose message hee durst not but faithfully discharge to his uttermost power, and at his uttermost perill. Nor must I looke to fare better than the Prophets of old, who complained of those, who made a man an offender for a word, and laid a snare for him that reprooved in the gate; Yea then Christ himselfe, whom the Pharisees thought to intangle in his words. (a4 r – v) “What ever become of my body,” he says in closing, “which is every day threatened by Pursuivants to bee haled to Prison . . . I heartily thanke my Lord Jesus Christ, who hath accounted mee faithfull, and called me forth to stand for his cause, and to witnesse it before all the World, by publishing my said Sermons in Print” (a4v). Throughout the text proper, this same prophetic pedigree legitimizes the dissidence of his fellow nonconformists, whose courageous fidelity to the Word defies the edicts of an episcopate Burton characterizes as both tyrannous and duplicitous. He reads Puritan constancy in the face of excommunication, suspension, “Pistolling,” “blood-shedding,” and “hanging” (25) as proof of their “feare of God,” which he in turn identifies as the source and stabilizer of their “freedom of speech” (27). For Burton, this willingness to suffer is what distinguishes the true (Puritan) prophet from the false (Laudian) rhetorician. Comparing their contest to the standoff between Moses and the Egyptian magicians in the book of Exodus, he tacitly acknowledges the superficial likeness of their arguments, all the while admonishing the reader that just as Moses’s rod was holy, not “for being (though miraculously) turned into a Serpent (for even the Magitians of Egypt by their inchantments could (in show) turn their rods also into Serpents),” but for “being a Serpent [that] devoured all the Magitians Serpents,” so “is true feare, in Gods Child, when it stands in emulation,

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or opposition with other feares though they seeme never so terrible, as the Magitians Serpents, yet it overcomes and devoures them all” (26). Similarly, the fearless outspokenness of the anticeremonialists reveals them to be the true heirs of Daniel, Nehemiah, and Elijah (26), whose words and deeds expose their Laudian adversaries as time-servers who “love to sleep in a whole; [sic] skin, and are loth to hazard a haire of their head for Christ” (30). Later, citing the same scripture reference that would adorn the frontispiece of the Eikon (“more than conquerors”), Burton salutes the collective, Christlike suffering of his nonconforming brethren as a corrective to the self-serving logic of Laudian eloquence. His argument is worth quoting at length: For howsoever obedience to God, and the not obeying of mans unjust commaunds fares ill in the world oftentimes, and never more, then in these dayes of ours, wherein though wicked Imposers are not able to give any other reason of their impious commaunds, but Volumus and Jubemus, Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas, so as if present obedience be not yeelded, they cry out, Rebells, they suspend, excommunicate, sequester, undoe, threatening moreover halter and hatchet, as was noted before: yet a faithfull, honest, godly Minister, or Christian, being constant to his God and to his Word, as Daniel and the three Children were, shall find it more happy and comfortable to keep his Christ, and a good conscience, though with the losse of all these outward things, then to hold them with the losse of his conscience, and confidence in his Lord and Master Christ. Yea and herein have wee cause to comfort our selves, and to blesse the name of our God, who hath not left himselfe without witnesse, but hath raysed up many zealous and courageous Champions of his truth, I meane faithfull Ministers of his word, who choose rather to loose all they have, then to submit and prostitute themselves to the wicked unjust and base commands of usurping Antichristian Mushromes. Surely this is an infallible signe to perswade me, that God will not desert his cause, seeing hee thus stands by his Servants, making them more then Conquerers through him that loveth them. (83)

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Burton’s confidence aside, the shared scriptural citation and the reference to rebellion suggest just how problematic martyrdom and persecution could be as markers of good imitatio. Laudian apologists, taking their cue from Heylyn, were equally quick to exploit martyrdom as a rhetorical resource. Moreover, both conformists and nonconformists acknowledge martyrdom as contested rhetorical territory. Heylyn’s Briefe and Moderate Answer (1637) to Henry Burton’s For God and the King attempts to invalidate the prophetic personae of the Puritans as prideful pretension, lacking in the humility and Christian charity that mark genuine martyrdom. Citing 1 Corinthians 13:2, he argues that “though they had all Faith, so that they could remove mountains, which I think they have not; or should they give their bodies to be burned, as I thinke they will not; it would profit nothing.”41 Conversely, Burton calls out the ceremonialists for moral cowardice. “Nor let our present Prelates glory,” he scoffs, “that they can shew us such Predecessors, Prelates, who were Martyrs, unlesse they themselves will therein be their Successors” (107). Like motherhood, then, the motif of martyrdom ultimately exposes rather than smooths over the tensions inherent in reformed imitatio. Prynne’s Quench-Coale is perhaps the clearest example of this dilemma. Like Burton, he presents himself as a plain-speaking prophet and patriot whose record and continued risk of persecution provide material support for his subversive speech. “I shalbe ever ready,” he pledges in his prefatory letter to the king, “not only to spend . . . my Limbes, my Fortunes and Liberty, but my very Life and Soul, Chusing rather to hazard all or any of these, then to behold my God, my Soveraigne, my Country, my Rel[i]gion, secretly undermined, abused, betrayed, trampled upon, or ruined, and yet sit mute.”42 However, Prynne is painfully aware that his personal history of suffering for the cause, which at this point can be quite literally read on his face, is subject to multiple interpretations. In Quench-Coale, the suffering bodies on display are those not of the primitive and Puritan martyrs but of Prynne’s ceremonialist enemies, whom he fantasizes about mutilating in ways that would make their hypocrisy legible. For example, in his address to the king, he recommends ear docking for the “busy Innovatours” who have reformed the collect for the royal family to remove references to election and branding “with an hot-iron in the cheekes or

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forehead with an S for slaunderers” for those who spread “fables of Puritans.”43 John Cosin is a favorite target of imagined corporal punishment. Arguing that his doctrinal pronouncements and ceremonialist policies would have been offenses judged as “capitall in other men,” Prynne bemoans his advancement.44 For “the good Service he hath done the Church of Rome,” he deserves to have “his head and quarters advanced as high as London bridge . . . in Leiw of all other preferments.”45 Prynne wishes a less gruesome fate on a local papist at the pub, whose slanders against the church and state include claiming the king and the archbishop of Canterbury as coreligionists: “Had a Puritan, as they stile them, spoken but halfe so much,” he grouses, “he should have been fined, imprisoned, pilloried, & lost his eares ere this.”46 Whatever they might imply about his psychology, Prynne’s grisly fantasies epitomize the shared hopes and fears of Protestant imitatio in the years leading up to the Civil War. Like his ceremonialist opponents and the “Arcadiaes and fained Histories” he singles out for special criticism in his antitheatrical treatise Histriomastix, Prynne posits a “natural,” if tragically compromised, alignment between earthly signs and their transcendent referents, roughly analogous to the (equally natural and equally problematic) relationship between body and soul.47 If the body is no longer a legitimate site of divine intervention and presence in this scenario, it is an especially potent sign, uniquely capable of stirring up and (at least ideally) disciplining the fallen, “fleshly” desires that alienate the human world of surfaces from its transcendent, ordering source. Prynne’s impulse here to map (or remap) words onto appropriately signifying bodies is testament to the special power attributed to them in his hermeneutic, a hermeneutic that— as much as it would likely have infuriated him to acknowledge it — is of a piece with ceremonialist, royalist, and Arcadian rhetorics of embodiment, all seeking, albeit at different removes, to stabilize interpretation by grounding signification in disciplined and disciplining bodies. Whether that body is a virtuous woman, a suffering martyr, an exemplary monarch, a properly ordered body politic, or the corporate body of Christ as constituted by various interpretations of the scriptures, the underlying principle is the same: authentic signification (and thus, in the case of explicitly religious discourses, sanctification) is achieved by assimilation of the particulate, desiring, sinful self to an authorized and authorizing surface.

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Even Milton’s own early interventions in the debate surrounding ceremony cannot entirely dissociate reformed imitatio from the spectacle of the properly disciplined body. His Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634, one year after the controversial republication of James I’s Book of Sports, and first printed (anonymously) in 1637, relies on the Lucretia-like allure of the Lady, whose Orphic eloquence remains indissociable —both for the reader and for her would-be ravisher — from the charms of her “princely” person. This dangerously “perplex’t” poetics is only partly redeemed by the demi-divine ministrations of the river nymph, Sabrina, whose power to liberate the Lady from the tyranny of Comus’s lust is contingent on the continence of her own martyred, aristocratic, geographically and politically specific body.48 By 1541, Milton no longer had any use for Sabrina’s kind of magic. His antiprelatical, anticeremonial tract Of Reformation unequivocally rejects resort to the “purifying” enchantments of blood (martyrdom) and breeding (apostolic succession), promoting instead a model of the body of Christ authorized entirely from within by the indwelling Word.49 Even here, however, he does not abandon the hope that this insistently “inside-out” notion of the Church Militant will manifest itself “as the shadow does the substance” in an orderly Christian commonwealth (CPW 1:571). Furthermore, despite his loss of faith in the capacity of even the most proven and pedigreed visible bodies to stabilize the precarious spiritual processes of sanctification/signification, he does not reject the rhetorical power of bodily metaphors, which in fact organize both his critique of the scab-encrusted, gluttonous, effeminizing, belching, vomitous status quo, and his vision of the authentically reformed England “as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big, and compact in vertue as in body” (CPW 1:572). Milton’s acute awareness throughout Of Reformation of bodily metaphors as metaphors — for example, his qualification of his own resort to the Mother England trope as of a piece with the “wont” of poets “to give a personal form to what they please” (CPW 1:585) — points toward the true target of his iconoclasm in his later dissection of the Eikon’s martyrological and biological imagery. This is not a contest of “bodily” surface versus “spiritual” essence, in which the former is utterly rejected as synonymous with “flesh,” but a reimagining of the relationship between the two as itself imaginary: the founding fiction, if you will, of a new, “literary”

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dispensation inaugurated by the advent of sermo. In Of Reformation and indeed throughout Milton’s prose and later poetry, this more emphatically “artificial” understanding of good imitatio is most fully worked out through the metaphor of adopted (rather than biological) sonship, a metaphor Gregory Kneidel has recently traced to Milton’s career-long engagement with the paradoxes of Pauline universalism. In his (Pauline) formulation of the body of Christ, adoption figures as a favorite Miltonic metaphor for a state of relation that is both real and imaginary, corporeal and incorporeal, now and yet to be fully accomplished.50 While Milton is certainly not unique among English reformers in his resort to this biblical motif or (as Kneidel has persuasively argued) among Protestant poets in his intense engagement with the built-in paradoxes of Pauline universalism, his adversarial position toward hereditary monarchy, apostolic succession, and the “idolatrous” aesthetic that he believed supported them both does uniquely position him to translate Paul’s liminal vision into a full-blown alternative poetics, one that does not abandon imitatio as a royalist or “Anglican” literary mode but rather takes its correlation with the imitation of Christ as Word to its logical, radical, conclusion.51 In this critical context, Eikonoklastes can be read as a good deal more than an exposé of royalist and ceremonialist rhetoric (although it is certainly that).52 It can also be seen as the earliest articulation of the aesthetic corollary to the Pauline theology of adoption/imitation that shapes Milton’s ecclesiology, politics, and pedagogy, both in his earlier prose and throughout the rest of his career. By systematically laying bare the “literary” mechanisms of martyrdom and heredity, Eikonoklastes brings to life the nightmare of Protestant imitatio only hinted at in texts like QuenchCoale and even Of Reformation, collapsing insides into outsides and essence into accidents with an iconoclastic ferocity that threatens to bring down the whole chain of “natural” correspondences linking human signs to transcendent reality. This rhetorical violence clears the ground for Milton’s major revision of Protestant imitatio, which seeks to liberate, once and for all, the reading, writing, reasoning Christian subject from the seductive and coercive effects of earthly bodies, individual and corporate alike.53 If such liberation can never be fully realized or even consistently imagined, that it must nevertheless be relentlessly sought is the innovation of Milton’s

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poetics, one that I will argue has its roots in Eikonoklastes’ radical reinterpretation of the imitation of Christ.

Gross Anatomy: Milton Dissects the King’s Book Eikonoklastes’ metaphoric housecleaning proceeds via a revisionist natural history of the recently martyred monarchal sign. Working from the royalist thesis that the stability and integrity of the English Settlement derive from the “natural” family likeness of fathers to bishops to kings to God, Milton sets out to shatter this literary analogy against the literal realities of blood and breeding. In this critical rereading of the English national narrative, nurture, not nature, provides the only (imperfect) protection against the corruptions of the flesh. This is bad news for kings, whose authority has traditionally rested upon the “natural” equivalency of majesty with wisdom and moral virtue. Indeed, Milton’s very first rhetorical act is to expose this premise as a polite fiction. It is awkward to write polemic against a deceased sovereign, he complains, not only because it is unseemly to speak ill of the dead or to glory in falls from high places, but also because kings make especially unworthy intellectual opponents. “Though strong in Legions,” kings are “but weak at Arguments; as they who ever have accustom’d from the Cradle to use thir will onely as thir right hand, thir reason always as thir left” (CPW 3:337– 38). The implicit argument here, that if kings are not exceptionally wise by nature, they are, more often than not, exceptionally immoral by nurture, is a running theme of Eikonoklastes. “Court-breeding,” according to Milton, is “but a bad Schoole” (3:410), an inverted parody of best early modern pedagogical practices in which parasitic courtiers and greedy prelates anticipate and imitate their master’s every whim. Far from an exemplary, divinely authorized sign, what the king is in this scenario is a study in solipsism. Surrounded by sycophants, he learns to “call his obstinacy, Reason and other mens reason, Faction” (3:356), thereby obstructing rather than facilitating stable signification among his subjects, who “must beleive, that wisdom and all reason came to him by Title, with his Crown; Passion, Prejudice and Faction came to others by being Subjects” (3:356).

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The consequence of this state of affairs is religious and political tyranny, which Milton defines in at least partly linguistic terms: All Britain was to be ty’d and chain’d to the conscience, judgement, and reason of one Man; as if those gifts had been only his peculiar and Prerogative, intail’d upon him with his fortune to be a King. When as doubtless no man so obstinate, or so much a Tyrant, but professes to be guided by that which he calls his Reason, and his Judgement, though never so corrupted; and pretends also his conscience. In the mean while, for any Parlament or the whole Nation to have either reason, judgment, or conscience, by this rule was altogether in vaine, if it thwarted the Kings will; which was easie for him to call by any other more plausible name. (3:359) Of course, there is nothing new about despotism. On this count, at least, Milton is on board with the royalist strategy of arguing from antiquity. He casts Charles as the latest in a long line of wicked tyrants who would “hunt after Faction” going all the way back to Nimrod, the architect of Babel (3:466), and including Rehoboam (3:382 – 83), Caesar (3:342), Henry III, Edward II (3:344), and Henry VIII (3:337). Most recently, Charles is the son of his father, whom Milton holds up for special censure as the author of his anti-Sabbatarian policies (3:359) and the inspiration behind his accommodationist, pro-Catholic politics (3:479). However, Milton’s very limited claims for parent-child resemblance here and throughout the text are worth noting. The point is not that Charles is a bad seed or that monarchy is of diabolical rather than divine origin (although Milton is clearly no fan). It is rather that the institution of monarchy is no more naturally stable than any other earthly body: that is to say, it is not very stable. In Milton’s narrative, pedigree and precedent offer no special protections against the corruptions of the flesh, which arise, always and everywhere in this text, through faulty imitation. Thus the venial sins of England’s Solomon ( James) become the fatal flaws of England’s Rehoboam (Charles). Similarly, the English people are “imbastardiz’d from the ancient nobleness” (3:344) of their freedom-loving ancestors, not because of a “natural disposition” (3:344) toward a “civil kinde of idolatry” (3:343), but through the influence of the prelates,

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“whose Pulpit stuff, both first and last, hath bin the Doctrin and perpetual infusion of servility and wretchedness to all thir hearers; and thir lives the type of worldiness and hypocrisie, without the least true pattern of vertue, righteousness, or selfe-denial in thir whole practice” (3:344).54 Milton’s explicit case against the Carolinian religio-political regime here — that “all antiquitiy that adds or varies from the Scripture, is no more warranted to our safe imitation, then what was don the Age before at Trent” (3:464)— is continuous with earlier and contemporary progressive Protestant discourses of imitatio.55 What makes Eikonoklastes innovative is its emphatic and relentless insistence on the literariness (rather than the literalness) of this project. By relieving imitation of its genetic pretensions, Milton does more than simply reject a particular, royalist construction of good imitatio. He undermines a much broader cultural faith in the “natural” correspondence of at least some earthly signs to transcendent realities, thereby transforming the body from a privileged (if deeply problematic and contested) site of Protestant imitation/signification to a source of purely “literary” metaphor, with all the contingency and manipulability of metaphor. A paradigmatic example of this technique is his account of Parliament’s “martyrdom” of Sir John Hotham and his son, who appear in the Eikon as tragic icons of failed assimilation to the monarchal sign. In Eikonoklastes, Milton reinterprets their dismembered bodies as purely literary tropes: Hee proceeds to declare, not onely in general wherefore Gods judgment was upon Hotham, but undertakes by fansies, and allusions to give a criticism upon every particular. That his head was divided from his body, because his heart was divided from the King: two heads cut off in one family for affronting the head of the Common-wealth; the eldest son being infected with the sin of his Father, against the father of his Countrie. These petty glosses and conceits on the high and secret judgments of God, besides the boldness of unwarrantable commenting, are so weake and shallow, and so like the quibbl’s of a Court Sermon, that we may safely reck’n them either fetcht from such a pattern, or that the hand of some household preist foisted them in; least the World should forget how much he was the Disciple of those Cymbal

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Doctors. But that argument by which the Author would commend them to us, discredits them the more. For if they be so obvious to every fancy, the more likely to be erroneous, and to misconceive the mind of those high secrecies, whereof they presume to determin. For God judges not by human fansy. (3:430) This all-in-one deconstructive reading of the Eikon’s martyrological and genealogical motifs is of a piece with Milton’s much more famous dissection of the king’s metaphorical body, widely read by modern-day critics as a key to his iconoclastic aesthetic. Lana Cable’s important work on this topic provides a useful point of reference. Following up on the thesis of Bruce Boehrer, who traces the Eikon’s appeal to popular associations of monarchy with patriarchy, she has shown how Milton’s rhetorical assault on the king’s body disables its “affective capacity” to channel traditional filial pieties: The traditional and popular iconic associations of king with father and God are the very associations that in Milton’s view had facilitated tyranny. To break down such associations therefore required an attack on precisely those iconic structures in Eikon Basilike that so depended . . . on the affective elements of intimate family relations, on private emotions, and on select glimpses of the royal father-god’s personal conduct. This masterly configuration of iconic structures Milton discountenances by fragmenting and literalizing the figurative whole into multiple constituent parts: the king’s metaphoric icon in Eikonoklastes disintegrates into a miscellany of discrete body images . . . in which the elementary activities of feeding and excreting and procreating render the figure incapable of ever again being joined in a harmonious portrait of majesty.56 Cable’s analysis is persuasive. However, contextualizing Milton’s technique here within a larger Protestant discourse of imitatio suggests a more nuanced view of the rhetorical situation that precipitated it. Read alongside the ceremonial controversies leading up to the Civil War, Milton’s iconoclastic treatment of the royal body not only delivers a public blow to political paternalism but also mounts a more subtle, though no less dev-

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astating, critique of the metaphorical structures through which even progressive Protestants tended to frame their relationship to the Word. Milton’s problem here is not bodies per se, either literal or metaphorical. Indeed, as we will see, the body remains a vital poetic resource for Milton, even in this, his most “anti-body” of texts. What he is rejecting is a hermeneutic that cedes stabilizing power (however contingent and compromised) to surfaces. In this sense, the offense of the king’s body and that of the king’s book are one and the same. Both “presume to determin” the precise nature of the relationship between human signs and the “high secrecies” of the divine mind, thereby obscuring the participation of fallen human fancy in what are in fact their own fictions. Milton’s own imitative ethos is the converse. “God,” he admonishes, “judges not by human fansy” (3:430). Taken to its logical extreme (and Milton is nothing if not taken with logical extremes), this criterion has far-reaching implications. If there is no essential, externally verifiable correspondence between transcendent reality and the world of human signs and surfaces, then there is also no possibility, this side of heaven, of a single, stable collective meaning. The God who “every morning raines down new expressions into our hearts” (3:505) makes no guarantee that their divine provenance will be readily recognizable, either to oneself or to others. Such a demystified and internalized account of good imitatio has no place for authorizing signs, only authors, who must take full responsibility for the dangers and difficulties of interpretation and emulation. To seek a this-worldly guarantor for one’s literary, liturgical, or political creations, even if only in the words of the Word itself, is to succumb to the seductive pleasures of spiritual infancy and adultery. These two alternatives loom large in Eikonoklastes’ richly metaphorical treatment of bad imitatio; and while the images themselves are familiar from anticeremonial polemic, the emphasis is strikingly (and significantly) different. Whereas Prynne and company tend to figure bad imitatio as a perversion (of one sort or another) of a posited natural relationship between earthly signs and transcendent referents, Eikonoklastes reverses the trajectory, tracing the failure of imitation to the presumption of false “family” intimacies. Milton’s treatment of prelacy provides perhaps the clearest example of this technique at work. In Eikonoklastes, prelates are unmasked as (bad) pedagogues, rather than patriarchs, whose fake genealogy

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mystifies the messy processes of spiritual education and thereby fosters a childlike or effeminizing dependency in king and people alike. In this scenario, the “dream and tautology” of “Law, Antiquitie, Ancestors, prosperity and the like” (3:466) has entrapped the people within an “unjust wardship” under the “encroaching Prerogative” of the king, who is himself the spiritually and morally stunted victim of an “over-dated minority from a Pupillage under Bishops” (3:466). This chain of predatory and perverted pedagogical relationships is represented here and elsewhere via the interpolation of inappropriately familial imagery. It is one thing to be a “most attentive Scholar, & Imitator” of one’s bishops: quite another “of a child to have suckt from them” all of one’s politics and theology (or as Milton would have it, “tyranny & superstition”) (3:549). In Eikonoklastes, this prelatical overdetermination of the imitative relation is at the heart of the king’s own patronizing fictions. Like his false spiritual “fathers,” he deludedly imagines himself to be a “natural” source of supernatural authority and wisdom, a supposition Milton explodes from the inside out in a feat of faux-genealogical gymnastics worth quoting at length. Responding to the Eikon’s claim that the rulings of Parliament are null and void without the king’s seminal contribution: Yet so farr doth self-opinion or fals principles delude and transport him, as to think the concurrence of his reason to the Votes of Parlament, not onely Political, but Natural, and as necessary to the begetting, or bringing forth of any one compleat act of public wisdom as the Suns influence is necessary to all natures productions. So that the Parliament, it seems, is but a Female, and without his procreative reason the Laws which they can produce are but wind-eggs. Wisdom, it seems, to a King is natural, to a Parlament not natural, but by conjunction with the King: Yet he professes to hold his Kingly right by Law; and if no Law could be made but by the great Counsel of a Nation, which we now term a Parlament, then certainly it was a Parlament that first created Kings, and not onley made Laws before a King was in being, but those Laws especially, whereby he holds his Crown. He ought then to have so thought of Parlament, if he count it not Male, as of his Mother, which to civil being, created both him, and the Royalty he wore. And if it hath bin anciently interpreted the presaging signe

