Pious designs: theological aesthetics in the writings of George Herbert and the Ferrars of Little Gidding

Boston University OpenBU http://open.bu.edu Theses & Dissertations Boston University Theses & Dissertations 2013 Pious designs: theological aesthetics in the writings of George Herbert and the Ferrars of Little Gidding https://hdl.handle.net/2144/15164 Boston University BOSTON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Dissertation PIOUS DESIGNS: THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS IN THE WRITINGS OF GEORGE HERBERT AND THE FERRARS OF LITTLE GIDDING by REGINA LABA WALTON B.A., Hampshire College, 2000 M.Div., Harvard University, 2003 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 © Copyright by REGINA LABA WALTON 2013 Approved by First Reader ______________________________________________________ Peter S. Hawkins, Ph.D. Professor of Religion and Literature Yale Divinity School Second Reader ______________________________________________________ Christopher Martin, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Boston University Third Reader _______________________________________________________ Karen Westerfield Tucker, Ph.D. Professor of Worship Boston University ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS “Speake not of my debts, unlesse you meane to pay them.” —Outlandish Proverbs Selected by Mr. George Herbert (1640) Since I have benefited from the scholarly assistance, general helpfulness, forbearance, and friendship of so many during the course of this project, I will gladly and gratefully speak of my debts, with no pretensions that repayment is possible. I would like to thank the following organizations for the fellowships and scholarships awarded to me in support of my doctoral studies: the Episcopal Church Foundation, the Boston University Humanities Foundation, the Boston University Women’s Guild, and the Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University. My advisor, Peter S. Hawkins, has from the beginning asked pointed questions with unfailing kindness. I could not have asked for a better “pattern,” as the Ferrars would say, of scholarship and teaching in religion and literature. I am grateful to Christopher Martin of the English Department and Karen Westerfield Tucker of the School of Theology, whose expertise and willingness to serve as readers has made this a stronger and truly interdisciplinary project. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, has been a model pastor-scholar for me. I thank him for his collegiality, encouragement, and friendship over many years of teaching together, and for serving as a member of my committee. iv Joyce and David Ransome’s decades of scholarship on Little Gidding has made my own work possible. I am especially grateful to Joyce for her help with numerous queries on all things Ferrar. Deeana Klepper, Jonathan Klawans, and Karen Nardella at the Division of Religious and Theological Studies have shown me a number of kindnesses in their administrative capacities during the course of my studies, which I deeply appreciate. I would like to thank Trevor Cooper for making his article on the Ferrars’ public worship available to me in advance of publication, and to Debora Shuger for sending me the manuscript of her talk on the Little Gidding Story Books. Constance Furey and John N. Wall provided valuable feedback and assistance along the way. All twenty-first century scholars of Herbert owe Helen Wilcox a great debt for her edition of Herbert’s English poems. Fittingly, significant portions of this study were composed at Anglican retreat centers, and I thank these communities for their hospitality: the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Julia Slayton and the Sisters of St. Anne at Bethany House in Arlington, Massachusetts, the Order of the Holy Cross in West Park, New York, and especially Tony and Judith Hodgson, Wardens (now retired) at Ferrar House, Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire, UK. Many people apart from myself prayed for this study’s conclusion; special thanks for their intercessions on my behalf go to Br. Jonathan Maury, SSJE, and the Tuesday night Bible Study at the Parish of the Good Shepherd, Waban, Massachusetts. Meg Gatza, Melody Thomas, Kristin Raley, Sarah Miller, Bonnie Fitch, Alison v Foley Nash, and Emily Nash provided excellent childcare that allowed me to write and work with peace of mind. The Rev. G. Truman Welch and the people of the Parish of the Good Shepherd, Waban, Massachusetts, are, in the spirit of Little Gidding, a Christian community engaged with the life of the mind, whom I am very grateful to have ministered alongside. Many friends have smoothed the way, especially Charity Lofthouse, Mari Jyväsjärvi, Cristine and Chris Hutchison-Jones, Nick Godfrey, Sarah Fredericks, Jennifer Schley Johnson, Lynette Cassel, Frances Bean, Shannon Last, Chris Wendell, Hall Kirkham, Adam Shoemaker, Peter Tierney, and Loring and Louise Conant. From my mother, Jacqueline Laba, I inherited my love of the Bible and English literature. My father, Michael Laba, has always encouraged me to approach challenges with tenacity and clear-headedness. This project would not have been completed without their support. My children, Gregory and Cecily, were born during my doctoral studies. I thank them for their consistency in napping and talent for independent play, and especially for the tidal wave of joy, wonder, and love that each of them has brought into my life. Finally, I thank my husband, Chris Walton, for his technical support, tireless copyediting, and for the immeasurable encouragement he has given me throughout the writing of this dissertation, as well as his willingness in allowing a Welsh poet-priest and a large family of renunciants to move in with us these last several years. vi PIOUS DESIGNS: THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS IN THE WRITINGS OF GEORGE HERBERT AND THE FERRARS OF LITTLE GIDDING REGINA LABA WALTON Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2013 Major Professor: Peter Hawkins, Professor of Religions and Literature, Yale Divinity School ABSTRACT This study examines both the theological aesthetics of George Herbert (1593– 1633), English priest and poet, and those of his friends, the Ferrar family of Little Gidding, who founded a quasi-monastic religious community near Cambridge from 1624–1646. In their writings, Herbert and the Ferrars negotiated two traditional but unusually competing aesthetic stances: the “beauty of holiness,” on the one hand, and austere plainness, on the other. They skillfully navigated between conflicting theological positions during the years leading up to the English Civil War. Chapter 1 reviews the historical connection between Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar (1592/3–1637) in light of recent revisionist biographies. It describes and contextualizes the anomalous and controversial devotional life at Little Gidding within the complex religio-political landscape of the 1620s and 1630s; it also argues for a shared theological aesthetic between Herbert and the Ferrars as evident in their collaboration on various projects. (Herbert also designated the Ferrars his literary executors.) Chapter 2 revisits the question of Herbert’s paradoxical “plain style,” a topic that has engaged scholars for decades, by exploring his poetic use of clothing images in conjunction with the vii Renaissance commonplace of the “garment of style.” Chapter 3 examines in detail liturgical practice at Little Gidding, both the family’s public and private worship life, as well as their extensive renovation of two churches. Here I argue that the community did not fit easily within any single category in the “worship wars” of the early seventeenth century, but instead drew upon influences across the liturgical spectrum, from Laudianism to puritanism. Chapters 4 and 5 explore how Herbert (in his poetry) and the Ferrars (in their religious dialogues called the Story Books) use narrative of various kinds, but especially parable and exempla, for catechetical ends, and emphasize the centrality of “true stories” to Christian belief. The conclusion argues that the texts examined in this study present a theological aesthetic that is deeply connected to a lived, practiced ethics. This project fills in a major gap in Herbert studies while recovering important primary sources for the understanding of religion, literature and culture in early modern England. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv Abstract vii Table of Contents ix List of Illustrations xii Chapter 1: “Contrary Reports”: Herbert, the Ferrars, and the English Religious Landscape 1 I. “Where prayer has been valid” 1 II. The Biblical Sources of Protestant Aesthetics 6 III. Biographical Background 9 George Herbert 9 Nicholas Ferrar and the Move to Little Gidding 12 The Ferrars, Colletts, and Mapletofts 15 What Was Little Gidding? 22 “Spirituall Edification”: Herbert and Little Gidding 25 IV. Herbert, the Ferrars, and the English Church of the 1620s and 1630s 35 “Every definition is a misfortune” 35 Herbert and the Ferrars on the Ecclesiastical Spectrum 40 V. Overview 49 Chapter 2: “In him I am well drest”: George Herbert’s Plain Style Revisited 51 I. “Plainly Saying, My God, My King,” “Utmost Art,” and the “Naked Simplicitie” of The Temple 52 Previous Scholarship on Herbert’s Plain Style 64 “Give me simplicitie”: “A Wreath” and “The Starre” 74 Simplicity in Christian Tradition, Augustine, and Savonarola 79 II. Herbert and the “Garment of Style”: Confused Clothing and Ruined Finery 94 “Excesse of Apparell” 103 Confused Clothing 111 ix Ruined Finery 117 “The British Church” and “Aaron” 128 Chapter 3: Liturgy at Little Gidding: “The Word Continually” 139 I. Edward Lenton’s Visit to Little Gidding 145 II. Construction of the Gospel Harmonies as a Liturgical Practice 164 III. Little Gidding and the Book of Common Prayer 174 IV. Sunday Worship 177 The Ferrars’ Sunday in Context: Sabbatarianism and Anti-Sabbatarianism 183 V. Weekday Worship: Praying the Hours 196 VI. Night Watches 205 VII. The Ferrars and Herbert as “Re-edifiers”: The Restoration of St. John’s, Little Gidding, and St. Mary’s, Leighton Bromswold, and the Little Gidding Glebe-Lands 211 St. John’s Church, Little Gidding 213 St. Mary’s Church, Leighton Bromswold 220 Glebe Lands 225 Summary of Restorations 226 Conclusion 231 Chapter 4: Storying in The Temple: Ranging Freely Within the Zodiac of Christ’s Wit 234 I. The Role of Stories in The Temple 237 II. Sidney, Bacon, and the Truth of Fiction 249 III. Herbert’s Storying Poems 260 Story and the World “contracted to a span” 261 Story and Dialogue 266 Story and Expectation 277 Chapter 5: Storying at Little Gidding: Dialogue, Exempla, and “The Lying Patternes of Orlando” 301 I. “A school of Christian religion” 301 II. Previous Scholarship on the Little Academy 313 III. Renaissance Dialogue, Collaborative Authorship, and the “framing & x moulding of this storying Busines” 323 IV. Literary Models for the Story Books: Erasmus, Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre 338 V. “What example will you give us?” Exemplarity and Historical Truth 351 VI. “The lying Patternes of Orlando” and Little Gidding’s Bonfire of the Vanities 368 Conclusion: “Then Order plaies the soul”: Theological Aesthetics as a Way of Life 386 Appendix: Illustrations 393 Bibliography 398 Curriculum Vitae 417 xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1: Title Page, The Arminian Nunnery 393 Fig. 2: Exterior, Church of St. John, Little Gidding 394 Fig. 3: Interior, Church of St. John, Little Gidding 395 Fig. 4: Façade of Church of St. John and Tomb of Nicholas Ferrar 395 Fig. 5: Exterior, Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Leighton-Bromswold 396 Figs. 6–7: Interior, Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Leighton-Bromswold 397 xii 1 CHAPTER 1: “CONTRARY REPORTS”: HERBERT, THE FERRARS, AND THE ENGLISH RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE If you came at night like a broken king, If you came by day not knowing what you came for, It would be the same, when you leave the rough road And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for Is only a shell, a husk of meaning From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled If at all. Either you had no purpose Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured And is altered in fulfillment. There are other places Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws, Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city— But this is the nearest, in place and time, Now and in England.1 I. “Where prayer has been valid” By the time T.S. Eliot made his pilgrimage to St. John’s Church in the tiny village of Little Gidding, about thirty miles outside of Cambridge, on May 25, 1936, it had already been “a symbolic place of mind” for him for a number of years, representing “a distant paradigm of the contemplative life, founded as it was on a mystical devotional spirit which he would embrace with increasing intensity” in the years after his baptism in 1927.2 During the 1920s, Eliot read Izaak Walton’s description in his Life of Herbert of the Ferrar family’s seventeenth-century religious retreat at Little Gidding, Mario Praz’s account of the poet Richard Crashaw’s connection with Nicholas Ferrar and his niece 1 Four Quartets, “Little Gidding I,” in T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 201. 2 Ronald Schuchard, “If I think, again, of this place’: Eliot, Herbert and the Way to ‘Little Gidding,’” in Words in Time: New Essays on Eliot’s Four Quartets, Edward Lobb, ed. (London: Athlone, 1993), 52. 2 Mary Collett in Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra (1925), and J.H. Shorthouse’s fictional portrayal of religious life in the community in the novel John Inglesant (1881). In the early 1930s, immersion in George Herbert’s poetry led Eliot to reappraise his own attitude towards him: whereas he had previously considered Herbert a minor poet in comparison with Donne, he now criticized the “false setting” in which Herbert had been presented in anthologies and popular editions, coming instead to admire the “spiritual stamina” of the poems in The Temple: “Throughout there is brain work, and a very high level of intensity; his poetry is definitely an oeuvre, to be studied entire. And our gradual appreciation of the poetry gives us a new impression of the man.”3 His pamphlet George Herbert, published in 1962, which draws on many of his uncollected and unpublished essays on Herbert over the previous thirty years, was his last major essay; Herbert had been a guiding spirit to him throughout the second half of his life.4 Eliot was among the founders of the Friends of Little Gidding, established to maintain St. John’s Church, along with A.L. Maycock, who had published a popular biography of Nicholas Ferrar in 1938.5 Though he visited Little Gidding in 1936 and had been aware of it for many years before that, he did not begin his poem until 1941. “Little Gidding” is imbued with mysticism and poetic meetings, but it is also a poem about the end of history, where the Holy Spirit “breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror” like a bomber, where the 3 Quoted in Schuchard, 55. 4 Ibid., 79–80. On Eliot’s faith, see Barry Spurr, “Anglo-Catholic in Religion”: T.S. Eliot and Christianity (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2010). 5 See “T.S. Eliot at Little Gidding,” http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk/lgchtmlfiles/lgpeople2.html . 3 dead speak with tongues of fire, where Julian of Norwich’s refrain “All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well,” is repeated, because, as in Julian’s fourteenthcentury England, all was not well but instead approaching what seemed to be an insurmountable crisis.6 Perhaps Eliot was drawn to the spirituality of Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar because they, too, lived in an England that was unsettled and heading towards war (though both Herbert and Ferrar would die before the outbreak of the Civil War). “Little Gidding” was composed during the Blitz of London; Eliot likely remembered the Ferrars’ night watches and their continual praying of the Psalms as he himself kept watch as an air raid warden and firewatcher at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Little Gidding may have been a “distant paradigm of the contemplative life”; however, part of its appeal for Eliot must have been that it was not removed or protected from political upheaval and conflict, but represented a sanctuary where the tumult of history still appeared on the doorstep: in the form of Charles I, the “broken king,” in Eliot’s phrase, in flight after the Battle of Naseby and seeking shelter, or the (imagined) Parliamentary forces, ransacking and destroying religious items deemed idolatrous.7 “So, while the light fails / On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel / History is now and England.”8 6 Eliot, Collected Poems, 207, 206. 7 It was widely believed until recently that Little Gidding had been ransacked by Parliamentary forces; this supposed episode is described in the opening of the article “Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert,” by T.O. Beachcroft, which Eliot published in his Criterion in 1932. Recent historical research has disproved this episode, though the community was the victim of a polemical pamphlet (“The Arminian Nunnery”) circulated to incite violent action against them, and members of the community did flee England for the Netherlands from 1643–1646. See T. O. Beechcroft, “Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert,” Criterion 12 (October 1932), 24-42, and “Alleged Ransacking—an Update” at http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk/lgchtmlfiles/detailfiles/lgcpopuptextpage1.html. 8 Eliot, Collected Poems, 208. 4 Eliot’s interest in Herbert and Little Gidding was more broadly about the life of faith expressed and made manifest in art, in worship, and in history. “You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid,” he wrote.9 This statement alludes to a sense of the sincerity or legitimacy of the prayers offered in the little church centuries ago, but it is worth noting that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, what constituted “valid” prayer was a topic of heated debate, as was the physical posture in which one prayed. Eliot’s statement is also a theological one in the sense that this “validity” is connected to a sense of holiness of place, another aspect of the larger controversy between the various factions in early modern English religion, whose debates were so embroiling and yet so slippery that even today historians cannot agree on nomenclature for the various parties involved. Like Eliot, I am interested in religious experience made manifest through art, worship, and history. The present study investigates what I am calling the shared theological aesthetics of George Herbert (1583–1633), and his friends, the Ferrar family of Little Gidding, whose community existed from 1625 to 1642, and then continued in a reduced form until 1657. Theological aesthetics has been defined as an inter-disciplinary approach that is “concerned with questions about God and issues in theology in the light of and perceived through sense knowledge (sensation, feeling, imagination), through beauty, and the arts.”10 The breadth of this relatively recent inter-discipline allows me 9 Eliot, Collected Poems, 201. 