Religious Discourses And The Articulation Of Renaissance Subjectivity

380 Pages·2015·20.53 MB·English

by  Patrick Niehus

Contents
Int roduction. Reli gion, S ubj ectivity, and Renais sance Culture. 1
I. A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists Again. 1
II. Recovering a Religious Renaissance. 9
Itr. Renaissance Subjectivity: Some Preliminary Remarks. t4
fV. Intellectual History and the Religious Renaissance. t9
Part I. Framing Death, Framing the Self.
Chapter One. Making Death Matter: Contemplation of the End and Renaissance
Subjectivity.
25
I. Confronting the 'blast which blowes': Recycling Death in the
Renaissance.
25
Precedents.
II. The Ars Moríendi: 33
Itr. The Ars Moriendi andProtestant Subjectivity. 35
lV. Searching for Signs, and the Integration of Private and Public
Selves. 4I
V. Going to Arthur's Bosom: Variations on Dying in Shakespene. 46
Additions.
VL Conclusion: Medieval Traditions, Renaissance 50
Chapter Two. The Quintessence of Dust: Bodily Decomposition and Macabre
Theology. 51
Macabre.
I. The Question of the 51
II. The Peremptory Nullification of Man: Theologies of Mortification.
54
Corpse.
trI. Illustrating the Grotesque 59
Christ.
IV. The Forlorn Body of a Human 64
Death.
V. The Body as Mirror to the Otherness of 12
Conclusion.
VI. 78
Chapter Three. Treason, Torture and Transgression: Subversive Death in the
Renaissance. 80
Dismemberment.
I. Fears of 80
II. Somatic Prose and the Nashean Carnivalesque: Unmaking Bodies
nThe Unfortunate Traveller. 82
Death.
trI. Violence and the Aestheticisation of 87
Subversion.
IV. Acting the Part (I): Violence, Treason and 92
V. Acting the Part (II): The Drama of Death. 98
Representation.
VI. Anatomy and Anxieties of 110
Conclusion.
VIL 115
Chapter Four. Stained with an trl and Odious Name: Renaissance Exclusions of the
Self-Murderer.
1.l7
I. Equivocal Responses to Doubtful Deaths. tt7
II. Defrling Corpses: Suicide and the Inscription of Sin. r20
trI. John Sym and the Marginalisation of the Suicide. r22
fV. Conclusion. t28
Chapter Five. Taking Command of One's "master-day": Rehabilitating the
Renai ssance S elf-Murderer. 1,30
Introduction.
I. 130
tr. Stoicism, Humanism, and Heroic Illeism in the Renaissance. 130
trI. 'Tis Immortallite to die aspiring': Chapman's Poetics of Suicide.
135
Donne. l4l
IV. The Impulse to Martyrdom (I):
V. The Impulse to Martyrdom (II): Acts and Monuments and the
7-eal.
Limits of 146
Conclusion.
VI. 154
Chapter Six. 'The fruitful river in the eye': Renaissance Elegy and the Troublesome
Grief.
Representation of 155
Introduction.
I. 155
Conventions.
tr. Elegiac Themes and 156
lnterpolation.
III. Elegy and Authorial 161
Mythmaking.
IV. Sidney and Elegiac 166
V. Donne's Anniversari¿s and the Creation of a Philosophical Mode.
168
Mode.
VI. Dislocations within the Elegiac 172
Part II. Representations of the Renaissance Self Against Its Others.
Chapter Seven. The Papal Antichrist and the Turk: Forms of Evil in Lutheran
Apocalypticism. 186
Alterity.
I. Luther and the Creation of Apocalyptic 186
tr. The Babylonian Captivity of the Church: Luther's Early Anti-
Papalism.
187
Theology.
III. Luther's Changing Attitude to Apocalyptic 190
fV. Eschatology, Scatology and History: Polemical Representations of
Antichrist. I94
Turk.
V. Apocalypticism and Assimilation: Luther and the 199
Monstrous.
VI. Conclusion: Making the 206
ur
Chapter Eight. Sixteenth Century English Apocalypticism: Bale, Becon andFoxe in
Antichrist.
the V/ar Against 207
Otherness.
I. Cross-cultural Continuities in the Creation of 207
tr. The Pervasiveness of Apocalyptic Anti-Catholicism in Tudor
England.
208
trI. John Bale and the Creation of Protestant Propaganda. 2I7
IV. The Principle of Inversion: Anti-Catholic Motifs and Polemical
Plays.
Techniques in Bale's 213
V. The "ragynge serpentes" of Antichrist: Apocaþtic Elements in
Laws.
King John andThree 222
Identity.
VI. Bale's Vocacyon and the Creation of Protestant 224
Time.
Vtr. John Foxe and the Rhythms of Sacred 230
Anti-Chnst.
VtrI. Becon's Antitheses: Antichrist as 236
D(. Conclusion: From Apocalypticism to Eschatology - Extending the
Self-Definition.
Scope of 242
Chapter Nine. 'Being in Misery': Existential Anxieties and Renaissance
Representations of Hell. 243
Representations.
I. Sadistic Impulses and Infernal 243
Damned.
II. The Absolute Otherness of the 248
III. Shakespearean Confrgurations: The Hell of Social
Lear.
Undifferentiation in King 250
IV. Feigned Fiends: Demystifying Insanity and the Scripting of
Body.
the Infernal 256
V. The Satanic Predicament and the Making of Hell in Paradise Lost.
264
VI. Milton's Hell and Earth: Typology and the Erasure of Difference.
270
Lost.
VII. The Ambiguous Hell of Paradise 271