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of a future Tyrant, but to dream of copulation with his Mother, what can it be less then actual Tyranny to affirme waking, that the Parlament, which is his Mother, can neither conceive or bring forth any autoritative Act without his Masculine coition. (3:467) The role of the common folk in this dysfunctional family vignette is equally cringe-inducing. If Parliament here is an abused Oedipal mother, the people are the imbecilic progeny of an irregular union, “a great baby” that “shall tast nothing but after his [i.e., the king’s] chewing” (3:469). Once again, there is nothing new about Milton’s choice of metaphors here. He is hardly the first to portray his enemies as religious and political perverts. What makes his technique interesting is its attentiveness to the fine line between literal and literary truths. The king’s imitative epistemology and consequent religio-political ideology are ultimately offensive not because they are literary (inevitable in Milton’s aesthetic) but because they are insufficiently acknowledged as such. If the Eikon epitomizes the hope that human signs can participate in the divine presence at work in the Word, Eikonoklastes explores the devastating consequences of identifying too closely with any single expression of that hope. In this sense, the real target of Eikonoklastes’ metaphorical violence is not the body of the king but the genetic claim to “truth” implicit in even progressive discourses of early modern Protestant imitatio. Milton literally turns that claim on itself, exposing it as a breeding ground of error and exploitation. This reanalysis of good imitatio transforms Charles from a heroic Christ figure into the tragic spiritual heir of his most infamous female forebears: Mary Tudor, whose false pregnancy is a mocking mirror of his “pregnant motives” (3:379), and Mary Queen of Scots, whose false martyrdom prefigures his own (3:597).57 Milton’s gendering of genetic imitatio here as a feminine and feminizing corrosive to normative, adult masculinity offers an important context for Eikonoklastes’ seemingly antipoetic sentiment, not least its ambivalent treatment of Sidney’s literary milieu and legacy. As Annabel Patterson has pointed out, Milton’s abhorrence for plagiarism hardly accounts for his dismissal of the Arcadia as a “vain amatorious Poem . . . a Book in that kind full of worth and witt, but among religious thoughts, and duties not worthy to be nam’d; nor to be read at any time without good caution” (3:362). Nor

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does it explain what reads in the 1650 edition like a repudiation of the entire European romance tradition: For he certainly whose mind could serve him to seek a Christian prayer out of Pagan Legend, and assume it for his own, might gather up the rest God knows from whence; one perhaps out of the French Astraea, another out of the Spanish Diana; Amadis and Palmerin could hardly scape him. Such a person we may be sure had it not in him to make a prayer of his own, or at least would excuse himself the paines and cost of his invention, so long as such sweet rapsodies of Heathensim and Knighterrantry could yeild him prayers. How dishonourable then, and how unworthy of a Christian King were these ignoble shifts to seem holy and to get a Saintship among the ignorant and wretched people; to draw them by this deception, worse then all his former injuries, to go a whooring after him. And how unhappy, how forsook of grace, and unbelovd of God that people who resolv to know no more of piety or of goodness, then to account him thir cheif Saint and Martyr, whose bankrupt devotion came not honestly by his very prayers; but having sharkd them from the mouth of a Heathen worshipper, detestable to teach him prayers, sould them to those that stood and honourd him next to the Messiah, as his own heavn’vly compositions in adversity, for hopes no less vain and presumptuous . . . then by these goodly reliques to be held a Saint and Martyr in opinion with the cheated People. (3:366– 67)58 These remarks are consistent with the seemingly antitheatrical, antipoetic tone of the work as a whole, which misses no opportunity to construe the king’s bid for martyrdom as a piece of political theater and the king himself either as a cynical stage manager or as a swooning, effeminized sonneteer, seduced by his scheming Catholic wife into actually believing his own shoddily constructed fictions. Patterson convincingly connects Eikonoklastes’ apparent pessimism about the epistemological value of literary language to Milton’s growing distrust of the literary forms and modes most popular at court, romance (in every conceivable generic configuration) being the runaway royal favorite. As she points out, from the 1630s on, romance was increasingly associated with the court, particularly with Hen-

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rietta Maria, whose well-known love for pastoral romance was almost certainly a contributor to the mini-renaissance enjoyed by Sidney’s Arcadia throughout the Carolinian period.59 The subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) antifeminism of Eikonoklastes’ antipoetics suggests how Milton’s “disappointment” in “literature” in general and the romance mode in particular is bound up with the text’s interrogation of the conventions of Protestant imitation.60 A useful starting point for this line of inquiry is the earliest (1649) version of Milton’s attack on the Eikon’s appropriation of Pamela’s prayer. Where the better-known and expanded 1650 version castigates Charles for stealing a prayer from a “Heathen fiction” (3:362), the earlier version reads “Heathen Woman.”61 While it would be possible to make too much of this substitution, it does offer a particularly neat illustration of the close and paradoxical correlation between femininity and fictionality in Eikonoklastes’ line of argument. Throughout the text, femininity works analogously to Milton’s notion of sonship in Of Reformation— less as a “natural” than as an imagined state of relation, in this case, to the divine mystery of human creativity. Milton’s “Heathen Woman” invites us to consider the dangerous proximity of “literary” modes and practices to the seductive potential of human signs and surfaces.62 The Eikon’s frontispiece works like a masque to “catch fools and silly gazers” (3:342). Its political rhetoric reads like “a peece of Poetrie,” which deceives the unwary reader through “smooth and cleanly” fictions (3:406). Its meditative passages perform the “Stage-work” that supports the king’s false claim to martyrdom (3:530). If Sidney’s Pamela celebrates the power of imaginative fictions to allure us to virtue, then, in the context established above, Milton’s “Heathen Woman” epitomizes the risks inherent in such an aesthetic. In this sense, she is the “literary” original of his Henrietta Maria, whose sexual, religious, and political seductions have converted the king from a statesman (emphasis on man) into a living literary stereotype of effeminized foppery, and the court into a disordered domestic space where the women are men and the men are slavishly imitative “Apes” (3:370). Considered from this perspective, the problem posed for Milton by Pamela’s presence in the Eikon is farther-reaching than the problem of plagiarism per se (although that is clearly an important related issue). In Eikonoklastes, the image of Pamela at prayer personifies the problem at

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the heart of Protestant imitatio: the problem of the flesh and its unruly desires. Moreover, her pious, feminine, “princely” body embodies the establishment strategy — equal parts religious, literary, and political— for containing and properly channeling the flesh. Milton’s dismissal of Pamela and her ilk in Eikonoklastes is best understood then, not as a wholesale rejection of either the “feminine” or literary art, but as a rebuttal to a broader cultural tendency to cede individual, “authorial” responsibility (a state Milton defines as truly imitative of Christ) to the disciplinary or seductive power of surfaces. By construing these two states of discipline and seduction as one and the same, Milton discredits the stabilizing powers of monarchy and church ceremonial, while also raising important questions about how “good” signs work and what they should aspire to do. His own answer to that question represents a subtle but consequential modification to the “Sidnean” aesthetic of allure that in more and less exaggerated and distorted versions underlies the royalist politics, Laudian piety, and courtly fictions he lumps together here as seductive and therefore ultimately idolatrous. Fittingly enough, this reformed Reformed poetics is most clearly articulated in the Eikonoklastes in a famous passage on prayer that converts Sidney’s “Heathen Woman” into a Protestant-friendly incarnation of the Theotokos as Bearer of the Word.63 Responding to the argument that set prayers guard against personal excesses while expressing common Christian concerns, Milton makes the case for extempore prayer as truer to the “Divine Spirit of utterance” within (3:505). This “perfect Gift” is, of course, the Holy Spirit, whom Milton defines here in almost entirely linguistic terms as the “giver of our abilitie to pray” (3:506). That our corresponding “gift” of transmission or translation is “onely natural” (3:506), and therefore subject to human error, is no call for coercive measures (like liturgy), which, as they run counter to the spirit of God’s “free spirit,” actually exacerbate rather than ameliorate, the problem of bad imitatio: Much less can it be lawfull that an English Mass-Book, compos’d for ought we know, by men neither lerned, nor godly, should justle out, or at any time deprive us the exercise of that Heav’nly gift, which God by special promise powrs out daily upon his Church, that is to say, the spirit of Prayer. Whereof to help those many infirmities, which he [Charles] reck’ns up, rudenesse, impertinencie, flatness, and the like, we

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have a remedy of Gods finding out, which is not Liturgie, but his own free spirit. Though we know not what to pray as we ought, yet he with sighs unutterable by any words, much less by a stinted Liturgie, dwelling in us makes intercession for us, according to the mind and will of God. (3:507) This alternative aesthetic of “free” prayer reverses the polarity of Sidney’s golden-world poetics. While both formulations of good imitatio center on language as the primary point of contact with the transcendent, Milton’s is both more democratized and less naturalized. If the “right” poet “figures forth” the divine image naturally imprinted on the human mind and heart, the righteous prayer gestures toward a reality utterly beyond its comprehension, a supernaturally indwelling Word that exceeds the structures of human speech and human consciousness even as it operates on and through them. This difference is a matter of degree. Sidney leaves room in his Defence for the mystery that is divine inspiration; and Milton continues to appeal to the “natural” authority of a divine image within. However, whereas Sidney celebrates the incarnational power of poetry to “set out” the transcendent loveliness of virtue in her most reader-ravishing “masking raiment” and “holiday apparel,” Milton emphasizes the inevitable gap between linguistic surfaces and the “unimprisonable . . . utterance” that prompts and properly orders true prayer (3:505).64 For Milton, the “gift” of prayer is contingent upon the believer’s willingness to mind this gap and assume responsibility for the difficult and dangerous task of searching, “stirr[ing] up,” and shaping the fallen “affections” into appropriately prayerful “words and matter” (3:506). As Achsah Guibbory has pointed out, this process is not unlike the equally uncertain and dangerous task of childbirth.65 If the Spirit provides the animating “essence” of human words, it does not guarantee their safe or successful delivery, much less an issue so unmistakably lovely as Lady Virtue, full grown and finely dressed for our easy recognition and appreciation. More to Milton’s immediate polemical point, the subtle reproductive imagery structuring this passage offers a sobering corrective to the genealogical pretensions of Eikon Basilike and its precursors in pro- and anticeremonialist polemic. Here, good imitatio does not cling childishly to the body of Mother Church but willingly runs the risks of spiritual

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adulthood. For Milton, every act of successful imitation/signification is a fresh miracle, a Virgin Birth made of matter and of spirit, which may or may not be readily apparent as such to earthly eyes. This holds true for Eikonoklastes itself, which Laura Lunger Knoppers has compellingly read as an imaginative re-incarnation of martyrdom in its purest etymological form as a “witness” to the truth.66 Here we have not the beautiful Lady Virtue or the spectacularly martyred Lucretia, naturally drawing all men’s eyes to them, but a rather ugly “remembring” (3:338) of the Carolinian body politic, “sent abroad, in the native confidence of her single self, to earn, how she can, her entertainment in the world” (3:339). Not surprisingly, Milton’s “truth” was neither widely nor warmly received, earning for itself a martyrs’ death after the Restoration in a public burning.67 The dangerous, messy imaginative effort on display in Eikonoklastes is the business end of the hermeneutic outlined in Areopagitica. In both cases, what makes words work as a medium of the Word within is not so much their incarnational capacity to figure forth the “form of goodness” in a lovely Lucretia or Lady Virtue as their liminal status as catalysts of an ongoing flesh-to-spirit reconciliation not to be fully consummated until the end of time, when the “lovely form” of “virgin Truth,” martyred and scattered to the four winds at the Fall, will be restored to “an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection” (CPW 2:549).68 Here, naked truth itself is language’s only guarantor; and as Milton puts it in his telling turn of Reformist commonplace in Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), she is the daughter, not of time, but of heaven (CPW 1:639). In such a scenario, the dust and heat of democratized interpretation and signification are not to be avoided or transcended; rather, they must be actively pursued as the most reliable (albeit imperfect) safeguards against the ever-present temptation to conflate shadowy types with transcendent reality. The measure of Milton’s distance and difference from Sidney on this point is perhaps most easily taken in Areopagitica. Whereas Sidney defends poetry as a “medicine of cherries,” winning us through pleasure “from wickedness to virtue — even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste,” Milton makes the case for a free press as the soul-saving source of “usefull drugs and materials wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong med’cins” (CPW 2:521).69 The distinction here is finer than it at first

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might seem. Sidney stakes his highest hopes for self-replicating Cyruses on those “few” readers discriminating and diligent enough to “learn aright” the poet’s craft, while Milton freely acknowledges the preponderance of “childish men, who have not the art to qualifie and prepare” the “working mineralls” of words (2:521). Nevertheless, the shift in emphasis is significant. For Sidney, poetry’s special epistemological status derives from its power to assimilate the sinful, desiring reader to a beautiful body/surface that — at least ideally — reincarnates the divine image as naturally (if only partially) embedded in the structures of the human mind. For Milton, poetry, at least good poetry, is a better teacher than philosophy, not (or not only) because it is more beautiful and therefore more pleasurable, but because it, like prayer, invites the reader’s active participation in the ongoing revelation/re-membering of a truth that is neither whole nor readily recognizable. This “ability to describe and define without circumscribing or dictating” short-circuits the fallen, human impulse toward idolatry, thereby imitating sermo’s conciliatory call to a transcendent reality that is both now and not yet.70 In this radical revisioning of reformed imitatio, the disciplined flesh is still the site of sanctification/signification. However, what it gestures toward is not the transcendent, at least not directly, but its own desire for the transcendent. Lana Cable has incisively characterized this feature of Milton’s aesthetic in her discussion of his use of metaphorical language. Her description of the epistemological underpinnings and implications of his iconoclastic technique is equally relevant to our understanding of his revised imitatio: The radical ambivalence that denies itself comfort in representable truth must, by the same rule, divest itself of reliance on any assumption of the spirit: all may be carnal illusion. Embrace of metaphor’s mortal striving thus becomes, for the iconoclastic artist, the creative equivalent of submission to divine will, with poetic achievement a commensurate form of supervenient grace. For the poet, the word made flesh— the “driving of language from the mental to the physical” — amounts to surrender of transcendent desire to the only expressive mode desire truly commands: an unselfdeluded, frankly mortal art of carnal rhetoric.71

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Cable’s notion of “carnal rhetoric” is central to my own argument because it captures what sets Milton apart from Sidney and the other subjects of this study. What they treat as the primary obstacle to good imitatio Milton embraces as its point of departure. If Eikon Basilike imagines the imitation of Christ as the art of converting flesh into word, Eikonoklastes requires us to rethink what it is that words should do. By taking the Eikon’s words and exposing them as flesh, as the rhetorization of the king’s own undisciplined desires, Milton implicitly redefines the imitation of Christ as the surrender (rather than the pursuit) of stable signification in conformity to the limitless receptivity, expressivity, and resourcefulness of sermo. This is not so much a “carnal rhetoric” as incarnation redefined or — as Milton might prefer to frame it — more fully realized. Cable describes this conceptual shift in terms of the debate surrounding idolatry. However, her analysis is applicable to Eikonoklastes’ engagement with the question of good imitation: In its defense of personal chaplains, set prayers, and the liturgy; in the manner of its scriptural quotation; and most spectacularly in its plagiarism of the prayer offered by Pamela in Sidney’s Arcadia, Eikon Basilike makes a showcase for what Milton could only regard as idolatry of words. Words exploited for purposes alien to their original intent, words devitalized and dispirited by rote recitation, words distanced from the tensive impulses of thought and feeling that generated them, become, like their exploiters, slaves to idolatry. Such words are made by their misuse to signify, not human intention, desire, and response, as Milton would wish, but rather the cessation of these. Self-witnessing dead words thus travesty their vital origin in the divine Word.72 In the context of this study, the scandal of Pamela’s appearance in the Eikon is not Charles’s alone. Her beautiful, “princely,” feminine body, piously poised for martyrdom, represents everything that is wrong, from Milton’s point of view, with the reformed project of humanist imitatio as epitomized by the royalist (mis?)reading of Sidnean romance. Simply put, the Pamela of the Eikon is herself a thief, a hermeneutic shortcut, whose authorized/aristocratic allure robs the human encounter with the Word

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behind words of its death-defying difficulty and danger. If she exposes Charles’s authorial dishonesty, she also announces Milton’s pursuit of a new aesthetic capable of more fully expressing the radical representationality of sermo.

Postscript: A Voice in the Wilderness Milton’s full reclamation of the “royalist” genres of romance and martyrology must wait for Paradise Regained, where Christ proves his status as true son and sacrifice by rejecting the false certainties of religio-political spectacle and biblical literalism in favor of a seemingly boundless linguistic resourcefulness.73 Like the passive heroes and heroines of Heliodoran romance, Jesus must prove his virtue in a trial of spiritual literacy: in this case, a head-to-head hermeneutic combat with the father of lies himself.74 Here, however, there are no providentially ordered (if technically offlimits) oracles to guide our interpretation of his interpretations. Rather, Jesus himself is the oracle, and of an explicitly different order: whereas the (Satanic) oracles of old were an inert admixture of heavenly wisdom and fleshly falsehoods (heavy on the falsehoods), Jesus is a “living Oracle,” a dynamic heuristic for communion with the divine (Paradise Regained, 1.460). What’s more, he is the harbinger of an “inward Oracle” that mediates that heuristic to “pious Hearts” (1.463). This difference, as Ken Simpson has carefully elaborated, is the difference between verbum and sermo, one that is played out again and again in Christ’s encounters with Satan.75 Nothing if not a careful reader, Satan struggles to make sense of Jesus within a “fleshly” hermeneutic that celebrates the sign as a “natural” (if highly problematic) point of contact with divine presence and power. If Jesus is the “Son of God,” the answer to the riddle of his identity must be sought within the semantic range of that epithet as it appears in the Hebrew scriptures. If he is a “king,” he must, by definition, have a visible kingdom, whether on earth or in heaven. Jesus, however, refuses to be defined by earthly signs (even sacred ones), choosing instead to gesture creatively and contextually toward the Father.76 Simply put, he is Erasmian sermo come to life: not Word or even words, but the generative faculty that is language itself.77

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If Milton’s Jesus is not strictly original in this sense, he is nonetheless radical. Simpson has pointed out how Milton’s theology in his later works takes the long-accepted Erasmian premise to its logical (and heretical) conclusions. For Milton, a speech act simply cannot be synonymous with its speaker or with the thought that produced it.78 This anti-Trinitarian Christology (worked out in detail in his Christian Doctrine) makes the imitation of Christ more central to his aesthetic even as it makes it less certain. On the one hand, it divorces imitatio from the pursuit of divine presence, which is associated exclusively with God the Father. On the other, it closes the distance between the miracle of the incarnate Logos and the human capacity for speech and reason. In such a scenario we are all made to be sons of God, unique, temporal expressions of the eternal divine mind.79 If, then, as Milton claims in Of Education, it is our duty to “know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, and to be like him,” that duty is more properly understood as a process of self-actualization in collaboration with the Holy Spirit and scripture than as an act of assimilation to any particular sign, no matter how “sacred” (2:366– 67). Indeed, much of the plot of Paradise Regained turns on this very distinction. Again and again Jesus rejects even the most biblical templates for “Christlike” behavior. Ultimately, what defines him as the Son of God is not his Davidic or his divine lineage or his recognizable fulfillment of prophecy. It is his precarious (miraculous?) upright posture on the pinnacle of the temple in defiance of Satan’s enticement to slavish biblical literalism.80 As Stanley Fish has suggested, this scene is the ultimate expression of Milton’s radical understanding of adiaphora, in which nothing (not even the Bible itself ) has intrinsic merit or meaning apart from relation to God.81 Jesus’s “standing” is thus neither a repudiation nor an affirmation of any single earthly sign. It is instead a posture of pure receptivity born out of passionate desire to please God. This stance of “hungering more” to do the “Fathers will,” as Jesus puts it in reference to his forty-day fast, is the only guarantor of speech/sonship in Paradise Regained (2.259). It is thus also the test of true imitatio. Cable aptly characterizes the resulting aesthetic: “Rather than imitate God, Milton’s autonomous individual subsumes the predominance of penetrating mind into the truth of God’s predominance,” thereby enacting “the sustained paradox of a fully autonomous will attuned to perfect subordination in the will of God.”82

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Given the interpenetration of poetry, politics, and theology in early modern discourses of good imitatio, Cable’s claim that Milton’s aesthetic calls for a “radical restructuring of the imaginative dynamics of individual faith” is something of an understatement.83 It is also a radical rethinking of how words work to relate individuals to each other in harmonious social bodies. Far from a church of one man, as an earlier generation of scholarship would have it, Milton’s body of Christ appears in the context of this and other more recent studies as the radical realization of Rogers’s and Sidney’s nascent dream of the Protestant Church visible, a community of readers, writers, and speakers knit together in the joint enterprise of interpreting scripture. Simpson offers what is perhaps the clearest articulation of this emphatically “literary” ecclesiology: “Milton’s textuality,” he argues, “implies a dynamic textual community gathered at a great religious feast across the ages to discover and unfold the Word of God. Not only is the Word the only visible mode of Christ’s presence available to Christians since the ascension, but the visible church is unified by Christian literary production, whether oral or written.”84 With one important caveat, one might say the same for Erasmus or indeed for Rogers and Sidney, both of whom, as we have seen— albeit for different reasons and to different degrees— tend to conflate this shared vision of the Church Militant with the maintenance of the visible bodies of church and state. It is for Milton to fully realize the radical potential of reformed imitatio. Jesus’s final “stand” against Satan on the pinnacle of the temple does just that, locating the miracle of the Incarnation in its reversal of the trajectory that enslaves human signs to fleshly surfaces.85 Here, even the literal body of Christ is efficacious only insofar as it bespeaks the Son’s desire to do the Father’s will. This recentering of salvation history on a literary (rather than literal) Passion necessarily shifts the focus of good imitatio. Whereas Sidney and company seek (with more and less success) to assimilate the desiring “flesh” to a disciplined, corporate body, Milton imagines such bodies as constituted by words, which are themselves the effect of desires that cannot be otherwise authenticated or reformed. The body of Christ so constituted is an altogether different animal from the “organically grown” religio-political entity envisioned by Milton’s predecessors, Catholic and Protestant alike. While no less vital and (at least ultimately) sound, it is not, in any discernible, earthly sense, whole.