10 Gesa Elspeth Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 1. See also Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God, Imagination, Beauty, and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Patrick Sherry, Spirit and Beauty: An 5 some latitude in crossing between the fields of literary criticism, liturgical theology, and church history (divisions which in the seventeenth century would have been viewed as artificial at best). Models for my study include Graham Parry’s Glory Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, Achsah Guibbory’s Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton, and Ramie Targoff’s Common Prayer, all of which combine literary criticism with religious studies and cultural history.11 In the early seventeenth century, many of the ecclesiastical controversies between established-church “Anglicans” and non-conforming Puritans in England revolved around what we would now term aesthetic choices: these included stained glass windows and lavishly decorated churches versus white-washed walls with scriptural mottos; the acceptability of illustrated Bibles; the placement and nomenclature of the altar/communion table; organ music versus unaccompanied singing; and artfully composed prayers, as in the Book of Common Prayer, versus spontaneous prayer “from the heart.”12 Aesthetics (defining the beautiful) has long been tied to ethics (defining the good), and nowhere is this clearer than in the period before the English Civil War. The scholarship of this period does not tend to refer to these controversies as matters of Introduction to Theological Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Bruno Forte, The Portal of Beauty: Towards a Theology of Aesthetics, translated by David Glenday and Paul McPartlan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); James Alfred Martin, Jr., Beauty and Holiness: The Dialogue Between Aesthetics and Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Alejandro García-Rivera, The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999). 11 Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006); Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001). 12 On “Anglicanism” as a problematic term in this period, see below. 6 religious aesthetics: whether this merely due to “aesthetics” as an anachronistic term for the period, or because of the secondary meaning of “aesthetics” as surface adornment as opposed to true substance, I can’t say. Despite the popular use of the term in this way, throughout this study I argue for religious or theological aesthetics as a sensual expression of deeply-held values. The theological aesthetics of the Ferrar family expressed in their worship, texts, and pattern of life, and Herbert’s as expressed through his poetry and prose, reveals much about the complexity of the religious landscape in the Stuart period, as we will see. II. The Biblical Sources of Protestant Aesthetics Barnabas Oley, in his preface to the first edition of Herbert’s conduct manual for clergy The Country Parson (1652), memorializes Thomas Jackson, Nicholas Ferrar, and George Herbert. Of Nicholas Ferrar he says, I have heard him say . . . that to fry a faggot was not more martyrdom than continual obloquy. He was torn asunder as with mad horses, or crushed betwixt the upper and under millstone of contrary reports: that he was a papist, and that he was a puritan.13 Nicholas Ferrar and his family, as will become apparent in the course of this study, were caught repeatedly in the crosshairs of the divided nature of Protestant aesthetics. In the early modern period, this was a fraught negotiation between two biblically-sanctioned but contradictory poles: what I call the “beauty of holiness” (after Psalms 96:9 and 29:2, 13 Quoted in Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar: A Reconstruction of John Ferrar’s Account of His Brother’s Life Based on All the Surviving Copies [Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section 24, no. 4: 263–428] (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996), 95. Hereafter cited as Muir and White. 7 “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” later a motto for the Laudian party in the Church of England) and contemptus mundi, the impulse towards plainness and asceticism. The “beauty of holiness” aesthetic position has its roots in Genesis 1, in God the artist assembling creation out of chaos and declaring it “good,” in human beings, created male and female in the image of God, and gifted with their own image-making abilities as a part of this divine inheritance. It has its roots in the lyricism and raw emotional power of the Psalms of David, in the splendor of the Temple of Solomon and of the jeweled breastplate and splendid vestments of its high priest, and in the passages of scripture that urge the worshipper to praise God with music and dancing. These are the portions of the Bible that assume that the most proper and fitting way to worship God involves summoning all the poetic, musical and artisanal skill that human beings can muster, and directing this creative energy towards the divine. But there is another strong current running through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, one that renounces the human-made image because of the dangers of idolatry. Its Biblical origin is in the second commandment, “Thou shalt make no graven images,” and the story in Exodus of the fashioning of the Golden Calf by Aaron, while his brother Moses is on Mt. Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments; this first opposition of Image and Word echoes down the centuries. This second aesthetic stance sees earthly beauty, and the beauty of created objects or compositions, not as a fitting response of praise for God’s act of creation, but as a counterfeit impulse that will lure the worshipper away from God, as the Israelites were seduced away from invisible Yahweh to tangible Baal. The creation pronounced “good” by God in Genesis 1, in Genesis 3 was corrupted 8 by human sin. Eve, made in the image of God, was deceived by the serpent’s promise that she could become a god herself. Thus, every product of human ingenuity and inventiveness, from the Tower of Babel onwards, has held the possibility that it could subvert attention and glory away from the divine giver of creativity, and towards the mortal artist. Every image is a potential idol. The way to combat the power of the senses is to discipline them. Asceticism is, in one sense, an answer to aestheticism; ironically, one that often becomes a particular aesthetic in itself. Despite periods of iconoclasm in the Eastern Church, and internal dialogue in Roman Catholicism on the nature and purpose of art in the religious life, the continual negotiation between the poles of the “beauty of holiness” and contemptus mundi has been the particular task of Protestant aesthetics, due to the Protestant emphasis on the word over the image: on Jesus, the logos, as sole intermediary, and on the preeminent place of the Bible in Protestant religiosity. However, the Bible itself is a conflicted witness to the value of human artistry. If the Bible itself contains poetry, can all poetry be suspect? If the Bible describes the majesty of Solomon’s Temple, built to God-given dimensions, and Aaron’s jeweled breastplate, then isn’t there some place for the work of the artisan in the Kingdom of God? If God pronounced creation “good,” can we ever, even in a fallen world, fully reject it? Protestants, from the time of the Reformation onwards, have lived in this paradox. The discussion of shared theological aesthetics in the following chapters centers around the way in which George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar and his family negotiated between “the beauty of holiness” and contemptus mundi, during a period in which these 9 were strongly political, as well as theological and artistic, categories. For Herbert, the paradox of Protestant aesthetics unfolded in the poems of The Temple (1633), in which he struggles to find a style appropriate to a Christian psalmist, one that praises God plainly, simply, and “in spirit and in truth,” but yet still offers his “utmost art,” (“Praise (II)”) summoning his poetic powers in thanksgiving for Christ’s sacrifice and work of redemption. For the Ferrars, this negotiation was worked out not in art per se, but in their worship and communal life, as they sought to recapture the simplicity and pattern of prayer of the primitive church. Faithful to the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer, they nevertheless promoted in their worship, intellectual exercises, and craftsmanship a particular version of English Christianity that was deeply rooted in both its own past (distant and recent) and in the spirituality of the European CounterReformation. In the early Stuart period, both of these affinities were viewed by many as threats to a secure Protestant future. III. Biographical Background George Herbert George Herbert (1593–1633) was born in Montgomery Castle, Wales, to an aristocratic Welsh family, the seventh of ten children; his father died when he was three years old, whereupon his mother moved the family to London.14 He matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the age of seventeen presented his mother, Magdalen Herbert, a friend of John Donne and a patron of the arts, with two sonnets in which he 14 Details of Herbert’s life from Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2004), xvi–xxxiv. 10 dedicated himself to the composition of sacred verse. A tremendously gifted scholar, he had expressed a desire to “set foot into divinity” to his family in 1618. However in 1620 he was elected Public Orator of Cambridge, a post with the responsibility for composing and delivering orations welcoming, thanking, and petitioning in the name of the University. He served in Parliament from February through May of 1624, but on only one committee, and was ordained deacon at the end of that year, which precluded further parliamentary service. In 1625, his friend Francis Bacon dedicated his translation of a selection of Psalms to him, in thanks for Herbert’s help in translating The Advancement of Learning into Latin. The swampy Cambridge air did not agree with Herbert’s weak constitution, and he spent the next several years living with various relatives and friends, trying to recover his health; he had little money and no home of his own. The deaths of King James in 1625 and Bacon in 1626 ended two avenues for patronage and preferment. In 1626 he was installed by proxy as canon of Lincoln Cathedral and prebendary of Leighton Ecclesia (the latter about four miles from Little Gidding). In 1629 he married Jane Danvers, a cousin of his stepfather Sir John Danvers. In 1630 he was presented with the living at Bemerton, outside of Salisbury, in the spring, and was finally ordained priest that September. The long delay between Herbert’s diaconal and priestly ordination is quite unusual and not explained by the surviving evidence. Herbert and his wife took his three orphaned nieces, and lived in the Bemerton rectory until his death from consumption in 1633, one month before his fortieth birthday. As mentioned above, Herbert dedicated himself to the composition of divine verse early in life; most of the poems in his collection The Temple were likely written before 11 his final years at Bemerton, when he would have been busy with pastoral responsibilities and family life. That said, they cannot be dated with any certainty. Some of Herbert’s poetry in Latin and Greek was circulated in manuscript and/or published: Musae Responsoriae, a defense of the Church of England in response to the puritan Andrew Melville was dedicated to James I (c.1620–1621); a Latin poem published in a Cambridge volume in memory of Francis Bacon (1626); and Memoriae Matris Sacrum, a poem in memory of his mother which was published together with a memorial sermon by John Donne (1627). However, there is no surviving evidence that Herbert’s English poetry circulated in manuscript before its posthumous publication (unlike Donne, whose poetry circulated widely before its publication).15 From his deathbed, Herbert sent the manuscript of his collection of poems, The Temple, to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, who prepared it for publication and refused to allow several lines from the long concluding poem “The Church Militant” to be censored. Upon its publication in 1633, it was an immediate best seller and soon went through several editions.16 His prose work The Country Parson was not published until 1652, owing to the unfavorable political climate for the work at the time of Herbert’s death.17 15 Despite this lack of evidence in commonplace books, however, both Cristina Malcolmson and Greg Miller make strong arguments that Herbert’s English poetry did circulate within a limited coterie that may have included his kinsmen and kinswomen at Wilton House (near Bemerton) where he was Chaplain, and the Ferrars at Little Gidding. See Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life, and Greg Miller, George Herbert’s Holy Patterns: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007). 16 The offending lines were, “Religion stands on tip-toe in our land,/ Readie to passe to the American strand.” “The Church Militant,” lines 235-236, in The Works of George Herbert, edited by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 196, hereafter cited as Hutchinson. 17 Elizabeth Clarke, “The Character of a Non-Laudian Country Parson,” in The Review of English Studies 54, no. 216 (2003): 479–496. 12 Nicholas Ferrar and the Move to Little Gidding The biography of Nicholas Ferrar (1592–1637) has many similarities with that of his friend.18 Born in London into a successful merchant family, Nicholas was a pious child who insisted that his mother sew his collars without lace (and therefore like a clergyman’s), and went through the line at his confirmation twice in order to receive a second helping of the Bishop’s blessing. Nicholas matriculated at Clare College, Cambridge, where, like Herbert, he distinguished himself academically, and was known for his exceptional memory. He was offered a lectureship, but like Herbert, had a constitution unsuited to the Cambridge climate and was often ill. He decided to follow medical advice and travel abroad. In 1613, accompanying the Princess Elizabeth and her husband Frederick V to the Palatinate as part of their entourage, he left England for what would turn out to be a five-year journey, parting ways with the Princess in Germany and traveling on through Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands. In the course of his travels he studied medicine and experienced many forms of Counter Reformation and Reformed religiosity as well as Jewish worship.19 In 1617, Nicholas returned to England. Though he had wanted to resume his fellowship at Cambridge, instead he complied with his parents’ wishes and stayed in London to join his older brother John in the management of the Virginia Company, in which his father (d.1620) had been an early 18 Details of Nicholas Ferrar’s biography are from A.L. Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding (1938. Reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1980), hereafter cited as Maycock, and Joyce Ransome, The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2011), hereafter cited as Ransome, Web of Friendship. Due to the large number of Ferrars, Nicholas Ferrar will commonly be referred to as Nicholas throughout this study. 19 See Joyce Ransome, “Prelude to Piety: Nicholas Ferrar’s Grand Tour,” The Seventeenth Century 18 (Spring 2003): 1–24. 13 investor. In 1622, he was named Deputy working under Sir Edwin Sandys, and was therefore responsible for correspondence with the Jamestown settlement and the day-today running of the Company. This post brought him into frequent contact with George Herbert’s stepfather Sir John Danvers, who was also heavily involved in its governance. Company meetings were held both in the Ferrars’ home in St. Sithes’ Lane, and at Danvers’ Chesea home. The Virginia Company’s aims were varied: to make money for its “adventurers,” both those investors at home and colonists abroad; to expand England’s empire; and to convert Native Americans, thus increasing the Protestant presence in the New World. The Ferrars took this missionary aspect of the Company very seriously, contributing money towards a school where Native and English boys would be educated together in the Christian faith (which never came to fruition). On March 22, 1622, the Powhatan Indians attacked the Jamestown settlement, massacring some three hundred settlers; this, combined with acrimonious power struggles within the Company itself and the failure to flourish of any of the industries launched in Jamestown, led James I to seek to revoke the Company’s charter in 1623. However, the Company refused to surrender it, and Nicholas argued so strongly on behalf of the Company before Privy Council and in the Parliament of 1624 (twenty percent of whose members were Company members also) that at one point he and his brother John were actually placed under house arrest for several days.20 Having anticipated the Crown’s calling in of all the Virginia Company records, Nicholas had prepared a copy of all of them, a heroic effort and foresighted action, as today this copy is the only set of the records that survives. Even after they left 20 See Ransome, Web of Friendship, 42–46. 14 London for religious retreat at Little Gidding, Virginia would continue to be an important cause to Nicholas and John Ferrar throughout their lives (John’s daughter, born at Little Gidding, was named Virginia after the colony).21 At the same time as the Virginia Company’s dissolution, John Ferrar’s business partner (and former brother-in-law) Thomas Sheppard faced bankruptcy when his creditors all demanded payment simultaneously (the provocation for this action is unclear, though it is known that John had increasingly left Sheppard to run their business while he increasingly took on more responsibility with the Virginia Company). With no limited liability laws, John became equally responsible for Sheppard’s debts. As John was now the eldest son and pater familias, his bankruptcy would have meant ruin for the entire family. Nicholas stepped in and used his negotiating skills to reschedule payments and reduce some of the liability. In order to provide Sheppard with some capital, Mary Ferrar, John and Nicholas’ mother, purchased some property from him with her dower money: the ruined manor house and estate in Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, about thirty miles northwest of Cambridge.22 In the wake of these humiliations, the family decided to renovate the property and to move there as an extended family in order to live a life of religious retirement: Nicholas Ferrar, his mother, his brother John and his wife and child, along with their older sister Susanna and her husband John Collett and many of their fifteen children, all 21 On the Virginia Company, in addition to Maycock and Ransome, Web of Friendship, see Appendix 1: “The Ferrar Family and the Virginia Company” in Muir and White, 119–127, and Florence Sandler, “The Gallery to the New World”: Donne, Herbert, and Ferrar on the Virginia Project,” John Donne Journal 19 (2000), 267–297. 22 Ransome, Web of Friendship, 47. 