Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature

Yesterday's exam reading--which I did not finish until this morning--was Hannibal Hamlin's Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (2004) which I had been looking forward to reading for quite some time. I was a little disappointed, however, at how little of the book felt truly groundbreaking after all the exam reading I've been doing. While this was the first major book of literary criticism on the Psalms in England since Rivkah Zim's English Metrical Psalms in 1987, there's a lot of work that's been done in areas other than literary criticism that Hamlin either didn't read or didn't choose to reference and build on (Print and Protestantism, which I covered in an earlier post, was never referenced, despite it's rather substantial section on the importance of Metrical Psalters).

That said, Hamlin does a great job synthesizing much of the most important material on the Psalms, and did cover a few things from angles that I hadn't considered before. Hamlin's basic goal is to show "as much as is feasible, the rich contribution of the Psalms to English Culture in this period" (15). As a secondary goal, though by far a more interesting one, he argues "for a reassessment of the status of translation as a literary enterprise" (261). The way these two goals intersect produces the most important contribution Hamlin makes to scholarship in this book, as he shows how "the peculiar combination of sacred and secular, Hebraic and Hellenic, that constituted early modern English culture depended upon the creative appropriation of the content of biblical and classical texts to serve the varied purposes of writers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England" (261). This combination--and the way that translations of both classical and biblical materials played into it--is at its best in the third and fifth chapters. The third chapter discusses the Psalms and English quantitative verse, as translators attempted to use hellenic metered forms as they translated the Psalms into English. Even more interesting is the fifth chapter, a case study on Psalm 23 translations, which integrated biblical images of sheep and shepherds with the classical pastoral and georgic modes.

The other chapters were not always so ground breaking for me. The first chapter covered the origins and reception of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter. The second chapter was more interesting as it looked at all the attempts to create rival psalters (covering the psalters of George Wither, George Sandys, Henry King, Francis Rous, and the Bay Psalm Book). This chapter highlighted the tension between the popularity of the S&H psalter (albeit a popularity enforced by the Stationer's patent on psalters) and the general feeling among the literary elite that S&H just wasn't all that great. The fourth chapter covers the relationship between the Psalms and English verse more broadly, focusing heavily on how the Sidney/Pembroke Psalter influenced later authors, but also covering the more diverse uses by Gascoigne and others.

The final two chapters are, like chapter 5, case studies on individual Psalms: Psalm 51, one of the penitential psalms (and one that was crucial to Luther's development of the doctrine of justification by faith alone), and 137, a poem of exile. The examination of Psalm 51 highlights the differences between Calvinist and Lutheran readings of the psalm, as well as its importance in major literary works like PL and Hamlet. Psalm 137, Hamlin argues, was particularly well suited to the Renaissance and Reformation because "both of these were movements of renewal and rebirth, but they were based on the rediscovery and reappropriation of past cultures which remained fragmentary and to some extent irredeemably lost. In several respects many of the men and women of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were exiles, and the Psalm of Exile had particular resonance for them" (219). As Psalm 51 provided a common language to talk about sin and repentance, Hamlin shows how 137 created a language of exile that was employed by Shakespeare and Milton (to name the most famous).

Read more...

Ian Green, Print and Protestantism

My latest piece of exam reading has been the incredibly long Print and Protestantism by Ian Green. (I made the mistake at the holiday party on Friday of saying it was by Graham Greene... wasn't that embarrassing...) The book clocks in about 600 pages, and it's a very dense 600 pages, though interesting if you're crazy like me. I'm going to keep the notes I post here broad, rather than quoting all the interesting bits related to my dissertation.

The book is a history of the relationship between print technology and Protestant texts printed between 1530 and 1730. Green works by creating a sample of the most popular religious texts printed during this period, with popularity determined by the number of editions published. From this material, he responds to the historical research that had focused either on "scholarly"/elite "tomes" or "cheap tracts." Green suggests that a wider scope reveals that the intermediate forms of publications "increased much more rapidly in number and variety than those at either the top or the bottom" (vii). These best-selling texts are less controversial, and tend to be "instructive, encouraging, or devotional" (vii). In other words, they tend to be didactic, but not necessarily radical.

The first chapter characterizes the different people involved with the publication and sales of religious texts: authors, printers/publishers/booksellers, and readers (distinguishing between clergy, gentry, and the 'middling sort of people'). The second chapter focuses on the different types and availability of Bibles, along with the associated aids that were included in Bibles--marginal notes, visual aids like maps, prefatory materials, etc. This chapter really brought home to me exactly how much the modern study Bible is the child of Reformation publication practices.

Chapter 3 details the relationship between hermeneutics/reading practices and the publications aimed at helping individuals understand the Bible. Publications distinguished between different types of readers--intellectual "elephants" who could wade in deep theological waters, and "lambs" who could read the Bible, but needed a different sort of help. There was therefore a diversity of types of aids for reading the Bible that depended on the very different audiences--and led to a large variation in how different groups read the Bible. In this chapter (along with 5 and 9), Green shows that "print was regularly used by ecclesiastical authorities and individual reformers to disseminate statements of what was wrong with the old church and right about the new, and to urge conformity to the new" (555). This helps explain how lay acceptance of Protestantism grew gradually as the print culture grew (corresponding to Christopher Haigh's argument in English Reformations).

Chapters 4-7 each look at a different category of best- and steady-sellers in the sample. These included sermons, treatises and polemics/prophecy (chpt 4); books on prayer--including the BCP--and communion, and other devotional aids (chpt 5); works on the life of faith, godly living, and godly dying (chpt 6); and "entertaining edification" which includes the poetic works most familiar to students of literature, like Herbert, Southwell, Milton, etc. (chpt 7). Chapters 4-6 show exactly how much the polemics against Laudianism/Arminianism were in the minority, despite the large amounts of critical attention they have drawn (555). Chapter 9 focuses on the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter and the use of metrical psalms in the culture. I'll be interested to see how his analysis compares with Hannibal Hamlin's in Psalm Culture in Early Modern English Literature.

