Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions

366 Pages·2013·3.729 MB·English

by  Arthur F. Marotti, Chanita Goodblatt, Phebe Jensen, Lowell Gallagher, Avraham Oz, Achsah Guibbory, Anne Lake Prescott, Elliott M. Simon, Noam Flinker, Yaakov Mascetti, Jeanne Shami, Noam Reisner, Sanford Budick

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND EARLY
MODERN EN GLISH TEXTS

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND EARLY
MODERN EN GLISH TEXTS
Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions
Edited by Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt
Wayne State University Press Detroit
© 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan
48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the
United States of America.
17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Religious diversity and early modern En glish texts :
Catholic, Judaic, feminist, and secular dimensions / edited
by Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 8143- 3955- 8 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978- 0- 8143- 3956-5 (ebook)
1. En glish literature— Early modern, 1500– 1700—History
and criticism. 2. Religion and literature— Great
Britain. 3. Christianity and other religions in literature—
Great Britain. 4. Great Britain— Intellectual life.
I. Marotti, Arthur F., 1940– editor of compilation.
PR428.R46R47 2013
820.9'382—dc23
2013006166
Typeset by Westchester
Composed in Warnock Pro and Meta
Plates in Lowell Gallagher’s “Remembering Lot’s Wife: Th e
Structure of Testimony in the Painted Life of Mary Ward”
published by permission of Congregatio Jesu Augsburg
(Germany). Photos: Studio Tanner, Nesselwang.
Photographs in Chanita Goodblatt’s “Per for mance and
Parshanut: Th e Historie of Jacob and Esau” are by Adva
Abergel Salomon and are printed with her permission.
Th e Israel Science Foundation and the Goldstein-Goren
International Center for Jewish Th ought at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev funded the international
symposium “Religious Culture in the Early Modern Period:
Tradition, Authority, Heterodoxy” (2005), in which many of
the contributors to the present volume participated. We
would like to thank Professor David Newman, Dean of the
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, for providing a grant to support
publication of this book.
Contents
Introduction 1
Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt
Part I. Minority Catholic Culture
1. Marian Verse as Pol itic ally Oppositional Poetry in
Elizabethan Eng land 25
Arthur F. Marotti
2. Religious Identity and the Eng lish Landscape: William Blundell
and the Harkirk Coins 55
Phebe Jensen
3. Remembering Lot’s Wife: The Structure of Testimony in the
Painted Life of Mary Ward 77
Lowell Gallagher
Part II. Figuring the Jew
4. Early Mimics: Shylock, Machiavelli, and the Commodification
of Nationhood 107
Avraham Oz
5. Milton, Prophet of Israel 136
Achsah Guibbory
Part III. Hebraism and the Bible
6. Per for mance and Parshanut: The Historie of Jacob and Esau 153
Chanita Goodblatt
v
7. Exploiting King Saul in Early Modern Eng land: Good Uses for
a Bad King 178
Anne Lake Prescott
8. Prophetic Voices: Joachim de Fiore, Moses Maimonides,
Philip Sidney, Mary Herbert, and the Psalms 195
Elliott M. Simon
9. Biblical and Rabbinic Intertextuality in George Herbert’s
“The Collar” and “The Pearl” 230
Noam Flinker
Part IV. Women and Religion
10. “This Pretious Passeover Feed Upon”: Poetic Eucharist and Feminine
Vision in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 251
Yaakov Mascetti
11. Reading Funeral Sermons for Early Modern Eng lish Women:
Some Literary and Historiographical Challenges 282
Jeanne Shami
Part V. Religion and Secularization
12. Framing Religion: Marlovian Policy and the Pluralism of Art 311
Noam Reisner
13. Shakespeare’s Secular Benediction: The Language of
Tragic Community in King Lear 330
Sanford Budick
Contributors 353
Index 357
Color Plates
vi Contents
Arthur F. Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt
Introduction
In recent work on the religious culture and literature of early modern
En gland, one fi nds specialized treatments of Catholic culture and texts, of
the repres ent at ion of Jews, of the Hebraic infl uence on Christian writers,
and of women and religion. Th is collection of essays addresses these topics
but also attends to a fi fth topic: the relationship of religion to pro cesses
of secularization under way in this era. Th e boundaries between religious
confessions, the hybridization of religion, the infl ection of religious con-
fl icts and identities by gender, the repres ent at ion in polemical and non-
polemical texts of religious “others,” and the secular and/or agnostic and
atheistic territory outside religion are all part of the complex and evolving
culture of early modern En gland. Using a variety of critical methods, rang-
ing from historical analysis, deconstruction, feminist inquiry, and inter-
textual interpretation to pedagogical experimentation, the contributors
to this collection deal with this wide range of subjects, but all assume that
what is often dismissed as marginal is in a real sense central to the reli-
gious and cultural life of what was being defi ned as the Protestant En glish
nation. Catholics persisted as an important and po liti cally dissident mi-
nority, and the residual elements of the “old religion” survived long after
the break with Rome; the Hebrew Bible and Jewish biblical scholarship
were formative intellectual infl uences as well as a cultural presence to
which Catholics and Protestants responded both positively and negatively;
early modern women had a culturally vital role in the religious changes
taking place; religious confl icts and de facto pluralism could lead to skepti-
cism, agnosticism, atheism, and the demand for the separation of the reli-
gious and secular orders.