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We are reminded here of the allegory of Truth in Areopagitica, in which the role of the reading, speaking, writing Christian is not to bear witness to (or through) a spectacular body but rather to gather up its remnants in anticipation of the day when the triumphant, returning Jesus “shall bring together every joynt and member” (CPW 2:549). This piecemeal process offers no obvious protections from the risks of misrecognition, no privileged, extraliterary point of reference from which to direct the difficult and dangerous project of re-creation. Until the Second Coming, the position of the church and each of its individual members, poets included, is that of Christ in the wilderness on the pinnacle of the temple, neither wholly rejecting nor embracing the “natural” signs of divine kinship and kingship, but poised uncomfortably between heaven and earth, waiting to be made a miracle. If this model proves too inaccessible, as many critics have complained it does, one could do worse than follow Jesus’s mother, the spiritually literate Heliodoran heroine to end all heroines and the original of Milton’s paradigmatic poet/prayer in Eikonoklastes.86 As David Haskin has persuasively argued, Milton’s Mary puts into practice Milton’s “gathering” hermeneutic, patiently piecing together her encounters with the mystery of the Word to form a coherent narrative that eventually becomes the story of Christ’s childhood as told in Luke. She is thus both the ideal reader and herself an author.87 Significantly, it is to her “house private” (Paradise Regained 4.638) that Jesus returns to invent the divine oration that will set in motion the chain of events destined to culminate in the reconstitution of Truth and the violent destruction of “all Monarchies besides” the Kingdom of Heaven (4.150). The broader implications of this hyperliterary version of the imitatio Christi are profound. On the one hand, as we have seen, Milton fully democratizes Sidney’s golden world, delegating the rights and responsibilities of self-authorship to each individual reader and writer. On the other, he radically destabilizes the fallen human processes of signification and interpretation, uprooting them from the “fleshly” matrices that had traditionally substantiated their claim to a “natural” connection to the transcendent order. Even for the fittest reader, this is no small price to pay for literary liberation, and it is a cost that Milton would spend the better part of his postregicide career counting. The losses here are not purely (or even primarily) epistemological. As recent criticism of his major poems has

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been at pains to emphasize, Milton can never entirely detach himself from the beautiful bodies he so thoroughly rhetorically dismembers and demystifies in Eikonoklastes. Milton remains decidedly a poet in, if not of, the flesh.88 Death, divorce, and deracination in all their pathos are major themes of his later works, as is the seductive thrill of political violence, which may or may not participate in the promise of Apocalypse.89 These precarious paradoxes can and have been persuasively read in terms of Milton’s Hebraism, his Pauline universalism, and his anticipation of the postEnlightenment public sphere as imagined by Habermas.90 However, Milton’s “Janus-faced quality”— his commitment to the collective creation of a reading, writing, reasoning “public” that is both privatized and political, patently imaginary and universalizing and yet somehow also distinctively English (and Protestant and masculine)— can be perhaps most fully and least anachronistically explained in terms of his radically liminal rereading of sermo. Poised on the boundary between flesh and spirit, between the now and the not yet of Restoration England and the New Jerusalem, it enables the creative contradictions that will eventually give birth to the modern nation-state and its correlative “public sphere.” However, if Milton is the literary ancestor of Habermas, he is also the heir of the earlier subjects of this study, all of whom sought to liberate the divine gift of eloquence from the tyrannous desires of variously imagined individual and religio-political bodies. In such a context, the imitation of Christ is anything but a marginal practice. It is in fact a founding fiction of the emergent English public sphere, which takes its earliest shape from the broken and bitterly contested corpse of the visible body of Christ.

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Introduction 1. Rogers, Of the Imitation of Christ, “First Epistle of the Translator.” Throughout this book in quotations of early modern texts, I retain original spelling and punctuation, but I have not reproduced every detail of typography such as eccentric or nonmodern use of capitalization and italics. 2. I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 303. 3. See ibid., Appendix I, for detailed publication information. 4. Quote from Greene, Light in Troy, 1. Greene further describes early modern imitatio as “a precept and activity which . . . embraced not only literature, but pedagogy, grammar, rhetoric, esthetics, the visual arts, music, historiography, politics, and philosophy” and had implications “for the theory of style, the philosophy of history, and for conceptions of the self ” (1– 2). Other general treatments of imitation and exemplarity in the early modern period include Lyons, Exemplum; Quint, Origin and Originality; Rigolot, “Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity”; and Steadman, Lamb and the Elephant. 5. Among the first to treat imitatio Christi as a genuinely Protestant phenomenon was J. Sears McGee, whose landmark comparative study of “Anglican” and “Puritan” pieties devotes considerable attention to the continued importance of this devotional model among conservative English Protestants (McGee, Godly Man, 107– 13). However, his organizing binary has the inadvertent effect of privileging “Puritan” as the more innovative end of the Anglican/Puritan devotional 201

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spectrum. Anglican imitatio is characterized as “following pre-Reformation tradition” and is identified with both medieval soteriology and classical morality (107 n. 56), while the Puritan devotional emphasis on human depravity and Christ’s role as mediator is treated as an outgrowth of the new Protestant emphasis on justification by faith (108). This critical framework obscures the dynamism of “traditional” themes like imitatio Christi and their mobility across confessional divides. If McGee’s characterization of “the puritan relationship with Christ” as “often intimate, but seldom imitative” (107) has become something of a truism, his construal of Anglican imitatio as essentially conservative has been equally, if more subtly, influential, rendering some instances of Protestant imitatio invisible and others too readily dismissible. Elizabeth Hudson’s “English Protestants and the Imitatio Christi ” — a follow-up to McGee’s “Conversion and the Imitation of Christ” — is the most recent work exclusively devoted to the imitatio Christi theme in early modern England. Hudson complicates McGee’s Anglican/Puritan binary but does not challenge his basic understanding of the imitation of Christ as a static devotional framework inherited from the Middle Ages. Noting “considerable ambiguity, even inconsistency” in the devotional culture of the period, she “nevertheless concludes that conservative Protestants were more likely to recommend Jesus as the model for human behavior than were their puritan contemporaries,” attributing this difference to “Puritan doubts about human ability to emulate so perfect a model” and “the close identification of the imitatio Christi theme with traditional Catholic piety” (541). The imitation of Christ has thus yet to be fully integrated into our account of English Protestant devotional practice or the broader “secular” culture of imitation with which it no doubt interacted. See Perry, “Imitation of Christ.” 6. Dickens, English Reformation, represents the older view that the English Reformation was a popular reaction against the moral bankruptcy of late medieval Christianity. Perhaps the most influential proponent of the view that it was a reformation from below is Patrick Collinson; see his various essays collected in Godly People, Religion of Protestants, and Birthpangs of Protestant England, as well as his monograph Elizabethan Puritan Movement. This interpretation was challenged by several revisionist historians who characterize the English Reformation as imposed on a reluctant populace from above: Haigh, English Reformations, Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, and Reformation and Resistance; Bossy, Christianity in the West; Scarisbrick, Reformation; and Duffy, Stripping of the Altars. Judith Maltby points out that both “bottom-up” and “top-down” models of the Reformation tend to rely on records of dissent, thereby marginalizing the conformist majority; while acknowledging the greater methodological difficulties inherent in studying conformity, she suggests that its neglect in the histori-

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ography of the English Reformation is also due to “the assumption that nonconformists took their faith more ‘seriously’ than men and women who conformed to the lawful worship of the Church of England” (Prayer Book and People, 8). For a recent general history of the Reformation focused on its implications for “ordinary” English men and women, see Jones, English Reformation. For good studies of conformist piety, see Maltby, Prayer Book and People; Targoff, Common Prayer; and Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature. Warren, “Tudor Religious Cultures,” surveys the historiography. 7. See I. Green, Print and Protestantism, Appendix I, for detailed publication histories of the works referenced here and in the following sentences. Allison and Rogers, Catalogue of Catholic Books, give annotated lists of the printed literature of the English Counter-Reformation. Useful anthologies include Miola, Early Modern Catholicism, and Roberts, Critical Anthology. 8. I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 325. 9. See Jackson and Marotti, “Turn to Religion.” 10. Cummings, Literary Culture, 15. 11. Ibid., 57. 12. Rigolot neatly sums up the difference between medieval and early modern conceptions of imitatio: “Medieval imitatio posited fictional texts as extensions of a unique source of undifferentiated truth: the Holy Scripture, an infinitely expandable master text. By contrast, Renaissance imitative theory became increasingly metaphoric: it tended to posit the relationship to paradigmatic figures as strictly one of analogy” (“Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity,” 561). 13. Cf. Greene, Light in Troy, 8: “If a remote text is compassed in a language for which the present supplies only a treacherous glossary, and if it is grounded in a lost concrete specificity never fully recoverable, then the tasks of reading, editing, commenting, translating, and imitating become intricately problematized.” 14. Quoted in ibid., 6. For detailed treatment of the epistemological anxieties precipitated by humanist scholarship, see ibid., chs. 1– 3; see also several chapters in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: Waswo, “Theories of Language”; Jeanneret, “Renaissance Exegesis”; Boyle, “Evangelism and Erasmus”; Javitch, “Assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics”; Moss, “Horace in the Sixteenth Century”; Ward, “Cicero and Quintilian.” 15. Cummings, Literary Culture, chs. 1 and 3; Lanham, Motives of Eloquence; Waswo, Language and Meaning, ch. 1, and “Theories of Language.” 16. Waswo, Language and Meaning, 63. 17. Greene, Light in Troy, 19. 18. Cf. Struever, Language of History, 64: “Rhetorical imitatio, with its concept of virtuosity as both a command of past techniques which possess continuous

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sanctions and a sensitivity to the unique demands of the present situation, provides a model of continuity in change.” 19. Waswo, Language and Meaning, 132. 20. According to Lathrop, “The New Learning in England was of a character that may be called Erasmian, for though it was clearly apprehended by Colet and Linacre, it was typically embodied and most energetically set forth by Erasmus” (Translations from the Classics, 32). In his edition of Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Derrick stresses the influence of Erasmus on Elizabethan pedagogy: “The influence of Erasmus on Wilson is seminal. Possibly at Lincolnshire, certainly at Eton and Cambridge, Wilson’s studies were permeated with Erasmus’s social and religious ideals and dependent on Erasmus’s texts. The merger of Christian piety and classical learning had a fundamental effect on Wilson’s assumptions: first, that Christian values should predominate over pagan philosophies; second, that the purpose of acquiring classical wisdom was to promote religious and civic service, not individual glory; third, that imitation of classical precedents was meant to be practical training and not slavish imitation of classical Latinity” (lxxxvii). 21. Cummings, Literary Culture, 105. 22. Ibid., 106. 23. For an overview of the relationship of this “literary” ideal to earlier understandings of imitatio Christi, see Perry, “Imitation of Christ.” 24. Erasmus, Ciceronianus, 65. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. 25. G. Smith describes the controversies surrounding imitatio on the Continent and England’s relatively moderate position (introduction to Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 1). 26. Sidney and Languet, Correspondence, 20. 27. Webbe, Discourse of English Poetrie, 298. 28. Quint, Origin and Originality, ch. 1, discusses the religious implications of autonomous creativity in The Praise of Folly. 29. Scodel discusses the significance of Davenant’s preface (“SeventeenthCentury English Literary Criticism,” 549). Burrow identifies the episode of Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death in Paradise Lost as an exploration of “some of the longest-standing problems of English Renaissance criticism: imitation becomes at once a creative, life-giving process (as Jonson had regarded it), and a deadly inbreeding of an author divorced from God with his own creations” (“Combative Criticism,” 497). Rigolot discusses the tensions between humanist enthusiasm for ekphrasis and Protestant iconoclasm (“Rhetoric of Presence,” 161– 67). 30. Stillman, Philip Sidney, 43– 46.

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31. Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature, 113. Rosendale aptly sums up the implications of Protestant logocentrism for English literary culture: The Reformation, in the process of desacralizing the absolute and immanent signs of medieval Catholicism, simultaneously resacralized the representational sign as sign. The divine will revealed in the text of scripture is manifested not in the accreted authority of medieval commentary but through direct, individual interpretative engagement with the text; the divine grace available in the sacrament takes effect not in terms of literal presence, but through faithful individual reception of representational signs as signs. And as the sacrament’s claims to presence gave way to a spiritually invested model of “notable and special signification” (even as the spread of print and literacy made Bible-reading not only desirable but increasingly feasible), this principle stimulated an expansion of the cultural status and function of representation and interpretation, the operations of which became in turn broadly constitutive not only of belief and knowledge, but of individual and communal identity. (22) 32. Marotti and Jackson, “Turn to Religion.”

Chapter 1. The Church Eloquent 1. On Sidney’s biography, see Stewart, Philip Sidney, and Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney. One of his greatest periods of literary productivity (1579 – 80) coincides with his yearlong withdrawal from the court to Wilton, his sister’s country estate. The relationship of Sidney’s retreat to his public quarrel with the Earl of Oxford and his recently penned letter of protest against the queen’s possible marriage to the French Catholic duke of Anjou remain somewhat unclear. DuncanJones treats the quarrel and the letter as contributing but not decisive factors, arguing finally that Sidney left voluntarily (Sir Philip Sidney, 141– 67). Quilligan, on the other hand, argues that Sidney was likely banished (“Sidney and His Queen”). Stillman makes the case on rhetorical grounds that Sidney’s letter would have been unlikely to provoke banishment (Philip Sidney, 23– 28). 2. In addition to his translation of Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ, Rogers’s notable pre- and Counter-Reformation translations include several books of pseudo-Augustinian prayers, a translation and Protestantization of Diego de Estella’s Contempt of the World (1586), and Sheltco à Geveren’s Of the Ende of This World, the Seconde Commyng of Christ a Comfortable and Necessary Discourse, for These Miserable and Daungerous Dayes (1577). His translations of sermons and

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devotional works by notable Lutheran divines Niels Hemmingsen and Johann Habermann and by the famous Lutheran theologian and pedagogue Johannes Rivius will be discussed below. 3. Matthew and Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 47:584 – 85. For more detailed treatments of Rogers’s career, see J. Craig, “Cambridge Boies”; K. Parker, “Thomas Rogers”; and Collinson, “Lectures by Combination.” 4. Rogers, Miles Christianus. For an account of the feud that likely spurred this treatise, see J. Craig, “Cambridge Boies.” 5. Rogers, General Discourse, [*.iii]v. 6. Ibid., [*.iii]v. 7. Antipoetic and antitheatrical sentiments have a long tradition in Western thought, predating Plato’s Republic. In England, 1577– 86 was a particularly concentrated period of debate that coincided with the rising popularity of the public theaters and the rising prominence of the “godly” in London civic affairs. The most famous of the antipoetic polemics is Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (1579), commissioned by London’s civic authorities who were concerned about the effects of poetry and playgoing on public morals. Its dedication to Philip Sidney has often been cited as the primary catalyst for Sidney’s Defence (e.g., Kinney, “Parody and Its Implications”). This idea has fallen out of favor in recent years. Duncan-Jones has argued that while the Defence shows signs of careful attention to Gosson, it was likely occasioned by Sidney’s need to defend his poetic pursuits to his future father-in-law, Francis Walsingham (Sir Philip Sidney, 231– 33). On the question of Gosson’s relationship to Sidney, see also M. Mack, Sidney’s Poetics, 9, and Stillman, Philip Sidney, 8. Quite apart from any connection to Gosson, the dating of the Defence is a matter of dispute: Duncan-Jones argues for a “late” date of 1582 – 83 based on textual affinities with Astrophil and Stella (Sir Philip Sidney, 231– 33), while Stillman supports the earlier date of circa 1580 based on verbal correspondences with the 1578/79 Lady of May (“Justice and the ‘Good Word’ ”). General studies of early modern English antipoetic prejudice and poetry’s defenders include Herman, Squitter Wits and Muse-Haters; Fraser, War against Poetry; Matz, Defending Literature; and Ferguson, Trials of Desire. Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, offers an important corrective to the caricature of Gosson as a Puritanical philistine, pointing out that Sidney and Gosson have similar educational backgrounds and are in agreement on many points, specifically the “abuses” of the stage; cf. Sénéchal, “Antitheatrical Criticism.” On the religious context of antitheatricalism, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, ch. 5. 8. Rogers, Philosophicall Discourse, [A.ii]r.

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9. The 1580s are increasingly viewed as a key decade in the development of what might be called the post-Reformation public sphere, attended by rising frustration among progressive Protestants due in part to the efforts of Archbishop John Whitgift (who replaced the more Presbyterian-friendly Edmund Grindall in 1583) to suppress dissidence and impose uniformity of worship. As Whitgift restricted access to official channels of influence and tightened restrictions on printing, the Presbyterian opposition became ever more creative about taking its case to the reading public. The Marprelate Tracts, a series of seven satirical pseudonymous works printed between October 1588 and September 1589, mark a high point of tensions between church leadership and the Presbyterian faction. As Black explains, these sorts of encounters “changed the rules of polemical engagement” and “generated spiraling chains of engagement, response, and appropriation” that “soon challenged whatever ability the state had once had to shape and control public discussion” (“Martin Marprelate Tracts,” 1092). 10. By 1590, Rogers’s ties to Richard Bancroft and Christopher Hatton would put him on the outs with most of his (pro-Presbyterian) colleagues in Suffolk (see J. Craig, “Cambridge Boies,” and K. Parker, “Thomas Rogers”). In the bigger picture, the late 1580s were a period of crisis for the Presbyterian movement. Patrick Collinson identifies the deaths of John Field and Sidney’s uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1588 as the beginning of the end of progressive Protestant hopes in Elizabethan England for the reformation of the church along Presbyterian lines. The breakdown of dialogue was exacerbated by the Martin Marprelate controversy and the efforts of Bancroft in the early 1590s to root out and prosecute the leaders of the Presbyterian and separatist movements. The rest of the decade was relatively lacking in religious conflict, in part because progressive Protestants no longer pursued a national agenda but sought instead to protect Puritan sympathizers at the local level (Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, part 8; see also MacCulloch, Later Reformation in England). 11. Rogers, Faith, Doctrine, and Religion, [¶¶¶¶.4]r. 12. Rogers, Two Dialogues or Conferences. 13. For an earlier version of this argument, see Perry, “Imitatio and Identity.” 14. Bunny, Booke of Christian Exercise, “Epistle Dedicatorie,” 4. 15. I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 309 and 335– 41. 16. The first stand-alone Protestant translation of the work was Edward Hake’s (1567). Hake’s translation, like Rogers’s, was based on the Latin text of the first three books by Swiss humanist (and close friend of Languet) Sebastien Châtellion, also known as Castellio. However, Hake’s translation was much less popular than Rogers’s and went out of print sometime before Rogers made his

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translation, which is also notable for its prefatory material. See Crane, “English Translations,” and I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 306. 17. Rogers, Of the Imitation of Christ, a3r. Subsequent citations to this work will be given parenthetically. 18. Ascham, Schoolmaster, 117. 19. In fact, Rogers’s revision is less extensive than one might imagine. He omits reference to monks, hermits, purgatory, prayers for the dead, and invocation of the saints. His rhetoric is less anti-Catholic than Hake’s, although his own “godlie” sympathies are clear in his substitutions of “proud pope” for “pope,” “godlie” for “religious,” and “zealous” for “devout” (I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 307). 20. Crane cites an anonymous French version found at the University of Louvain without indication of date or printer as the likely source for this preface. A translation of the first three books of the Imitatio Christi, its preface begins, “Si ce liure de l’Imitation de Christ à ces annees passees apporte quelque fruict” (quoted in Crane, “English Translations,” 96 n. 17), while Rogers’s translated French preface begins, “If this booke, which concerneth, the following christes example, have heretofore yeelded some frute” (n.p.). According to Crane, “it does not seem likely that Rogers is indebted to this French translation in his version, as he does not mention it in the course of comment on previous translation of the Imitatio” (“English Translations,” 96 n. 17). 21. Boyle contrasts Erasmus’s humanist understanding of the power of the Word with medieval and classical notions about the magical efficacy of speech (Erasmus on Language, 47– 88); for thorough treatments of this topic, see Entralgo, Therapy of the Word, and Ong, Presence of the Word. 22. Boyle, Erasmus on Language, 101. 23. Anderson, Translating Investments, 45. 24. Crane explicitly links the popularity of the Imitatio Christi in English translation to its compatibility with Protestant doctrine (“English Translations,” 83). For a description of the devotio moderna, see the introduction to Van Engen, Devotio Moderna. 25. Rogers’s main source text was Castellio’s 1563 Latin version. This Protestant revision modifies Kempis’s style to suit contemporary tastes, provides abundant marginal reference to the scriptures, omits the final book, and corrects the original for doctrinal errors. However, Rogers quotes from the original in his preface and occasionally translates from it in favor of Castellio (Crane, “English Translations,” 80 – 81). My discussion of the main body of the text will focus primarily on the implications of Kempis’s theology for Rogers’s Elizabethan Protestant audience. For this reason, I will quote from Rogers’s translation unless otherwise noted.