Green argues in chapter 8 that there was a growing tension between clerical and lay perspectives/publications, especially when it comes to the relationship between entertainment and didacticism. Ministers and preachers "were prepared to countenance entertaining forms as a means of pressing the same orthodox message that they presented in their sermons and treatises" while lay authors "tended towards a view of Christianity that stressed [either] the value of reason and morality . . . [or] a semi-Pelagian, almost totally moralistic, variety" (443).

This tendency for the orthodox message to be watered down or exchanged for something else is even more exaggerated when it comes to the cheap tracts, chapbooks, and ballads explored in chapter 10. Green states that "the great majority of the cheap works which sold best were neither the product of 'godly' authors' pens nor would have been acceptable to them" (445). These cheap works "leant towards the obstinate popular semi-Pelagianism . . . and there was a strong likelihood that these popular attitudes were perpetuated by authors and publishers who did not fully grasp or did not sympathize with official or 'godly' teaching, but who did know what would sell copies" (502).

Overall, Green identifies three major patterns:

1. "Educated authors responded to the opportunity of using print by experimenting with a much greater variety of genres than before." (553)
2. "Canny publishers used nearly every trick in the book to expand markets and maximize profits: smaller formats, cheaper paper, different typeface and layouts, attractive titles, decorated title-pages, experimental genres, abridgements, pastiches, and so on." (553)
3. "And increasing numbers of literate people proved willing to acquire printed material, especially in the rapidly expanding middling ranks of society, while the illiterate were regularly exposed to it through other means, such as a vernacular liturgy or 'lining out.'" (553-4).
   

Out of these three patterns, Green discerns three major varieties of Protestantism that become apparent through the print publications:

1. The protestantism of the clergy in the first century after the reformation defined "orthodoxy" without being monolithic. It was defined by the reconsideration of the staple assumptions of Catholicism, but with "sufficient tensions and variations . . . especially at the flexible, permeable boundaries between the sacred and the secular" etc. (556)
2. The protestantism of the educated elite was characterized by "a constructive tension between Reformation ideas on the one hand and classical, humanist, or Renaissance ideas on the other, and by a tendency towards moralism, rationalism, and anti-clericalism" (556).
3. The protestantism of "ballad and chapbook publishers and their tame authors who, in the seventeenth century especially, trumpeted their Protestant credentials while churning out works of dubious orthodoxy" (556).
   

Green finishes up by examining the ways these different types of Protestantism as expressed in print culture affected the different readerships he began by examining--the clergy, the aristocracy/gentry, the middling-sort--as well as a few more specialized groups of readers (such as women and children). Ultimately, he argues that the secularism that arrived in the 18th century and that has at various points been attributed to "Shakespeare or the Levellers" actually originated in the 16th and 17th century's "clergy's strategic decision to simplify and tone down some aspects of the orthodox message, and from the laity's preference for a form of belief that regularly slipped into equating faith with good works, and good works with salvation." Moreover, he show, quite convincingly, that publishers "are both an excellent barometer and a key player" in this move (590).

Read more...

BCP and articles on Early Modern Authorship/Collaboration

So, I've done a lot of little pieces of exam reading over the last few days: the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, and two articles on Early Modern Collaboration/Authorship.

1. The Book of Common Prayer from 1559. This was the edition of the BCP that was re-introduced when the Protestant Elizabeth I came to power after her Catholic sister Mary I died. The original BCP had been introduced by their Protestant brother Edward I in 1549, but Mary had understandably banned it.

Bits and pieces of the Book of Common Prayer are pretty familiar to a lot of church-going Protestants, even those who aren't CoE I would guess, even if they aren't aware that the texts come from the BCP. Most people are probably familiar with the language of, say, "The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony," which begins,"Dearly beloved friends, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of his congregation, to join together this man and this women in holy matrimony...." While we're used to a much cut down and modernized version, this is where the language comes from. Some of the prayers have also crossed denominational boundaries. A modernized version of this one, from the order for Morning services, is used by my decidedly not-CoE church fairly frequently:

Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways, like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. . . .

But there are other parts of the BCP that are more foreign: as part of the Litany, there is a prayer for the Queen's Majesty, a prayer fair weather, a prayer for rain, and a prayer in the time of famine. The BCP is designed to respond to and shape the life of the Christian in England in the 16th century, and to do so, it has to respond to political, social, material, and economic realities as well as managing to be nearly universally applicable.

One of the other interesting things about the BCP is its schedule for Bible reading. Essentially, the BCP requires that each church read through the entire book of Psalms each month, the Old Testament once a year, and the New Testament three times a year. The only exceptions are "certain books and chapters which be least edifying and might best be spared and therefore left unread." Of course, I was very interested in figuring out which things they decided to leave out. Some parts were predictable: Genesis 10 (one of the "begat" chapters) and most of Leviticus and Numbers, where guidelines for the building and decorating of the tabernacle, the clothing of priests, etc., were detailed. Other absences were more intriguing. For example, Ezekiel chapters 1, 4, 5, 8-12, 15-17, and 19-32 are all missing, as are most of the chapters from Revelation (chpts. 1, 22, and 25 are the only ones included). In other words, the BCP edits out a lot of the prophetic-apocalyptic (apocalyptic-prophetic?) material from the orderly reading of the Bible. I suspect that the reason for this is two fold: one, apocalyptic materials are incredibly difficult to interpret well. The CoE, like most churches, rather prefers an orderly Bible that it can say it knows what it means. This is more difficult with apocalyptic materials. A more insidious, political reason, of course, is that apocalyptic material--being so difficult to interpret well--is easily turned to political ends, as happened regularly in the 17th century. Now, just because the BCP didn't include these texts in its regular reading cycle doesn't mean people didn't have access to them; they weren't redacted from the actual Bibles. But I suspect it does make their presence in the culture notably different than the portions that were read on a more regular basis.