1
In the chapters that follow the contributors deal with topics and writ-
ers from the mid- sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Th ey discuss
not only major and minor canonical authors, such as William Shakespeare,
Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Aemelia Lanyer, and John Milton, but
also lesser known or little known fi gures whose culturally symptomatic
work refl ects the religious and cultural changes taking place in this period.
Th e scholars contributing to this collection are North American and Is-
raeli. Many of them originally participated in the conference “Religious
Cultures in the Early Modern Period: Tradition, Authority, Heterodoxy,”
which was held in Israel in 2005 at Ben-G urion University of the Negev
(the conference was supported by the Israel Science Foundation). Although
papers from that conference w ere published in a 2006 volume,1 many of
these scholars have continued their dialogue, and the American and Israeli
editors of this new collection have shaped this project to retain some of
the emphases of the original international meeting. Th ree part icu l ar inter-
ests have persisted in the discussion: (1) the relationship of Judaism and
Jewish texts to early modern Christianity and its internal confl icts; (2) the
relationship of tradition and the hegemonic religious order to heterodoxy
in its various forms; and (3) the phenomenon of religious hybridization in
an era of sharpened confessional confl icts.
To group the individual contributions to this present collection in sec-
tions that highlight their shared concerns and focus, we have divided the
thirteen essays into fi ve topically focused parts: Minority Catholic Cul-
ture; Figuring the Jew; Hebraism and the Bible; Women and Religion; and
Religion and Secularization. Th ere is an undeniable emphasis on fi gures
who were on the margins of the dominant religious culture— Catholics,
Jews, women, and incipient secularists—b ut the assumption of all the con-
tributors is that we cannot understand the culture as a w hole without
attending to the repressed, the marginalized, and the unacknowledged.
Minority Catholic Culture
Over the past two dec ades studies of early modern Eng lish Catholic cul-
ture have burgeoned in the fi elds of both history and literary studies. A
previously marginalized or ignored Catholic minority community and its
writers have received serious attention from scholars who have redefi ned
the cultural functioning of En glish Catholics within the larger society,
complicating our notions of religious change and diversity.2 Whereas ear-
lier studies of recusants emphasized Catholic suff ering and martyrdom,
current early modern Catholic studies include work on serial converts,
church papists, religiously amphibious or ambiguous individuals, and
2 Introduction
former Catholics who retained a cultural attachment to the old religion
but who were observant Protestants. Historians such as Eamon Duff y and
Christopher Haigh emphasize the slow pace of Eng land’s change from
being a Catholic country to a Protestant one, as well as the cultural hybrid-
ity of religious practice and belief, as Eng land underwent, in Haigh’s for-
mulation, a series of reformations.3 Th e three essays in this part of this
collection deal with diff erent aspects of Eng lish Catholic history and writ-
ing in the period, running from the time of the brief reign of the Catholic
Queen Mary (r. 1553– 1558) through that of King Charles I (r. 1625– 1649).