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26. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. conversation, n., sense 7.a, online version, August 20, 2011. 27. Christianity’s engagement with Stoicism dates back to the church fathers. Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period, it was widely believed that Seneca and St. Paul had corresponded (Monsarrat, Light from the Porch, 31). 28. Bouwsma summarizes the essential contradiction between Christian and Stoic epistemology: “The issue between them, in its most direct terms, was the difference between the biblical understanding of creation, which makes both man and the physical universe separate from and utterly dependent on God, and the hellenistic principle of immanence which makes the universe eternal, by one means or another deifies the natural order, and by seeing a spark of divinity in man tends to make him something more than a creature of God. Augustinianism contradicted this view at every point. Seeing man in every part of his being as a creature of God, it could not regard his reason . . . as divine and thus naturally capable of knowing the will of God” (“Two Faces of Humanism,” 9). On Stoicism’s influence on early modern English literature, see Miles, Shakespeare, and Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics, esp. ch. 5. 29. “As we fancie a thing,” writes Kempis, “so we judge thereof: and blinded with private affection we commonlie give partial sentence. Now were the love of God alwaies, and our onlie guide, our senses, which are enimies to truth, would not so easily troble us. But commonly somewhat either lurketh within, or chancethwithout, which carieth us awaie” (Rogers, Of the Imitation of Christ, 28). 30. The believer’s description of this love in bk. 3, ch. 7, bears quoting at length: Love wil be above, and cannot be kept downe by anie abject thing. Love wil be free, and loose from al worldlie affection, that neither hir inward sight be dimmed, nor she be either entangled by worldlie prosperitie, or subdued by adversitie. Love is most sweete, most strong, most hie, most large, most comfortable, most perfect: nothing is better than love either in heaven above, or in earth beneath. For it ariseth from God, and resteth on God above al things. . . . He that loveth, knoweth what this meaneth. A great crie in the eares of God, is the ardent affection of the minde, while it saies, O my God, my love, thou art al mine, I am wholie thine. Raise up in me a vehement love, that I maie taste with y inner mouth of mine hart, how sweete it is to love, and swimme as it were in the streames of love. Grant that I maie so burne in love, that through the heate of desire I maie exceede my selfe: that I maie sing the ballad of love, folowe thee my lover aloft, and set forth thy praises

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with such a zeale, that even my hart maie faint againe: that I maie love thee more than my selfe; yea neither love my selfe, nor anie other that love thee unfeinedlie, but in thee, and for thee, even as the law of love that shineth out of thee commandeth, and doth require. (Rogers, Of the Imitation of Christ, 123– 24) 31. “Now if anie woulde examine the cause why so gladlie we chat, & prattle together,” instructs Kempis, “he shal finde it to be even comfort forsooth, & recreation. For y more earnestlie we covet, & desire a thing; or the more certainlie we know anie evil to be towarde us, the more vehementlie we love to talke and thinke thereof, albeit commonly to smal profit, and purpose” (Rogers, Of the Imitation of Christ, 18). Unlike the Word, which redirects desire toward its divine source, this kind of “outward comfort” threatens “inward consolation” because it distracts both speaker and listener away from the pursuit of divine presence. 32. “No man,” Kempis warns, shal finde anie spiritual comfort, except he occupie himselfe diligentlie in stirring up his minde unto godlines; the which thou shalt the more easilie attaine, if thou enter into thy chamber, and shut thy selfe from trobles of the worlde. . . . For commonlie thou shalt finde that in thy closet, which thou wouldest leese [lose] abrode. . . . Solitarines, and quietnes is good for him that would proceede in virtue, and learne the mysteries of holie Scripture. For there shal he finde even flouds of teares, whereby he maie wash, and clense himselfe everie night, that he may by so much be nigher unto his maker, by how much he is farder from the resort of men. (Rogers, Of the Imitation of Christ, 41) 33. Elizabeth’s moderate religious policies were a source of frustration and concern to the more progressive among her subjects, who sought a more thorough reformation of worship and discipline. Praise of Elizabeth often manipulates the ambivalence surrounding her status as a single woman to support the new Protestant emphasis on salvation by grace alone and to push her toward further reform (see esp. Day, Booke of Christian Prayers, and Alymer, Harborrowe For Faithfull and Trewe Subjects; also Christian, “Elizabeth’s Preachers,” and Axton, Queen’s Two Bodies). 34. Rogers, Soliloquium Animae, A3r and [A3]v. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. 35. Narveson, “Publishing the Sole-Talk.” 36. Humanist pedagogy and Protestant reform are, of course, inextricably linked in early modern England. Richards traces the tremendous interest in the

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pedagogical value of dialogue to Reformist efforts to create a broader and more civil public forum and offers a particularly illuminating account of the role of “conversation” in teaching eloquence through example (Rhetoric and Courtliness, chs. 2– 3). 37. Ibid. See also May and Wisse, introduction to On the Ideal Orator, and Cox, Renaissance Dialogue. 38. Rogers, Miles Christianus, 14. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. 39. Rogers argues, And as some preaching is not better than all, but farre inferiour to some writing: so some writings are both equall to some, some better than many, some more excellent in some respects than all Sermons, and whatsoever proceedeth from the mouth, which you call the lively voyce of man: and of this last sort are the written Sermons, and other bookes of the Prophets and Apostles, called usually the holy Scriptures, whereby we are bettered when we are not by the lively voice of those men, the Apostles I meane and Prophets, and whereby the controversies of all times are to be determined, when they are not by the voices of any men, be they never so livelie. Other writinges of holy and learned also in diverse respects exceede preaching. For bookes will teach, and counsell, and comfort, and strengthen, and confute, and doe those and the like duties both for the instruction of the ignorant, conversion of sinners, overthrowing of Heresies, when, and where, and in such sort as happely no man can, and some men will not, or dare not. (Miles Christianus, 22) 40. Rogers’s translation of this text follows close on the heels of Hemmingsen’s dismissal from his university post in 1579. As Denmark’s most prominent Reformed theologian, Hemmingsen joined with other followers of Melancthon to oppose the Formula of Concord (1577), which sought to unite Lutherans in clear opposition to other Reformed churches, most notably Calvin’s Geneva. His commitment to a more inclusive Protestant dialogue is a typically “Philippist” position; Rogers’s choice to translate him reflected his own hopes for a more inclusive Protestant dialogue in England. 41. Rogers, Faith of the Church Militant, ¶.2r. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. 42. Important studies establishing Sidney as a conflicted courtier-Calvinist include Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney; Sinfield, “Protestantism”; Berry, Making of Sir Philip Sidney; McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney; and Worden, Sound of Virtue. 43. Stillman, Philip Sidney, ch. 2, attributes the optimism of Sidney’s poetics on this point to his training in the “new hermeneutic,” a “new” approach to

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reading and writing derived from the rehabilitation of the classical tradition of interpretatio scripti. Rooted in classical legal practices, this not-so-new hermeneutic emphasized analysis of the complete work and its composition (as opposed to piecemeal analysis of words) and attention to authorial intention and decorum as the keys to correct interpretation. Stillman shows how Melanchthon and his followers adapted this hermeneutic to construct a uniquely optimistic Protestant epistemology, grounded in a rhetorical approach to scripture. See also Stillman, “Scope of Sidney’s Defence”; Stillman, “Deadly Stinging Adders”; and, for a detailed study of the “new hermeneutic,” Eden, Hermeneutics. P. Mack, Renaissance Argument, gives a complementary but different account of early modern habits of reading and writing. Stillman is of course not the only critic to read Sidney’s poetics as epistemically optimistic, but such studies have tended to emphasize Sidney’s classical over his Christian heritage: e.g., Henniger, Sidney and Spenser; Robinson, Shape of Things Known; A. Miller, “Sidney’s Apology for Poetry”; and Ulreich, “Poets Only Deliver.” M. Mack, in Sidney’s Poetics, like Stillman, represents Sidney’s epistemic optimism as integral to (rather than at odds with) his Christian heritage but focuses on the patristic roots of the Defence and is less sensitive to the nuances of Sidney’s particularly Protestant context. On Melanchthon’s thought and influence in England, see esp. Schneider, Philip Melanchthon’s Rhetorical Construal, and Schofield, Philip Melanchthon. 44. Quoted phrases from Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 221 and 216. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. M. Mack’s discussion of classical, Patristic, and pre-Reformation contexts for Sidney’s formulation of poetic imitation as imitative of the act of creation is important (Sidney’s Poetics, esp. chs. 1 and 5). 45. Stillman, Philip Sidney, 39. Kuin, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Model,” also explores Sidney’s ties to the monarchomachic discourses of the Continent as well as Sidney’s relationship to fellow Languet protégé Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. 46. Stillman, Philip Sidney, 226– 27. 47. Ibid., 219. Stillman points out that Cyrus is cited more frequently than any other hero in the Defence (218). 48. Ibid., 171. 49. Lamb, “Apologizing for Pleasure,” 515. More deconstructive approaches to Sidney tend to attribute the apparent contradictions of the Defence to one or more of three overlapping factors: Sidney’s discomfort with the sensual, “embodied” nature of poetry; competition between his Protestant and aristocratic identities; and the irreconcilability of Aristotelian and Platonic poetics. Sidney’s discomfort with the “effeminizing” effects of desire has become something of a critical commonplace; for important treatments, see Dolan, “Taking the Pencil,”

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and Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse Haters. D. Craig, “Hybrid Growth,” and Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse Haters, chs. 1– 2, treat the tension between Platonic and Aristotelian poetics in the Defence. 50. Matz, Defending Literature, ch. 3. See also Matz, “Sidney’s Defence of Poesie”; Berry, Making of Sir Phillip Sidney; Worden, Sound of Virtue; Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney; and Sinfield, “Protestantism.” 51. E.g., Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney; and Sinfield, “Protestantism.” 52. Stillman, Philip Sidney, 171. 53. Shuger, “Castigating Livy,” 529. 54. Jed, Chaste Thinking, 32. 55. Shuger, “Castigating Livy,” 545. 56. For an allegorical reading of Sidney’s treatment of the painter in the revised Arcadia, see Berry, Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 182. Berry invites us to see the painter, who loses his hand in a battle he has rather cynically decided to troll for useful images of combat, as a figure for John Stubbs, whose public pamphlet against the Anjou match resulted in the loss of his right hand. Stillman traces a more sympathetic (if not uncritical) reception of Stubbs’s pamphlet within Sidney’s correspondence with his Philippist mentors (Sir Philip Sidney, 23– 28). 57. Shuger, “Castigating Livy,” 545. 58. Sidney, “To My Dear Lady and Sister.” 59. Greville, Dedication, 11. 60. Greville, “Treatise of Monarchy,” 2:45. 61. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 121, 122. For a more recent, expansive, and religiously nuanced treatment of this same quality of Greville’s work, see Sierhaus, “Idol of the Heart.” 62. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 122. 63. Spiller, “Counsel of Fulke Greville,” 446– 47. For other readings of the Life as a key to Greville’s aesthetic, see also McCrea, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”; Skretkowicz, “Greville, Politics,”; Bowers, “What Is the Meaning”; and Herman, “Bastard Children of Tyranny.” 64. Greville, Dedication, 134. 65. Rees, Fulke Greville, 64. 66. Greville, Dedication, 12. 67. Ibid., 24, 37. 68. Ibid., 21, 68. 69. Ibid., 68– 69. 70. Greville was forced into retirement from 1604 to 1612, when the death of his longtime enemy Secretary of State Robert Cecil made it possible for him to resume political office. He is believed to have written the Dedication during

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this period and to have undertaken major revisions of his plays, which he likely began writing in the 1590s as part of the Senecan experiments of the Pembroke circle (Wilkes, “Textual Introduction,” 12). The textual history of Mustapha is somewhat complex, but the particular argument I make here is unaffected by Greville’s revisions over time. An unauthorized, incomplete, and anonymous quarto appeared in 1609, the only work of Greville’s to be published in his lifetime aside from occasional lyrics in songbooks (Wilkes, “Textual Introduction,” 1:9). This version differs in some important respects from the folio version published after Greville’s death in 1633. All citations of the play will be from Wilkes, Complete Poems and Plays, vol. 1, which uses the Warwick MSS (a six-volume set of scribal manuscripts prepared under Greville’s supervision) as its foundation text. This version of the play reflects a late stage in Mustapha’s development. 71. Rees, Fulke Greville, 65. 72. Shuger, Habits of Thought, 215. See also Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, ch. 6. Norbrook argues that Mustapha and indeed all of Greville’s works advocate a kind of “voluntary servitude” in the face of intractable religious and political corruption. 73. Following Wilkes, I read this chorus as the final chorus of the play. The Chorus Sacerdotum, which closes the play in the 1633 edition, was interpolated during printing (Wilkes, introduction to Mustapha, 1:203). 74. Sidney’s corpse provoked an outpouring of literary encomia not to be seen again until the execution of Charles I. See Baker-Smith, “Sidney’s Death.” Ronald Strickland, “Pageantry and Poetry as Discourse,” argues that Sidney’s funeral, both in its execution and in its literary representation, subverted the social hierarchies typically communicated by Elizabethan funeral pageantry; that Sidney’s technical status as a commoner and the heavy involvement of foreigners and non-aristocrats in the ceremonial transformed what was traditionally a display of aristocratic hegemony into a ritualized class struggle; and that the new medium of the broadside elegy granted a new measure of interpretative power to lower status readers. Cf. Goldring, “Funeral of Sir Philip Sidney.” For a description of the event, see Bos, “Sidney’s Funeral Portrayed.” The verses produced in honor of Sidney are collected in Colainne and Godshalk, eds., Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney. 75. Arthur Marotti has argued that publication of Sidney’s Works in 1598 “fundamentally changed the culture’s attitudes toward the printing of the secular lyrics of individual writers, lessening the social disapproval of such texts and helping to incorporate what had essentially been regarded as literary ephemera into the body of durable canonical texts” (Manuscript, Print, 229– 30). 76. See Bowers, “ ‘What Is the Meaning,” and Herman, “Bastard Children of Tyranny.”

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Chapter 2. The Sound of Silence 1. See the introduction to Weller and Ferguson’s edition of Mariam and the Life (“Tragedie of Mariam”) for manuscript sources and first dates of publication. All citations to Mariam will be to this edition. Kegl has pointed out that it might be more accurate to characterize Mariam as the “first extant — and extended— original English drama published by a woman” rather than as the first drama published by a woman (“Theaters, Households,” 136). Jane Lumley’s translation of Iphigenia in Aulis and Mary Sidney’s translation of Marc Antoine preceded Mariam, as did Mary Sidney’s original, sixty-line dramatic dialogue, Thenot and Piers, which was performed as part of an entertainment for the queen in 1592 and printed in 1602 (139). 2. Earlier feminist readings of Mariam that tend to focus heavily on the character of Mariam and on her resemblance to the Elizabeth Cary of the Life include S. Fisher, “Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny”; Beilin, Redeeming Eve, ch. 6; Travitsky, “Feme Covert”; and Ferguson, “Running On.” 3. Raber, “Gender and the Political Subject” and Dramatic Difference, ch. 4; Shannon, “Tragedie of Mariam” and Privacy, Playreading, ch. 3; Findlay, Williams, and Hodgson-Wright, “Play Is Ready”; and Acheson, “Outrage Your Face.” Lamb, “Myth of the Countess,” has pointed out that the term circle is problematic in relation to the dramatic writings associated with Mary Sidney. Following Straznicky (“Profane Stoical Paradoxes,” 105), I use the term loosely here to refer to those writings influenced by the literary commitments of the Sidneys. 4. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, one chapter of which (“Allegories of Imperial Subjection”) builds on Ferguson’s own earlier work on Mariam and on other historicist treatments of the play: see esp. Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, 149– 91; Ferguson, “Spectre of Resistance”; Kemp, “Family Is a Little Commonwealth”; N. Miller, “Domestic Politics”; Clarke, “This Domestic Kingdome”; Iwanisziw, “Conscience”; Kegl, “Theaters, Households”; Zimmerman, “Disaffection, Dissimulation”; Bennett, “Female Performativity”; and R. Green, “Ears Prejudicate.” 5. The Life has also benefited in recent years from being read on its own terms. Dolan, for example, contextualizes it within the conventions of Catholic life-writing, particularly as written by, for, and about recusant women (“Reading, Work”); and Warren reads it as part of a continuous tradition of “embodied” female piety stretching from Margery Kempe to Anna Trapnel (Embodied Word, chap. 4). 6. My argument here takes its cue from Shuger’s groundbreaking study of the embeddedness of English censorship law in the Christian notion of charity (Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, esp. chs. 4 – 6). Her examination of the long

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influence of Christianized injuria law (a Roman category of laws protecting the dignity and integrity of both individual and social “selves”) on English censorship laws and practices suggests how “privacy” might function in this context as a situation-appropriate means of charitable engagement with the body politic rather than as segregation from “public” discourse. 7. See especially Straznicky, “Profane Stoical Paradoxes”; Raber, “Gender and the Political Subject” and Dramatic Difference, ch. 4; Shannon, “Tragedie of Mariam” and Privacy, Playreading, ch. 3. 8. According to Augustine, God has ordained that “by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual” (On Christian Doctrine 1.4). For Augustine, language (particularly but not exclusively that of scripture) enjoys special status as a vehicle of divine revelation because of Christ’s incarnation as the Logos. For an account of its emotional effects on the reader/ believer, see On Christian Doctrine 2.7. 9. As one particularly prominent example, Jacobus de Voragine’s ubiquitous thirteenth-century legendary, the Legenda Aurea, lists the exemplarity of saints as only one of six possible reasons for recording and circulating their vitae. According to Jacobus, the primary value of saints’ lives is not their capacity to inspire more and less literal imitations of Christ’s life and passion (although that is clearly seen as highly desirable), but rather their Logos-like ability to bridge the distance between heaven and earth: sancti enim de nobis in coelo festum faciunt, gaudium enim est angelis Dei et animabus sanctis super uno peccatore poenitentiam agente. Ut igitur iis vicissitudinem rependamus justum est, ut, quia ipsi de nobis festum agunt in coelis, et nos de ipsis festum agamus in terris. . . . cum enim sanctos honoramus, tunc nostram rem agimus et nostrum honorem procuramus, quia corum festivitas est nostra dignitas. Nam cum honoramus fratres nostros, et honoramus nos ipsos, caritas namque facit omnia esse communia; omnia quidem nostra sunt coelestia, terrestria et aeterna. (Legenda aurea, 720 – 21) ——— [The saints make festival in heaven over us, for there is joy before the angels of God and holy souls over one sinner doing penance, and so we should make a fair return by celebrating their feasts on earth. . . . When we honor the saints, we are taking care of our own interests and procuring our own honor. Their feast day honors us. When we pay tribute to our brothers, we honor ourselves, since love makes all things to be in common, and all things are ours, in heaven, on earth, and in eternity.] (Golden Legend, 2:274) 10. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1.35.

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11. I cite Foxe parenthetically from the 1583 edition as represented in Acts and Monuments Online. All quotations are taken from the prefatory section entitled “The Utilitie of This Story,” some version of which appeared in all four of the major editions undertaken in Foxe’s lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583). 12. Freeman has characterized this shift as a more explicit patterning of the martyr after Christ, observing that the Foxean martyr is valorized not for asceticism or virginity but for a particular kind of heroism under duress (introduction to Martyrs and Martyrdom, 20). 13. For a careful study of the role of the miraculous in English Protestant martyrology, see Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, ch. 3. 14. E.g., Monta, Martyrdom and Literature; T. Anderson and Netzley, Acts of Reading. 15. Freeman, “Imitatio Christi,” 36. 16. See esp. Erasmus, Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake. 17. See Rhodes, “English Books of Martyrs.” Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, ch. 3, and Freeman, introduction to Martyrs and Martyrdom, discuss the convergence of Catholic and Protestant martyrologies on a single, shared, “heroic” model of martyrdom patterned on the behavior of Christ. 18. As quoted in Rhodes, “English Books of Martyrs,” 11. 19. In recusant literary culture, pious but less-than-saintly figures are explicitly praised for their accessibility. As Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon, puts it in his introduction to his life of Lady Magdalen Browne, Viscountess Montague, “As men, for the most part, do rather admire than climb the highest mountains, who yet by the lowness of little hills are invited to ascend, so more do commend than imitate the virtues of famous saints”; he has chosen his subject in hopes that “they who despair to imitate the admirable sanctity of S. Mary Magdalen, may see themselves capable to attain the piety of Magdalen Viscountess Montague” (Life of the Lady Magdalen, 4 – 5). For a fuller treatment of women’s Catholic biography in post-Reformation England, see Dolan, “Reading, Work.” 20. Campbell marks the Appellate Controversy of 1594 as the beginning of this shift (Intellectual Struggle, 26– 27). Bossy, English Catholic Community, 35– 48, gives a detailed account of the complicated rivalries among Jesuit, Benedictine, and secular priests on the English Mission. For a recent history of Catholic communities in England, with particular emphasis on the role of aristocratic Catholic families, see Questier, Catholicism and Community. 21. Barbour points out the centrality of critiquing and reimagining this myth in seventeenth-century English literary culture and finds the literature of the period to be marked by “a deep-seated fear that Protestant valor is lapsing” (Literature and Religious Culture, 12).

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22. While early interpretations of Mariam usually read silence as purely oppressive, recent studies have taken a more nuanced view; see esp. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, ch. 6; Zimmerman, “Disaffection, Dissimulation”; and R. Green, “Ears Prejudicate.” As Lukyi shows, however, representations of silence in the period, particularly in relation to women, tend to be overdetermined rather than readily interpretable as either repressive or subversive (“Moving Rhetoricke,” ch. 1). 23. Weller and Ferguson, introduction to “Tragedy of Mariam,” 7. 24. Ibid., 5. 25. See esp. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, ch. 6, and Iwanisziw, “Conscience.” 26. Josephus provides two somewhat conflicting accounts of this relationship, one in the Jewish Wars and another in Antiquities of the Jews. Cary seems to have relied exclusively on the version in Antiquities, which focuses on Herod’s execution of Mariam and her supposed lover, Sohemus (Weller and Ferguson, introduction to “Tragedy of Mariam,” 17). 27. Although Catholic convert Thomas Lodge’s English translation of Josephus was not published until 1602, Cary’s readers would have been basically familiar with her subject matter, as it probably circulated in manuscript before this date (Weller and Ferguson, introduction to “Tragedy of Mariam,” 18). In her most recent treatment of Mariam, Ferguson links Lodge’s translation of Josephus to contemporary debates about equivocation, particularly in relation to the predicament of English Catholics, and explores the implications of these debates for Cary’s adaptation of her source material (Dido’s Daughters, 268). The character of Herod (sometimes a conflation of three historical Herods) was a favorite on the medieval and early modern stage, and Cary’s treatment of the Herod-Mariam story reflects the influence of two distinct dramatic traditions that had grown up around him in England and on the Continent (Valency, Tragedies of Herod and Mariame, 33). In the popular mystery cycles, Herod most often appears as the slaughterer of the Innocents, someone whose spectacular downfall at the end of the play foreshadows the triumph of good over evil accomplished by the advent and passion of Christ. In the elite, neo-Senecan drama, he is the archetypal tyrant, whose tragic end exemplifies the fickleness of fortune and the limits of monarchical power (Weller and Ferguson, introduction to “Tragedy of Mariam,” 23). 28. Lodovico Dolce’s Marianna (ca. 1565) is largely concerned with the trajectory of Herod’s jealous rage, which eventually destroys his entire family. In Hans Sachs’s Tragedia . . . der Wütrich König Herodes . . . (1552), Marianne dies by the end of the second act, and the main action is the dynastic struggle between Herod and her sons. Alexandre Hardy’s Mariamne (1600) focuses on Herod’s psychological torment as he struggles to reconcile the requirements of statecraft with his genuine love for his wife. See Valency, Tragedies of Herod and Mariame.