2. Heather Hirschfeld, "Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship," PMLA 116.3 (2001): 609-22.

Hirschfeld provides a survey of the theories of collaboration that were in use in EM scholarship at the time she was writing. She largely organizes the survey by differentiating between the theories that are applied to different genres--scholars working on prose, she suggests, have slightly different terms and ideas from those working on drama. Beyond this survey, her argument is that "collaboration" and "collaborative authorship" are terms that are used too broadly, as they "designate a range of interactions, from the efforts of two writers working closely together to the activities of printers, patrons, and readers in shaping the meaning and significance of a text" (610). These are disparate types of collaboration, she suggests, and we need to "find another word to describe the relation and experience of authorship by two writers who contribute, calculatedly, to the same text" because "this kind of enterprise, and the understanding and experience of authorship it entails, seems fundamentally different from kinds of collaboration more loosely construed" (620).

3. Jeffrey Knapp, "What is a Co-Author?", Representations 89 (2005): 1-29.

Knapp argues against writers like Jeffrey Masten and Richard Helgerson, who have argued that collaboration was the dominant mode of conceiving authorship (especially play authorship) in the Renaissance. Rather than arguing that collaboration didn't happen regularly, he instead attempts to show that despite the material realities of collaboration, "the primary theoretical model for playwriting through the English Renaissance was single authorship" (1). Playwrights may have collaborated almost non-stop, he suggests, but they simultaneously had difficulty conceptualizing the collaboration that happened between multiple authors: "So commanding a paradigm was single authorship during the Renaissance that it made the common theatrical practice of collaborative writing difficult to acknowledge, let alone extol" (8). He is convincing on this level, though his attempts to use Hamlet to prove his point prove less impressive: he suggests that Shakespeare emphasizes the collaboration between playwright and actors over that between multiple authors/playwrights. Yet it strikes me as poor evidence to say that because Shakespeare does not depict positive examples of playwright-playwright collaboration that he had trouble conceiving of it.

Read more...

Stargate Universe (Spoilers for "Justice")

So, today, between reading Pilgrim's Progress and writing about it, I watched the latest episode of Stargate Universe, "Justice." It was a pretty awesome episode, and advanced the story of the Destiny a hell of a lot. (Sidenote: I'm liking SGU's approach to titles--one word each, naming the problem that the characters are facing.) In this particular episode, there were a lot of itty-bitty problems with how they set up the story, but nothing that threw me out of the story completely.

So, here's what happened:

Problem soldier #1, Spencer had been suffering from depression, but had run out of his meds because they are too far from Earth to get more. Problem Soldier #2, Greer, finds him dead in his quarters, shot in the head. There is brief speculation that he might have committed suicide based on an amateur's ability to identify blood splatter patterns... but there is no gun. A review of Eli's kino video reveals no clues. A search of the ship reveals the gun, hidden in Colonel Young's quarters. Young protests he is innocent, but is nonetheless forced to step down in favor of a civilian, the military personnel nearly threaten to mutiny, and an inquiry/trial begins. During the inquiry, Rush posits that Young probably did kill Spencer in order to protect the ship (and we all know this is what Rush would have done). So far, the title seems appropriate.

And here's where things get interesting, and you don't want to read this if you plan to watch the episode and want to be surprised: it turns out that Rush had altered the kino video and planted the gun in the Colonel's quarters (after having found Spencer dead) in order to get the Colonel out of the way. Okay, not terribly surprised so far? How's this for the next twist: the Colonel confronts Rush on the next deserted planet they come to, beats the hell out of him, and abandons him there, barely making it back to the Destiny in time for it to jump back into hyperspace. Now, how's that for justice?

The Colonel clearly can't afford Rush going behind his back and/or undermining his authority. At least one person is now comatose because of Rush's actions (granted, said person was stupid enough to sit in the alien chair when he didn't have to, so it's not entirely Rush's fault, but Rush deserves some blame too). Rush has demonstrated pretty clearly so far this season that he has few ethical limits of his own. Rush proudly, if angrily, claims that he'll never be finished with Young. Out in the middle of no-where, Young doesn't have many options for dealing with a rebel--especially a brilliant one like Rush. So, is it justice to essentially sentence him to death? That's pretty much the question the episode asks.

As far as the Colonel knows, Rush is almost guaranteed to die--if this was real life instead of Stargate, there's no way he could survive. But this IS Stargate, so there is a more predictable twist: Rush is stuck on a planet with an (albeit apparently dead) alien spaceship. He doesn't have any equipment, and the planet has no visible vegetation or water. But somehow I don't think that's going to stop him--I suspect that within two or three episodes, he's going to get picked up by an alien ship of some sort, and they're all going to come after the Destiny. (Either that or around the end of the season...) And so that alien ship will, I would guess, prove to be our first clue to the big, bad, alien villains.

Read more...