Th e fi rst of these pieces, by Arthur Marotti, concentrates on the po liti-
cal valences of poetry written to or about the Virgin Mary in Elizabethan
Eng land (Chapter 1). Marotti argues that, because of the Queen’s adher-
ence to a Protestant policy of displacing Mary from the center of devotion
she had occupied in traditional Catholicism and the Queen’s wish to make
herself an object of respect and reverence, Catholic (and non-C atholic)
poets who off ered the usual forms of praise of Mary and asserted belief in
her Assumption, Immaculate Conception, and heavenly queenship were,
in eff ect, composing po litic ally oppositional verse— not only protesting the
large cultural program of replacing Catholicism with Protestantism but
also objecting to Queen Elizabeth’s assumption of a status to which she
had no rightful claim. Marotti discusses, fi rst, the large body of Marian
verse composed by William Forrest in the Marian and Elizabethan peri-
ods, highlighting both its implicit and explicit religiopo liti cal criticisms.
Because this little known work exists mainly in manuscript and because
most of the pieces were never printed, Marotti includes a generous selec-
tion of them to introduce this writing to modern readers.
Marotti also examines a variety of Elizabethan Marian poems by lay
and clerical Catholics, Catholic converts, anonymous writers, and even a
non- Catholic aristocrat— all of which had a po liti cally oppositional tenor.
He concentrates on poems dealing with the destruction of the shrine of
Our Lady of Walsingham and with the martyred Edmund Campion and
on Marian verses by Henry Constable, Richard Verstegan, Robert South-
well, and the Earls of Arundel (Philip Howard) and Essex (Robert Devereux).
In their specifi c historical context, these pieces asserted the beliefs of a
repressed religious minority, rejected the tenets of the established En glish
church, served as a bonding agent for a dispersed Catholic community,
and/or criticized the female monarch who was in cultural rivalry with the
Virgin Mary.
Phebe Jensen, in her essay on the manuscript writings of William
Blundell (Chapter 2), demonstrates how one persecuted Catholic gentle-
man coped with religious oppression by creating a Catholic refuge within
Introduction 3
the larger Protestant polity, just as other Catholic families in their local
neighborhoods created “islands of true Eng lishness.” Blundell turned his
antiquarian research and the happenstance discovery of a cache of medi-
eval coins on his estate into an argument for the Anglo- Saxon and Catho-
lic identity for Eng land that could contest the mythology of pre-R oman
British origins constructed by antiquarians who wished to construct a
diff erent lineage for En gland as a Protestant nation. What was at stake for
Blundell was the character of Eng lish topography and sacred spaces;
whereas the dissolution of the monasteries and the despoiling of most reli-
gious shrines and pilgrimage destinations by the Protestant government
had the eff ect of desacralizing Eng lish geography, Blundell evoked an era
in which En glish saints (some of them monarchs), holy places, and the more
widespread ecclesiastical presence in the country gave religious meaning to
his country and its topography. As Jensen observes, for Blundell and for
many other Catholics “the idea that the land was composed of a matrix of
holy places that commemorated the miracles of Eng lish saints, the good
deeds of virtuous Anglo- Saxon kings, and the steadfastness of early mod-
ern Catholics was central to the defi nition of En gland.” Late in the essay,
however, Jensen points to a kind of compromise position or hybridization
of traditional religious sites in the Protestant conversion of them into his-
torically important national locations— an anticipation of what happened
in modern times with the treatment of special places associated either
with national triumphs or tragedies, such as the Gettysburg battlefi eld and
the World Trade Center site, which have become virtually sacred spaces
for the exercise of historical memory and hybridized civic and religious
piety. In the large movement of En glish cultural history, the Catholic con-
ception of a religiously marked public space fi nally yielded to the forces of
desacralization and secularization, but it is important to understand how a
countercultural position such as Blundell’s functioned within the chang-
ing religiopo liti cal environment.
Lowell Gallagher, in his theoretically sophisticated essay on Mary
Ward, the “female Jesuitress” (Chapter 3), concentrates specifi cally on the
visual portrayal of Ward’s history in the so-called Painted Life, the visual
narrative commissioned by her order. Gallagher uses the biblical fi gure of
Lot’s wife to defi ne the religious and cultural place of this innovative fe-
male reformer, who, as an uncloistered proselytizer and educator, was in
many senses culturally out of place. Like Lot’s wife, Ward was a cultural
and religious boundary fi gure. Adopting Erich Auerbach’s formulation,
Gallagher sees her as poised between veritas and historia. Ward led an al-
ternately approved and disapproved religious teaching order, which was
banned by papal bull in 1631. First, Gallagher uses church father Irenaeus’s
4 Introduction