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29. Beilin first pointed out the Christ imagery surrounding the character of Mariam (Redeeming Eve, 170 – 72). 30. See esp. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, ch. 6. 31. Ferguson reads these lines as potentially equivocal. Noting that the word “lord” is printed “Lord” in the 1613 edition, she suggests that the “one” a good wife should divulge her thoughts to here is God, not her husband (Dido’s Daughters, 297). 32. See Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient. For aristocratic women, like Mariam, the association between chastity and silence in conduct literature for women was particularly problematic because it conflicted with the courtly ideal of eloquence (see Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady, ch. 7; Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Ideology of Conduct; Amussen, Ordered Society). 33. Lake with Questier, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, xxvi. 34. Sir John Davies’s dedication to Cary of The Muses Sacrifice is most frequently cited as evidence of Cary’s involvement with the Sidney circle (Straznicky, “Profane Stoical Paradoxes,” 107). However, Cary had other associations that are equally suggestive. Most important of these is her relationship with Michael Drayton, friend of Samuel Daniel, public admirer of Philip and Mary Sidney, and friend of Thomas Lodge. In 1597, Drayton dedicated two of his Heroicall Epistles to Cary (107). Bernard Newdigate has suggested that Drayton served for a time as Cary’s tutor; if so, it may be through Drayton that she became involved in the literary activities of the Sidney circle (108). Eleven other dramas are categorized as Sidnean closet dramas: The Tragedy of Antony (1590), trans. Mary Sidney; The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594) and Philotas (1604), by Samuel Daniel; Cornelia (1594), trans. Thomas Kyd; The Tragicomedi of the Vertuous Octavia (1598), by Samuel Brandon; Mustapha (1596) and Alaham (1601), by Fulke Greville; and Darius, Croesus, The Alexandrean Tragedy, and Julius Caesar, or The Monarchicke Tragedies (1603– 7), by William Alexander (Shannon, “Tragedy of Mariam,” 144). 35. On political themes in Garnier’s dramas, see Jondorf, Robert Garnier, chs. 2– 6, and Witherspoon, Influence of Robert Garnier. 36. For example, although Greville writes that his tragedies “trace out the highways of ambitious governors, and . . . show in the practice of life that the more audacity, advantage and good success such sovereignties have, the more they hasten to their own desolation and ruin,” he makes it clear that the purpose of his work is not to instruct the governors but to offer moral guidance “to those only that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world” (quoted in Straznicky, “Profane Stoical Paradoxes,” 111). 37. Straznicky, “Profane Stoical Paradoxes,” 117– 24. Joel Davis’s reading of Fulke Greville’s unfinished prose epistle, “Letter to an Honourable Lady,” offers

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a more nuanced analysis of this privatizing impulse. He argues that Greville uses the role of “wife” to distance ethical discourse from the discourses of politics and history (“Presidents to Themselves”). 38. Straznicky, “Profane Stoical Paradoxes,” 124. 39. Beilin has argued that Lodge’s translation of Josephus, which includes a running “countdown” in the margins of the text marking the number of years between events in the history and Christ’s birth, suggests how Josephus’s text could have functioned in Catholic circles as a kind of source code for allegorical and prophetic interpretations of current events (Redeeming Eve, 165). Ferguson builds on Beilin’s work, linking the play’s thematic engagement with the ethical complexities of empire (an issue also addressed by Straznicky) to a distinctly “Catholic” reading, in which “England is part of a spiritual empire ruled by the pope, in God’s name and centered in Rome” (Dido’s Daughters, 271). In such a reading, where Herod is “the allegorical double for the king who sought to divorce England from Rome,” the play is suffused with a sense of “eschatological urgency” (271). 40. As Bennett points out, Mariam’s protestations imply that she knows how to “frame disguise” and has done so in the past (“Female Performativity,” 300). Furthermore, Mariam’s capacity for self-deception renders her claim to transparency suspect. See also Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, ch. 6. 41. Saints Cecilia, Dorothea, Juliana, Barbara, Christina, Margaret, Katherine, and Lucy are prominent members of the group of eloquent preReformation female martyrs. For an interesting treatment of the survival of the virgin-versus-magistrate motif in early modern literature, see Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints, ch. 5. 42. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom. Knott characterizes the Protestant formula of “bold speaking” followed by “patient suffering” as a way of acting out against Catholic ceremonialism and authoritarianism (8 and 13; cf. 50, 69, and 73). See also Hughes, Reformation in England. According to Hughes, the typical Marian martyr is characterized by his “burning zeal for the Scriptures and for his right to possess them in his own tongue and to guide his life by what he makes out to be their meaning — his zeal for the right, which he also claims and exercises, to denounce as criminal, blasphemous, anti-Christian, and hateful to God, and to uproot and destroy by every means in his power, whatever, in his judgment, does not accord with the Scriptures” (2:274). Kolb makes a similar observation about Lutheran martyrology. According to Kolb, “Emphasis on bold confession of the Word of God became to a large extent the saintly activity of the Lutheran Reformation” (For All the Saints, 9). 43. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 50 – 51.

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44. Ibid., 13. Knott uses Foxe’s account of the martyrdom of John Rogers to illustrate some of the rhetorical strategies at work in Foxe’s reconstructed dialogues (see ibid., ch. 1). 45. Huggarde, Displaying of the Protestantes, 50r– v. 46. Persons, Christian Directory, 572– 73. 47. Persons, Treatise, 1:266. 48. Allen, True, Sincere, and Modest Defence, 140. 49. Monta, Martyrdom and Literature, 3. 50. As Monta has pointed out, church authorities made a similar effort to construe the Foxean martyrs as good citizens. Actes and Monuments’ later incarnations were abridged and revised to deemphasize its subversive potential (ibid., 42). 51. Ibid., 24 – 25. 52. Monta argues that English Catholic martyrologies placed special emphasis on the legibility of Catholic martyrdom. This assertion of an unproblematic relationship between bodily sign and transcendent referent served to counter the charge of treason and to complement the emphasis of the Catholic mission on the distinctiveness of the Catholic sacrament (ibid., 24). 53. The association of silence or passivity with Stoical heroism is fairly straightforward in Sidnean closet drama. However, these associations are far less stable in other neo-Senecan dramas of the period. For a thorough treatment of the multivalence of neo-Stoicism in early modern drama, see Braden, Renaissance Tragedy. Chow, Stoicism in Renaissance English Literature, and Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics, more generally treat the ambivalence surrounding neo-Stoicism in early modern literature. Aggeler, “Sparkes of Holy Things,” and Marceau, Stoicism and St. Francis de Sales, discuss the relationship between neo-Stoicism and Catholic and Protestant theology. 54. See Lake and Questier’s account of the political calculations possibly informing Campion’s confrontations with the authorities (“Puritans, Papists,” 600 – 606). 55. In his address to the reader, Alfield announces that the purpose of his account is to counter the “slanders” of Campion’s enemies with “a lively Image of resolute martirs, constantly professing their faith and belief, resolutely disclaiming from all treasons and treacheries falslie intended against them: and loyaly behaving themselves towards our queene and country who as they were in their lives lanterns of piety and vertue so in their deathes made themselves paternes and examples for all good Christian subjects to follow” (True Reporte, [A1]v). 56. Ibid., E3r.

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57. See, e.g., Munday, Discoverie of Edmund Campion. On Campion’s centrality in English Catholic martyrology, see McCoog, “Flower of Oxford”; Williams, “Campion”; and Kilroy, Edmund Campion. 58. Monta argues that the emphasis of English Catholic martyrological discourse on the transparency of the martyrs’ intentions complements the emphasis of English Catholic polemic on the distinctively Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and the honoring of saints (Martyrdom and Literature, 23). 59. According to Knott, one-fifth of the 275 Marian martyrs identified by Foxe were women (Discourses of Martyrdom, 52). In contrast, the vast majority of Catholic martyrs were male. It is important, however, not to underestimate the impact Catholic women had within the domestic sphere. As Bossy was among the first to point out, the home was the center of Catholic practice in England after the Reformation (English Catholic Community, ch. 7). Much important work has been done on the role of Catholic women in household Catholicism; see esp. Willen, “Women and Religion,” and Rowlands, “Recusant Women.” Rowlands emphasizes that married women played a vital role in the survival of Catholicism because their status afforded them some protection from recusancy laws—although the duty of ensuring religious conformity was believed to lie with the head of the household, it was difficult to hold men accountable for the crimes of their wives, so many husbands conformed in order to protect the family property while their wives maintained a Catholic household— and traces the steps of English law to grapple with this problem from 1560 to 1640. On the centrality of Catholic women in English Catholic print culture, see Dolan, “Reading, Work.” 60. Sullivan notes that the outspokenness of Protestant women is often emphasized in Catholic attacks on Protestant willfulness (Dismembered Rhetoric, 93, with discussion of English Catholic martyrologies in ch. 5). 61. For this view of Askew, see King, “Godly Woman.” 62. Matchinske gives a detailed account of the very different social and political contexts within which these two stories unfold (Writing, Gender, and State, chs. 1– 2). More recently, Peters has foregrounded the similarities between these two figures in the popular imagination, observing that popular representations of Askew tend to emphasize her feminine dependence rather than her outspokenness (Patterns of Piety, ch. 11). 63. Askew’s conviction is based on the Six Articles of 1539, which designate as a heretic all persons who “publishe preache teach say affirme declare dispute argue or hold any opynion” against transubstantiation. She also violated the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, which outlawed public Bible reading for women (Beilin, Examinations of Anne Askew, xxv and xxvi). Clithrow’s conviction resulted not from her priest-harboring itself but from her refusal to plead

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to a charge of it. Under English law, the refusal to plead to a criminal charge was punishable by pressing to death, peine forte et dur (Mush, “Life of Margaret Clithrow,” 3:438 n.). Mush attributes her refusal to a desire to avoid incriminating others. For the full account, see 3:333– 440. 64. Matchinske, Writing, Gender, and State, 69. 65. E.g., Southwell, Marie Magdalen’s Funeral Teares. For thorough treatment of the importance of this tradition in Protestant and Catholic thought, see Sullivan, Dismembered Rhetoric, ch. 4, and Shuger, Renaissance Bible, ch. 5. 66. Cleopatra functions throughout as a kind of ethical foil for Mariam, who looks down on her for using her wit and beauty to control powerful men (Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, ch. 6). Like Salome, Cleopatra also functions as an important marker of racial difference in the text. Both women are used to set off Mariam’s physical and spiritual “whiteness”; see Callaghan, “Re-reading.” 67. Graphina is not mentioned at all by Raber, Straznicky, or Shannon. In their edition of the play, Weller and Ferguson simply note her “submissively virtuous femininity” (introduction to “Tragedy of Miriam,” 39). More recently, Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, ch. 6, has radically revised her earlier characterization of Graphina as a flat character, reading her telling silences as part of a broader thematic engagement with the ethics of equivocation. Florby’s treatment of Cary’s career as a translator and historian links the etymology of Graphina’s name to Cary’s authorial identity (“Bridging the Gaps”). 68. Cf. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, 289. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 284. 71. For a more detailed account of the legal status of early modern married women, see Travitsky, “Feme Covert.” 72. Rowlands, “Recusant Women,” 161. 73. Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, 141– 42. 74. Ibid., 334. 75. Ibid., 3:382. 76. Dolan, “Reading, Work,” 330. 77. Straznicky carefully traces the complex relationship between “public” and “private” in Sidnean closet drama. As she puts it, “The anti-absolutist discourse that runs through the Sidney plays has led critics to recognize them as inherently political works, works that participate in pivotal ideological debates. But it is equally important that the Sidney closet dramas, Mary Sidney’s and Elizabeth Cary’s among them, are aligned with a closed interpretative community, so that whatever stake they may have in public political discourse is held in balance with— perhaps even authorized by —a distinctly private ethos” (Privacy, Playreading, 50).

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78. Cf. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, 303. 79. Kelly, “Mariam and Early Modern Discourses,” 47. 80. On the Catholic subtext of the Herod-Mariam plot, see Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, ch. 6, and Kelly, “Mariam and Early Modern Discourses.” 81. For a reading of Cary’s Life as a Counter-Reformation Vita, see Long, “The Life as Vita.” 82. Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary, 103 and 108. The Life will be cited from Wolfe’s edition. 83. Ibid., 8– 9. Lucius seems to have been on relatively good terms with his mother up until this incident. He was an advocate of religious toleration, and his home, Great Tew, was a center for religious debates between Protestant and Catholic divines. William Chillingworth was a favorite guest of Lucius, and it was his influence over her sons that prompted Cary to abduct them. The Life provides an account of the gradual deterioration of her relationship with Lucius, who is a historical figure in his own right: he was secretary of state for Charles I and died in one of the first battles of the Civil War at the age of thirty-four. He is perhaps best remembered as the subject of Ben Jonson’s poem, “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison.” For a thorough treatment of the ecumenical intellectual community at Great Tew, see Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture, ch. 2; for biographical information on Lucius Cary, see Weber, Lucius Cary, and Murdock, Sun at Noon. 84. Nelson, “To Informe Thee Aright,” and Florby, “Bridging the Gaps,” contextualize this work within English religious debate. In addition to her letter to her son and the translation of Perron, the Life mentions among Cary’s literary works three saints’ lives (of Mary Magdalene, Agnes, and Elizabeth of Portugal) and “many verses of our Blessed Lady” (141). None of these works survives. 85. For a good introduction to the role of Bible and devotional reading in Protestant ideals of female virtue, see King, “Godly Woman.” 86. Richard Neile (1562 – 1640) was a prominent member of the Laudian faction who became archbishop of York in 1631 (Weller and Ferguson, “Tragedy of Mariam,” 191 n. 25). 87. Quoted in Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 72– 73. 88. Ibid., 92– 93. 89. All but two of Cary’s works (Mariam and her translation of Perron) circulated in manuscript. Straznicky’s treatment of the publication history of Mariam details the ways the two different issues of the play marked its coterie origins and shielded the author from inappropriate intimacies with the larger reading public, while celebrating her literary reputation among more discerning readers (Privacy, Playreading, 65). Even Cary’s translation of Perron is carefully framed. As Nelson

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has pointed out, translation was a “time-honored” strategy for mitigating the potentially subversive impact of an argument: “Couched as it was in terms of a translation of an argument not against Charles but against his father, Cary muted the ways in which her treatise attempted to correct the English Church’s errors” (“To Informe Thee Aright,” 148). On the conformity of Cary’s (sometimes strongly worded) letters to the conventions of aristocratic letter writing, see Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary, 32– 40. 90. D. Foster, “Resurrecting the Author,” 146 n. 8. Foster also claims that Anne preserved many of her mother’s writings, including a copy of the English translation of Blosius that Cary was working on when she died. Barbara Lewalski, too, names Anne as the probable author of the Life (“Writing Women,” 807 n. 34). 91. Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary, 225– 30. Latz also argues for Lucy as the author of the Life on the basis of the fact that the manuscript was found along with Lucy’s vita (“Glow-Worm Light,” 118– 19). 92. Baker became a spiritual adviser for the community in 1624. His first and best known disciple was Dame Gertrude More, granddaughter of Sir Thomas More. Although he left the community in 1633, many of the nuns there (including Anne and Lucy Cary) continued to follow his methods. In 1641, Anne Cary, known as Clementia after her profession, was appointed by Archbishop Vanderburch, along with another disciple of Baker, Dame Catherine Gascoigne, to help the French nuns of St. Lazare in Cambray reform according to Baker’s teachings (Low, Augustine Baker, 131). 93. Spearitt points out that the writings of the Discalced Carmelites (particularly Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross), the French Capuchins (as represented by Fr. Benet Canfield), and the English Benedictine Augustine Baker offered an alternative to the discursive, Counter-Reformation spirituality typified by the Jesuits (“Survival of Mediaeval Spirituality,” 26). Bellenger also characterizes Baker and the Benedictine tradition he represented as an alternative for recusants to Ignatian spirituality (“Augustine Baker,” 49). See also Bossy, English Catholic Community, ch. 7. 94. Baker’s method actually reverses the Ignatian paradigm. According to him, “The will is the guide and the captain, and the understanding doth but attend the will, going whither he goes and following him” (quoted in Haynes, “Augustine Baker,” 164). 95. This process is described in his most influential work, Sancta Sophia: It is impossible for a soul that leads an abstracted life, and diligently pursues internal prayer, to fix continually in meditation, or to rest in any degree of affective prayer; because the nature of such intellectual and spiritual operations

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is to become more and more pure, abstracted, and universal, and to carry the will and affections of the soul still higher and further into God; the activity of the imagination and understanding continually abating, and the activity of the will continually increasing and getting ground upon the understanding, till at last all its operations become so quieted and silenced that they cease, or at least become imperceptible. (Quoted in S. Cressy, Holy Wisdom, 375) 96. Warren, Embodied Word, 66. 97. Ibid., 99. 98. Ibid. 99. Butler, “Father Augustine Baker,” 584. 100. Ibid., 587– 88. This digest was published in 1657 as Sancta Sophia; see Warren, Embodied Word, 98, for an account of the nuns’ struggle to retain possession of Baker’s manuscripts. 101. On the date of the Life, see Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary, 49. 102. Spearitt, “Survival of Mediaeval Spirituality,” 28. 103. Truran, “Present Author,” 77. 104. According to Truran, Baker’s advocacy of affective prayer for women was based, in part, on his belief that “women were not naturally inclined to exercise their rational faculties” (ibid., 74). 105. Wolfe, Elizabeth Cary, 62. 106. The Flemish mystic Louis de Blois (1506– 66), known as Blosius, composed several devotional works, including Institutio spiritualis, Consolatio pusillanimium, Sacellum animae fidelis, and Speculum monachorum (Weller and Ferguson, “Tragedy of Mariam,” 186 n. 10). The Life does not specify which of Blosius’s works Cary was translating.

Chapter 3. The “Book of Virtue” 1. The king’s authorship of the text was questioned almost from the time of its publication. The current critical consensus is that the work was a collaborative effort between Charles I and a close circle of editors, most prominently John Gauden. See Madan, New Bibliography, 126– 63; Wilcher, “What Was the King’s Book For?” and Writing of Royalism, ch. 10. 2. Wheeler, “Eikon Basilike,” 122. See also Madan, New Bibliography. 3. Bush, English Literature, 216. 4. Wheeler, “Eikon Basilike,” 122.

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5. Lacey, Cult of King Charles, 5. Important treatments of Eikon Basilike include Zaller, “Breaking the Vessels”; Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, ch. 5; Guibbory, “Charles’s Prayers”; Sharpe, “Image Doting Rabble” and “So Hard a Text?”; Ferrell, “Kneeling and the Body Politic”; Raymond, “Popular Representations”; Achinstein, “Milton and King Charles”; Corns, “Lovelace, Herrick”; Helgerson, “Milton Reads the King’s Book”; Knott, “Suffering for Truth’s Sake”; David Loewenstein, “Casting Down Imaginations”; and McKnight, “Crucifixion or Apocalypse?” 6. Citations of Eikonoklastes and Milton’s other prose works are to The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (hereafter CPW) and are given parenthetically by volume and page number. 7. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 209. 8. Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 150. 9. Lacey, Cult of King Charles, passim; Zaller, “Breaking the Vessels,” 757– 61. 10. Disagreements about the respective roles of preaching, extrabiblical ceremonies, and set prayers in public worship are as old as the English Reformation itself. This chapter focuses on the period of particularly intense conflicts precipitated by the ceremonialist reforms of William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to 1645. For general history, see esp. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored; also Fincham, Early Stuart Church; Davies, Caroline Captivity; Maltby, Prayer Book and People; and Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature. 11. Madan, New Bibliography, 13, 120 – 21, 168– 70. Madan argues that the four prayers, as printed by Dugard, “possess the undoubted authority of Edward Simmons, one of those most intimate in the counsels of the King” (121). For bibliographic information on separate editions of the Prayers, see 88– 91. 12. Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 167. 13. As Madan points out, the Prayers’ cribbing from Bayly was as controversial in its own day as its inclusion of Pamela’s prayer. Richard Royston, the Eikon’s first printer, first identified Bayly as a source in the third issue of his third edition, prompting the removal of the second prayer from some later editions. In 1650, in the first edition of the Works of King Charles, Royston himself reinstated the prayer from Bayly, removing instead Pamela’s prayer, which by this time had become highly controversial (Madan, New Bibliography, 14). Early royalist defenses of the Prayers argued that Pamela’s prayer, having been adapted for Christian use, was unobjectionable and had most likely been added by a bookseller in any case (120). 14. I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 348– 51. Green hypothesizes that the text was originally targeted at relatively prosperous adults. However, he notes that

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throughout its long career it came to be recommended to diverse audiences, from princes and gentry all the way to young children just learning to read (349– 51). 15. Ibid., 348. I. Green points out that The Practice of Pietie is often “held up as a typical, even archetypal, ‘puritan’ work in the tradition of the works of Becon, Cleaver, and Dod” and characterizes Bayly as a “moderate puritan prelate” (Print and Protestantism, 348). For an earlier discussion of Bayly, see Stranks, Anglican Devotion, 36– 60. 16. This copy, in the National Archive, dates from around 1632 (Madan, New Bibliography, 14). 17. Citations to Bayly’s Practice of Pietie are given parenthetically. 18. I. Green posits that the emphasis of the text on ceremonial conformity and the boundlessness of divine mercy may have been behind an attempt to suppress the work in the 1640s. That effort was unsuccessful, and new editions were published nearly every other year until well into the eighteenth century. The Practice was also translated into Welsh, German, French, Hungarian, Romanian, and Italian. Nearly seventy editions had been published in Germany by 1750, where it is thought to have contributed to the rise of pietism (I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 349). Translations of the text for “gospelizing the Indins in New England” (in 1665 and 1685) can be found through EEBO. 19. I. Green notes the emphasis of most guides on “works,” in part because of the nature of instructional manuals (Print and Protestantism, 21). Wheeler also observes the popularity of set prayers in “Puritan” manuals of devotion (“Eikon Basilike,” 130). 20. See, for example, Perkins, Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified (1596): “We deceive ourselves,” he asserts, “if we thinke that he is onely to bee knowne of us as a redeemer, and not as a spectacle or patterne of all good duties to which we ought to conforme ourselves” (25). Throughout the text, Perkins imagines sanctification as a crucifixion of the flesh. 21. For a summary of Erasmus’s “literary” Christology and its influence on Reformation thought, see Cummings, Literary Culture, ch. 3. 22. For the literary character of English sacramental theology and practice, see Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature, 88– 108. 23. According to James I, the king is not “mere laicus, as both the Papists and Anabaptists would have him,” but “mixed betwixt the ecclesiastical and civil estate.” His secular rule is a literal extension of the divine order, a frontier outpost of the kingdom of heaven. As God’s “lieutenant,” his piety is both a model of religious devotion and a pattern of civil obedience. By “resembling right” the “mighty King divine,” he effects not only his personal salvation but the political and spiritual sal-