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

Today I had (relatively) fun reading for my exams: John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan wrote the book during a twelve-year imprisonment for preaching illegally. Bunyan was a nonconformist or dissenter, terms that were applied to anyone who rejected the CoE. The story he writes traces the allegorical journey of Christian from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, as he encounters friends (the Evangelist, Faithful, Hopeful) and foes (Talkative, the Giant Despair, Athiest) along the way. I'm here including a rather awesome map from the 19th century that includes all the major events:


One of the interesting things about this map is the circular spiral, which seems to me to recall Dante's depictions of the levels of hell and paradise. This is very different from the eighteenth century map (c. 1780) that is perhaps more "accurate" in that it reflects the fact that Bunyan emphasizes that the road is straight and narrow:

But Bunyan's narrative is not so straight forward (no pun intended) as the second map implies. Even if the road is straight and narrow, this is a dream narrative as well as an allegory, and even when the right way is clear to the reader, it is not always so clear to Christian or his companions, even when it should be. (My edition of Pilgrim's Progress demonstrates that second map is based on contemporary maps for standard journeys--here's an example.)

It was really interesting to read this immediately after the last two books I've read on women prophets in the 17th century, as both books emphasized how prophecy was understood as having a two-fold meaning during the period: first, just plain old interpretation of scripture, and second, visionary apocalypticism. There are elements of both in Bunyan's book. Much of Christian's journey is not just marked by scripture references, but also discourses interpreting scripture, and the middle third of the journey is explicitly based on Psalm 23 (walking through the valley of death, lying down in green pastures, being lead by still waters). But the frame of the story is an apocalyptic dream vision as well, one that engages in social commentary on the ills of the time and promising hell fire punishment for them, as well as the celestial city for Christians who follow the right road. Its hard to imagine that readers in the 17th century especially, after having been surrounded by prophets of various sects who promised the new millennial reign of Christ or the destruction of people who do not obey God, would not have understood Bunyan's text as existing in a similar vein. Various scenes from within the book also echo other, similar religious texts: Faithful's trial and execution at the Vanity Fair, for example, has clear similarities to trials and executions included in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which in also mimicked by dozens of texts during the 17th century.

But the text is also in many ways a representation of Bunyan's own life as a Christian. It is not the direct autobiography that Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners was, but clearly Bunyan's own experiences shaped his text. Yet, perhaps more remarkable is that, despite his insistence on a single road with a single entrance, he seems sometimes to recognize the fact that different Christians have very different journeys and temptations. There is only one way to God, Bunyan argues, but along that way there are many different options, and what is dangerous for one man may not be for another.

There are a few other notable features to the text:

1. The narrator's presence in the story is unusual. He constantly reminds the reader that this is the narration of a dream, which perhaps emphasizes either how all of what happens occurs within the mind of the dreamer (the reflection of a single psyche), or that it cannot be interpreted literally, because it is a dream.
   
2. Bunyan frames his allegory as following a biblical model, and even suggests, perhaps, that he was divinely inspired to do so: He writes in "The Author's Apology for His Book" that he "fell suddenly" into writing the book: "I did not understand / That I at all should make a little Book / In such a mode" (he uses similar language multiple times). He later goes on to write that metaphors (along with "Types" and "Shadows") are a way of conveying truth, and were used by the Prophets as well as Christ and the Apostles.

Read more...

Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution

Teresa Feroli argues in her book Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution that the women prophets of the English Revolution marked an early phase of the rise of modern feminism. While most feminsts have marked the start of feminist consciousness in Mary Astell--that is, after the English Revolution--Feroli argues that there are proto-feminist elements to the women prophets as they develop a role for women as political activists (15). Feroli articulates for major elements to her project:

1. That prophecy and politics are intrinsically connected;
   
2. that prophecy's political imperative caused women prophets to see/construct themselves as politically viable speakers and writers;
3. that these women ultimately defined a political order that priveleged individual agency over the dictates of a predetermined heirarchy;
4. and that during this time period, female autonomy evolved from being dependent upon a patriarchial system to being an attribute of female sexuality or the female body.

The fourth point is in many ways the most developed of the four, and certainly the one that gets the most attention in the book. The first two chapters, both on Eleanore Davies, focus on how the early prophets did construct their authority in relationship to the patriarchal system, while the third and fourth, on Anna Trapnel and Margaret Fell respectively, describe the move towards authority based in womens' bodies.

Chapter 1 argues that Davies is "mourning the passing of old social structures" like the monarchy. Davies in particular admired King James, who was "the muse of her prophetic writing because he epitomized the virtues of divine right." She memorialized James as a "prophet-king who shares with her an intimite tie to the Word. Over time, however, she makes his the voice that calls her to prophesy. James is no longer merely an inspired king, but the embodiment of divinity itself" (37). According to Feroli, Davies reworked traditional ideas about inheritence and divine right to fit her own needs. In Chapter 2, Davies points to what she sees as the corruption of the current, patriarchal order (epitomized in the execution of her brother, Lord Castlehaven, who she thinks was wrongly accused of rape and sodomy and turned into a scapegoat), and that God was punishing England by giving them a female prophet.

Chapter 3 looks at Fasting and the construction of the female body in Anna Trapnel's Cry of the Stone. Feroli argues that Trapnel's text complicates the idea that bodies were understood as liabilities for early modern women (98). Instead, she see Trapnel as establishing her own body as a model for the body politic through her textualization of her body:

Trapnel represents her body as more than a medium for showcasing [divine] power. She makes her body into a text . . . that articulates both the power and reason of divine authority. . . . Trapnel is able to theorize her body [according to Scripture] as a set of political practices . . . Trapnel attempts to preserve the body's claim to authority. Rather than priveleging the word/Word over the body, she seeks to reconcile the distinct claims to authority fo both. (121)

She likens her body, Feroli says, to "a text that articulates a central point" and suggests an interchangeability of word and body (122, 142). The word, she argues, "is always bound up with the flesh." Feroli doesn't take it any further than that, but it strikes me that this is a sort of incarnational reading of text and bodies that I might want to do more with in my dissertation.