15 settled there in 1625, during a time of plague in London. Once at Little Gidding, the Ferrars restored the ruined manor house and church, and devoted themselves to a life of prayer and good works which included hourly recitation of the Psalms and readings of scripture, diet restriction, plain dress, worship three times daily in the church on their property, night watches or vigils where the Psalter was recited, the assembling of elaborate “gospel harmonies” or concordances, participation in a series of dialogues about asceticism and renunciation of the world, and good works among the poor of their neighborhood.23 Though the household consisted primarily of the extended Ferrar and Collett family, other long and short-term visitors lived with the community, and some gentry families sent their sons to be educated there (including Sir John Danvers, who arranged for one of George Herbert’s nephews to board at Little Gidding). The community had another significant poetic connection aside from George Herbert: Richard Crashaw (who met the Ferrars through his association with Pembroke College, Cambridge, and his own father’s association with the Virginia Company) visited and participated in the community’s worship and night watches over a period of ten years.24 The Ferrars, Colletts, and Mapletofts Some understanding of the kinship of the Ferrar, Collett, and Mapletoft families, and their roles at Little Gidding, will aid the reader later in this study.25 Nicholas Ferrar 23 See Chapter 3, “Liturgy at Little Gidding,” for a full discussion of the Ferrars’ pattern of life. 24 Maycock, 231–233. 25 The family members living at Little Gidding were both Ferrars and Colletts (and later some Mapletoft children), as Nicholas and John Ferrar’s older sister Susannah married John Collett and had as many as sixteen children (though the exact number is not known), twelve who survived to adulthood. However, 16 Sr. (1544–1620) and Mary Woodnoth Ferrar (1544–1634) had nine children of whome three died young; of those that survived, Nicholas, Susanna, and John moved to Little Gidding.26 Susanna married John Collett by 1600; they lived in Bourn, a village outside of Cambridge, where Nicholas often visited while at Clare College. Susanna seems to have been the other strong personality among the three Ferrar siblings at Little Gidding, and could hold her own against her much younger brother Nicholas, as numerous family letters attest. She was intelligent, well read, and an accomplished lutenist. Her assumed name in the religious dialogues called the Story Books was the Moderatour, which certainly suited the mother of such a large family. Her husband, John Collett, was called the Resolved, though the Resigned might have suited him better; he seems to have stayed in the background at Little Gidding.27 Susanna and John’s daughters were (in birth order) Mary, Anna, Susanna, Hester, Margaret, Elizabeth, Joyce, and Judith. The Collett’s three older sons had already left home for various occupations in London. When the family moved to Little Gidding, Mary, Anna, and Susanna were in their twenties; Hester and Joyce were in their late teens; Elizabeth was ten or twelve; Joyce and Judith were around ten and eight; and the youngest son, Ferrar Collett, was six or seven (about the same age as his cousin Nicholas following custom and for the sake of convenience, I will refer to the entire extended family living at Little Gidding, as a group, as Ferrars. For a family tree of the Ferrars, Collets, and Mapletofts, see Ransome, Web of Friendship, 258–260. 26 Susannah (1581–1657), Erasmus (1586–1609), William (b.1590, who emigrated to Virginia in 1618 and died soon after), John (1588?–1657), Nicholas Jr. (1592–1637) and Richard (b.c.1595, fl. 1664). Richard was the black sheep of the family and occasionally appeared to ask for money. 27 Maycock, 172. 17 Ferrar, Jr., John’s son).28 Susanna left Little Gidding in 1628 on her marriage to Joshua Mapletoft, one of Nicholas’ friends; they settled in the village of Margaretting, where Mapletoft was a parish priest (the Collett daughters were strongly encouraged to marry clergymen).29 Susanna Mapletoft was a friend and correspondent of George Herbert’s; when he died, he had her copy of the first volume of Little Gidding Story Books in his possession, which was returned to her. Three of Susanna Maptletoft’s children eventually came with her to live at Little Gidding after Joshua Mapletoft’s death in 1635. John Ferrar’s first wife died in 1613 after a brief marriage that produced no surviving children. He then married Bathsheba Owen on Valentine’s Day, 1615 (during the five-year period that Nicholas was traveling on the Continent). Bathsheba, like John, came from a successful merchant family, and “doubtless expected to live the comfortable life of a prosperous London merchant’s wife.”30 She was to be sorely disappointed. John was incredibly devoted and deferential to his brilliant, charismatic, and pious younger brother, and his admiration only increased after Nicholas stepped in and negotiated a settlement of John’s potential debts in 1625. After this time, Nicholas functioned as the eldest son; Bathsheba always resented her brother-in-law’s usurpation of her husband’s rightful place (and resented especially that John was in favor of this arrangement). When Mary Ferrar died in 1634, she left the manor house not to John, but to Nicholas. Bathsheba was querulous and unhappy at Little Gidding, and she and Nicholas were 28 Maycock, 159. 29 Maycock, 177n. 30 Ransome, Web of Friendship, 41. 18 thorns in each other’s sides until his death in 1637.31 After the outbreak of the Civil War, Bathsheba stayed in London while her husband and other members of the family went to the Netherlands until 1646. They had three children, Nicholas, Virginia, and John, the latter two of whom were born at Little Gidding; Nicholas Jr. (technically III, but called Jr.) was, like his uncle, a gifted scholar, with a remarkable facility for languages. He prepared a polyglot Bible and presented it to King Charles I, but died shortly thereafter in 1640 at the age of twenty. He was educated by his uncle Nicholas and had been groomed to be his successor.32 Nicholas’ true spiritual heir, however, was his niece Mary Collet, the oldest of his sister Susanna’s children.33 Both Mary and her younger sister Anna were very close to their uncle, and considered him their spiritual director; like him, they both decided to remain unmarried in order to commit themselves fully to the spiritual life, though they made no vows. Mary and Anna were enthusiastic participants in the various projects at Little Gidding. They were the ones primarily in charge of the dispensary for aiding the poor in the village. They were the main fabricators of the Gospel Harmonies, versions of the four gospels woven together in one continuous narrative with a variety of textual apparatuses, skillfully arranging the text according to Nicholas’ design and illustrating it 31 See Bernard Blackstone, “Discord at Little Gidding,” Times Literary Supplement (August 1, 1936). 32 See C. Leslie Craig, Nicholas Ferrar Junior, A Linguist of Little Gidding (London: The Epworth Press, 1950). 33 Mary was raised by her grandparents in London (though it is unclear why), and, as she was only eight years younger than her uncle Nicholas, they must have spent some portions of their childhoods together. 19 with decoupage from various continental religious prints.34 The sisters (Mary Collett primarily) also learned bookbinding, and bound and decorated many volumes at Little Gidding.35 They were two of the most dedicated participants in the dialogues that were transcribed into the Story Books.36 In these dialogues, Mary Collett was first called the Chiefe, and then, when her grandmother retired from the proceedings, was elected Mother in her place. As all of her sisters were named after virtues (including Anna, who was the Patient in the first and longest series), Mary’s leadership role is clear. The Collett sisters’ role in the construction of the Gospel Harmonies has been receiving renewed critical attention of late, in part because of scholarly interest in “mixed media,” the history of the book, and the vexed history of religious images throughout the long English Reformation. The Harmonies’ combination of textual and visual can now be exploited by the digital humanities.37 While the Harmonies are certainly worthy of the attention they have received, I find it interesting that they have garnered more attention than the Story Books, in which the Collett sisters speak for themselves, rather than 34 On the Gospel Harmonies, see Chapter 3, “Liturgy at Little Gidding.” 35 On Little Gidding bindings, see Cyril Davenport, “Little Gidding Bindings,” Bibliographica 2, no. 6 (1896): 129–149, and, by the same, “Three Recently Discovered Bookbindings with Little Gidding Stamps,” Library: A Quarterly Review of Bibliography and Library Lore 1 (1899): 205. 36 See Chapter 5, “Storying at Little Gidding.” Mary was thirty and her sister Anna twenty-eight in 1631, when the first of the dialogues that made up the Story Books took place. 37 See Adam Smyth, “‘Shreds of holinesse’: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” in English Literary Renaissance 42 (Autumn, 2012): 452-481; Margaret Aston, “Moving Pictures: Foxe’s Martyrs and Little Gidding,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, edited by Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin, 82–104 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); and Paul Dyck, “‘So rare a use’: Scissors, Reading, and Devotion at Little Gidding,” in George Herbert Journal 27, nos.1-2 (2003): 67-81. The Houghton Library at Harvard University announced in March of 2013 that the Little Gidding Harmony in the library’s collection has been completely digitized and is now available for patron use online at http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45243608?n=1&imagesize=1200&jp2Res=.25&printThumbnails=no . 20 through an arrangement of the biblical text and illustrations of Foxe’s martyrs. The survival of the Story Books is nothing short of remarkable. In an age with an extreme paucity of writing by women (let alone educated women and theological writing), to have the voices of Mary, Anna, their mother, and their sisters preserved, in edited versions of conversations that actually took place, is extraordinary. Debora Shuger’s choice to include an exerpt from the Story Books in her recent anthology of seventeenth-century religious writing (the first time they have been anthologized, to my knowledge, since the publication of Bernard Blackstone’s Ferrar Papers in 1938) is one possible sign that these texts may soon receive the wider readership which they richly deserve.38 Anna Collett died in 1638, the year after her uncle Nicholas; Mary lived to old age and died in 1680, spending the last two decades of her life in London in the home of her brother Thomas. The poet Richard Crashaw, a frequent visitor to Little Gidding, greatly admired Mary Collett. Though she was only eleven years his senior, he called her “my mother,” and wrote that she was “the gentlest kindes[t] most tender-hearted and liberall handed soul I think this day aliue.”39 One final notable among the Ferrar cast of characters is their cousin, Arthur Woodnoth, a goldsmith based in London who was one of Nicholas’ closest friends and served as a sort of London agent for the family. Woodnoth was also connected to George 38 See Debora Shuger, Religion in Early Stuart England, 1603-1638: An Anthology of Primary Sources. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012) 590-616. The Collett sisters appear to be the only women represented in the anthology, which runs over a thousand pages. 39 Quoted in Paul A. Parrish, “Richard Crashaw, Mary Collet, and the ‘Arminian nunnery’ of Little Gidding,” in Representing Women in Renaissance England, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 196. 21 Herbert; he worked for a time for Herbert’s stepfather, Sir John Danvers, and sought advice from Herbert about whether or not to continue in his employ. Woodnoth brought news back and forth between Little Gidding and Bemerton and was involved in the rebuilding of the Leighton Bromswold church. It was from Woodnoth that the Ferrars learned of Herbert’s death. Herbert also named him the executor of his will, and, like Nicholas, he was involved in the publication of The Temple.40 Though they kept to themselves, the Ferrars’ unusual way of life attracted attention and even royal notice. In 1633, King Charles I sent a messenger to borrow the Gospel Harmony about which he had heard. He only returned it when the Ferrars promised to make him one of his own; this initiated many years of Harmony construction for Charles and other royal and noble recipients.41 King Charles visited the community in 1642, touring the church and the house, and in 1646, he sought refuge there as Eliot’s “broken king,” in the dead of night with only two attendants. Nicholas, the charismatic spiritual leader of Little Gidding, had died in 1637. John had participated in a plan to send some silver plate to the King, which was made known; members of the community traveled to the Netherlands in 1642 or 1643 to escape political persecution, though they returned by 1646.42 John Ferrar and his sister Susanna Collett both died in 1657, at which point ownership of the manor changed hands, ending a unique experiment in English 40 See Daniel W. Doerksen, “Nicholas Ferrar, Arthur Woodnoth, and the Publication of George Herbert’s The Temple, 1633,” George Herbert Journal 3, nos. 1–2 (Fall 1979/Spring 1980): 22–44. 41 See Joyce Ransome, “Monotessaron: The Harmonies of Little Gidding,” The Seventeenth Century 20 (Spring 2005): 22–52. 42 Sources for biographical details on Nicholas Ferrar and the Ferrar family are in Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, Muir and White, and Joyce Ransome, Web of Friendship. 22 Christian communal life. What Was Little Gidding? Before examining the Ferrars’ friendship and collaboration with Herbert, it is worth briefly considering the question, “What was Little Gidding?” The Ferrars’ pattern of life, with its regular hours of public and private prayer, austerity in dress and diet, special devotional practices such as the night watches to pray the Psalter, and especially the life-long commitment to celibacy made by three members of the community (namely, Nicholas and his two oldest nieces, Mary and Anna Collett), suggest a monastic lifestyle almost one hundred years after the dissolution of the monasteries in England. Certainly the anonymous author(s) of The Arminian Nunnery (1641) thought this was the case, and on the title page of their polemical tract (above a crude woodcut of a nun fingering a rosary) described Little Gidding as “a Monasticall Place.”43 However, it is plain from the wealth of documentation that the Ferrars were not crypto-Catholics, but conformed to the Book of Common Prayer; nor were they attempting to reinstitute a religious order in Protestant England. In fact, though the puritan authors of The Arminian Nunnery would have been loath to admit it, certain aspects of their devotional life would have resonated with puritans or even separatists: their strict observation of the Sabbath; their plain dress; their austere diet and disavowal of excess; their emphasis on family prayer and reading and memorizing scripture; their 43 The Arminian Nunnery; or, a briefe description and relation of the late erected monastical place called The Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, humbly recommended to the wise consideration of this parliament. The foundation is a company of Ferrars at Gidding (London: Thomas Underhill, 1641). Also see Chapter 3, “Liturgy at Little Gidding”; a reproduction of the title page appears as Fig. 1 in the Appendix. 23 harsh critique of games and pastimes popular with the gentry; their curtailing of Christmas festivities; and their love of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, in which the lives and ends of Protestant martyrs were recounted in grisly detail and graphic illustrations for the benefit of the faithful.44 And, of course, while Nicholas, Mary and Anna had committed themselves to remaining unmarried, they were explicit that they had made no vows. The rest of the family consisted of married couples, whose children grew up and married and, for the most part, moved on to their own homes. The Ferrars described themselves as “retired.” Though Nicholas still traveled to London on family and other business, he and John had made a relatively clean break with their old lives; about a year after settling at Little Gidding, the elderly Mary Ferrar visited London in order to bid a final farewell to her friends. At the end of every month, the family prayed a long prayer composed by Nicholas, giving thanks for their deliverance from near-ruin. They did not participate in the traditional customs of visiting and hospitality which gentry families offered to one another (though they offered much relief to the poor and housed several elderly widows). Izaak Walton, in his Life of George Herbert, spends a long aside on the Ferrars and describes them as “like a little Colledge.”45 There was indeed a somewhat collegiate atmosphere at Little Gidding, with the round of prayer in the small, chapel-like church (which indeed was remodeled by the Ferrars to have choir stalls as in a college chapel), the emphasis on study and intellectual engagement with faith for family members of all ages and both sexes, the ascetic 44 45 See Margaret Aston, “Moving Pictures: Foxe’s Martyrs and Little Gidding.” Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson, intro. by George Saintsbury (1927. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 310. 24 atmosphere, even the black clothing that most of the family seemed to favor. Nicholas had bowed to his family’s wishes and never resumed his Cambridge fellowship; instead, he made his family more like a Oxbridge college with himself as Master, and continued his scholarly pursuits. Universities in this era were indeed “Monasticall places”; perhaps both Walton and the authors of the Arminian nunnery were correct in their assessments. That Nicholas and Herbert eventually found themselves as self-rusticated Cambridge fellows untethered from their University may have deepened the friendship that had formed earlier in Cambridge or London. Little Gidding, in modern parlance, was an “intentional community” comprised of an extended family. As John Ferrar wrote shortly after their arrival, “We have one mind and one purse.” The family’s echo of the book of Acts and primitive Christianity, however, had monastic overtones to others. After consideration, the seventeenth-century descriptions seem the most apt: Little Gidding was “like a little College,” as Walton suggests, dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom and virtue for all its members, regardless of age or gender. And yet, the assessment of The Arminian Nunnery, once defanged, does convey some truth: it was somewhat of a “Monasticall Place,” though not actually a monastery, and the Ferrars were a “Fryer-like Family” if ever there was one, who imposed a liturgical frame over the rhythms of family life, structuring their day, as the Benedictines say, around ora et labora, prayer and work. Reid Barbour writes of Little Gidding as a re-imagining of English parish life: In repairing the ruins of this one estate, the Ferrar family strove to rebuild English parish religion as they saw fit, without all the external depravity and political factionalism that had dismantled their involvement in that more obvious epic adventure, the plantation of true religion among the 25 Indians of the New World. Theirs was not just a retirement from business; it was a kind of abdication from Stuart society itself, a society that nonetheless they longed that Little Gidding might come in some small measure to reconstitute.46 However, the Ferrars’ version of English parish life was stricter and more allencompassing than the average English family could ever hope to emulate (even if they wanted to). Though the Ferrars truly longed to “be a Pattern in an age that needs Patterns”, it was never clear how this influence was to take place, removed, as they were, from the world (in part for their own protection). After the community’s disbanding, however, the memory of Little Gidding did prove influential in a variety of diffuse ways: in the development of voluntary societies in the Church of England; in the refounding of the religious orders during the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century; and, alongside Herbert’s poetry, as a contribution to what came to be called Anglican spirituality.47 However, they have no direct legacy, and their manner of life was anomalous, as was widely noted in the period. “Spirituall Edification”: Herbert and Little Gidding Izaak Walton writes in his Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670) that 46 Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35. 