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vation of his people, who learn from his good imitatio how to relate to him and the transcendent order he represents ( James I, Basilikon Doron, 160). 24. All biblical citations are taken from the Authorized Version. 25. In Daems and Nelson, Eikon Basilike. Parenthetical citations of Eikon Basilike refer to this edition, and identifications of scriptural sources in the analysis that follows are indebted to its notes. 26. For histories of the propaganda wars surrounding church ceremony from 1624 to 1640, see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, ch. 4; and A. Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic. 27. The second half of the prayer is as follows: Blesse the Churches and kingdoms (wherin we live) with the continuance of peace, justice & true religion. Defend the Kings majesty from all his enemies and grant him a long life in health & all happiness to reign over us. Blesse our gracious Queene Mary Prince Charles the Lady Mary the Lady Elizabeth, and all her princely issue: encrease in them all heroicall gifts and spirituall graces, which may make them fit for those places for which thou hast ordained them. Direct all the Nobilitie, Bishops, Ministers, and Magistrates of this Church and Commonwealth to govern the commons in true religion, justice, obedience & tranquilitie. (138) 28. “Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me” (Isa. 6:6– 8). 29. Prynne’s response to Heylyn’s treatise is entitled A Quench-Coale: A briefe Disquisition and Inquirie, in vvhat place of the Church or Chancell the Lords-table ought to be situated, especially vvhen the Sacrament is administered? (London, 1637). For a treatment of this exchange, see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, ch. 4. 30. Paul’s discussion of martyrdom occurs in verses 35– 39 and reads in full: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted like sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, Nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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31. See especially Knott, “Suffering for Truth’s Sake,” and McKnight, “Crucifixion or Apocalypse?” 32. Annabel Patterson calls the composite (1593) Arcadia “a central Caroline and Civil War text” that achieved “extraordinary significance as a cultural symbol in the court and even the life of Charles I” (Censorship and Interpretation, 24). She argues that the Arcadia functioned as a kind of “disguised discourse” in the period (25) that reinforced the king’s self-image as an aesthetic, as well as religious, reformer: “The efficacy of the text as ideology consisted, and still consists after the Restoration, in its ability to present a balanced and not uncritical account of Caroline history” (181). It works, that is, much like the Eikon, to support a reading of history as infinitely interpretable in purely human terms. In any case, the Arcadia was at “the center of a little renaissance” at court. It was republished in 1627, 1628, 1629, 1633, and 1638 and was dramatized by James Shirley in 1632 and by Henry Gapthorne in 1634 (171; cf. Potter, Secret Rites, ch. 3). For a discussion of the composite Arcadia’s varied readership and largely positive reputation among both conservative and progressive Protestants, see Werth, “Reformation of Romance.” 33. Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 464. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. 34. For Cecropia as a figure for Mary Queen of Scots, see Worden, Sound of Virtue, 172 – 83; and on her similarities to Catherine de Medici, see Greenlaw, “Captivity Episode.” More recently, Brumbaugh, “Cecropia,” has argued for a general association of Cecropia with the Catholic Church and provides a history of the scholarship on Cecropia’s possible real-world analogues. 35. Brumbaugh points out the textual parallels between Sidney’s description of the mob veneration Cecropia elicits and early Protestant satire of the Roman Church as the Whore of Babylon. According to Brumbaugh, Cecropia bears a particularly striking resemblance to Pornopolis in John Foxe’s Christus Triumphans (1556). She argues, “Mob veneration of both Cecropia and Pornopolis is presented as resulting largely from skillful exhibiting of exterior spectacle and splendor” (“Cecropia,” 21). 36. In this sense, Pamela’s devout royal body works much like prayer book piety as described by Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature. Unsurprisingly, Philip Melanchthon also favored a “rhetorical” approach to religious ritual: just as the Word moved the heart through the ears, so the rite moved through the eye. See Aune, To Move the Heart. 37. Derek Alwes suggests how Cecropia’s flatteries and deceptive spectacles might be read as the antitype of Sidnean fiction: rather than delight and teach, they “offer only horror and death” (“To Serve Your Prince,” 160). In any case,

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Cecropia’s solipsism makes it impossible for her to accurately “read” Pamela. As McCanles puts it, her fatal flaw is that she “cannot understand how anyone can act any differently than herself ” (Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World, 75). 38. As many critics have noted, the debate between Pamela and Cecropia reflects Sidney’s engagement with both classical philosophy and Christian apologetics. It has been variously read as a refutation of Epicureanism (Greenlaw, “Captivity Episode”; Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance, 16, 75– 77; and Rose, Heroic Love, 35– 73 and 138– 40); a moderate Platonist/Protestant defense of virtuous pagans (Walker, “Ways of Dealing with Atheists”); and an imitation of Cicero’s De natura deorum (Levinson, “Godlesse Minde”). For a synthesis of these arguments, see Buhler, “Pre-Christian Apologetics.” 39. Kinney is among those who situate Pamela at the center of the unfinished Arcadia. See “Rhetoric and Fiction,” 391. 40. Stillman argues that Sidney would have had exposure to a particularly emphatic “Melanchthonian” version of this aesthetic through his close relationship with Hubert Languet (“Scope of Sidney’s Defence”). 41. Biester, “Pleasant and Terrible Reverence,” suggests that Sidney represents Pamela as evoking an ideal mixture of fear and love, both of which are necessary components of “majesty” as defined by the mirror-for-princes genre. 42. Starke argues that Cecropia’s case for the essential, rather than instrumental, value of Pamela’s “purse” parodies more and less cynical courtly appropriations of Neoplatonic discourses of divine “beauty.” Such a reading sets up Pamela’s affiliation with the Eikon as a corrective to (mis?)readings of Carolinian courtly ceremonial as uncritical, Neoplatonic celebrations of style over substance (Starke, “Majesty of Unconquered Virtue”). Kinney’s treatment of the purse as a “speaking picture” of art is more representative (“Rhetoric and Fiction”). 43. Starke, drawing on the work of Gail David, treats Pamela as the “humanist conscience” of the revised Arcadia, linking her performance in the third book to those of a number of other sixteenth-century English “romance virgins” (including Milton’s Lady) whose combined beauty and eloquence moderates both the Neoplatonic elevation of feminine beauty and the Christian suspicion of female speech (“Majesty of Unconquered Virtue,” 189); see also David, Female Heroism, passim. In any case, Pamela’s reconciliation of surface and essence, piety and pleasure, is of a piece with Sidney’s defense of poetry as a pleasurable vehicle of personal and political reformation. For recent varying views on the (sometimes competing) political, religious, and socioeconomic commitments underlying Sidney’s moderate Protestant poetics, see Sinfield, Faultlines; Lamb, “Exhibiting Class”; Fendler, “Emancipation of the Sign”; Matz, Defending Literature, 56– 87; and Stillman, Philip Sidney.

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44. Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, elucidates the role of the debate surrounding ceremony within broader debates in the period about the relationship of “fallen” human nature and culture to the divine order. See also Shuger, Habits of Thought. 45. Biester, “Pleasant and Terrible Reverence,” traces the Arcadia’s engagement with both classical and contemporary discussions of political spectacle, linking his various “speaking pictures” of majesty to treatments of the topic in Machiavelli’s The Prince, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Cicero’s Of Duties, and Erasmus’s Education of the Christian Prince. He argues that the Arcadia participates in the mirror-for-princes genre, offering aristocratic and royal readers positive and negative exempla for virtuous self-fashioning. 46. As Stillman puts it, freedom from the “twin tyrannies of self-love (man’s original sin) and self-loving sovereign oppressors” was the central message of the Gospel as interpreted by Sidney’s humanist, Philippist mentors (“Deadly Stinging Adders,” 238). 47. Kingsley-Smith has recently argued for the Arcadia as a plea for artistic and religious toleration based, not on the principle of adiophora (in line with Melanchthon and Hooker), but on the inextricability of idolatry from the human experiences of art, worship, and erotic love (“Cupid, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm”). 48. See Worden, Sound of Virtue, 176, for the history of this argument. 49. Mentz, Romance for Sale; cf. Greenhalgh, “Love, Chastity.” 50. Greenhalgh points out that the bodily integrity and legibility of both male and female protagonists are special features of Heliodoran romance (“Love, Chastity,” 23). In this sense Charles’s self-presentation as a legible sign is consistent with the aesthetic of the Aethiopica. 51. In early modern poetic and antipoetic discourse, this analogy is easiest to spot in the frequent association of poetry and romance with femininity and effeminization. The beauties of literary form, like those of the female body, are both seductive and deceptive, with the power to transform reasonable (masculine) readers into (effeminate) slaves to pleasure and passion. This transformation was in turn associated with political disorder. See Herman, Squitter Wits and MuseHaters, chs. 1– 2; Lamb, “Apologizing for Pleasure”; Dolan, “Taking the Pencil”; P. Parker, “On the Tongue”; and Wall, Imprint of Gender. Although similar dangers were associated with the theater (see, e.g., Levine, “Men in Women’s Clothing”), Herman makes a convincing case that antipoetic texts represent these dangers slightly differently, as inherent to the project of literary imitation itself, rather than as an effect of socially and sexually transgressive theatrical spaces and practices (Squitter Wits and Muse-Haters, 15).

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Chapter 4. The Church (P)articulate 1. Lamont is agnostic on the authorship of the tracts, concluding that any of the three men might have been responsible, either singly or in collaboration. He points out that Bastwick and Burton both strongly denied authorship, even after nothing was at stake, and that Prynne did not cite News from Ipswiche in his long list of ecclesiastical writings in 1643 (Marginal Prynne, 38– 39). The current consensus is that Prynne wrote Ipswiche and Burton wrote A Divine Tragedy (D. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, 223). 2. Bastwick, Breife Relation, 22. 3. Quoted in Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 40. See D. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, 226, and Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 139– 43), for retellings of the “execution.” Burton and Prynne both recounted these events in longer autobiographical works: Burton, Narration of the Life, and Prynne, New Discovery. 4. Lamont, Marginal Prynne, 39; D. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, 225. 5. See D. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, 222 – 33; and Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 144. 6. Fuller, Church History of Britain, bk. 11, p. 154. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. The year 1637 was momentous on many fronts. It marked the calling of the Scottish Covenant against the English prayer book, the arrest of John Williams (a combatant, as we will see, in the altar controversy), and a Star Chamber order limiting press freedom (Escobedo, “Invisible Nation,” 198 n. 20). For the relationship of these contexts to Milton’s early work, see Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, ch. 10. 10. For a detailed, recent history of this debate, see Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored. 11. The official position of the Church of England as stated in the Thirtynine Articles (1563) was that communion was a partaking, for true believers, in Christ’s body and blood and also a sign of oneness within the body of Christ. Nonceremonialists were suspicious that the ceremonies enforced by Laud, in addition to being “popish,” were designed to reinforce a hierarchical notion of that body; see Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, 21; cf. D. Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat, ch. 12; Lake, “Laudian Style.” On the other hand, as Guibbory notes, Laudian ceremony was about more than power politics. It also represented the hope for a “corporate Christianity” (Ceremony and Community, 21); see also Shuger, “Society Supernatural.”

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12. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 178. 13. J. Williams, “Copie of the Letter,” 69. 14. Heylyn, Coale from the Altar, 9. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. 15. J. Williams, “Copie of the Letter,” 74. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Prynne, Quench-Coale, 30. 18. Ibid., 33. 19. Prynne, “To the High and Mightie,” 11. (Quench-Coale’s prefatory materials are paginated separately.) 20. Prynne, “To the Christian Reader,” 65– 66. 21. See esp. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists; Davies, Caroline Captivity; Sharpe, Personal Rule. 22. Laud, Relation of the Conference, [c3]r. 23. Prynne, “To the Christian Reader,” 71– 72. 24. Knott, “ ‘Suffering for Truth’s Sake,’ ” 155. Milton’s criticism of Laud on this issue appears in Animadversions (Collected Prose Works [hereafter CPW] 1:678– 79). In response to nonconformist appropriations of the Actes and Monuments, church authorities licensed abridged versions that played down or excised passages that could be subversive (Monta, Martyrdom in Literature, 42). 25. His most provocative reference in this respect is his account of the change in nomenclature (from “Altar” to “Lords Boord”) that marks the transition from the 1549 to the 1552 Prayer Book. Citing Foxe, he portrays this development as a response to bottom-up agitation: “The people being scandalized herewith in Countrey Churches, first beats them [altars] downe de facto, then the supreme Magistrates by a kind of Law puts them down de jure” ( J. Williams, “Copie of the Letter,” 74). 26. Ibid., 71. 27. For Williams’s point, see ibid., 72. 28. Lake and Questier, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 56– 57. 29. See Hill, Antichrist, ch. 1; A. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, ch. 4; and Dolan, Whores of Babylon, ch. 2. 30. Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 55 n. 25. 31. Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 196. 32. Ibid., 231. 33. Prynne, Quench-Coale, 48. Cawdrey goes so far as to call Christ “the Antitype” (Superstitio Superstes, 42). 34. Prynne, “To the High and Mightie,” a2r, 4. 35. Prynne, “To the Christian Reader,” 61– 62.

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36. Bastwick, Letany of John Bastvvick, 11. 37. Ibid., 12. 38. For the context of this image in English Protestant Apocalyptic thought, see Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 34. 39. Burton, For God and the King, 38– 40. Subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically. 40. Unlike the authority of the bishops, which Burton characterizes as alternately seductive and infantilizing, the king’s laws invite a more rational interaction, one that allows for limited participation and interpretation. The “subjection and obedience” owed by subject to king is not arbitrary but “according to his just Laws” (For God and the King, 40), which are analogous to the various covenants governing God’s relationship to his chosen people in the Bible. Quoting Charles’s own father, James I, Burton reminds the king: “As every just King in a setled Kingdome is bound to observe that paction made to his people by his Lawes . . . according to that paction which God made with Noah after the deluge . . . therefore a King governing in a setled Kingdome, leaves to be a King, and degenerates into a Tyrant, as soone as hee leaves off to rule according to his lawes” (40). 41. Heylyn, Briefe and Moderate Answer, a1v– a2r. 42. Prynne, “To the High and Mightie,” 35. 43. Ibid., 7, 15. 44. Ibid., 10. 45. Ibid., 32. 46. Ibid., 40, marginal note. 47. Quoted in Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 171. As Patterson points out, Prynne’s first trial was ostensibly about insulting the queen and inciting insurrection, “but the more subtle, unstated charge was that he had challenged Caroline culture at its heart, attacking as decadent and unchristian the genres in which the court read itself ” (171). 48. Quoted words from Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (a.k.a. Comus), line 37. Citations of Milton’s poems refer to The Riverside Milton. For the relationship of Comus to contemporary debates about court and church ceremonial, see Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, ch. 6, and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 233– 53. 49. Mueller has contextualized Milton’s use of bodily metaphors in Of Reformation within a broader conversation among English nonconformists in the 1640s about the appropriate shape of the church visible, reading Milton’s innovative use of a common set of metaphors as indicative of an innovative take on Calvin’s (Pauline) theology of ingrafting in Christ that offers “an unprecedented role for human agency in and beyond history” (“Embodying Glory,” 10). According to

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Mueller, Milton’s end here is “nothing less than refounding and politicizing the concept of the church as Christ’s body” (24). For general treatments of the “flesh” versus “spirit” motif in Milton’s antiprelatical tracts, see Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, ch. 6, and Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, ch. 5. 50. Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn, ch. 5. Working from a different angle but toward a related set of conclusions is a growing body of scholarship on the productive tension in Milton’s work between more and less racialized and geographically rooted imaginings of the political “body” of the English nation, particularly with respect to the equally slippery literary construct of “empire.” See especially Stevens, “Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism”; Loewenstein and Stevens, Early Modern Nationalism. A foundational work for this line of inquiry is Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. My reading of Eikonoklastes as deconstructive of genetic and martyrological constructions of good imitation is intended, not to reinforce older interpretative dichotomies of “flesh” versus “spirit,” but rather to contribute to Kneidel’s project of uncovering the theological underpinnings of what is in fact a much more complex interaction between the two terms: more specifically, I want to link Milton’s “Janus-Faced” politics and aesthetics to his emphatically literary understanding of the imitation of Christ. 51. Guibbory identifies imitation with royalist and “Anglican” poetics and originality with radical nonceremonialism (“Charles’s Prayers,” 288). My argument below builds on her work to complicate that picture of imitation. 52. Important treatments of Eikonoklastes along these lines include Zaller, “Breaking the Vessels”; Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, ch. 5; Guibbory, “Charles’s Prayers”; Helgerson, “Milton Reads the King’s Book”; Knott, “Suffering for Truth’s Sake”; Loewenstein, “Casting Down Imaginations”; McCoy, Alterations of State, ch. 4; Knoppers, “Paradise Regained ”; Boehrer, “Elementary Structures of Kingship”; and Achinstein, Milton, ch. 4. 53. Corns’s identification of Eikonoklastes as a watershed in Milton’s personal aesthetic has become a critical commonplace. Corns notes that Milton’s prose is markedly plainer after 1649 (Development of Milton’s Prose Style, 57– 65). Trubowitz offers a helpful summation of Milton’s iconoclastic project here and its relationship to his late-career monism: “The poet’s antipathy to dynastic kingship and its organic measures of personal entitlement and social belonging require him to repudiate the body and the traditional body politic and to revalue personal and collective identity in disembodied rather than embodied terms. This is not to say that Milton is not a Monist but to argue . . . that he is a dualist as well. For a variety of surprisingly underanalyzed reasons, Milton wants and needs to integrate spirit and body but also to separate them. . . . In hitherto unrecognized ways, Milton’s shifting perspectives on mind-body, spirit-flesh relations shape his

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formulation of the emergent nation as liminal: corporeal and incorporeal, real and imagined, Hebraic and Christian, exclusive and inclusive” (“Body Politics,” 388– 89). 54. Milton is making use here of a traditional “Norman yoke” motif, the implication being that the English people (i.e., the Anglo Saxons) enjoyed greater freedoms prior to the imposition of “foreign” laws by the invading Normans. For Milton’s engagement with this idea, see Hadfield, “Milton and the Struggle.” 55. See, for example, Smectymnuus, Answer to a Book. This reply to a defense of liturgy and episcopacy written by Bishop Joseph Hall sparked a lengthy and closely followed exchange between Hall and the anonymous group of ministers represented by the acronym “Smectymnuus” that set the stage for Milton’s entry into public debate on these topics. See CPW 1:76– 86. 56. Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 150. 57. Knott, “Suffering for Truth’s Sake,” 162. 58. Patterson, “Paradise Regained.” Patterson traces Milton’s fluctuating attitude toward the genre: from early moderation to growing ambivalence to renewed moderation (in Areopagitica and Paradise Lost) to final rejection in Paradise Regained. Her analysis of Paradise Regained centers on Milton’s emphatic rejection of romance conventions of narrative structure and his equally emphatic rejection of the erotic and the marvelous. My interest here in Milton’s treatment of Pamela and in my brief analysis of Paradise Regained below is in Milton’s rejection of the underlying “body politics” of romance, if you will, the push toward integration of the reader — even the critical reader — into an organic, this-worldly whole. For an important treatment of Milton as continuous with (rather than finally at odds with) romance tradition, see Lewalski, “Milton: Revaluations of Romance.” 59. Patterson, “Paradise Regained,” 194. For Patterson’s full treatment of the role of the Arcadia and Arcadias in the Carolinian aesthetic, see her Censorship and Interpretation, ch. 4. 60. Patterson, “Paradise Regained,” 197. 61. J. Milton, Eikonoklastes, 12. 62. In her discussion of the role of gender in Milton’s notion of civic virtue, Gina Hausknecht offers a nuanced reading of Milton’s remarkably nonbiological notion of masculinity in the prose tracts. As Hausknecht puts it, “Reason is a property of mature masculinity and masculinity is itself a virtue, characteristic not of biological sex but of merit” (20). She cites Eikonoklastes as the most “masculinist” of Milton’s prose tracts, the only one, in fact, in which the word feminine is used pejoratively — not surprisingly, in relation to Charles’s dependence on his wife. According to Hausknecht, “The royalist conception of manly behavior is itself imitative of women,” who are linked throughout the text with foreignness and

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Catholicism. As she goes on to show, the concern here is not essential femininity per se but the seductive, “Circean” power of beautiful surfaces (27). 63. For Protestant treatments of this traditional epithet, see Haskin, “Milton’s Portrait of Mary.” Haskin treats the role of Mary as Word Bearer in Paradise Regained. 64. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 227 and 231. 65. Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, 192– 93. 66. Knoppers, “Paradise Regained,” 104. 67. Ibid., 105. 68. The phrase “form of goodness” is from Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 227. The reading of Truth’s broken body as an organizing metaphor for Milton’s aesthetic after his break with Presbyterianism is widespread. For especially relevant articulations, see Ainsworth, Milton, ch. 1; Knott, “Suffering for Truth’s Sake”; Simpson, Spiritual Architecture, ch. 1; and Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, ch. 4. Haskin reads Milton’s habit of “gathering” truth without a this-worldly hope of symmetry or completion as an important revision to the “analogy of faith” central to Protestant interpretative practices (Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, ch. 3). For a recent reading that complicates this critical commonplace, see Greteman, “Exactest Proportion,” whose analysis of the mathematical imagery at work in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Areopagitica cautions against the tendency to read Milton’s awareness of the gap between sign and referent as evidence of his abandonment of the project of reconciling them. As Greteman puts it, “While Milton’s works appear fully conscious of a profound gap between sign and signified that testifies to the incommensurability of human and divine understanding, they often work to limit that gap. Or perhaps more accurately, they assert that it can be navigated by reason in an act of truth-revealing interpretation” (399). 69. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 227. 70. Ainsworth, Milton, 16. Trubowitz describes a similar process at work in the last books of Paradise Lost, when Adam is taught to “read” the history and politics of the material world as “shadowy types” of truth (“Body Politics,” 401– 4). Achinstein discusses how the hermeneutic of Areopagitica shapes a good citizen capable of participating in an emergent public sphere (Milton, 58 – 70), but as Ainsworth points out, Achinstein does not address how that process might also shape a good Christian (Milton, 19). 71. Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 45. 72. Ibid., 163; Lewalski, “Milton and Idolatry,” contextualizes this reading of Eikonoklastes within a larger discussion of idolatry in Milton’s work. 73. See Patterson’s reading of Paradise Regained as a last attempt at reconciliation with the genre of romance (“Paradise Regained”). For a more positive assess-

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ment of Milton’s engagement with the genre of romance, see Lewalski, “Milton: Revaluations of Romance.” Knoppers reads Paradise Regained as a rewriting of Eikonoklastes framed in response to the revitalization of the cult of Charles I after the Restoration and the republication of his various martyrologies, including Eikon Basilike (“Paradise Regained ”); see also McCoy, Alterations of State, ch. 4. For treatments of the rise and gradual decline of the cult of Charles I after the Restoration, see Zaller, “Breaking the Vessels”; and Lacey, Cult of King Charles, chs. 5– 7. 74. Many critics have characterized Paradise Regained as a hermeneutic contest between Jesus and Satan, among them Radzinowicz, “Paradise Regained ”; Krook, “Hermeneutics of Opposition”; Rushdy, “Of Paradise Regained ”; Goldsmith, “Muting of Satan.” Perhaps most famously, Fish, “Things and Actions Indifferent,” reads the contest as one-sided, with Jesus’s victory over Satan accomplished by his refusing the “temptation” of any action at all, including interpretation. This understanding of the main conflict in Paradise Regained is related to debate as to whether the text ultimately advances what Herman has called a “poetics of certitude,” in which a single sense of scripture and Milton’s reading of it is advanced, or a “poetics of incertitude” that allows for multivocality and also implicitly for action in the world, as the “poetics of certitude” tends to be utterly interiorized as well as static (Destabilizing Milton, 157). Herman summarizes scholarship on this question in “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Found.” 75. Simpson traces the “literary ecclesiology” implicit in Paradise Regained to Milton’s acceptance (in Of Christian Doctrine) of Erasmus’s translation of logos as sermo rather than verbum. Simpson argues that the relationship of Milton’s biblical hermeneutics to Erasmus’s rhetorical theology has been understudied in favor of an emphasis on his debts to patristic and Reformation sources (Spiritual Architecture, 9– 10). See Stephen Honeygosky for a detailed study of the theological roots of Milton’s notion of the visible and invisible churches. Countering older arguments that Milton gave up on the visible church, Honeygosky argues for his continued engagement with radical notions of the visible church that did value the externals of worship and the material realm, “so long as they were not forced or rigid, and so long as they were always subordinated to the invisible and internal realm” (Milton’s House of God, 15). 76. Radzinowicz frames this “hermeneutic combat” as a debate over the correct interpretation of priesthood and sonship in the Psalms (“Paradise Regained ”); Bryson reads the debate as Jesus’s rejection not only of earthly kingship but also of his Father’s oppressive model of heavenly kingship (Tyranny of Heaven, ch. 5). 77. Netzley has recently articulated an important hermeneutic corollary to this argument. If, as I argue, Milton’s Jesus incarnates a more radical interpretation of sermo, he also models a new ethics of reading, or rather rereading, in