Chapter 4 looks at Margaret Fell, a quaker prophet who explicitly defended the right of women to prophesy and speak in public more generally. Feroli takes her title from Fell's text Womens Speaking Justified. She argues that Fell "predicates visionary authority on the physical bond that women, both as mothers and lovers, share with Christ" (149). It is in this chapter that Feroli examines the larger Quaker movement and its place in feminist history, even when authors like Fox were not explicit in advancing women's causes.

Read more...

Diane Watt, Secretaries of God

Diane Watt’s book, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, examines the tradition of female English prophets between the 15^th and 17^th centuries. She is interested in tracing the continuity—and change—as female prophecy developed and reacted to religio-political events during this period. She begins with assumption that “by the later Middle Ages, there existed in Western Christendom established traditions of popular and specifically female prophecy which, although open to appropriation by the various and confliting power structures, have their own partial autonomy and which are, to some extent at least, independent cultural and thus potentially political forces” (2). In using the term “secretary” for women who participated in these traditions, she points to the dual meanings of this term—first, that of God’s confidant and trusted servant, and second, that of a governmental position. In fact, one of the shifts that Watt identifies is the move of English women prophets from local to national concerns, especially concerning political events.

One of the other shifts Watt focuses on is the shift from understanding prophecy as a move from visionary prophecy to interpretive prophecy. Watt argues that “the Reformation did signal an important turning point in English women’s prophecies in some respects, but not in others. For example, in the Middle Ages, prophets and visionaries not only saw themselves as divinely inspired teachers, but were often also consulted as seers and spiritual guides, and demonstrated physical manifestations of their gifts. In much Protestant theology, however, prophecy was understood primarily as the interpretation of Scripture.” (11) Due to the shift in meaning of the term, even among recusant circles, during the Reformation “women were less likely to have revelatory and visionary experiences” (11).

Her reason for focusing on women prophets is that “Prophecy was seen as a feminine activity, regardless of the sex of the speaker, but while it authorized the female voice, it was derived from and at the same time reinforced women’s perceived inferiority” (13).

In chapter 2, on Margery Kempe, we get our first sense of one of the other major themes—the role of male collaborators who work to authorize the work and text of the women prophets. In Kempe’s case, “The scribe is anxious to attribute supernatural powers to his subject. His ‘masculine’ objectifying voice confirms the veracity of her revelations and the orthodox of her piety and authorizes the text itself” (18). According to Watt, the scribe makes Kempe’s prophetic voice very important: “Kempe used the more widely accepted sorts of prophecy, in particular her divine revelations about the state of individuals within the church to justify another type, the interpretation of Scripture” (19).

Watt emphasizes the parallels between Kempe and Christ that are created in the text. First, “In believing that she was privileged to know the secrets of the Holy Ghost, Kempe saw herself as inspired teacher, facing opposition and incredulity as a prophet ‘in her own country’” (37). Then, “In its lengthy accounts of her trials and sufferings, it patterns her life according to the imitatio Christi” (49). “Ultimately, Kempe’s decision to have her autobiography written was a decision not only to describe the mercy of the Lord… but also to convince the reader that she was a true secretary of God.” (50)

Chapter 3 focuses on Elizabeth Barton. Here, Watt shows how Reformation related issues moved English women prophets from the local to the national scene (on the Continent, they had a tradition of being involved on a national level already). Barton was a Catholic who prophesied that Henry VIII would lose his kingdom. Barton is represented in the Acts of Attainder as a false prophet (52). While Barton’s prophecies have been seen as part of “some larger Machiavellian plan,” Watt argues that “they are related to the established and partially autonomous traditions of female and popular prophecy” (54). One of the more interesting observations Watt makes is that “prophecies often functioned as a form of political commentary and protest, but sometimes they not only articulated, but also inspired social and political unease” (54). Barton also is part of the developing tradition where physical illness becomes part of the construction of a woman prophet. She had a trance like state, and an illness that attacked her throat so that God could speak through her. Quoting Purkiss, “’prophetic utterance necessarily involves a radical dislocation of the voice from the body’” (62).

In chapter 4, Watt looks at Anne Askew and her editors John Bale and John Foxe. She argues that Bale’s desire to make Askew a type or figure of female virtue prevents him from understanding Askew’s own representation of her self (108). Bale emphasizes her femininity, and “is concerned only with what is typical in her character and experiences” (109). This leads to contradictory depictions of Askew in Bale’s edition. The same is true of Foxe’s editorial approach, as “Askew’s characterization of herself as ‘harmless as a dove, wise as a serpent’ undermines the conventional portrayal of the pious Protestant woman as chaste, silent, and obedient. It is drawn from Scripture and Reformation teaching which emphasizes that women and men are equal before God and that anyone can be transformed by the Spirit.” (117). Yet Askew was still dependent on others for her text’s publication/circulation, which Watt argues led them to “[gloss] over her powerful and independent personality” (117).

In chapter 5, Watt examines the prophecies of Lady Eleanor Davies, an upper class woman “charged [by Laud] with interpreting Scripture,” among other things (118). Davies’ texts are difficult to understand, and Watt argues that “her fragmented syntax and idiosyncratic punctuation can be understood as an attempt to create an authentic and esoteric prophetic voice for the writer or secretary of God” (122). The use of the third person to refer tone’s self “is a strategy which potentially facilities the dislocation of an authoritative and thus male voice from the female body” (123). In constructing herself as a prophet, Davies emphasizes that she is “the heir not to Deborah, but to Daniel and John of the Apocalypse, and as a new Moses, Ezekiel, or Elijah, she was faced with the difficulty that the antecedents whom she chose for herself were male. The phenomenon of God words being uttered through a woman was potentially problematic because even though as a conduit her relationship to her prophecy was one of the passivity, she became vicariously empowered by the voice speaking through her. In writing in the third person, Davies did not efface her own subjective position as a woman; on the contrary, she reconstructed God, and thus authority, as female” (148).