47 For Little Gidding and Church of England voluntary societies, see Ransome, Web of Friendship, Chapter 4, “Voluntarism and Wider Mission”; for the community as a beginning of the recovery of the religious life in England, see S.L. Ollard, The Anglo-Catholic Revival: Some Persons and Principles (A.R. Mowbray, 1925), 82; for Little Gidding and Anglican spirituality, see Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams, eds., Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 163–165. In recent years, there has been an annual summer procession and pilgrimage from Leighton Bromswold to Little Gidding sponsored by the Bishop of Ely; see http://www.ferrarhouse.co.uk. 26 Mr. Farrers, and Mr. Herberts devout lives, were both so noted, that the general report of their sanctity gave them occasion to renew that slight acquaintance which was begun at their being Contemporaries in Cambridge; and this new holy friendship was long maintan’d without any interview, but only by loving and endearing Letters. And one testimony of their friendship, and pious designs, may appear by Mr. Farrers commending the considerations of John Valdesso (a Book which he had met with in his Travels, and Translated out of Spanish into English) to be examin’d and censur’d by Mr. Herbert before it was made publick; which excellent Book, Mr. Herbert did read, and return back with many marginal Notes, as they be now printed with it: And with them, Mr. Herberts affectionate Letter to Mr. Farrer.48 Walton leaves Herbert on his deathbed in order to make a long aside on the Ferrar family, their manner of life, and their sanctity. Walton can be problematic as a source, with his tendency to read poems biographically and invent speeches or even whole narratives; but in many ways his characterization of Herbert and Ferrars’ friendship is borne out in the Ferrar materials. However many times or often they actually saw each other (see below), they did have a very close friendship which was primarily conducted by letter. John Ferrar notes that Herbert “ever styled him ‘Brother Ferrar,’” and this is supported by the few surviving letters of Herbert to Nicholas, one of which (from March 1631/2) begins, “My Exceding Dear Brother.”49 Walton notes that Nicholas wants his translation of the One Hundred Ten Considerations of Juan Valdés (whom the Ferrars called Valdesso) to be “examin’d and censur’d” by Herbert; this was true of several translation projects, and 48 49 Walton, 312. Muir and White, 95, Hutchinson, 378. Francis Turner, and early biographer of Nicholas Ferrar, made a summary of the contents of Herbert’s letters to Nicholas Ferrar which survives; see Ransome, Web of Friendship 106-8. 27 also with certain aspects of the Ferrars’ manner of life.50 John Ferrar says that Herbert approved of the text drawn up by Mary Ferrar, and urged them to have it engraved and to hang it up (later, their mutual friend Bishop John Williams would urge them, prudently, to take it down).51 The community began the practice of night watches “upon the invitation of that worthy servant of Christ, Mr. George Herbert (his most entire friend and brother, for so they styled each other).”52 That the recommendation of this practice, which was to be so controversial and the focus of much criticism in The Arminian Nunnery, came from Herbert should give pause to those who promote a strongly Calvinist reading of him. Herbert was also sent one of the Gospel Harmonies, for which, he said, he most humbly blessed God that he had lived now to see women’s scissors brought to so rare a use as to serve at God’s altar and encouraged them to proceed in the like works as the most happy employment of their times and to keep that book always, without book, in their hearts as well as they had it in their heads, memories, and tongues.53 A letter from Arthur Woodnoth records Herbert’s request that the Ferrars send him some of their stories; presumably Arthur had been telling him about the religious dialogues underway at Little Gidding. As Herbert had Susanna Mapletoft’s volume of the Story 50 Nicholas’ translation of Valdés was not published until 1638. Both men, not surprisingly due to their struggles with illness, were very interested in treatises on temperance and diet; Herbert’s translation of Luigi Cornaro's Treatise on Temperance and Sobriety was published in 1634 together with Nicholas' translation of Leonard Lessius's Hygiasticon. These works became the basis for dietary experimentation at Little Gidding. See Joyce Ransome, “George Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar, and the ‘Pious Works’ of Little Gidding,” George Herbert Journal 31, nos. 1–2, (Fall 2007/Spring 2008): 1–19. 51 See Muir and White, 88-9, 102. 52 Muir and White, 92. 53 Muir and White, 76. On Herbert and the Little Gidding Gospel Harmonies, see Paul Dyck, “‘So rare a use’: Scissors, Reading, and Devotion at Little Gidding,” George Herbert Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2003/Spring 2004), 67–81. 28 Books in his possession when he died, this request was obviously granted.54 Herbert’s approval was important to Nicholas and to the community, and he was well informed about their way of life. The biggest joint project that Herbert and the Ferrars undertook was the renovation of St. Mary’s Church, Leighton Bromswold (described in detail in Chapter 3). In 1626, Herbert had been named prebendary at Leighton Bromswold, about four miles from Little Gidding, by Bishop Williams. Since this was a good distance from Salisbury, and, presumably, because he wanted to pass on a preferment to his friend, Herbert offered it to Nicholas.55 Perhaps there was also a desire on Herbert’s part to see his friend ordained a priest (as Nicholas’ own tutor, Augustine Lindsell, hoped for as well). Although Herbert had held the Leighton prebend as a deacon, expanded pastoral responsibilities might have encouraged Nicholas to seek priestly ordination. In this period, there was not really a conception of a “permanent diaconate,” and so remaining in deacon’s orders indefinitely was quite unusual. However, Nicholas was clear that his vocation was to his family; he had sought ordination in order to read the daily office in their church, and had no intention of expanding his ministry to include preaching, sacraments, or a larger parish of non-relations. “The one urged with much earnestness, the other as eagerly put all off,” until Nicholas found a solution: “Nicholas Ferrar very earnestly hereupon assaults his brother Herbert to set to the work and to try what he could do amongst his friends towards so good a work,” the renovation of St. Mary’s, which had 54 See Chapter 4, “Storying in The Temple.” 55 Muir and White, 94-5. 29 grown so dilapidated, that the parishioners were meeting in the Duke of Lennox’s great hall for Sunday worship.56 Herbert and the Ferrar brothers were a good combination for the execution of this project, since the Ferrars had recently renovated their own church (and in fact used many of the same workers and artisans again for Leighton Bromswold), and Herbert could raise funds using his aristocratic family connections, which he did, as well as donate money himself. However, the work was not completed before his death in 1633. The church has not been significantly altered since this renovation, and is a testament to this collaboration and friendship. However, as “handsome and uniform” as this country church is, the truly enduring monument to Herbert’s friendship with the Ferrars is The Temple itself; for without them, Herbert’s poetry might not have found its way into print. John Ferrar notes, “And when Mr. Herbert died, he recommended only, of all his papers, that of his divine poems, and willed it to be delivered into the hands of his brother, Nicholas Ferrar, appointing him to be the midwife to bring that piece into the world.”57 Whether or not Izaak Walton’s description is accurate in every instance, his death bed scene describing the transmission of the manuscript of The Temple is moving and has become an iconic part of Herbert lore. During Herbert’s final illness, Nicholas sent his friend Edmund Duncon to visit Herbert, to assure him of the Ferrars’ prayers for him, and to bring back an account of his health to Little Gidding. As Walton tells it, Herbert said to Duncon, 56 Muir and White, 93–94. 57 Ibid., 94. 30 Sir, I pray deliver this little Book to my dear brother Farrer, and tell him, he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master; in whose service I have now found perfect freedom; desire him to read it: and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor Soul, let it be made publick: if not, let him burn it.58 Nicholas, of course, did not burn it; but instead, according to John Ferrar, “many a time read [it] over and embraced and kissed [it], again and again he said he could not sufficiently admire it as a rich jewel and most worthy to be in the hands and hearts of all true Christians that feared God and loved the Church of England.”59 As noted above, the Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge wanted to excise the two lines about the flight of religion to America, but Nicholas “would by no means allow the Book to be printed, and want them,” and eventually his persistence won out.60 The Temple survives in two manuscript copies; W (MS. Jones B 62 in Dr. Williams’s Library, London), and B (MS. Tanner 307 in the Bodleian Library); the latter is thought to be the copy that the Ferrars prepared for the Cambridge licensers at Little Gidding.61 Arthur Woodnoth was with Herbert when he died, and wrote of his death to Little Gidding. John Ferrar records the prayer the family prayed when they had heard he was past recovery (though by the time they received this news, he had already died). He also notes that 58 Walton, 314; italics are Walton’s. 59 Muir and White, 94. 60 Walton, 315. 61 Hutchinson, l–lvi. 31 Mr. Herbert, seeing he could not draw Gidding nearer him, he would draw nearer to his brother, Nicholas Ferrar, and, not long before his death, was upon exchanging his living for one merely for the situation as being near his dear brother, though in value much inferior to his own; but he said that he valued Mr. Ferrar’s near neighbourhood more than any living.62 There is no other documentation of Herbert’s desire to move closer to the community, but it is clear that he closely followed the devotional life at Little Gidding as well as their projects, such as the Story Books and the Harmonies. Herbert and Nicholas’ sense of spiritual kinship is not surprising, based on their similar backgrounds, scholarly temperaments, and large number of interests they shared. Greg Miller has argued that the Ferrars were part of a coterie that had access to Herbert’s poetry even before his death; I do not think his evidence is conclusive, but it certainly seems plausible.63 Amy Charles, Herbert’s biographer, notes that Walton’s claim that Herbert and Nicholas’ friendship “was long maintained without any interview” originates with Barnabas Oley’s preface to The Country Parson, where he comments that their friendship consisted in “spirituall Edification” rather than in “Ceremonies of Visits and Complements.” He comments further, “yet saw they not each other in many years, I think, scarce ever, but as Members of one Universitie, in their whole lives.”64 Considering the number of overlapping connections Herbert and Nicholas shared, Charles considers it very unlikely that they only visited once in their lives other than at Cambridge (where 62 Muir and White, 98, 94. 63 See Greg Miller, Ch. 3: “Scribal and Print Publication: Little Gidding, Catechism, and Protest,” in George Herbert’s Holy Patterns: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007). 64 “A Preferatory View of the Life of Mr. Geo. Herbert, &c.” in Herbert’s Remains (1652), quoted in Muir and White, 96–97. 32 they were at separate colleges). Sir John Danvers worked with Nicholas on the Virginia Company and held meetings at his home, where Herbert often stayed during those years; both men also knew John Donne (who was active in the Virginia Company) and had a patron and friend in John Williams. Arthur Woodnoth, as we have seen, was close to them both and bridged some of the distance through his visits and letters. Further, Herbert also held an ecclesiastical post four miles from Little Gidding. Walton would not have known about several of these connections; it seems that Oley is mistaking Herbert’s comment that his friendship with Nicholas was focused on the spiritual, rather than on the customs of hospitality, to mean that they did not visit at all. There are numerous references to letters between Herbert and Nicholas, though only two survive (though, as previously noted, an early biographer of Nicholas, Francis Turner, made a summary of the contents of some of them); Charles argues that these letters, because of their value to the community, may have been kept separately from the rest of the family’s correspondence, which may have contributed to their disappearance.65 Two recent biographies of Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert take a revisionist stance on just how removed from the world each man was. In the traditional telling, begun by Walton and continued in many other sources, both Nicholas and Herbert became disillusioned after their experience in Parliament in 1624, and, with their worldly ambitions thwarted (Nicholas through the Virginia Company disaster and Herbert through the death of his patrons), instead turned to religious retreat. Joyce Ransome, in 65 Amy M. Charles, “Spirituall Edification,” in Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert, edited by Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 12. 33 The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (2011), highlights the ways in which Nicholas, even after his family’s move and dedication to spiritual matters, was by no means a solitary contemplative, but was actively engaged in educating and then finding apprenticeships for his nephews, settling his nieces with good clerical husbands, resolving family disputes, overseeing his family’s remaining business interests in London and even keeping some ties with the ongoing colonization in Virginia (though Virginia was primarily John Ferrar’s passion). Ransome also incorporates a large number of letters from the Ferrar Papers at Magdalene College, Cambridge, to demonstrate the complex nature of family life at Little Gidding, and to present Nicholas in a more nuanced light than his previous biographer, Alan Maycock, had done. For Ransome, Nicholas is a “mystic and a micromanager,” deeply pious but also controlling.66 Cristina Malcolmson, in George Herbert: A Literary Life (2004) wants to contextualize Herbert within what she terms the “Protestant activism” of Herbert’s family and of his patronage networks: The traditional image of George Herbert as an isolated genius living in retreat from the world has almost completely given way before evidence that the religious poet was publicly engaged, active within an important social circle, and directly concerned with the future of world Protestantism.67 Malcolmson makes a compelling case, which is in part a reaction to Amy Charles’ 1977 biography that views Herbert as more of a ceremonialist; a Calvinist, but not a 66 Ransome, Web of Friendship, 23. 67 Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), ix. 34 “Protestant activist.”68 However, the Ferrars are inconvenient for Malcolmson’s argument, and they play a very limited role in her biography. Though she acknowledges that “[i]t is clear that several people around George Herbert during his Bemerton years felt he had renounced the pursuit of status and worldly honor” (including Arthur Woodnoth, whom as we have seen was a devoted friend to Herbert), she still argues that “[t]he letters from Herbert to Nicholas indeed demonstrate that Herbert felt a special bond with Ferrar, but this might be grounded in their ordination within the church, not in any sense of retreat from the world.”69 It is one thing to argue that Walton, at “two removes,” as Herbert would say, had misinterpreted Herbert’s ambition or lack of it, but to argue against the opinion of close friends seems on shakier ground, especially when Herbert acknowledged sympathy with them in so many areas. This is not to argue, as Stanley Stewart has, that Herbert’s friendship with the Ferrars makes him a Laudian by association (especially since the Ferrars’ own Laudian credentials may not be what they seem), but the relationship must be taken into account. Herbert’s powerful kinsman William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, certainly had a religious and political agenda, and Herbert played his part in furthering it, as he would have been expected to do. But Herbert recognized a spiritual kinship with the Ferrars, and was considered a “brother” to them; it seems unlikely that this sympathy would not have extended to the retreat that was at the center of their life. 68 Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 69 Ibid., 145–146. 35 IV. Herbert, the Ferrars, and the English Church of the 1620s and 1630s “Every definition is a misfortune” Describing John Williams’ episcopal visit to Little Gidding in 1634, John Hacket wrote, “All their Practice was heavenly; a great deal of it had some Singularity.”70 A local minister, inspecting Little Gidding (after Nicholas’ death) in response to negative rumors he had heard, reported to John Ferrar after his tour, “not anything but what may be well allowed [is] in your church . . . anything you do or practise but is unblameable, though not so usual nowadays.”71 Despite rumors and accusations to the contrary, the Ferrars were undoubtedly “conformists,” one of the range of terms substituted in the absence of the anachronistic “Anglican”; but they were singular conformists.72 In fact, a bold statement of their singularity greeted every visitor to Little Gidding in the form of a large “table,” possibly cloth or parchment, which hung in the great parlor and was inscribed with the following: IHS HE, that by reproof of our errors and remonstrance of that which is more perfect, seeks to make us better, is welcome as an angel of God. HE, that by a cheerful participation of that which is of good, confirms us in the same, is welcome as a Christian friend. But 70 John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: a memorial offer’d to the great deservings of John Williams, D.D. . . . (London, 1693), 51. 