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which the point is not any particular interpretation but the cultivation of a charitable interior disposition of sustained attentiveness, both to the possibilities of any given act of reading and to one’s own responsibilities as an interpreter. As he puts it in his analysis of Jesus’s final temptation on the pinnacle of the temple, “Any interpretive authority that exists at this moment is the result of a specific reading activity, not a privileged textual site or source” (Netzley, “How Reading Works,” 150). Netzley’s argument here also helps to clarify the subtle but important distinction between my understanding of Jesus as sermo and Fish’s reading of Jesus as the ambassador of adiophora. Jesus is not so much “indifferent” as liminal. To quote Netzley, “Paradise Regained does not only ask readers to penetrate difference in a quest for sameness . . . but also to reread sameness” (150), not only (as Netzley argues) as an act of personal discipline that shapes a “dispositional ethics” (160), but also (I would argue) as a continually creative unfolding of God’s Word in time. 78. Simpson, Spiritual Architecture, ch. 1; see also Rumrich’s discussion of Jesus’s nature in Milton’s heterodox theology (“Milton’s Theanthropos”); and Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, ch. 6. 79. Although he does not explore its implications for Paradise Regained, Kneidel’s reading of the Pauline “domestic economy” at work in Milton’s prose tracts is relevant here. As Kneidel shows, Milton’s understanding of both the family and the body politic is deeply influenced by the rhetoric of adoptive sonship at work in the Pauline epistles (perhaps most spectacularly in Gal. 3:36– 39, where sonship erases all distinctions of gender, class, and culture). As he points out, the “operative sign” of adoptive sonship is imitation (Rethinking the Turn, 140). 80. Jesus’s response to Satan in this final temptation scene is a famous critical crux for Milton scholars and has inspired a variety of competing interpretations, the central question being whether or not Jesus’s words, “it is written / Tempt not the Lord thy God,” should be read as an assertion of sonship (which in turn can be construed either as a definitive victory over Satan or as taking Satan’s bait). Lewalski reads this moment as both a victory over Satan and a moment of selfdiscovery (Milton’s Brief Epic, 303– 21). Fish finds in it the ultimate refusal of interpretation that reveals even the words of scripture as adiophora (“Things and Actions Indifferent,” 88– 89). Netzley emphasizes the “dispositional ethics” produced in the reader by Jesus’s refusal to proffer an interpretation (“How Reading Works,” 163). 81. Fish, “Things and Actions Indifferent.” 82. Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 49. 83. Ibid., 147. 84. Simpson, Spiritual Architecture, 17.

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85. Milton’s version of this scene is especially interesting in light of his scorn for Charles I’s appropriation of it in Eikon Basilike to portray Parliament’s handling of him as irreverent. Eikonoklastes takes the king to task for his presumption in identifying himself with Christ (CPW 3:405). 86. For critics’ complaints of this model’s inaccessibility, see, e.g., A. Fisher, “Why Is Paradise Regained So Cold?”; Forsyth, “Having Done All to Stand.” Fish’s argument that plot is the primary temptation of Paradise Regained has been the most influential version of this point of view (“Things and Actions Indifferent”). 87. Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, ch. 5. Gay offers a similar reading that establishes Mary as a model of a community-building hermeneutic centered on meditation on and sharing of the Word (“What He Meant I Mus’d”). Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle traces Milton’s debts to Bonaventure’s Life of Christ, reading Paradise Regained as a reclamation of the Virgin Mary for Protestant piety (“Home to Mother”). 88. See esp. Trubowitz, “Body Politics”; Stevens, “Milton’s Janus-Faced Nationalism”; and Loewenstein, “Milton’s Nationalism.” 89. Trubowitz’s characterization of this quality in Paradise Lost is equally applicable here: “Milton’s epic allows us to witness that imperceptible moment when the nation emerges as an abstract modern community —but a community that despite its new symbolic or spiritual ties cannot entirely do away with the body, nature, and the concreteness of Hebraic scriptural history. . . . Milton looks forward to the universal triumph of the spiritually emancipated, post-apocalyptic Christian England. However, he also never forgets the terrible price that Reformation exacts in this-world terms: historical amnesia, deracination, exile, the loss of visceral connection among generations and between spouses” (“Body Politics,” 392). Even the metaphor of adoption is not immune. Kneidel traces its role in constructing new bodies visible, with the capacity to be just as oppressive as the old ones Milton rejected (Rethinking the Turn, 141). 90. For Milton’s ambivalent engagement with Judaism, see Stevens, “JanusFaced Nationalism”; Rosenblatt, Torah and the Law; Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, ch. 6; and Shoulson, Milton and the Rabbis. For Milton as a forerunner of Habermas, see Gus, “Enlightenment as Process,” and Binney, “Milton, Locke.”

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Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Ward, John O. “Cicero and Quintilian.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, edited by Glyn P. Norton, 77– 87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Warren, Nancy Bradley. The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350 –1700. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. ———. “Tudor Religious Cultures in Practice: The Piety and Politics of Grace Mildmay and Her Circle.” Literature Compass 3, no. 5 (2006): 1011– 43. Waswo, Richard. Language and Meaning in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. ———. “Theories of Language.” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, edited by Glyn P. Norton, 25–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Webbe, William. A Discourse of English Poetrie. In Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 1, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 226–302. 1904. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Weber, Kurt. Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. Weiner, Andrew. Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Weller, Barry, and Margaret W. Ferguson, eds. “The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry” with “The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Werth, Tiffany. “The Reformation of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s The New Arcadia,” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 1 (2010): 33– 55. Wheeler, Elizabeth Skerpan. “Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation.” In The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, edited by Thomas N. Corns, 122– 40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Wilcher, Robert. “What Was the King’s Book For? The Evolution of Eikon Basilike.” Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 218– 28. ———. The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wilkes, G. A. Introduction to Mustapha, by Fulke Greville. In The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville Lord Brooke (1554 – 1628) in Two Volumes, edited by G. A. Wilkes, vol. 1. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.

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Willen, Diane. “Women and Religion in Early Modern England.” In Women in Reformation and Counter Reformation Europe, edited by Sherrin Marshall, 164 – 88. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Williams, John. “A Copie of the Letter Written to the Vicar of Gr: Against the Placing of the Communion Table at the East End of the Chancell.” In Coale From the Altar, by Peter Heylyn. London, 1637. Digital facsimile viewed through EEBO. Williams, Michael E. “Campion and the English Continental Seminaries.” In The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, edited by Thomas McCoog, 285–99. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1996. Wilson, Thomas. The Arte of Rhetorique. Edited by Thomas J. Derrick. New York: Garland, 1982. Witherspoon, Alexander. The Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924. Wolfe, Heather, ed. Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters. Renaissance Texts from Manuscript 4. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 230. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. Worden, Blair. The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Zaller, Robert. “Breaking the Vessels: The Desacralization of Monarchy in Early Modern England.” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 757– 78. Zimmerman, Shari A. “Disaffection, Dissimulation, and the Uncertain Ground of Silent Dismission: Juxtaposing John Milton and Elizabeth Cary.” English Literary History 66 (1999): 553– 89.

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Abraham, 24 Achinstein, Sharon, 238n70 Actes and Monuments (Foxe), 70 – 72, 83– 84, 87, 166– 68, 221n50, 234n24 Acts 7, 127, 135– 36 Aethopian History (Heliodorus), 153– 54 Alfield, Thomas, 85– 87, 221n55 Allen, William, 84 altar controversy, 161– 81 Bastwick on, 171– 72 Burton on, 160, 172– 77, 235n40 Foxe and, 166– 67 imitatio Christi and, 161, 162– 63, 165– 66 issues in, 160 – 64 Laud and, 162, 165, 172 martyrdom and, 166– 69 maternity image and, 168– 74 Prynne on, 160, 164, 165, 170

Alwes, Derek, 230n37 Anderson, Judith, 29 Andrewes, Lancelot, 3 Anglican Church. See Church of England Apostles, 41 Appellate Controversy (1594), 217n20 Arcadia (Sidney), 30, 59, 141, 149, 189 on body, 151– 53 on desire, 150, 151– 52 on idolatry, 151, 232n47 Milton on, 187– 88 Pamela’s prayer in, 111, 146– 49, 231nn41– 43 prefatory letter to, 57– 58 treatment of painter in, 56, 213n56 Areopagitica (Milton), 192, 198 Ascham, Roger, 25 Askew, Anne, 87– 88, 222nn62– 63 Augustine, 70, 216n8

267

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Baker, Augustine, 104, 225n94, 226n104 Cary and, 102– 3, 225n92 on divine presence, 102, 225n95 Bancroft, Richard, 17, 20, 207n10 Barbour, Reid, 217n21 Bastwick, John, 14, 157, 160, 233n1 on altar controversy, 171– 72 public pillorying of, 157– 60 Baxter, Richard, 22 Bayly, Lewis, 127, 227n13 The Practice of Pietie, 14, 112– 13, 114 – 29, 227n14, 228nn15– 18 “Prayer for Morning,” 127, 128– 29, 229n27 Beilin, Elaine V., 220n39 Bennett, Alexandra, 220n40 Berry, Edward, 213n56 Bible biblical literalism and, 196 Kempis work and, 22, 23 public reading of, 88, 222n63 See also specific Bible chapters Biester, James, 231n41 Black, Joseph, 207n9 blood, 166 Blosius (Louis de Blois), 104, 226n106 body Bayly on, 114 – 29, 149 ceremonialist polemic around, 159– 81 fallen, 117– 18, 120 female, 55, 78 integrity of, 68, 232n50 Kempis on, 34 language and, 53– 54, 141, 156 martyrdom and, 130 – 31 as metaphor, 44, 45, 156, 179– 80, 235n49, 236n50 Milton on, 151– 53, 179, 180, 184 – 85, 199, 235n49, 236n53

Index

of monarch, 129– 40, 149, 150, 155, 184 – 85 Pamela’s prayer and, 141– 42 persecution of, 174 – 75, 177 poetry and, 52, 53 sanctification and, 115– 18, 119, 121, 149 Sidney on, 52, 53– 56 as sign, 15, 54, 133, 149, 160, 178 soul and, 26, 146, 153, 155, 178 body of Christ, 12, 102, 121, 160, 199 church and, 170, 233n11, 235n49 Hemmingsen on, 45, 53 Milton on, 179, 197, 235n49 monarch and, 46, 123–24 Boehrer, Bruce, 184 bold speech, 77– 78, 83– 84, 220n42 Book of Common Prayer, 13, 20, 234n25 Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 14, 71 Bossy, John, 222n59 Bouwsma, William, 209n28 Bownde, Nicholas, 20 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 27– 28, 34, 241n87 Brumbaugh, Barbara, 230n35 Bryson, Michael, 239n76 Bunny, Edmund, 2, 21– 22 Burton, Henry, 14, 157, 160, 233n1 on altar controversy, 160, 172– 77, 235n40 public pillorying of, 157– 60 Bush, Douglas, 107– 8 Cable, Lana, 109, 112, 184, 193– 94, 197 Caesar, Philippus, 19 Calvinism, 162 Bayly and, 112, 114, 127 Sidney and, 9, 49, 53 Campbell, Kenneth L., 217n20

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Campion, Edmund, 85– 87, 221n55 Cary, Anne, 101– 2, 103, 225n90 Cary, Elizabeth, 9, 14, 65– 105 biographical information, 94, 96 Catholicism of, 75– 76, 94, 98– 99, 101, 104, 105 daughters of, 99, 101– 2 Her Life biography of, 12– 13, 65, 66, 94 – 105, 215n5, 225nn90 – 91 as heroic author, 94 – 105 Mariam similarity to, 65, 82– 83, 88– 95 The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron, 95, 224n89 in Sidney circle, 69, 219n34 as subversive, 75, 77, 101, 104 The Tragedy of Mariam, 12– 13, 65– 67, 74 – 83, 89– 95, 215n1, 224n89 Cary, Sir Henry, 94, 95, 98, 101 Cary, Lucius, 94, 95, 224n83 Cary, Lucy, 101– 2, 104, 225n91 Catholic Church and Catholicism, 15, 41, 82, 222n59 Cary and, 75– 76, 94, 98– 99, 101, 104, 105 citizenship and, 85, 221n50 fracturing of, 73– 74 martyrdom and, 82, 84 – 87, 89 “quietness” and, 85 as Whore of Babylon, 169, 170 – 72, 173, 230n35 Cecil, Robert, 213n70 Cecropia, 143– 47, 150, 230nn34 – 35, 230n37 Pamela debate with, 145– 47, 231n38 charity, 75, 89, 100, 101, 102, 177 Charles I, 107– 14 downfall and martyrdom of, 14, 107, 131

269

Eikon Basilike (Charles I), 14, 107– 11, 129– 40, 151, 154 – 55, 189– 91, 194 imitatio Christi by, 13, 110 – 11, 129, 134 – 35, 140 – 42, 148, 154, 155, 194 imitation of authors by, 14, 105, 142, 154 – 55 on martyrdom, 129– 30, 134, 137– 40 Milton on, 108– 9, 114, 120, 150, 182– 83, 186– 87, 189– 91, 194, 241n85 Prayers, 111– 12, 154, 227n11, 227n13 on sacramental kingship, 129, 165 chastity, 80 – 81, 219n32 childbirth, 191 Chillingworth, William, 99– 100, 224n83 Christ, 6, 24, 31, 198 church and, 44, 235n49 Eikon Basilike imagery of, 133– 34 Milton depiction of, 195– 96, 197, 198, 239n74 as sermo, 194, 240n77 See also imitatio Christi Church Militant, 12, 40 – 49, 105, 160 – 61, 197 Christ and, 44, 235n49 Hemmingsen on, 42– 46 “inside-out” notion of, 179 role of, 48 Church of England, 2, 13, 98, 171, 202n5 ceremonialism and, 123, 160 – 61, 164 – 66 dissent and, 203n6, 207nn9– 10, 233n11 Foxe on, 167– 68

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Church of England (cont.) as “mother church,” 168, 169, 170, 171, 172– 73, 191– 92 state and, 49, 51 See also altar controversy Cicero, 6– 7, 25 Ciceronianus (Erasmus), 6– 7 Cleopatra, 88, 223n66 Clithrow, Margaret, 87– 88, 92, 222n63 closet drama, 69, 81, 104, 223n77 clothing, 29– 30 Coale from the Altar (Heylyn), 162– 63, 166, 167– 69 Colet, John, 6, 204n20 Collinson, Patrick, 202n6, 207n10 Communion, 20, 162, 233n11 conversion, 43, 94, 95, 98– 99, 101 1 Corinthians 13:2, 177 Corns, Thomas N., 109, 236n53 Cosin, John, 178 Counter-Reformation, 21, 73, 82, 102, 225n93 Crane, David, 208n20 Cranmer, Thomas, 167 Cummings, Brian, 3, 4, 6, 16 Cyrus, 51, 60, 68, 212n47 Davenant, William, 8 David, 44, 48 adultery by, 23– 24, 48, 52 imitation of, 138– 39 Davies, Sir John, 219n34 decorum, 56– 57, 69 Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (Greville), 58– 61, 62– 63, 213n70 Defence of Poesy (Sidney), 18, 49– 63, 191 Dent, Arthur, 1– 2 Derrick, Thomas J., 204n20

Index

desire, 34, 55, 151– 52, 189– 90 language and, 31– 32, 35, 45, 141, 210n31 Sidney on, 197, 212n49 Word and, 32– 33, 38, 39– 40 devotional manuals, 114, 228n19 dialogue, 36– 40, 210n36 Dickens, A. G., 202n6 Discourse of English Poetrie, A (Webbe), 8 Displaying of the Protestantes, The (Huggarde), 84 divine monarchy, 131– 32, 137 divine revelation, 67, 131, 155, 170, 216n8 divine tragedie lately acted, A, 157, 233n1 Doctrine of the Sabbath (Bownde), 20 Dolan, Frances, 91, 215n5 Dolce, Lodovico, 218n28 Dollimore, Jonathan, 58– 59, 62 Drayton, Michael, 219n34 Dudley, Robert, 207n10 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 206n7 Dyke, Daniel, 2 Earl of Strafford, 134, 140 Ecclesiastes 10:17, 46, 47– 48 Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker), 98 Eikon Basilike (Charles I), 129– 40 authorship question of, 226n1 Christ imagery in, 133– 34, 137– 38, 139– 40 editions and translations, 107 frontispiece of, 109, 189 idolatry in, 133, 151 imitatio Christi in, 110 – 11, 140, 148, 194 as imitation, 14, 154 – 55 impact and legacy of, 107– 8, 113– 14

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martyrology in, 129– 30, 137– 40, 184 Milton response to, 108– 9, 114, 120, 150, 186– 87, 189– 91, 194, 241n85 Pamela’s prayer in, 140 – 43, 147, 149, 155, 156, 189– 91, 194 – 95 popularity of, 107– 8, 110 The Practice of Pietie and, 112 scholarly treatments of, 108– 10 Eikonoklastes (Milton), 160, 181– 95, 199, 236n53 on Eikon Basilike, 108, 111– 12, 150, 189– 91 on gender, 189, 237n62 on iconophilia, 113, 119 imitatio Christi by, 183, 185– 86, 187, 194, 236n50 on literary language, 188– 89, 194 on martyrdom, 14, 183– 84, 236n50 on prayer, 111– 12, 190 – 91, 198 Elizabeth I, 60, 210n33 eloquence, 7, 79, 100 Cary on, 13, 77, 78, 88– 89, 94 ceremonialist polemic and, 165, 176 Erasmus model of, 7, 27– 28 imitatio and, 14, 34, 37, 39, 40, 69, 110 Kempis on, 34, 39 martyrdom and, 71, 83, 85, 86 Milton on, 13– 14, 199 Pamela’s prayer and, 143, 145 Rogers on, 12– 13, 38, 39, 40, 45 of sermo, 90 – 91 Sidney on, 12– 13, 50, 55, 57, 66 Embodied Texts (Warren), 16 English Martyrologe (Wilson), 73 Erasmus, Desiderius, 6, 25, 72, 197 influence of, 9, 204n20 on literary theory and rhetoric, 6– 8, 208n21, 239n75

271

Eucharist, 12, 165 Bayly on, 116, 123 as human sign, 162– 63 Kempis on, 32, 36– 37 Exodus, 125, 175– 76 Faith of the Church Militant, The, 42 Ferguson, Margaret, 65, 90, 218n27, 219n31, 220n39 Field, John, 207n10 First booke of the Christian exercise (Persons), 2, 22 Fish, Stanley, 239n74, 240n80, 241n86 flesh, 131, 197, 199 body and, 150, 160 desire and, 45, 189– 90 fallen, 122, 153 language and, 56, 152, 155 spirit and, 105, 132, 134 Word and, 121, 133, 194 For God and the King (Burton), 160, 172– 77, 235n40 Formula of Concord (1577), 211n40 Foster, Donald, 102, 225n90 Fourth Booke of the Imitation of Christ, The, 35– 36 Foxe, John Actes and Monuments, 70 – 72, 83– 84, 87, 166– 68, 234n24 Book of Martyrs, 14, 71 Freeman, Thomas, 217n12 Fuller, Thomas, 158 Garnier, Robert, 81 Gauden, John, 226n1 Gay, David, 241n87 gender, 15, 169, 172, 189 Cary on, 77, 82– 83 Milton on, 187– 88, 189, 237n62 Pamela and, 148– 49, 231n43 See also women

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Gerson, Jean, 72 “Godlie Preface,” 26, 27, 28– 29, 208n20 Gosson, Stephen, 206n7 Grammar and Grace (Cummings), 3 Granada, Luis de, 3 Graphina, 89– 93, 95– 96, 223n67 Green, Ian, 2– 3, 8, 114, 227n14, 228n15, 228n18 Greene, Thomas M., 4 – 5, 201n4, 203n13 Greenhalgh, Darlene C., 232n50 Greteman, Blaine, 238n68 Greville, Fulke, 66, 68, 214n72, 219n36 Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, 58– 61, 62– 63, 213n70 Mustapha, 61– 62, 81, 214n70 Guibbory, Achsah, 191, 232n44, 236n51 Habermann, Johann, 18 Habermas, Jürgen, 15, 199 hagiography, 72– 73, 82, 87, 94– 95, 104 See also sacred biography Hake, Edward, 207n16 Hall, Joseph, 237n55 Hardy, Alexandre, 218n28 Haskin, Dayton, 238n68 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 17, 207n10 Hausknecht, Gina, 237n62 Heliodorus, 153– 54, 198, 232n50 Helots, 151 Hemmingsen, Niels, 18, 19, 211n40 on role of Church, 42– 46, 48– 49 Henrietta Maria, 189 Herbert, Mary Sidney, 66, 68 Herman, Peter C., 239n74 Herod the Great, 76– 77, 79– 81, 82– 83, 218nn27– 28 Heylyn, Peter, 128, 162– 63, 166, 167– 69 Hezekiah, 136– 37

Index

Honeygosky, Stephen, 239n75 Hooker, Richard, 98 Hotham, Sir John, 183– 84 Hudson, Elizabeth, 202n5 Huggarde, Miles, 84 Hughes, Phillip, 220n42 humanism, 8, 55 Protestant, 3, 12, 53, 210n36 signification and, 43, 73 idolatry, 163, 173, 194 Charles I and, 109, 133, 155, 182– 83 imitation and, 8, 9– 10 Milton on, 109, 151, 182– 83, 232n47 imitatio Christi altar controversy and, 161, 162– 63, 165– 66 Bayly on, 116, 148 body and, 45, 46, 189– 90 Burton on, 173, 174, 177 by Cary, 66, 68, 69, 74, 76 Catholic vs. Protestant practices of, 105 by Charles I, 13– 14, 110 – 11, 129, 134 – 35, 140 – 42, 148, 154, 155, 194 dialogic model of, 36– 40 eloquence and, 14, 34, 37, 39, 40, 69, 110 Erasmus on, 7– 8 Eucharist and, 162– 63 gendering of, 187– 88 good vs. bad, 8, 34, 41– 42, 71, 105, 173, 174, 177, 180, 185– 86, 190 – 91, 194, 197, 236n50 historiographical approaches to, 2, 202n6 humanist, 22, 194 – 95 idolatry and, 8, 9– 10 Kempis model of, 34, 37– 38