Read more...

Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England (Thornton)

Okay, so I'm back to the exam reading, though my schedule got seriously messed up, partly because of last week and partly because a book I ordered several weeks ago still hasn't arrived via either ILL or from B&N. So, today I am rather unexpectedly reading Tim Thornton's book Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England. Thornton is looking primarily non-biblical, non-apocryphal prophecy--the most well-known of which are the prophecies of Merlin concerning the future of England. His basic goal is to trace the influence of the various prophecies and how groups responded to them and tried to control them (1). He argues that prophecy was important to both the elite and lower classes, and that "printed prophecy represented a close and creative dialogue with a continuing and vigorous and highly political oral and manuscript tradition which, although it (at least) compelled the elite's attention, was not exclusively under elite control" (7). He argues that looking at these prophecies "prompts us to re-emphasize the importance of the interpretation and reception of texts and traditions in a historiography which has become too conscious of textual consistencies as against meaning and understanding" (7). I'm not entirely certain what that last sentence means--my best guess is that the historiography overemphasizes "textual consistencies" instead of focusing on how readers understood what a text meant.

Of the chapters, chapters 1 & 2 are the most relevant to my project (chapters 3-5 focus on these prophecies as they were employed after the time period I'm interested in, all the way up to the present day). Chapter 1 focuses on prophecy in the 16th Century, tracing responses to prophecy among the elite (especially Henry VII, Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn). He shows how prophecy was integrated into political culture by choosing to challenge prophetic interpreters rather than prophets themselves (25)--using prophecies to support particular views of the future when politically useful, and opposing such use when when it was "politically unacceptable" (24). This seems to confirm my general suspicions about how Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reflects attitudes towards prophecy during the period.

Contemporary theology reacted to the cultural use of ancient prophecy in several different ways. On the one hand, "the biblical condemnation of diabolical divination was more easily applied to astrology than ancient prophecy, and aside from a rather limited tradition which interpreted this condemnation very strictly, it was rationalized away by many," and individuals criticized not "its fundamental credibility but its practical success" (26). Yet, radical Protestant authorities were "ferocious in their condemnation of all forms of prophecy and astrology" (49).

In Chapter 2, Thornton argues that in the 17th century, the development of a culture of biblical prophecy and a culture of astrology combined with that of ancient prophecy. Astrology gained prominence after the death of John Calvin (55), and biblical prophecy was integral to Protestant thinking--John Bale and John Foxe both emphasized biblical prophecy as a way of understanding where England was headed (56). This meant that "the most common sceptical response to ancient prophecy was, therefore, neither outright disbelief nor a preference for astrology or biblical prophecy, but a practical mockery of its de facto limitations" (57). The rest of the chapter then proceeds to trace the importance of the Mother Shipton prophecies, first in relationship to the specific location of York, and then more broadly throughout England.

Read more...

20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Don't Learn From Twilight

Because I ended up taking the week off from exam reading (it started with needing a break, then became a case of having one forced on me by a three day migraine), I thought I would offer up a critique of--okay, really, a rant about--the most recent Twilight-related material to come my way: Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight. This actually came at me from several directions: a friend on Facebook tagged me in a note where she reposted it, and another friend flagged it for my attention via Google reader.

I will point out, before I begin my rant, that I am not an obsessive Twilight fan-girl. I have read all four of the books, and found them entertaining but problematic on multiple levels--poorly written at times, rather immature, filled with sometimes disturbing obsessions. I've seen the movies, but found them, in parts, hilariously bad. I prefer my vampires to come in a James Marsters-wrapped package--picture to the right--rather than a Robert Pattinson one. But this isn't a Buffy post, as much as I would like it to be.

So, back to the point of origin for this rant: 20 unfortunate lessons girls learn from Twilight. I have problems with both the premises of such a list and quite a few of the so-called lessons.

Let's start with the most obvious premise: the idea that girls are "learning lessons" from the Twilight books. The underlying problem here is that some people have bought into the myth that all books "teach and delight." Clearly Twilight delights a fair number of people. Surely all those impressionable teenagers are looking to these books to teach them how the world works! Um, excuse me? While I do believe fantasy novels do tell us things about the real world, they do so usually on a pretty abstract level. The novels foil one-to-one comparisons precisely because, hey, we're talking about vampires and werewolves here (and I'll show exactly how this breaks down when I get to the specific lessons). Instead of saying that teenage girls are learning lessons from Twilight, I think it's probably more accurate to say that based on how girls are interpreting Twilight, we can tell what these girls probably already thought before they got hooked. While the list sometimes rings true because people know women who behave this way, I'm guessing that they didn't just start doing it because they read the Twilight novels. This is in some ways more scary than thinking Twilight is teaching these lessons, but only because it means we can't blame it on some stupid book.

The other basic, problematic premise here is that the boys in Twilight are actually in any way dangerous to Bella. The author of the list calls the novels "bad-boy-worshiping." The problem is, the two main boys in these novels aren't really bad boys at all. Both have sharp teeth and are supernaturally strong, but that's about as far as it goes. Edward not only won't drink Bella's blood, he won't have sex with her until after they are married, despite her incessant pressure to do both. That's not bad-boy behavior. Jacob is pretty much just as innocent. What makes the novels seem like they are bad-boy-worshiping is that both boys are afraid of being bad boys. They are both afraid they are bad because they are strong. But if there is a "lesson" in these novels, it is that strength does not make one good or bad, but that there is always a choice and the need for personal responsibility, even if your nature predisposes you to bad behavior. (ooh... I'm sensing some theology here...)