71 Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar: A Reconstruction of John Ferrar’s Account of His Brother’s Life Based on All the Surviving Copies (Leeds, UK: The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Societry Ltd., 1996), 103. Hereafter cited as Muir and White. 72 Refering to Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar uses a variation of this phrase in his “The Printers to the Reader” in The Temple: “His obedience and conformity to the Church and the discipline thereof was singularly remarkable.” (Hutchinson, 4.) 36 HE, that any ways goes about to disturb us in that which is and ought to be amongst Christians, though it be not usual in the world, is a burden while he stays and shall bear his judgement, whosoever he be. And HE, that faults us in absence for that which in presence he made shew to approve of, doth by a double guilt of flattery and slander violate the bounds of friendship and charity. MARY FERRAR , widow, mother of this family, aged about 80 years, that bids adieu to all fears and hopes of this world 73 and only desires to serve God. This unapologetic recognition of the community’s sui generis manner of life was fabricated at the urging of George Herbert, who, after seeing a draft of this text, encouraged the family to have it inscribed and to display it prominently. In later years after Nicholas’ death, Bishop Williams counseled them as their friend to remove it, as “the times . . . grow high and turbulent and great may be the folly and madness of the people.”74 The period in which the Ferrars were putting up and taking down this inscription has attracted the notice of a significant number of religious and political historians in the last twenty-five years, but the theological categories are slippery and shifting, and consensus has still not been reached about basic terminology, let alone the reasons why events took the course they did or who bears responsibility for which outcomes. The 1620s and 30s are a sort of “black box” of the English Civil War; the complete implosion of the monarchy in the 1640s gives a gravity to what immediately preceded it, and also confers on this period the status of a Gordian knot of causes and motives. The questions 73 Muir and White, 89. 74 Muir and White, 103. 37 debated by historians include: Was the explosion of conflict in the 1630s the result of James I’s lax enforcement of the rubrics and tolerance of puritans during his reign, or was it because of Charles’s aggressive religious partisanship? Who were the true “revolutionaries” and innovators, the puritans or the Laudians? Who was more responsible for Laudian policies, Charles or Laud? How is “Laudianism” even to be defined, since 1) in many ways, it existed before Laud came to power; 2) there is some evidence that Laud himself was not fully on board with some “Laudian” policies and 3) it was most influential after Laud was long dead, during the Restoration?75 As Erasmus said, “Every definition is a misfortune.”76 This is certainly true of this period of church history. Historians now largely concur on a range of definitions for what constitutes puritanism. Following Austern, McBride, and Orvis, editors of the recent Psalms in the Early Modern World, I think that the Oxford English Dictionary delimits 75 Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), and Peter Lake’s Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988) are foundational studies on this period. Lake coined the phrase “avantgarde conformists” to refer to those within the Church of England who introduced ceremonial innovations in English Protestant worship. Nicholas Tyacke’s thesis in Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) that the Laudian/Arminian party, and not the puritans, were the true innovators and revolutionaries, is a much-debated and influential revisionist view. A good summary of Tyacke’s work and the previous historiography of this period is found in the Introduction to Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honor of Nicholas Tyacke, edited by Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2006). Julian Davies argues in The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 1625–1641 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) that King Charles, and not Laud, was primarily responsible for the religious reforms of his reign. On Laud and Laudianism, see Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and the essays in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560-1660, edited by Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2000) and The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, Kenneth Fincham, ed., especially Lake’s chapter “The Laudian Style.” Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1940 biography of Laud is still the standard; see also “Archbishop Laud in Retrospect,” in his book From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 76 Quoted in William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature 129 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 6. 38 the term well. “Puritan” in this study will be used to designate: A member of a group of English Protestants of the late 16th and 17th centuries, who regarded the reformation of the Church under Elizabeth I as incomplete and sought to remove any remaining elements of church practice (such as ceremonies, church ornaments, the use of musical instruments, and in some cases Episcopal authority), which they considered corrupt, idolatrous, or unscriptural. . . Originally the name applied chiefly to those within the Church of England who sought further reform, especially in the direction of Presbyterianism, and who gained ascendancy during the Commonwealth period. Subsequently (and especially after the Restoration of 1660) it was applied to those who separated from the established Episcopal Church as Presbyterians, Independents (Congregationalists), or Baptists, including many who were prominent in the colonization of the North American seaboard (especially New England).77 However, puritans are much easier to define than those people who were not puritans; namely, those who conformed to the Book of Common Prayer within the Established Church.78 Many scholars feel that using the term “Anglican” to refer to this group is anachronistic and misleading, as it implies that there was a fully-formed Anglican identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the term itself did not become common until the nineteenth or possibly the late eighteenth century.79 Conformists, Prayer Book Protestants, or simply moderates have been terms used to refer to this group, which itself was not homogeneous; however, none of these terms captures the diversity 77 S.v.,A.1.a, OED, cited in Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd McBride, and David L. Orivis, eds., Psalms in the Early Modern World (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), xix. 78 Even here, we are on slippery ground, as many puritans did conform to the Book of Common Prayer; they just would have preferred that it were revised or done away with all together. Some conformists were more satisfied with their conformity than others. 79 Ironically, the first extant printed use of the term was in 1598 by James VI of Scotland, who told the Scots that he did not intend “to bring in Papisticall or Anglican bishopping” when he assumed the English throne. Later he changed his mind and declared, “No bishop, no king.” Quoted in Austern, McBride, and Orvis, xx. 39 within this category of English Christians. Scholars of the period approach nomenclature in different ways. Anthony Milton in Catholic and Reformed offers some useful broad-brush definitions: “The term ‘Calvinist’ is used . . . to denote a general sympathy with the continental Reformed tradition in all its purely doctrinal aspects, and a sense of identification with the West European Calvinist Churches and their fortunes.” The term “puritan,” following Patrick Collinson and Peter Lake, is applied “to those Protestants who were distinctive in their enthusiasm and zeal for the cause of true religion” in a way recognized by themselves and their hostile opponents. Milton uses “Laudian” to apply “to all those clerics who were closely associated with Laud and who were unequivocal in their support for his ecclesiastical policies in the 1630s.” The use of the anachronistic term “Anglican” in the early seventeenth century belies a belief in “the existence of a stable Anglican ‘essence,’” and denies the ways in which puritans “played a leading and creative role” in the mainstream arena of the Tudor and early Stuart church.80 In addition to “conformists,” Judith Maltby uses the term “Prayer Book Protestants” to describe the conformist element within the Established Church, and her work highlights this segment that is often ignored by historians.81 Achsah Guibbory uses the term “ceremonialist” to designate those who embraced the English church’s rituals and ceremonies. This term, while not of the period, is appealing because it can include 80 81 Milton, 1, 8. See Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and her essay “‘By this Book’: Parishioners, the Prayer Book and the Established Church,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, edited by Kenneth Fincham, 115–137. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993 40 those moderate Calvinists who supported ceremonial worship even though they “were unenthusiastic about Laud and his program.”82 It is unclear to me why scholars have not chosen the historical term “formalist” to describe this group, which is what the puritans called their opponents (“puritan” itself having started out as a derogatory term as well), and highlights conformity to the “set forms” of the Prayer Book, which was at the heart of the worship wars. Perhaps “formalist/formalism” has too many twentieth-century literary associations to make it useful in this context as well, but it is worth introducing into the conversation. “Sacramentalist,” though not of the period, could demarcate those who sought to promote a more Eucharistic-centered piety, as opposed to a word-centered one. Since there is currently no consensus among historians, I do not adopt any one term for those who conformed to the Church of England; there is too much of a range of practice. For example, not all conformists were ceremonialists (in fact, many were puritans), and not all ceremonialists were Laudians. Even Calvinism and ceremonialism were not mutually exclusive, as we will see below. Herbert and the Ferrars on the Ecclesiastical Spectrum George Herbert’s liturgical theology has been a focal point for debate since the renewal of critical interest in his poetry in the 1950s. Herbert’s conformity to the rubrics of the Prayer Book or the Articles of Religion has never been in doubt; rather, there is disagreement is over which side of the via media Herbert favored. Scholars have argued, often not without personal investment, that Herbert was a Laudian or a ceremonialist or, 82 See Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5–6. 41 conversely, a staunch Calvinist. More recently, some have presented Herbert’s poetry and his views on the ministry as set forth in The Country Parson as evidence of quite diverse threads of Christian expression: ceremonialism, sacramentalism, and Calvinism, which do not always fit easily together.83 This position is closest to my own, though I acknowledge, as Graham Parry notes, that more often than critics would like or acknowledge, “the foundations of Herbert’s theological beliefs remain skillfully concealed.”84 However, those interested in placing Herbert on a theological spectrum will notice the many points of correspondence between the rector of Bemerton and the community at Little Gidding; indeed, it is not possible to fully describe and assess the 83 Gene Edward Veith, Jr.’s essay “The Religious Wars in George Herbert Criticism: Reinterpreting Seventeenth Century Anglicanism,” in George Herbert Journal 2, no. 2 (Spring 1988), 19–35, connects twentieth-century critical debates on Herbert with those of the seventeenth century. For Herbert as a ceremonialist or Laudian, see Rosamond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); Heather Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herbert’s Way to God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981); Stanley Stewart, George Herbert (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1986); and R.V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Woodbridge: 2000). For Herbert as a Calvinist, see Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979); Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Veith, Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1985); Christopher Hodgkins, Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993); and Daniel Doerksen, the most strident of the pro-Calvinist critics, in Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1997) and most recently Picturing Religious Experience: George Herbert, Calvin and the Scriptures (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011). Guibbory in Ceremony and Community, Graham Parry in Glory, Laud and Honour, and Ramie Targoff in Common Prayer argue for a reading of Herbert that recognizes a number of impulses, Calvinist and ceremonialist, Word-based and Eucharistically-centered, in Herbert’s work. Since the Ferrars have traditionally been interpreted as Laudians, their association with Herbert is often played up or down depending of the position being argued: Amy Charles in A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) gives a more ceremonialist reading of Herbert, and is very interested in his association with Little Gidding. However, Cristina Malcolmson in George Herbert: A Literary Life emphasizes Herbert’s close ties with his “activist Calvinist” extended family and patronage network, and makes little mention of the Ferrars other than their involvement with the publication of The Temple. 84 Parry, Glory, Laud, and Honour, 133 n.1. 42 theological aesthetics of either Herbert or Nicholas Ferrar without the other.85 One difference between the two friends is that Herbert’s conformity was never questioned. Although the Ferrars were an extended family and so in one sense simply a “household,” there was not really a precedent in the early modern period for so many family members (about thirty) living together under one roof. Their large number was not due to a large retinue of servants and attendants, as in some aristocratic households.86 That they lived austerely in order to pursue religious practice, and that the household contained several unmarried young women, caused the specter of covert Romanism to rear its head. King Charles I remarked that neglecting to persecute puritans promotes papism; in other words, if the liberal wing of the church was not reined in, ceremonialist conservatives would simply convert to Rome. There is evidence that this was indeed happening, and that the Ferrars fit the profile of those most likely to convert. As sacramentally-inclined Prayer Book conformists were Charles’ and Laud’s natural allies, the King needed to find a way to keep them in the Church of England.87 It is clear why the Ferrars’ spirituality was attractive to Charles, and he visited the community twice.88 85 See Chapter 3, “Liturgy at Little Gidding,” for an account of their joint renovation of St. Mary’s Church, Leighton Bromswold. 86 The Ferrars had several maids and hired three schoolmasters for the boys. 87 In the 1620s and 1630s, conversions to Rome “were visibly increasing among the aristocracy and gentry . . . those people most likely to convert to Rome on aesthetic grounds were precisely those who most strongly championed the ‘beauty of holiness’ within the Church of England . . . It was generally argued that puritan irreverence was giving justifiable scandal to the ‘godly and learned reverencing [of] antiquity . . .’” Milton, Catholic and Reformed, “Laudians and the Problem of Recusancy,” 81–82. 88 See also Pamela Tudor-Craig, “Charles I and Little Gidding,” in For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, ed. by Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (London: Collins, 1986). 43 Greater than the fear of conversions to Roman Catholicism, for puritans and moderate Calvinists, was that of creeping Arminianism within the Church of England itself. Arminianism, the theological counter-argument to Calvinism born in the Netherlands and imported to England, was condemned in 1618 at the Synod of Dort. It asserted the Christian’s free will to choose salvation over Calvinism’s predestination, and emphasized the sacraments, derided by Calvinists (though certainly not by Calvin himself), as vehicles of God’s grace.89 Both Laudianism and Arminianism went against the grain of the moderate Calvinism that had been the predominant theological tone in the English established church for decades. In the wake of the iconoclasm of the 1590’s, Elizabeth I neither banned religious images, nor restored them. When Laud and his Arminian allies gained King Charles I’s support through the Duke of Buckingham, their plans to restore and beautify decaying churches, to place altars against the east end of the church and rail them in, and above all to ensure liturgical conformity—all of this looked, to many, like a return to England’s Roman Catholic past. Laud’s strong-arming and even silencing of his opponents ultimately did himself and his King no favors. The vehemence of the reaction against Laud is evidenced by his seclusion in the Tower in 1640 and his execution in 1645, after the turning of the political tides which once brought him to power. At first glance, the Ferrars would seem to have both impeccable Laudian and Arminian credentials. Nicholas Ferrar’s tutor at Clare College, Cambridge, was 89 On English Arminianism, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590-1640 (1987, repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 44 Augustine Lindsell, a member of the Durham House group, ceremonialists who lived in the London household of Richard Neile, bishop of Durham, an early patron of Laud and later Archbishop of York. The Durham House group was primarily responsible for promoting the Laudian agenda.90 Nicholas was ordained a deacon at Westminster Abbey by Laud in 1626, with Lindsell in attendance; he and Lindsell remained life-long friends. The Ferrars were responsible for restoring and beautifying two decayed churches in their neighborhood. Laud and John Cosin, author of A Collection of Private Devotions (1627) which was widely denounced by puritans, presented one of the Ferrars’ richly illustrated Harmonies of the four gospels to Charles I in 1636; the community later presented a concordance of the Pentateuch to Laud himself.91 The pamphlet the “The Arminian Nunnery” associated Little Gidding with religious practices that constituted “a bridge to popery.”92 And yet, upon closer examination, many key pieces of the Ferrars’ liturgical theology fit uneasily in a Laudian framework. While certainly influenced by a Laudian or ceremonialist view of the sanctity of the physical church, other aspects of their piety belie a more puritan or Protestant impulse in their project. These include the community’s plain dress, disavowal of sports and gentry pastimes such as cards, their emphasis on 90 Augustine Lindsell, bishop of Peterborough later translated to Hereford, was described by the polemicist Peter Smart as “an earnest promoter of the book of pastimes on the Lord’s day, a great champion for the Arminians, and all the late innovations in doctrine, ceremony or worship introduced among us, a bitter enemy to preaching, lecturers, lectures and godly people” (quoted in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, “Augustine Lindsell,” accessed July 26, 2012). On the Durham House group, see ODNB (“Durham House group”) and also Victoria E. Raymer, “Durham House and the emergence of Laudian piety,” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1981. 