VItr. Conclusion: The Ideological Role of Hell in Renaissance
Culture.
274
Chapter Ten. Perfecting Experience: Visions of Heaven in Baxter and Herbert. 276
Perspectives.
I. Theological 276
II. Representing the Unrepresentable: Appropriating the "language of
Heaven".
280
III. 'Thy V/ord is all, if we could spell': Human Epistemology and the
Heaven.
Perfection of Seeing in 283
IV. 'Love (trI)' and the Paradox of the Heavenly Self. 288
Postponed.
V. Conclusion: Resolution 294
Postscript. V/riting the History of Wofull V/ights and Protestant Apostles: V/riting
Self.
the Renaissance 295
I. Rebarbative Calvinism in the Renaissance. 295
II. Francis Spira: cause célèbre in a Culture of Despair 296
lV
III. The Conflict of Conscience,Religious Despair, and Types of
Renaissance Surveillance. 298
IV. Writing the Renaissance Self. 305
Appendix 307
List of Figures 308
Works Cited 345
V
Errata
Pp. 57, 204 & 269 :For "simul acra",tead " simulacrum"'
P. 71: For "stigmartyr", read "stigmata"'
P. 93: For "exemPlum", read "exeÍnPla" '
P. 94: For "Ralegh's antagonism", read "Ralegh"'
P. L39: For "frisson", read "friction"'
P. 143 For "that", read "those'o'
Vp. ZZe, 24I, 242: For "complimentary ", tead "complementary"'
p. Z6Z,n. 35: Fof "her", read "his"'
P. TlÍ:For "mitigated", read "militated"'
Abstract
This thesis argues that Renaissance notions of identity, interiority, and alterity
are articulated through religious discourses invoked to make sense of death and
It
apocalyptic and eschatological experience. argues that Renaissance ways of
enunciating subjectivity are varied and often conflicting. The Self can be def,tned
against Others who are represented as unnatural, perverse, monstrous or alien; it can
also be destabilised by an alterity that is found to inhere in the Self itself.
The thesis is divided into two sections. An Introduction places my project in
the context of the modern historicising paradigms favoured by mariy Renaissance
scholars. It critiques the ways in which these historicist paradigms ignore the role of
religious ideas in the formation of ideological orthodoxies and heterodoxies. It
suggests reasons for this neglect, and proceeds to delineate the models of subjectivity
investigated in the thesis.
The first part of my study assesses Renaissance responses to death. Chapters
on representations of the dying process and the dead body investigate both the role of
religious themes in structuring those representations, and Renaissance appropriations
and reformulations of medieval themes. I also investigate the implications of dying for
subjectivity. The chapters argue that a hybrid, unstable, potentially transgressive sense
of Self is created in response to dying. The fourth and fifth chapters look at
Renaissance representations of suicide. The last chapter of the first section looks at
the problematic representation of death in elegy.
The second section analyses eschatological and apocalyptic discourses.
Chapters on Lutheran and Tudor apocaþtic thought argue that apocalyptic
discourses favour the bifurcation of Self and Other as a means of enunciating identity.
The last two chapters focus upon representations of Hell and Heaven. They show that
the ambiguity and paradoxes encountered in the process of defining the Renaissance
Self also impact upon representations of post-mortem experience. Throughout all four
chapters attention is given to the strategies through which Selftood and alterity are
figured.
A Conclusion discusses the importance of Calvinist theology to Renaissance
conceptions of subjectivity, and reiterates the main points about subjectivity made by
my study.
vl

Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my family for your patience and understanding; to my
colleagues in the English Department, for all your helpful advice; to those who read
patrs of this thesis (no easy task!); and lastly, to Heather Kerr, for your expert
guidance, boundless good will and constant optimism (sorely needed on nüny
occasions!).
vllr
Abbreviations
AHR American Historical Review
ELH English Literary History
ELR English Literary Renaissance
ES English Studies
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology
rWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
MLN Modern Language Notes
MLR Modern Language Review
NLH New Literary History
N&Q Notes & Queries
Phil. Q Philological Quarterly
PMIA Publications of the Modern Language Association
Ren. D Renaissance Drama
Ren. Q Renaissance Quarterly
R.E.S. Review of English Studies
SCH Studies in Church History
sEL 1500-1900 Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
SQ Shakespeare Quarterly
SSF Studies in Short Fiction
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