Anyway, on to a few of the so-called lessons. Many of the problems with these "lessons" is that they pick and choose facts from the novels--proof-texting of the worst sort. Take #1, for example:

1. If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence.

Clearly, the author of the list here is thinking about Edward. The problem, however, is that Bella isn't working just from the aloof and stand-offish behavior when deciding that Edward is in love with her. Edward tells her he's infatuated; he pretty much stalks Bella, coming into her room at night to watch her sleep (no invitation required!). He tells her flat out that she is the point of his existence. If boys don't do these things, girls "learning lessons" from the novels won't assume that the boys are secretly in love, etc.

It is at this point that I would like to point out one place where I do have a problem with the novels: "stalking" is not an acceptable proof of love. The novels are obsessed with obsession, and the line between innocent infatuation and obsession gets blurred far too much. But my point is that this list doesn't actually deal with the actual problems with the novels--it makes stuff up instead.

Here's an example of how translating "lessons learned" from a fantasy context into a real world context doesn't work:

14. If the boy you are in love with causes you (even indirectly) to be so badly beaten you end up in the hospital, you should tell the doctors and your family that you “fell down the steps” because you are such a silly, clumsy girl. That false explanation always works well for abused women.

Right, because telling them that a vampire tried to eat you wouldn't get you put in the psych ward. Let's also forget that Edward tried damn hard to keep her from being in danger, and that it was Bella being stupid enough to escape her assigned protectors that put her in danger. (Notice, I don't ever want to argue that Bella isn't often stupid or ridiculous--she is. But the problem here is that such stupidity is blindly obvious even to the teen girls who are obsessing over Edward and Jacob--not Bella. They want to BE Bella in part, I think, because they think they can do a better job of it than she can, and that Edward and Jacob deserve better.)

Let's look at another one of these lessons:

3. It’s OK for a potential romantic interest to be dimwitted, violent and vengeful — as long as he has great abs.

Well, Jacob does have great abs. However, he's not dimwitted. Violent and vengeful? Well, he's a werewolf who hunts vampires who are going around eating people. I suppose that's violent and vengeful, but that's again largely a matter of the fantasy genre. If this wasn't a fantasy novel, he'd be a cop from a family of cops, hunting a serial killer. We shouldn't mistake nature--vampire or werewolf--for character in these novels. And I don't think most teenage girls do.

Here's another problematic lesson that makes the mistake of confusing a behavior that happens in the book with one that the books imply are good:

14. It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you.

Let's first note that "seeing" here is really "hallucinating." The novels fight pretty hard against the idea that this was a good thing on Bella's part. She actually almost dies from her behavior, which in turn leads Edward to almost commit suicide (rather than bringing him back to her), and brings her to the attention of the Vulturi (which gets them all almost killed several times over). Just because characters manage to survive their bad choices does not mean that the novels teach that such behavior is desired.

Here's another lesson learned only from intentionally mis-reading the novels:

15. Men can be changed for the better if you sacrifice everything you are and devote yourself to their need for change.

Well, this assumes that either Edward or Bella is changed for the better, or that Bella is sacrificing herself to either of their need for change. I don't think there's any evidence for this at all in the books. I'm trying to think of a single example where this is remotely true, or could even be misconstrued as such, but I can't think of any.

I think that it's telling that by the time we get to the last three or four lessons, they aren't really lessons at all, but tired observations, that cannot be learned from the books even if they ought to be ("17. Girls shouldn’t always read a book series just because everyone else has"), or have nothing to do with teenage girls ("18. When writing a book series, it's acceptable to lift seminal source material and basterdize it with tired, overwrought teenage angst"), or reflect the fact that Twilight is only a small if obvious part of a much larger, much older shift in what Vampires signify in our culture ("20. Vampires — once among the great villains of literature and motion pictures — are no longer scary. In fact, they’re every bit as whiny, self-absorbed and impotent as any human being"). But that last one deserves its own post some other time.

Read more...

R.V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry

In Doctrine and Devotion in the Seventeenth Century: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan, R.V. Young's primary argument is that much of what has traditionally been identified as “protestant” poetics is really common to Christian devotional literature, both Protestant and Catholic, throughout the seventeenth century. He's here targeting, in large part Barbara Lewalski and the various scholars who have followed her in tracing the development of English religious/devotional poetry in the 17th century (see my two posts on Lewalski's book here and here). Young demonstrates how various techniques that were identified as Protestant by Lewalski and others are included in many Catholic writings as well. In other words, he argues that what they have identified is not a Protestant Poetics, but a Christian/Biblical poetics shared across Reformation boundaries. However, at times this argument gets a little annoying as Young seems intent not just on showing the continuity between the two traditions, but on denying that there are any differences between them at all. This mostly has to do with how strongly he frames his argument, rather than what he's actually saying. I think part of the problem is that Young is obviously and violently anti-Calvinist, at one point comparing Calvin to Lenin (11) and tends to conflate Protestantism, Calvinism, and Puritanism.

The best section of the book is the third, "Biblical Poetics in the 17th Century." It's here that a lot of the problems in the first two sections get addressed, and Young moves from simply arguing against Lewalski and company to finally establishing a positive argument about the period--and this is where the book finally becomes useful for me. Young argues that Jesus as Word/Logos is the central, shared part of Christian culture that both Protestant and Catholic poets turned to in the midst of dogmatic and doctrinal struggles: "The spiritual dynamic of biblical poetics finds in the scriptural text not the dead trace of an absent presence, but the living voice of the embodied Logos. The poet seeks to rewrite the Word of God in his own imitation or version of “scripture” thus inscribing the word—Christ’s name and presence—in his own soul in the blood of the lamb” (169). In other words, “Biblical Poetics, then, more than a systematic allusiveness to Scripture or generic imitation, involves the attempt of the poet to write his way into the sacred text, to move through the written book of revelation into the secret book of life” (181).