91 See Muir and White, 79; Ransome, Web 163, 171–172. 92 The Arminian Nunnery, 10. 45 personal study and listening to sermons, their belief in the righteousness of industry (and their exhausting commitment to this ideal), their penchant for hanging scriptural mottoes on their walls, as well as their withdrawal from society and their criticism of the decadence of the court. Their manner of life, in other words, contained a large dose of contemptus mundi. Their vision of religious community was collegiate rather than sacerdotalist, a marked difference from Laud’s emphasis on the priesthood and its sacrificial role.93 Above all, the Ferrars’ devotion to the Bible—to reading it, hearing it, even cutting it up and reassembling it—marked their endeavor as fully Protestant. That their devotion to scripture tended to express itself in ritual action is one of the ways that their religiosity held many disparate threads of Christian expression together at once. The Ferrars were a prominent family and extremely well-connected, and, though their social connections may in one sense paint them into a Laudian corner, they also get them out of it: for the Ferrars had a long-standing friendship with John Williams (1582– 1650), Lord Keeper of the Great Seal after Francis Bacon, Dean of Westminster, Bishop of Lincoln, Archbishop of York, and William Laud’s enemy and nemesis. John and Nicholas had known Williams from their work in the Virginia Company before he became their diocesan.94 A liberal Calvinist, Williams was also a lover of “the beauty of holiness.” In 1629, while he was building what John Henry Newman considered “the beau ideal of a Laudian chapel” at Lincoln College, Oxford, Williams was also preaching sermons from the Westminster Abbey pulpit that “affirmed his Calvinist beliefs in 93 In considering Nicholas’ possible Laudianism, it is notable that was never ordained priest, as the priesthood was held in extremely high regard by Laudians. 94 Muir and White, 101–103. 46 uncompromising terms.”95 He renovated his chapel at Buckden Palace, a few miles from Little Gidding, in a similar fashion (he was the Ferrars’ diocesan). However his book, Holy Table, Name and Thing, was a response to Peter Heylyn’s A Coal from the Altar, and argued against Laudian altar policy. Laud had Williams imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1637 until 1640 (when Laud himself was imprisoned); both Nicholas and John Ferrar visited him there.96 Williams probably met George Herbert when Herbert was at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Williams a junior proctor there.97 He later became an important patron of Herbert’s, ordaining him deacon and giving him several ecclesiastical preferments.98 That the Ferrars and Herbert shared a powerful friend who also could not easily be placed on the ecclesiastical spectrum is another suggestion of the alignment of their own theological aesthetics. Laud’s respect for the Ferrars, despite their close ties with his enemy and rival, speaks to both the mixed nature of their religiosity, and their skill at self-preservation in 95 ODNB Online, “John Williams (1582–1650),” accessed July 26, 2012. There is no modern biography of Williams, which is a shame, as he is an incredibly colorful character who held influential positions in both the church and government; his dramatic rises and falls, as well as his nasty rivalry with Laud, would make excellent reading, as well as illuminating many of the religio-political complexities of this period. 96 Muir and White, 108. Fincham and Tyacke, in Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), note that “historians have underestimated the centrality and significance of the rivalry between Laud and Williams in the ecclesiastical politics of the years 1625–40,” 354. 97 John Hacket, Williams’ longtime chaplain and biographer, was a classmate of Herbert’s both at Westminster School and at Trinity College; he and Herbert were the two star pupils of the time. Charles, A Life of George Herbert, 51, 54. 98 The Archbishop of Canterbury granted a dispensation dated 3 November 1624 for Herbert to be ordained deacon at any time by Bishop Williams without letters of dismissal from his own diocese. Amy Charles in A Life of George Herbert explores the possible reasons for this irregularity; see 113. Also in 1624 Williams presented Herbert with a portion of the rectory of Llandinam, Montgomeryshire (117), and in 1626 made him a canon of Lincoln Cathedral and prebendary of Leighton Ecclesia, Leighton Bromswold. 47 turbulent times. Acknowledging that Herbert and the members of Little Gidding participated in a Protestant aesthetic of negotiation between the poles of the puritanism and ceremonialism paints a richer portrait of the community, and of the complexity of the seventeenthcentury religious landscape. Thus, this study follows the lead of Peter White’s influential article “The via media in the Early Stuart Church,” which argues against the claim that Richard Hooker “invented” Anglicanism, and views the polarities of the early Stuart church as not replacing an earlier consensus, but as having been “inherited from the earliest stages of the Reformation.”99 Reacting to a tendency of historiography to take “no interest in those churchmen it cannot categorize,” White identifies and describes several figures that do not fit neatly into one ecclesiastical camp or another. He asserts, Doctrinal preference did not necessarily correspond with liturgical taste. Men, especially thinking men, develop. For all these reasons it is not always possible to categorise individual churchmen. As the church developed, moreover, the defence of the existing settlement required a flexible response to new challenges. The via media was exactly that, implying movement as well as moderation.100 Several fairly recent surveys of the religious art, devotional poetry and prose of this period have recognized the mixed aesthetics that I am describing. Achsah Guibbory, while not discussing the Ferrars directly, describes the via media of The Temple not as a “harmonious and peaceful middle way” but as “deeply conflicted,” in a sense that would 99 Peter White, “The Via Media in the Early Stuart Church” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, edited by Kenneth Fincham (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 211. 100 Ibid., 217. 48 apply to Little Gidding as well.101 Graham Parry uses Laudianism as a “portmanteau” term, distinguishing between “true” Laudians, and those who were sacramentally inclined but not necessarily compliant with the complete agenda of the controversial Archbishop of Canterbury: The situation is further complicated by the presence of some influential figures in the Church who drew inspiration from the writings and example of Hooker and Andrewes, who found the full liturgy of the Prayer Book deeply satisfying, and who brought order and harmony to their services, but who did not feel the need for a demonstrative piety exhibited by bodily gestures, rich apparel, or elaborate furnishings. Such figures still required a decent setting for their worship, and were attentive to the beauty of their churches and chapels, in moderate ways that distinguished them from the emphatic practices of the leaders of the Laudian movement. Amongst their number were George Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar and his followers at Little Gidding, and John Williams.102 Daniel Doerksen, a critic who in several books and articles has promoted a strong Calvinistic reading of Herbert, and who blames the Laudians for misrepresenting Herbert’s poetry and biography for their own ends, concludes, somewhat surprisingly, that Nicholas Ferrar is innocent of charges of Laudianism: Although Ferrar, unlike Herbert, had connections to Laud, he was also in close touch with Laud’s ecclesiastical opponent John Williams, and was arguably more scriptural than sacramental in his ecclesiology.103 As scholarship on the Ferrars moves away from the Anglican apologetics of the early twentieth century, therefore, historians are beginning to notice more nuance in the Ferrars’ theological position. 101 Guibbory, 45. 102 Parry, Glory, Laud, and Honour, 23. 103 Daniel Doerksen, “The Laudian Interpretation of George Herbert,” in Literature and History, ser. 3:3:2 (Autumn 1994): 40. 49 V. Overview This study is somewhat unusual in that it is making comparisons between texts in disparate genres characterized by a great difference in tone: the individual and intimate nature of Herbert’s lyric poetry compared with texts by the Ferrars, such as their dialogues, which were communally-authored. This study also includes the “close reading” of liturgy, sacred spaces, and devotional practice; fortunately, as Herbert participated in one of the Ferrars’ church renovations and addressed worship and devotional practice in The Country Parson, in this case apples are compared to apples. I think this difference in source material, both in unusual genres such as religious dialogue as well as “extra-literary” material such as descriptions of worship, is what has prevented the in-depth exploration of the shared aesthetics of Herbert and the Ferrars before now. Chapters 2 and 3 examine style: literary style and liturgical style, and how the larger crisis in the English church influenced Herbert’s use and discussion of plain style, as well as the Ferrars’ defense of their liturgical choices. Chapters 4 and 5 are about stories, which played a significant role in both The Temple, in the form of lyric parables of Herbert’s invention but constructed of composite biblical materials, and at Little Gidding, where exempla from the desert fathers to episodes from recent history informed the Ferrars’ religious dialogues collected in the Story Books. This study seeks to fill in a major gap in Herbert studies while also bringing texts by the Ferrars, long overlooked, into the larger critical conversation on early Stuart religion and literature. Izaak Walton describes the “holy friendship” and “pious designs” shared by 50 Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar.104 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there are two primary meanings of the word “design”: the first, “a mental plan,” is in the sense of both “a scheme conceived in the mind and intended for subsequent execution” and “the end in view, the final purpose.” The second, “a plan in art,” can refer to a preliminary sketch, an architectural plan, or the outline of a piece of decorative work, or to “original work in a graphic or plastic art.” Herbert and Ferrar were, in the first sense of the word, “dreamers and schemers,” whose initial ambitions for successful careers in the academy, the court, and the political arena were decisively redirected instead towards the pursuit of holiness. For both men this entailed ordination and withdrawal to the country; their initial plans for worldly honor were reoriented to the end of Christian perfection. In the second sense of “design,” retirement bore much fruit artistically for both: for Herbert, his volume of poetry The Temple and his pastoral conduct book The Country Parson; for the Ferrars, a variety of media including volumes of moral dialogues, the meticulous compilation of the Gospel Harmonies, and an idiosyncratic and extensive pattern of worship that combined Laudian ideas of the beauty of holiness with separatist austerity. In “The Crosse,” Herbert wishes for “some place . . . To set thy honour up as our designe.”105 Through a deep friendship and across a number of media, Herbert and the Ferrar family accomplished this goal, while negotiating a contentious and ever-shifting religious landscape. 104 Walton, 312. 105 Hutchinson, 164. 51 CHAPTER 2: “IN HIM I AM WELL DREST”: GEORGE HERBERT’S PLAIN STYLE REVISITED “Style,” as the novelist Martin Amis has said, “gives moral directions.”1 George Herbert in a number of places in The Temple meditates on the proper form and most fitting expression for religious verse. Herbert’s so-called “plain style” and his working out of a devotional poetics has long intrigued critics, because of the far-reaching scope of the question he addresses: “To what degree, in other words, is art, artifice, deviousness, duplicity—however one would want to consider it—essential to the nature of poetry?”2 An overview of this scholarship across many decades suggests the following: first, that Herbert’s style is at the center of his theological aesthetics; grasping what he is trying to achieve stylistically is a prerequisite for grasping the poetry. Second, Herbert’s plain style is not, after all, very plain. Many scholars, as we shall see below, have noted a complexity in Herbert’s stylistic simplicity that resists absolute definition. This chapter aims not for absolute definition, but clarity of description. Part I outlines the conflict in Herbert’s aesthetics through readings of poems that address the nature of devotional poetry itself. It then reviews and evaluates the previous scholarship on Herbert’s plain style, and explores theological discussions of simplicity that influenced Herbert, but have been overlooked. Part II considers Herbert’s repeated motif in The Temple of articles of clothing that are either used for purposes opposite to that for 1 2 John Haffenden, “Martin Amis,” Novelists in Interview (New York: Methuen, 1985), 23. Frank Manley, “Toward a Definition of Plain Style in the Poetry of George Herbert,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, edited by Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 205. 52 which they were intended, or that constitute “ruined finery.” I argue that these conflicted images of clothing are connected to the Renaissance commonplace of the “garment of style,” and represent Herbert’s own conflicted aesthetics as a devotional poet. I. “Plainly Saying, My God, My King,” “Utmost Art,” and the “Naked Simplicitie” of The Temple The poet Carl Phillips has framed the tensions involved in Herbert’s style this way: If questioning the ways of God is one of the items with which Herbert openly wrestles throughout The Temple, another as well is writerly ambition . . . Herbert seems (quite reasonably) aware of his gift; the problem is, what to do with it? How to temper it according to how best to serve God and not oneself? How to fashion the perfect offering and then avoid a dangerous pride in one’s own achievement? How to be a virtuoso of form and metrics and yet seem less to be flaunting than appropriately harnessing that talent?3 This is the quandary of the virtuous virtuoso, the problem of the Protestant artist. It is a Protestant problem because of the Reformers’ fear of idolatry, which led to suspicion of the fine arts at best and full-blown iconoclasm at worst.4 The place of wit, of invention and artistic skill, is ambiguous in much of Protestant devotional verse. As Donne laconically prayed in “A Litany” XXI, 3 Carl Phillips, “Anomaly, Conundrum, Thy-Will-Be-Done: On the Poetry of George Herbert,” in Carl Phillips, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004), 56. 4 See Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 53 When we are moved to seem religious Only to vent wit, Lord deliver us.5 And yet, in order to create a poem, some wit must be “vented.” But how should wit be subordinated to the higher purposes of devotional poetry, namely, praise or petition of the Creator (rather than self-praise of the poet), and teaching, delighting and moving the reader with the goal of spiritual growth and divine union? The delight in poetic wit, Herbert insists, should properly be consumed in the flame of a higher purpose, once the reluctant reader is rhymed to “good.” Yet consumed it never is. Herbert’s conceits, paradoxes, puns, rhymes, figures, and elaborate verse forms are never quite negated even if Herbert would ultimately have them disappear into some simple motto or elegant lesson. From the seventeenth century to our own, Herbert has been known chiefly as a poet of wit.6 As mentioned in the Introduction to this study, biblical attitudes towards art are mixed. While the Hebrew Scriptures celebrate craft and music (especially as these relate to worship, such as elaborate furnishings for the Temple or the singing of psalms), they also condemn the persistent human impulse towards idolatry. The New Testament says little about art or craft directly, but expands on the notion from the Hebrew prophets and the Psalms that true worship is spiritual.7 Herbert, of course, has chosen the Temple as the central image of his collection.8 In “The Altar,” the poet imagines “A broken ALTAR . . . 5 John Donne, The Major Works, John Carey, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 167. 6 Sam Westgate, “George Herbert: ‘Wit’s an Unruly Engine,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 38, no. 2 (April–June 1977), 281. 7 As in Psalm 51:17 “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” 8 On the wide range of possible allusions in Herbert’s title, see Mary Ellen Rickey, Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), 2–6. For doubts that this title was in fact Herbert’s, see Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 54 / Made of a heart, and cemented with teares.”9 In “Sion,” he narrates the rise and fall of the Temple worship of the ancient Israelites: Lord, with what glorie wast thou serv’d of old, When Solomons temple stood and flourished! Where most things were of purest gold; The wood was all embellished With flowers and carvings, mysticall and rare: All show’d the builders, crav’d the seers care.10 However, the glory of the Temple “Did not affect thee much, was not thy aim,” and so God quits his “ancient claim” for the more humble and confined space of the human heart: And now thy Architecture meets with sinne; For all thy frame and fabrick is within.11 The Christian has exchanged “Solomon’s sea of brasse and world of stone,” for the groans of a contrite heart, which, though the “note is sad,” is yet “musick for a King.”12 Emotional sincerity and earnest prayer is to take the place of the appointed sacrifices.13 “Sion” appears to end neatly: groans, “quick, and full of wings,” triumph over the Press, 1977), 185–186. Charles notes that the title in the B manuscript (the only of the two surviving manuscripts with a title) is in Nicholas Ferrar’s own hand, which raises the intriguing possibility that The Temple was titled by Nicholas, if not by Herbert. 9 F.E. Hutchison, ed., The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 26, hereafter cited as Hutchinson. 10 Hutchinson, 106. 11 Ibid. 12 Helen Wilcox notes that “Groans are the psalms of the new inner temple.” Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 383 n. 24, hereafter cited as Wilcox. The place of sighs and groans in Herbert’s theological aesthetics will be the subject of a future study. 13 Hutchinson, 106–107. 55 “heavie things” of the Temple; Christians will now “Worship in spirit and in truth.”14 However, the seeds of Herbert’s conflicted style are visible even in this tidy conclusion. Herbert in “Sion” contrasts the material Temple and the rituals enacted there, with the spiritual heart and the “groans” and prayers it offers. However, groans and prayers are not the only offerings Herbert desires to make; and once the offering is “A Wreathed garland of deserved praise” rather than “one good grone,” embellishment and craftsmanship reenter the picture.15 This is the irony of the move towards “spiritual” religion, which would seem to remove the temptation of idolatry, since most of the physical accouterments of religion have been dispensed with. Instead, the idolatrous impulse is simply internalized and spiritualized.16 Herbert wants the verbal artifacts of his poems, as much as possible, to contain and show forth the emotional purity that is the hallmark of interior religion. To achieve this, he must chart out a new kind of devotional poetics, one that dispenses with the conventional tropes and embellishments of Petrarchan love poetry, as in “Jordan (I)”: Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie? Is all good structure in a winding stair? 14 John 4:24. 15 “A Wreath,” Hutchinson, 185; see below for discussion. The precise relationship between prayer and poetry in Herbert is actually quite complex, and is beyond the scope of this study; it will suffice to say that one does not equal the other, though they are sometimes intimately connected. 16 See Gilman, 40 and 41: “For in its most telling moments the argument against sacred imagery drives below the realm of ‘external’ representation to relocate the iconoclastic struggle within the individual Christian.” “The commandment against idols is aimed, therefore, not merely at the superstitions of the Jews or at the decorations of the church, but, as Zwingli argues, at any interior process turning the mind to anything but God.” Idolatry is termed “spiritual fornication.” For more on Herbert and iconoclasm, see Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Le verbe fait image: Iconoclasmes, écriture figure et théologie de l’incarnation chez les poètes métaphysiques, le cas de George Herbert (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010). 56 May no lines passe, except they do their dutie Not to a true, but painted chair? Is it no verse, except enchanted groves And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines? Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves? Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines, Catching the sense at two removes? Shepherds are honest people; let them sing: Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime: I envie no man’s nightingale or spring; Nor let them punish me with losse of rime, Who plainly say, My God, My King.17 For a poem about plainness, “Jordan” is a highly allusive title, as one of his seventeenthcentury readers noted.18 The Jordan, the river in which John baptized Jesus (and also the river where Naaman was cleansed of his leprosy in 2 Kings 5:10, viewed as a type of Jesus’ baptism), is a symbol of regeneration and purification. This is the only explicitly (if indeed it could be said to be explicit) religious reference in the poem until the very last line, “Who plainly say, My God, My King.”19 Condensing all the devotional energy into the last line forces the reader to go back and reexamine what has come before: “Is there in truth no beautie?” now explicitly, and even primarily, refers to the truth of the gospel. The shepherds in the third stanza are no longer the standard swains that people pastoral verse, but could be the shepherds unto whom the angels announced Christ’s nativity, the 17 Hutchinson, 56–57. 18 “I am ready to say the author has, in these, lashed himself by prefixing a title, that either is, or at least is to me, very obscure.” George Ryley, Mr. Herbert’s Temple and Church Militant Explained and Improved (1715), edited by Maureen Boyd and Cedric C. Brown (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 61. 19 This phrase occurs in multiple Psalms: 5:2, 68:24, 84:3, and 145:1. Herbert uses a similar phrase in “Antiphon (I).” 57 simple witnesses to divine revelation, who then “sang” that news to others.20 “Jordan (I)” reads as a manifesto of poetic plainness, that questions the established conventions (as its opening words, “Who sayes?” make clear), defends the poet’s skill and credentials as a poet (“Nor let them punish me with loss of rime,”) and even attempts to trump the courtly competition with his brief but powerful declaration of praise to God, rather than to a mistress or patron.21 “Jordan (II),” like “Jordan (I),” is a complicated poem about plainness, but one that focuses the criticism inward, on the poet himself. When first my lines of heav’nly joyes made mention, Such was their luster, they did so excel, That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.22 Even though the poet has dedicated his lines to “heav’nly joyes” instead of earthly ones, he finds himself employing a Christianized version of the “fictions onely and false hair” poetics that he criticized in “Jordan (I).” The “plain intention” is present in his verse, but it has been gussied up with needless “curling” and “trim invention.” The sense has been 20 See Sidney Godolphin’s “Lord, when the wise men came from far”: A wiseman at the Altar bowes And offers up his studied vowes And is received; may not the teares Which spring too from a shepheards feares, And sighs upon his fraylty spent, Though not distinct, be eloquent? (lines 20–25) 21 As, indeed, the whole of The Temple is most unusually dedicated to God alone instead of an earthly patron; see below. 22 Hutchinson, 102–103. 58 “decked,” “as if it were to sell”; apart from the gaudiness of commercialism, this may allude to the fact that gentlemen like Herbert did not publish their verses, instead circulating them among a coterie in a more restricted way. Herbert seeks out “trim invention”; “Invention” was the original title of this poem in the W manuscript of The Temple.23 Helen Wilcox notes that Herbert’s use of this term “seems to indicate an excessive concern with the poet’s art,” as in “Love (I).”24 “Invention” was often the first section in Renaissance books of rhetoric, on how to come up with a topic; it originally implied recollection rather than wholesale creation, as Francis Bacon notes in The Advancement of Learning: “So as, to speak truly, it is no Invention, but a Remembrance or Suggestion, with an application.”25 However, this classical meaning had largely given way to the idea of original creation or novelty. Though Sidney praised poetic invention in the Defence of Poetry, in religious quarters, it faced great disapprobation. Lancelot Andrewes, in the summer of 1603, having evacuated the Westminster School (of which he, as Dean of Westminster Cathedral, was head) to Chiswick due to plague in London, preached a sermon on what he argued was the root cause of the pestilence: God’s wrath angered by men’s “own inventions.” Puritan preachers have “new tricks, opinions and fashions, fresh and newly taken up, which their fathers never knew of.” The people of England now 23 Ibid., 102. 24 Wilcox, 368 n.3. 25 Cited in William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: The Formal Basis of Elizabethan Prose Style, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 6 and 207 (Appendix 1). 59 think it a goodly matter to be wittie, and to find out things our selves to make to our selves, to be Authors, and inventors of somewhat, that so we may seem to be as wise as God, if not wiser . . . That Sinn may cease, we must be out of love with our own inventions and not goe awhoring after them . . . otherwise, his anger will not be turned away, but his hand stretched out still.26 George Herbert was an eleven-year-old pupil at the Westminster School in 1603, and was in attendance at Chiswick that summer; he may have actually heard this sermon being delivered.27 Andrewes, a master stylist and among the most learned divines and greatest preachers of his age, was appointed the chief of the Westminster Translators of the King James Bible by the King himself. F.E. Brightmann has observed of Andrewes that His imagination was collective and organizing, as it were, rather than originative. It showed itself in new combinations of existing material, rather than in substantively new contributions. He took up what he found and fused it into a new whole and that, often with poetic distinction.28 Herbert revered Andrewes his whole life long, and Andrewes was certainly a model for him in the creative and often arresting recasting of biblical material that marks The Temple; perhaps he also contributed to Herbert’s complicated and mistrustful relationship with “invention.” Thousands of notions in my brain did runne, Off’ring their service, if I were not sped: I often blotted what I had begunne; This was not quick enough, and that was dead. 26 Quoted in Adam Nicolson, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 30. 27 28 Ibid. F.E. Brightman, trans., The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes (New York: Meridian Books, 1961), xxxix. 60 Nothing could seem to rich to clothe the sunne, Much lesse those joyes which trample on his head.29 Herbert criticizes his earlier tendency towards “overwriting” and affected vocabulary. Ironically, though his imagination at that time teemed with “thousands of notions,” his embellishments mostly consisted of blots on the page, since he felt unable to let his lines stand: “This was not quick enough, and that was dead.” His desire to “clothe the sunne” kept him from finishing his poems; these lines seem to be in contrast to the present time, when the poet’s working methods are presumably more attuned to simplicity of thought and phrase (though Herbert’s many revisions between the two manuscripts of The Temple suggest that he was a careful editor). As flames do work and winde, when they ascend, So did I weave myself into the sense. But while I bustled, I might heare a friend Whisper, how wide is all this long pretence! Copy out onely that, and save expense.30 Like “Jordan (I),” “Jordan (II)” builds to a crescendo of busy, winding, purling, curling, and swelling artifice, and then drops a leveling line of plainness into the proceedings that flattens all the overwrought invention that has come before. In this case, Herbert needs to be rescued from himself. A “friend” appears alongside him, looking over his shoulder at the blotted script, perhaps noticing all the balled-up wads of aborted lines littering the floor, and suggests that there is an essence, an immediacy of thought and feeling, a “sweetnesse” that he is missing. This “friend” is often identified with Jesus; I am more inclined in this case to identify him (or her) with the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, in Greek 29 Hutchinson, 102. 30 Ibid. 61 literally “the one who comes alongside,” who gives inspiration, and who in times of trial (and perhaps poetic frustration) supplies the Christian with the words to say (Luke 12:12).31 Jesus also sees the Holy Spirit descending as he comes up out of the water at his baptism in the river Jordan (Matthew 3:13; Luke 3:22): by the poem’s title, Herbert makes clear who his muse is. The “friend” recommends a return to the root of “invention,” not fabrication or embellishment but recollection, a gathering and recombination of sources and experiences, a return to the source of eloquence: “copy out onely that, and save expense.” The “Jordan” poems, in sentiment if not in form, present a consistent poetics of plainness for devotional verse. However, there is a counterpoint to this adamant appropriation of the plain style elsewhere in The Temple. Herbert, as Barbara Lewalski and many others have argued (see below), is taking on the role of a new Christian Psalmist. David was known for his skill in music and in devising praises; he also danced before the ark of the Lord with all his might (2 Samuel 6:14). To offer the sacrifice of a contrite heart requires only sincere contrition; but to offer a song of praise requires skill, and all the skill one possesses. Herbert’s two complicated poems about plainness are answered by a very plain (though artfully so) poem about poetic skill, “Praise (II)”: King of Glorie, King of Peace, I will love thee: And that love may never cease, I will move thee. 31 Wilcox, 370 n. 15. Many commentators have also remarked on the similarity of the end of “Jordan (II)” to the end of the opening sonnet of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, “Foole said my Muse to mee, looke in thy heart and write.” Hutchinson, 513. 62 Thou hast granted my request, Thou hast heard me: Thou didst note my working breast, Thou has spar’d me. Wherefore with my utmost art I will sing thee, And the cream of all my heart I will bring thee.32 In thanksgiving for having his prayer answered by God, Herbert vows his love and wants to “move” God, this time not with pity, but by the praise he will offer. This is how Herbert moves from the “one good groan” of “Sion” back towards the splendor of the Temple itself, which, like his poem, was an artifact of praise. “Utmost art” is in strong contrast to “plainly” saying, “My God, My King,” especially after the self-critique in “Jordan (II).” This idea is repeated in the second stanza of “Easter,” after he summons his heart to rise and sing the praise of the risen Lord: Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy art. The crosse taught all wood to resound his name, Who bore the same. His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key Is best to celebrate this most high day.33 The heart, the seat of the emotions, is joined by the lute, symbolizing the poet’s skill and wit; these two “twist a song,” and then Herbert summons the Holy Spirit to “bear a part,/ And make up our defects with his sweet art.”34 These “three parts vied / And multiplied” are a sketch of Herbert’s view of the poetic process: heart, lute, and Spirit combine, and 32 Hutchinson, 146. 33 Ibid., 41. 34 Ibid., 42. 63 the resulting “consort” is the poem. The heart’s role is foundational, in terms of the emotion and “plain intention” that is to be expressed; the Spirit’s is corrective (an interesting take on inspiration, that the Spirit comes in last instead of first). It is the lute’s job to “struggle for thy part / With all thy art.” In “Jordan (I),” struggling is a sign of overreaching, of being out of alignment with the plain intention of the poem. But as these lines about Christ’s sinews as lute-strings make clear, the celebration of Easter must be “high strung.” Helen Wilcox notes that “Sacred music was set at a pitch a minor third higher than madrigals and other secular music”; she quotes John Lyly, “he that longeth for sweet Musicke, must set his stringes at the highest.”35 Herbert also uses the image of the awakening lute (Psalms 57:9) in “The Author’s prayer before Sermon” in The Country Parson: “Awake therefore, my Lute, and my Viol! awake all my powers to glorifie thee!”36 Herbert also instructs that the Country Parson, “When he preacheth, he procures attention by all possible art . . .”37 Though Herbert’s art in a poem like “Praise (II)” could be described as “artful artlessness,” the call in that poem and in “Easter” is for the poet’s “utmost,” for struggle, and for the grand style, at least in terms of emotional pitch (see below). These antithetical positions, of “plainly saying, My God, My King” on the one hand and giving one’s “utmost art” on the other is expressed multiple times throughout the course of The Temple. It is the energy moving between these two poles that lends Herbert’s style its dynamism, and which has captured the attention of critics, 35 Wilcox, 142 n.11–12. 36 Hutchinson, 289. 37 Ibid., 232. 64 which we will explore below. Previous Scholarship on Herbert’s Plain Style The paradoxes in Herbert’s style described above were widely recognized and analyzed in late twentieth century criticism.38 Arnold Stein, in his article “George Herbert: The Art of Plainness” and his book George Herbert’s Lyrics (both 1968) notes that Herbert “does not give us a single, consistent attitude towards expression”: His art of plainness does not bear a single stamp, and his arguments with God are conducted with great freedom and inventiveness. Whenever as critics we take a single example as our model to copy, we become aware of statements on the other side and of stylistic demonstrations that force us to widen our definitions.39 Stein makes a case for a plain style that exudes passion even within the confines of technical mastery, and which “does not austerely reject ornament,” as part of an aesthetic strategy that persuades by first giving pleasure.40 After an examination of classical and ancient Christian influences on Herbert’s rhetoric (especially that of Augustine), Stein emphasizes the importance of a “rhetoric of sincerity” in The Temple: 38 However, two foundational studies of Herbert, by Rosamond Tuve and Joseph Summers, do not remark on any tension within Herbert’s poetic style. Tuve’s emphasis on Herbert’s extensive use of traditional sources, especially biblical and medieval types and images, is behind her comment that “Herbert is acute, original, and apt; he is not self-consciously clever, fond of daring innovations, or playfully neat,” the latter half of which I cannot agree with at all, despite the great achievement of her study. Summers comments at length on Herbert’s use of language, both as a rhetorician at Cambridge, as a preacher at Bemerton, and as a poet. He concludes that in Herbert’s verse, “the beauty of language, like the soul’s, can live only if it is ‘lost’ to the proper object; that the craftsman maintains his mastery of beauty only upon the condition of his willingness to surrender it.” This is true, but Summers does not engage Herbert’s great struggles along the way over mastery, letting go, or finding the proper style for praise. Rosamond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 138, and Joseph Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and His Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 119. 39 40 Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), 26. Arnold Stein, “George Herbert: The Art of Plainness,” in The Poetic Tradition: Essays on Greek, Latin, and English Poetry, edited by Don Cameron Allen and Henry T. Rowell (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), 121. 65 “he aspires to an art of plainness that can achieve absolute sincerity and that can reveal impersonal truth without distortion, even while it registers the felt significance and force of a personal apprehension of that truth.”41 Simplicity, then, is in the service of sincerity, and this sincerity is achieved: “Sincerity is a simple state, an ultimate goal reached by a process of endeavor which must overcome, not merely avoid, real difficulties.”42 Mary Ellen Rickey in her study Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert is, as the title makes clear, responding to earlier descriptions of Herbert’s verse as expressing naïve simplicity; she especially chafes against the idea of Herbert’s poetry as less complex than Donne’s.43 Her project is to uncover the fullness of Herbert’s artistry, and she succeeds; she is especially effective in her description of the techniques by which Herbert gives the appearance of simplicity even in a poem with complex ideas, what she terms “the surprising combination of downright words and sophisticated conceptions,” by a preference “for technical words which also carry a more general import”; by avoiding proper names (especially classical ones) except for biblical figures; by preferring “genus to species”; and by only using familiar theological terms.44 Still, despite her study’s many strengths, she ultimately writes out the tension between what she terms “the nearly paradoxical coexistence of complexity and seeming simplicity in 41 Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics, 2. 