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language and, 4 – 6, 14, 44 – 45, 50 literary imitation and, 2, 6, 26 martyrdom and, 62, 177 medieval vs. early modern conceptions of, 4, 15, 203n12 by Milton, 4, 9, 13– 14, 157, 161, 180, 185– 88, 190 – 94, 196– 98, 236n50 as miracle, 27, 192 Pamela and, 142– 43, 150 Pauline, 130 piety and, 12, 24 – 25, 27, 43, 202n5 poetry and, 51, 197 Puritanism and, 2, 201n5 by Rogers, 19, 22– 41, 49 royalist views of, 123–24, 236n51 sacred biography and, 69– 70 scholarship on, 2, 201n5 scope of early modern, 1– 3, 201n4 secular, 3, 23, 49 as sermo, 21, 142– 43 by Sidney, 9, 21, 63, 93 as sign and signifier, 3– 4, 5, 12, 21, 25– 27, 29– 30, 160, 193, 194, 203n18 as sign of salvation, 29– 30 Word of God and, 11– 12, 27, 40 – 41, 44 – 46, 50, 163, 166, 169 writing as, 40 – 41 Imitatio Christi (Kempis), 22– 40 admonitions to silence in, 27– 28, 35, 210n32 on desire, 31– 32, 34, 38 on Eucharist, 32, 36– 37 Hake translation of, 207n16 as imitatio, 25, 34, 37– 38 on language and Word, 28, 31– 34, 35, 38, 209n29 Latin version of, 208n25 popularity and relevance of, 1– 2 Rogers revisioning of, 19, 21– 25, 39, 46

273

on self-subjugation, 46– 47 Soule-Man dialogue in, 37– 40 imitation, literary and poetic, 3, 4 – 5, 10, 11, 58 attacks on, 19, 206n7 decorum and, 56– 57 Greville defense of, 59 imitatio Christi and, 2, 6, 26 Lucretia’s body and, 54 – 56 Sidnean vision of, 21, 50 – 52, 56, 58, 63, 67, 83 Incarnation, 160, 216n8 miracle of, 34, 43, 62, 130, 196, 197 of Word of God, 49, 70 incarnational discourse and power, 67, 70, 71, 102 poetics and, 50, 67, 93, 102, 191 interpretatio scripti, 211n43 Irish rebellion, 136 Isaiah 6:5, 128, 229n28 Jackson, Ken, 15 James I Basilikon Doron, 124, 228n23 Book of Sports, 179 Jed, Stephanie, 55 Jesuits, 102, 225n93 John of the Cross, 103 Josephus, 76, 218nn26– 27, 220n39 Judgment Day, 118– 19 Kempis, Thomas à. See Imitatio Christi (Kempis) 2 Kings 18, 136– 37 kingship. See monarchy and kingship Kingsley-Smith, Jane, 232n47 Kinney, Arthur F., 206n7 Kneidel, Gregory, 16, 180, 236n50, 240n79, 241n89 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 192 Knott, John R., 222n59 Kolb, Robert, 220n42

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Lacey, Andrew, 108, 110 Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters, 12– 13, 65, 66, 94 – 105, 215n5 authorship of, 102, 104, 225nn90– 91 Cary biographical information in, 94, 96 on Cary conversion, 98– 99 Chillingworth treatment in, 99– 100 hagiographic style in, 94 – 95, 104 See also Cary, Elizabeth Lake, Peter, 15, 79 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 52– 53 Lamont, William M., 233n1 language, 4, 9– 10, 100 body and, 53– 54, 141, 156 Cary on, 13, 78, 79, 96, 101 desire and, 31– 32, 35, 45, 141, 210n31 fleshliness of, 56, 152, 155 hope of, 55 imitatio Christi and, 4 – 6, 14, 44 – 45, 50 incarnational power of, 35, 101 as instrument of truth, 82, 97 Kempis on, 28, 31– 34, 35, 209n29 Milton on, 188– 89, 191, 193, 194, 195 Protestantism’s preoccupation with, 30 Rogers on, 40, 42 Sidney on, 31, 51, 53– 54, 56 Word of God and, 30, 33– 34, 42, 50 Languet, Hubert, 8, 18, 231n40 Lanham, Richard, 4 Lathrop, Henry Burrowes, 204n20 Latimer, Hugh, 167 Latz, Dorothy, 225n91 Laud, William, 130, 158, 160, 166, 227n10 altar controversy and, 162, 165, 172 Letany, The (Bastwick), 160, 171– 72

Index

Lewalski, Barbara, 240n80 literary imitation. See imitation, literary and poetic Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Rosendale), 16, 205n31 Livy, 54 – 55 Lodge, Thomas, 218n27, 220n39 logos, 50, 70, 196, 205n31, 216n8, 239n75 London, William, 171 love, 34, 150, 209n30 self-love, 151, 232n46 Lucretia, 54 – 56, 192 Lukyi, Christian, 218n22 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 15 Mack, Peter, 212n43 Madan, Francis, 227n11, 227n13 Maltby, Judith, 202n6 Marie Magdalen’s Funeral Teares (Southwell), 3 Marotti, Arthur, 15, 214n75 Marprelate Tracts, 207nn9– 10 martyrdom and martyrology, 14, 62, 142, 177, 220n42 altar controversy and, 166– 69 bold speech and, 77– 78, 83– 85, 220n42 Cary on, 67, 74, 81– 93, 104 Catholic, 82, 83– 88, 221n52, 222nn58– 59 Charles I on, 129– 30, 134, 137– 40 Foxe and, 71– 72, 83– 84, 217n12 Milton on, 14, 180, 183– 84, 192 Pauline exhortation to, 129– 30, 229n30 Romans 8 on, 130 – 31 of Sidney, 14, 60, 155 suffering and, 177n83 women and, 83, 87– 88, 220n41, 222n59

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Mary, 198, 241n87 Mary Queen of Scots, 187 Mary Tudor, 187 Mass, 45, 105, 165 Matchinske, Megan, 88, 222n62 maternity, 168– 74, 179, 191– 92 Matz, Robert, 52, 53 McGee, J. Sears, 201n5 Melanchthon, Philip, 212n43, 230n36, 231n40 Sidney and, 9, 18, 49– 50 Mentz, Steve, 153– 54 Mercy and Truth, or Charity Maintained by Catholics (Wilson), 100 metaphor, 140, 172, 193 body as, 44, 45, 156, 179– 80, 235n49, 236n50 Milton, John aesthetic of, 161, 187, 189, 193, 195, 197 on body, 179– 80, 184 – 85, 235n49, 236n50 on Charles I and Eikon Basilike, 108– 9, 114, 120, 129, 150, 182– 83, 186– 87, 189– 91, 194, 241n85 in debate over church ceremony, 179– 81 on eloquence, 13– 14, 199 on gender, 187– 88, 189, 237n62 on idolatry, 109, 151, 182– 83, 232n47 imitatio of, 4, 9, 13– 14, 157, 161, 180, 185– 88, 190 – 94, 196– 98, 236n50 on martyrdom, 14, 180, 183– 84, 192 on monarchy and kingship, 150, 152, 181– 85, 237n54 on Pamela’s prayer, 13, 111– 12, 189– 91 Pauline universalism of, 199, 240n79 as poet, 190, 193, 199

275

on romance, 14, 188, 195, 237n58 on Satan, 8, 195, 196, 197, 204n29, 239n74, 240n80 on sermo, 161, 193, 199 on signs and signifiers, 189, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198, 238n68 on truth, 187, 192, 198, 238n68 on Word of God, 191, 192 Milton, John, works Areopagitica, 192, 198 Eikonoklastes, 14, 108, 111– 12, 150, 160, 181– 95, 198– 99, 236n53, 237n62 Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, 179 Of Prelatical Episcopacy, 192 Of Reformation, 179– 80, 189, 235n49 Paradise Lost, 8, 204n29, 238n70, 241n89 Paradise Regained, 14, 195, 196, 237n58, 239nn74 – 77 miracles, 50, 55, 70, 71, 116, 192 attribution and authentication of, 72– 73 imitatio Christi as, 27, 192 of the Incarnation, 34, 43, 62, 130, 196, 197 of sanctification and salvation, 28, 43– 44 monarchy and kingship, 10, 218n27, 235n40 Bayly on, 123– 25 body and, 129– 40, 149, 150, 155, 184 – 85 body of Christ and, 46, 123–24 divine guidance and, 131– 32, 137 James I on, 124, 228n23 Milton on, 150, 152, 181– 85, 237n54 patriarchy and, 184 – 85 sacramental kingship, 129, 165 Word of God and, 173

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Monta, Susannah, 85, 221nn50 – 52, 222n58 Montaigne, Michel de, 4 Moses, 24, 124 – 25, 175 Mosse, Miles, 41 Mueller, Janel, 235n49 Mush, John, 223n63 Mustapha (Greville), 61– 62, 81, 214n70 naming, 131 Narveson, Kate, 36 Neile, Richard, 98, 224n86 Nelson, Karen L., 224n89 Netzley, Ryan, 239n77 News from Ipswiche, 157– 58, 233n1 Of Prayer and Mediation (Granada), 3 Pamela, 152, 154, 194, 231n41 Cecrophia debate with, 145– 47, 231n38 gender of, 148– 49, 231n43 Pamela’s prayer, 113, 140 – 56, 231n42 Cecrophia and, 143– 46 Eikon Basilike on, 140 – 43, 147, 149, 155, 156, 189– 91, 194 – 95 eloquence and, 143, 145 Milton on, 13, 111– 12, 189– 91 Sidney on, 111, 146– 49, 231nn41– 43 Paraclesis, 6 Paradise Lost (Milton), 8, 204n29, 238n70, 241n89 Paradise Regained (Milton), 14, 195, 196, 237n58, 239nn74 – 77 Passion, 43, 76, 135, 164 paternity, 172, 174, 184 – 85 Patterson, Annabel, 187, 188– 89, 235n47 Paul, 180, 240n79 and martyrdom, 129– 30, 229n30

Index

Perkins, William, 2, 228n20 Persons, Robert, 2, 22, 84 piety, 6, 10, 114, 123– 25, 131 Bayly on, 113, 122– 29 Cary on, 96, 97– 99, 101 female, 87– 88, 91 imitatio Christi and, 12, 24 – 25, 27, 43, 201n5 of king, 108, 113– 14, 124 – 25 of Pamela, 144 – 45, 230n36 poetry and, 9 privacy and, 97– 98, 101– 2 suffering and, 86– 87, 94 – 95, 108 Word of God and, 110, 155 plagiarism, 142, 187– 88, 194 Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven (Dent), 1– 2 Plato, 43 pleasure bodily, 119– 20, 122 piety and, 231n43 Sidney problematizing of, 52– 54 poetry and poetics, 67, 152, 193, 197, 206n7 anxiety surrounding, 52– 53 effeminacy and, 53, 212n49 incarnational quality of, 50, 191 piety and, 9 playacting and, 156, 232n51 seductive power of, 10, 150 Sidney and, 9, 12, 50 – 52, 53, 56, 58, 63, 68, 191, 192– 93, 211n43 See also imitation, literary and poetic politics, 51– 52, 62, 68, 149, 197 Practice of Piety, The (Bayly), 114 – 29, 148, 228n15 body’s role in, 114 – 15, 119– 20 Charles I and, 14, 112– 13 frontispiece of, 125, 126 polemical thrust of, 127– 28 “Prayer for Morning” appendix to, 127, 128– 29, 229n27

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reception and audience of, 227n14, 228n18 wide appeal of, 112, 113 Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 8 prayer affective, 102, 103, 225n95, 226n104 Bayly on, 123, 127, 128– 29, 229n27 Book of Common Prayer, 13, 20, 234n25 Milton on, 111– 12, 190 – 91, 193, 198 silent and contemplative, 103, 104 See also altar controversy; Pamela’s prayer “Prayer for Morning,” 127, 128– 29, 229n27 Prayers (Charles I), 111– 12, 154, 227n11, 227n13 prelacy, 185– 86 Presbyterianism, 20, 128, 136, 207n7, 207n10, 238n68 Preston, John, 2 private and privacy, 103, 105, 215n6 Cary on, 68, 69, 74 – 75, 82, 91– 93, 96, 101– 2 piety and, 97– 98, 101– 2 public and, 92, 96, 104, 223n77 in Sidnean poetics, 69, 81, 89, 93 Prynne, William, 14, 127, 128, 185, 229n29, 235n47 on altar controversy, 160, 164, 165, 170 and authorship of tracts, 157, 233n1 Histriomatix, 178 public pillorying of, 157– 60 Quench-Coale, 160, 164, 165, 170, 177– 78 “To the Christian Reader,” 171 Psalms, 44, 48, 139, 239n76 Puritanism, 2, 131, 132, 135, 201n5 Pyrocles, 151– 52

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Questier, Michael, 15, 79 “quietness,” 85, 89, 91 Raber, Karen, 65– 66 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 239n76 recusancy, 76, 91– 92, 222n58 redemption, 104, 130, 139, 154 Rees, Joan, 61 Reformation, 3, 73, 82, 166– 67, 202n6, 205n31, 241n89 See also Counter-Reformation Religion of Protestants, The (Chillingworth), 100 resistance, 75, 76– 77, 89, 92, 93, 173 Resurrection, 116, 118– 19 Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern England (Kneidel), 16, 236n50, 240n79 Reynolds, Edward, 2 Richards, Jennifer, 210n36 Ridley, Nicholas, 167, 168 Rigolot, Francois, 203n12 Rivius, Johannes, 18 Rogers, Thomas, 3, 22– 40 Bancroft and Hatton ties with, 17, 207n10 Bible as source for, 22, 23 biography and writings, 17– 18, 205n2 on Church Militant, 42, 197 on eloquence, 12– 13, 38, 39, 40, 45 Kempis translation and revisioning by, 1, 11, 19, 21– 25, 39, 46 on language and writing, 40 – 42, 211n39 Miles Christianus, 40 – 41 polemical concerns of, 20 preface to A General Discourse Against the Damnable Sect of Userers, 18– 19 preface to The Faith of the Church Militant, 42

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Rogers, Thomas (cont.) “Second Epistle Concerning the Translation and Correction of this Booke,” 24 – 25 Sidney and, 18, 19– 20 on translation, 25 on Word of God, 30, 36– 37, 39– 41, 42 romance Heliodoran, 153– 54, 198, 232n50 Milton and, 14, 188, 195, 237n58 Romans 8, 129– 31, 134 – 35, 140 Rosendale, Timothy, 13, 16, 205n31 Royston, Richard, 113, 227n13 sacraments, 93, 116, 120, 123, 163 sacred biography, 67, 69– 70, 91 See also hagiography sacred/secular binary, 3, 21, 59, 89, 113 saints, 70, 216n9 Salome, 78– 80, 88, 90 salvation, 3, 28, 43– 44, 116, 119, 130 imitatio Christi as sign of, 29– 30 sanctification, 43– 44, 126, 130, 193, 228n20 body and, 115– 18, 119, 149 signification and, 3, 117 Satan, 8, 135, 195, 196, 197, 204n29, 239n74, 240n80 Schoole of Abuse (Gosson), 206n7 secular imitatio, 3, 23, 49 sacred and, 3, 21, 59, 89, 113 Seffray, Thomas, 20 sermo, 21, 110 – 11, 195, 239n77 Erasmian, 195, 239n75 Milton on, 161, 193, 199 representationality of, 142– 43, 195 Shannon, Laurie, 65– 66 Sharpe, Kevin, 15 Shell, Alison, 91 Shuger, Debora, 15, 55, 62, 63, 215n6

Index

Sibbes, Richard, 2 Sidney, Philip Arcadia, 30, 56, 57– 59, 111, 141– 55, 213n56, 231n43, 232n47 biography, 17, 205n1 on body, 52, 53– 56 Calvinism and, 9, 43, 53 circle of, 49, 69, 219n34 Defence of Poesy, 18, 56– 57, 191 on desire, 197, 212n49 on eloquence, 12– 13, 50, 55, 57, 66 on government and rulership, 51, 149– 50 Greville on, 58– 60, 61, 62– 63 imitative ethos of, 4, 49– 50, 66, 68, 141 legacy of, 10 – 11, 14, 63, 155 on Lucretia, 54 – 56 on martyrdom and martyrology, 14, 60, 155 martyr’s death of, 14, 60, 62, 155, 214n74 Melanchthon and, 9, 18, 49– 50, 231n40 as national legend, 62, 214n75 on Pamela’s prayer, 111, 146– 49, 231nn41– 43 poetics of, 9, 50 – 52, 53, 56, 58, 63, 68, 191, 192– 93, 211n43 politics and, 51– 52, 62, 68, 197 Rogers and, 18, 19– 20 on signs and signifiers, 12, 54, 141, 147 signs and signifiers, 48, 75, 121, 126, 165, 205n31 body as, 15, 54, 133, 149, 160, 178 Christ and, 162– 63, 170, 195, 198 imitability of, 5, 21, 54, 203n18 imitatio Christi as, 5, 12, 25– 27, 29– 30, 160, 193, 194 kingship and, 133, 137– 38, 149, 154, 198

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martyrdom as, 139 Milton on, 189, 192, 193, 194, 197, 198, 238n68 reality and, 54, 74 referents’ relation to, 28, 43, 45, 49, 59, 141, 155, 166, 178, 221n52, 238n68 sacred and secular categories of, 21 salvation and, 3, 29– 30 sanctification and, 3, 117 Sidney on, 12, 54, 141, 147 transcendental significance of, 7, 140 Word of God as, 49, 169, 174 silence Kempis admonitions to, 27– 28, 35, 210n32 of Mariam and Graphina, 82, 89, 90 – 91, 95, 218n22 silent prayer, 103, 104 silent speech, 35, 90, 94, 95– 96, 101, 104 silent suffering, 13, 84 – 85, 88 Stoical heroism and, 85, 221n53 women and, 218n22, 219n32 Simpson, Ken, 195, 197, 239n75 sin, 116, 118 imitation and, 9– 10 original, 3, 51, 117, 153, 232n46 Smith, Richard, 217n19 Socrates, 43 Soliloquium Animae, 36– 40 sonship, 28, 180, 189, 239n76, 240n79 soul body and, 26, 146, 153, 155, 178 Kempis dialogue between man and, 37– 40 Southwell, Robert, 3 Spearitt, Placid, 225n93 speech bold, 77– 78, 83– 84, 85, 220n42 good vs. bad, 41– 42 Milton on, 191, 196

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“public,” 74, 79– 80, 82, 104 silent, 35, 90, 94, 95– 96, 101, 104 Word of God and, 35, 39, 40, 41, 191, 208n21 See also language Spenser, Edmund, 21 Spiller, Elizabeth, 59 Starke, Sue, 231nn42– 43 Stillman, Robert, 16, 50 – 53, 211n43, 232n46 on Lucretia, 54 – 55 on Melanchthon influence on Sidney, 9, 49– 50, 231n40 Stoicism, 32, 81, 209nn27– 28 Straznicky, Marta, 65– 66, 81– 82, 223n77 Strickland, Ronald, 214n74 Struever, Nancy, 203n18 Stubbs, John, 213n56 suffering, 34, 86– 87, 108, 175, 176 martyrdom and, 83, 177– 78 supernatural, 3, 33, 41, 62, 123– 24, 153 natural and, 22, 24, 27, 137, 148, 186 Teresa of Avila, 103 1 Timothy 4, 125 2 Timothy 4, 138 Tragedy of Mariam, The (Cary), 12– 13, 65, 74 – 82, 215n1 gender question in, 77 Graphina in, 89– 93, 223n67 hagiographic subtext of, 67, 74 Herod in, 76– 77, 79– 81, 82– 83, 218n27 imitatio Christi in, 69, 74, 76 Mariam similarities to Cary, 65, 94 – 95 martyrdom in, 81– 83, 88– 94 plot and story line of, 74, 76– 81 publication history of, 224n89

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2 Timothy (cont.) Salome in, 78– 80, 88, 90 scholarship on, 65– 66 as subversive, 75, 77 translation, 25, 224n89 Trubowitz, Rachel J., 236n53, 238n70, 241n89 Truran, Margaret, 226n104 truth, 44, 100, 102, 135 Cary on, 75, 82, 97, 100 – 101 language as instrument of, 82, 97 Milton on, 187, 192, 198, 238n68 Tyche, 153 tyranny, 51, 145, 154, 232n46 Cary depiction of, 76– 77, 79– 80, 81 Charles accused of, 114, 141, 165 Milton on, 182, 184, 186– 87 resistance to, 76– 77, 104 Sidney on, 51, 52, 54 – 55 Ussher, James, 2 Voragine, Jacobus de, 216n9 Walpole, Henry, 87 Walsingham, Francis, 18, 206n7 Warren, Nancy, 16, 102, 215n5 Waswo, Richard, 4, 5, 8 Webbe, William, 8 Wheeler, Elizabeth Skerpan, 108 Whitgift, John, 207n9 William of Orange, 60 Williams, John, 162, 163– 64, 166 – 67, 233n9, 234n25 Wilson, John, 73 Wilson, Matthew, 100

Index

Wilson, Thomas, 204n20 Wolfe, Heather, 102, 104 women, 74, 87– 88, 93, 210n33, 222n60 affective prayer and, 103, 226n104 femininity and, 189 heroism of, 68, 89 – 93 married, 91– 92, 222n59 martyrdom and, 83, 87– 88, 220n41, 222n59 sexuality of, 78– 79 silence and, 218n22, 219n32 See also gender Word of God, 173, 208n21 Bayly on, 117, 121 centrality of, 10, 166 Christ as, 121, 155 Church Militant and, 42 – 45, 49 desire and, 32 – 33, 38, 39 – 40 dialogue with, 30 – 31, 36 – 37 flesh and, 70, 121, 133, 194 human speech and, 35, 39, 40, 41, 191, 208n21 imitatio Christi and, 11– 12, 27, 40 – 41, 44 – 45, 50, 163, 166, 169 incarnation of, 49, 70 Kempis on, 32, 33– 34, 38, 209n29 language and, 30, 33– 34, 42, 50 Milton on, 191, 192 Rogers on, 30, 36 – 37, 39 – 41, 42 signs and, 49, 169, 174 transformative power of, 27, 40 – 41 writing, 92 Rogers on, 40 – 42, 211n39 Wykes, Aquila, 171 Xenophon, 51 Zaller, Robert, 110

  is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.