Read more...

Jesse M. Lander, Inventing Polemic

This weekend I was reading Jesse Lander's book Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. I have a lot of notes on this one because there's a lot of really dense material, much of which will be really useful when it comes to my dissertation. I tried to keep the notes a bit shorter for this post, but I'm not sure I succeeded. Inventing Polemic focuses on the intersection of religious controversy and print technology in the form of polemic. The central argument is the polemic--characterized by fierce enthusiasm and unsophisticated earnestness--is a newly important category of writing during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that then loses its importance after the Restoration, when "literary" writing--characterized by politeness and irony--supplants it after being defined against it.

For Lander, polemic is a "genre, concept, and . . . practice" (35), rather than simply divisive political writing--though divisiveness is important. One of the primary purposes of polemic as a genre is not to convince one's opponents, but to to divide one's audiences into friends and enemies. "the polemicists aim is not to convert the object of the attack but to convince the wider audience that the case is so. Though polemic has genuine argumentative content, there is no denying that it functions to divide and polarize, the product of a line of thinking that eschews premature peace and pursues instead what Milton calls the 'wars of truth'" (12). But the sorting effect of polemic is not just to divide; it also tries to "consolidate a particular community of conviction" (16).

Because polemicism is not just a genre, however, other genres and categories of texts can be put to polemical use. For this reason, Lander uses both texts that we don't define as literary and those we do in his book, giving a chapter each to Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the Martin Marprelate Tracts, Hamlet, Donne's Pseudo-Martyr and Anatomy of the World, and Milton's Areopagitica. Lander is attempting to show that "polemical concerns mark even those texts from the period we have found most emphatically literary," and that the "modern notion of 'the literary' is in part constituted through a repudiation of polemic that imposes a historical amnesia, a willful forgetting of the polemical engagements of the past" (5).

Polemic occurs at the intersection of religious controversy and the invention of print because it relies on the collaborative nature of print for much of its power: "A printed book cannot be dismissed as the solitary ravings of a singular heretic, disgruntled reader, or political dissident. Obviously print does not compel belief, but the deployment of print technology by a network of artisans, entrepreneurs and writers, often working within complex institutions of licensing and censorship, does confer an authority upon the text" (16). This is a theme that Lander returns to repeatedly, esp. with regards to Foxe, the Marprelate tracts, and Milton.

Chapter 1 focuses on how individual editions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs were used for polemic purposes. Lander's situates his argument in relationship to the scholarly debate over whether Foxe contributed to the emergence of a language of national election. He argues that while Foxe himself does not, the material apparatus that surround two editions of the book--the 1576 edition and the Abridgement of 1589--are polemical in nature, though in different ways and in response to different religious controversies.

Chapter 2 looks at the Martin Marprelate tracts, which are more obviously polemical attempts at advocating a presbyterian form of church government. Here, Lander focuses, first, on the polemic's awareness of it's own materiality and the "sophisticated awareness of the many ways in which a book may signify," and second, on the tracts' attempts "to forge a collective identity through polemical engagement with both the bishops and the puritans" (83). (I had one major question while reading this chapter, and I hope someone out there can answer it for me: what is antinomian inspiration? Lander doesn't define it, and I think of antinomian as anti-legalist, and I really have no idea what how inspiration might be legalist, much less anti-legalist.)

Chapter 3 looks at Hamlet, and how the different Quartos establish different readerships, reacting against one another. Q1 emphasizes the text's nature as a version of the performed revenge tragedy, while Q2, Lander argues, has an "anxiety over the tyranny of the popular" (112) and works in an anti-polemic manner, "[anticipating] the establishment of the category of literature--a category in large part constituted through this repudiation of polemic" (144). So, this chapter is less about the polemical mode, and more about the advancement of a literary mode that is defined against the polemical mode.

Donne is the focus of Chapter 4, arguing that the predominant view of Donne as a coterie poet does not suffice to explain Donne's foray into print in both Pseudo-Martyr and Anatomy of the World. Lander makes the excellent point that Donne embraced print for his polemics, sermons, and devotions, so we should not extend the stigma of print for poetry to his other works. Donne's "work usefully points to the cultural affinity between poetry and polemic, to the ways in which both endeavors are animated by similar concerns" (145). Donne circulated his manuscripts before putting them to print, suggesting continuity between the two in a material fashion (152). Lander ultimately argues that "though polemical verse was ubiquitous, it, along with innumerable prose polemic, gave impetus to the development of conspicuously non-polemical poetry" (179). Donne's poetry, then, does not directly engage controversy, but it is nevertheless the product of the polemical atmosphere.

The final chapter I'm interested in (#5; #6 is on Chelsea College as a place to study polemic) is on Milton's Areopagitica. Lander argues that Areopagitica is "a polemic for polemic" (181). It represents "the zenith of religious polemic in English culture," and "is a defense of, and an invitation to, strenuous and zealous argument" (182). One of the more interesting bits of this argument is that, in Milton's argument, the idea that "polemic produces knowledge . . . relies on a providential belief in the ultimate, as well as the occasional, victory of truth over error. . . . For Milton, the dialectical expansion of knowledge . . . comes about as a result of both divine providence and human agency" (183). While Lander buys that Milton believes in a dialectical, collaborative pursuit of truth and knoweldge, he does not buy Dobranski's argument that Milton "makes an 'argument for a process of social authorship' that would acknowledge the contributions of all the agents involved in the process of making a book" (191). I think Lander is right that Dobranski pushes the argument a bit too far at points, and that Lander's modifications about the role of divine providence is really useful (don't want to go into too much detail here, but it's going to be a great addition for my chapter on Milton).

Read more...