42 Ibid., xiv. 43 Rickey, 160. 44 Ibid., 55–56, 163. 66 Herbert’s English poetry.”45 For a man who left no critical treatise, Herbert had a great deal to say about the writing of verse. Several of his pronouncements have been interpreted as declarations of his own simplicity and as proscriptions of what we now call metaphysical poetry. It is difficult to credit the idea that the master of undeniably metaphysical poems could object seriously to the conceit . . . both early and late poems in The Temple demonstrate his reliance on almost every characteristic of the manner which some readers find him condemning. On the contrary, I feel Herbert practiced exactly what he preached. He never made wholesale censure of embellishment in the writing of others and never disclaimed the complexity of his own work. I do not believe that one can find in Herbert any intimation that “writing from the heart” necessitates “writing without the head.”46 There is much to agree with here. However, the key word above is “wholesale,” as there is plenty of censure of embellishment in The Temple (of Herbert’s own work and of the work of others), as we shall see. Of Herbert’s many metaphorical descriptions of embellishment or ornament (silks, curling, winding, painted objects, etc.) almost all are negative. And while he “never disclaimed the complexity of his own work,” he certainly questioned it on numerous occasions (“Jordan (II),” “A Wreath,” “A True Hymne”). The one-stanza poem “Love-Joy” even seems to be a self-parody of artistic over-thinking. After the poet, “never loth / To spend my judgement,” lectures a bystander on how the letters J and C annealed on bunches of grapes in a stained glass window “seem’d to me / To be the bodie and the letters both / Of Joy and Charitie,” his audience answers him slyly, “Sir, you have not miss’d / . . . It figures JESUS CHRIST.”47 The poet has not “miss’d” the meaning, because of a happy allegorical coincidence, but his intellect has 45 Ibid., xiv. 46 Rickey, 172. 47 Hutchinson, 116. 67 taken him the long way around, as it tends to do. The poet who desires to copy out only the “sweetnesse ready penn’d” (“Jordan (II)”) and cries out “Give me simplicitie, that I may live” (“A Wreath”) does not disclaim his verse’s complexity, but he does certainly lament it on several occasions. Rickey interprets “The Forerunners” and “A true Hymne” as evidence that for Herbert, “simplicity is held defensible under certain circumstances, but it is not postulated as the goal for which the poet should strive,” and that “it is the duty of the accomplished poet to engage all the embellishments at his command when he undertakes to write praises.”48 In other words, “plainly say, My God, My King,” if that is all you can do; otherwise, one’s “utmost art” is expected. In this reading, Herbert’s plainness or simplicity is sort of a ruse, or a smooth surface over the “true” complexities of his verse. This is also the view espoused by Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth: Herbert’s artful simplicity is a pose that betrays itself to reveal a baroque sensibility beneath a veneer of plainness. His diction is superficially simple but nevertheless jarring; it calls attention to itself by being so studiedly commonplace.49 Rickey, Summers and Pebworth do not seem to acknowledge, as early modern rhetoricians did, that there are multiple levels within the plain style, and that the term “simplicity” in Christian theology has a much wider and less restricted meaning than acknowledged here (see below). As Kenneth Graham notes in his chapter “Rethinking Renaissance Plainness,” this can be a bewilderingly variegated topic. To investigate 48 49 Rickey, 177, 176. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., “Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne”: Essays on George Herbert (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), ix. 68 plainness is to encounter a distressing proliferation of plain styles: native plain style, classical plain style, Puritan plain style, Anglican plain style, Bacon’s plain style, Herbert’s plain style, Restoration plain style . . . an ironic illustration of a copiousness at odds with the brevity of most plain styles.50 Michael Gallagher, in his exploration of Renaissance rhetoric as it applies to Herbert’s poetry, describes the multiple levels of the classical plain style: In classical rhetoric the genus tenue was not a style devoid of artistry; rather it was characterized by hidden craftsmanship, by a subdued degree of ornament compatible with its emphasis on clarity and its conversational manner.51 This style was described by Cicero and others as subtilitas, something that seems easy but is difficult to imitate, or urbanitas. Gallagher notes that At first, it is true, there seems to be a certain conflict in his views between a desire to “plainly say, My God, My King,” (“Jordan [I]”) and a desire to offer God his “utmost art” (“Praise [II]”) . . . and yet the poems themselves undermine any such limited interpretation; they do not give the impression of “a sweetnesse readie penn’d.”52 Gallagher describes “A Wreath” as “a fairly typical example of a seeming contradiction in Herbert between content and performance, between what he is saying and how he is saying it.”53 Gallagher’s solution to this conflict is essentially to spiritualize it: “There is a danger of misinterpreting such poems unless it is understood that the plainness and simplicity of which they speak is primarily an interior and spiritual one.” Simplicity and 50 Kenneth J.E. Graham, The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1–2. 51 Michael P. Gallagher, “Rhetoric, Style, and George Herbert,” ELH 37, no. 4 (December 1970): 496. 52 Gallagher, 506. 53 Ibid. 69 art “belong to two different realms.”54 Thus, Gallagher emphasizes (rightly, I believe, and in contrast to Rickey) a more comprehensive meaning of simplicity as a way of life, a mode of existence: “It is clear both from his poetry and from his prose that Herbert’s preference for plainness or simplicity was not simply an esthetic matter but reached out to form a kind of life-value.”55 However, it seems a strange bit of logic to conclude that because what is being said does not match the style in which it is being said, that therefore what is said cannot be taken at face value. Further, that simplicity would be wholly interior and spiritual, and somehow separate from the realm of poetry and art which requires embellishment, artifice and all manner of devices to succeed, seems unlikely for a poet who strove, as he put it, for the soul to accord unto the line.56 Barbara K. Lewalski addresses Herbert’s stylistic quandary in her magisterial Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979), arguing (especially in response to Louis Martz’s Poetry of Meditation) that Herbert’s art is founded “upon elements of Protestant poetics”: biblical genre theory, biblical tropes, Protestant uses of the emblem tradition, metaphor and typology, and a Protestant theory of art; this view “forms a necessary corrective to approaches to Herbert through medieval iconography, Salesian meditation, the plain style, or the so-called Augustinian abrogation 54 Ibid., 507. 55 Ibid., 503. 56 See “A true Hymne”: “The finenesse which a hymne or psalme affords,/ Is, when the soul unto the lines accords.” Hutchinson, 168. 70 of art.”57 In Herbert’s poetry, the issue of whether art is appropriate to divine praises, and if so, what kind of art, is central. His position is by no means simple, but it is not contradictory, nor does it abrogate art or the human responsibility, especially the poet’s responsibility, to render fit praises. Poem after poem recognizes that the poet’s praises (like the preacher’s sermon) must emanate from a renewed heart and must be in some sense God’s work and not his own . . . But this recognition of the divine action in creating the spiritual conditions necessary for praises, and thereby the praises themselves, does not solve the problem of art for the poet any more than did the analogous commonplace for the preacher . . .58 Lewalski argues for an affinity between Herbert’s and others’ religious lyrics that seek to solve the “problem of art” and early modern ars praedicandi and sermon manuals, since “The religious lyric in general shares with the sermon the problem of rendering divine matter in human terms, and often shares as well a didactic purpose.”59 While this comparison is certainly a fruitful one in many ways, it is worth noting that Herbert, in his own miniature ars praedicandi in The Country Parson, unambiguously urges the preacher to use “all possible art” in getting his message across to his congregation, without a counterbalancing concern for plainness, except as a tool to help simple country people understand higher, spiritual things.60 As much as Herbert the preacher and Herbert the poet have in common, the latter occupation is a much trickier business. The sermon is a Protestant necessity—the Word 57 Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 283. 58 Ibid., 227. 59 Ibid., 214. 60 Hutchinson, 232. 71 must be explicated and opened up; the preacher speaks by the church’s (and therefore God’s) authority, in a wholly traditional and explicitly didactic Christian genre. The lyric poet has no such mandate, as Sidney, Harington and the other sixteenth-century defenders of verse were very much aware. Herbert exploits this difference to his advantage in The Temple, from the very first lines: “Hearken unto a Verser” (not a preacher!), but he never fully overcomes his anxiety about the alluring sweetness of language. Sermons cannot exist without their biblical foundations; Herbert, as Lewalski noted, chooses to undergird his poems with scripture, but he still must negotiate with “invention” at every turn. For Lewalski, Herbert solves the problem of art in religious poetry when he “undertakes nothing less than the task of becoming a Christian Psalmist” resulting “in the creation of religious lyrics of surpassing beauty, biblically-derived yet original, simple yet of great variety and complexity, “plain” yet exhibiting “utmost art.”61 True plainness “is not a renunciation of art but an affirmation of its divine source and biblical standard.”62 For Lewalski, the tensions between “utmost art” and “plainly saying” are subsumed within the identity of the Christian psalmist; this identity becomes the solution to the larger problem of the Protestant artist. My discomfort with Lewalski’s assessment is that, although Herbert is clearly taking on the role of Christian Psalmist with The Temple as his Psalter (as his immediate followers certainly viewed him and his work), this position for him does not seem to assuage his anxieties about art. Though Herbert may assume the identity of a Christian psalmist, his verses can only ever be in imitation 61 Lewalski, 316. 62 Ibid., 228. 72 of scripture, as his several mentions of “copying” attest.63 Further, as mentioned above, the Bible’s assessment of art is mixed. In a sense, the problem of the Protestant artist is a problem of authority: the poetry of the Bible (especially the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and passages from the prophetic books), such an important precedent for Sidney and other Renaissance defenders of verse, has the authority of scripture, of divine revelation. Preachers preach by the authority granted to their office by the Church. But who authorizes the Protestant poet? Even as Protestant theology, with its emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and the importance of individual devotion and learning, especially through the vehicle of written word, opens up a space for the religious lyric in the vernacular that is readily filled, the crisis of authority remains. Assuming the mantle of a Christian psalmist does not solve the problem of the Protestant artist; rather than a solution, it is more of a declaration to stand within the breach. This poetic mantle seems rather like the clerical garment in “The Priesthood”: “should I presume / To wear thy habit, the severe attire / My slender compositions might consume.”64 Stanley Fish famously saw Herbert’s poetry in terms of consumption in his SelfConsuming Artifacts (1972), where his artistry is part of a cyclical understanding of poetry: The intention, then, is not merely to give up art, but to give up art to God by sending it back clearly labeled as His, a making of the action fine by making it not mine. It is a literally unimaginable venture (to sign someone else’s name to your poems and make the attribution stick), one that 63 See “Thanksgiving,” “Jordan (II),” and “Providence.” 64 Hutchinson, 160. 73 involves the risk of holding fast to everything of which the poet would let go . . .65 The poetic process is a sort of constant exchange, with the poet only apparently, and not actually, playing a part, since ultimately all the action is God’s. For Fish, the tension in Herbert’s art falls not under the rubric of the plain style, but under his own construction of the poem as a self-consuming artifact. He notes, Here I depart from the consensus view in which Herbert is held to be a poet of the plain style. In his aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, the plain style is not a solution, but a temptation, the last infirmity of the noble poetic mind. By failing to see this, the commentators oversimplify exactly at the point where Herbert’s rigor and clearsighted toughness are most remarkably in evidence.66 For Fish, Herbert’s style is so conflicted and intense that no plain “veneer” is possible; again the notion of simplicity is more akin to dullness than any kind of desirable goal. To receive the simplicity for which Herbert asks in “The Wreath” would constitute a failure of potential on his part rather than a sign of poetic success (though, for Fish, the poetic success is achieved paradoxically in the “anti-aesthetic” of self-consumption). These studies have been the most influential in considering the tension in Herbert’s style, and offering various solutions to it: that sincerity, rather than simplicity, is Herbert’s true stylistic aim; that his simplicity is merely a smooth surface over his complexity of thought, and “plain saying” the resort of those whose “utmost art” is lacking; that Herbert’s simplicity is to be understood as internal and spiritualized, in a separate realm from his poetry with its worldly necessities of artifice; that the claiming of 65 Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 207–208. 66 Fish, 199 n.21. 74 the identity of the Christian Psalmist subsumes the tension between plainness and complexity by making the Bible the foundation of art; and, finally, that this tension is not related to plain style at all, but indicative of the incendiary relationship between the poet and God, in which the poetry is a negating and deconstructing self-consuming artifact.67 “Give me simplicitie”: “A Wreath” and “The Starre” I do not feel it necessary to somehow resolve the conflict between “plainly saying” and “utmost art” in order to ascribe to Herbert a consistent aesthetic position; Christianity is by nature a religion of paradox, and so it is not surprising that a Christian philosophy of art would reflect this. Instead I offer a description of Herbert’s aesthetics rather than a solution to them: Herbert’s poems tend to arrive at simplicity, or at least to strive for and strain towards it.68 Whether by plain speaking or struggling to give one’s 67 On Herbert’s plain style, in addition to the studies cited above, see also Leah S. Marcus, “George Herbert and the Anglican Plain Style,” in “Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne”: Essays on George Herbert, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 179– 193; Roger Pooley, “Anglicans, Puritans and Plain Style,” in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1980, edited by Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1981), 187–200; Rosalie E. Osmond, “George Herbert’s Richness in Austerity,” English Studies in Canada 6, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 133–144; Nicholas R. Jones, “Texts and Contexts: Two Languages in George Herbert’s Poetry,” Studies in Philology 79, no. 2 (Spring 1982), 162–176; Hermine Van Nuis, “Sincerity of Being and Simplicity of Expression: George Herbert’s Ethics and Aesthetics,” Christianity and Literature 27, no. 1 (Fall 1977): 11–21; Frank Manley, “Toward a Definition of Plain Style in the Poetry of George Herbert,” Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, edited by Maynard Mack and George deForest Lord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 203–217; Baird W. Whitlock, “The Baroque Characteristics of the Poetry of George Herbert,” Cithara 7, no. 2 (May 1968): 30–40; and Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, “‘Sweetnesse readie penn’d’: Herbert’s Theology of Beauty,” George Herbert Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2003/Spring 2004): 1– 21. For plain style in the English Renaissance, see Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962) and Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), as well as Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 68 My position is closest to Stein’s, who says that sincerity for Herbert is “an ultimate goal reached by a process of endeavor which must overcome” real difficulties (Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics, xiv). To substitute sincerity for simplicity, however, overlooks an important theological concept that undergirds 75 utmost, simplicity in language, thought, and life is the goal, because attaining this ideal allows for participation in God’s simplicity, God’s oneness. But arriving at simplicity is usually a convoluted affair (though a dazzling journey for the reader). The best the poet can do is to let his teeming brain somersault through its elaborate machinations until he somehow, with God’s help, vaults himself into the simplicity of grace. Simplicity can be reached in part, however fleetingly, on earth, but can only be attained in its fullness in heaven. This desire for simplicity can be observed in “A Wreath,” where the poet longs for simplicity and laments his lack of it, and “The Starre,” which presents a Dantean vision of the poet in paradise, where his “crooked winding ways” in language and life are transformed and redeemed. A Wreathed garland of deserved praise, Of praise deserved, unto thee I give, I give to thee, who knowest all my wayes, My crooked winding wayes, wherein I live, Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight, Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee, To thee, who art more farre above deceit, Then deceit seems above simplicitie. Give me simplicitie, that I may live, So live and like, that I may know, they wayes, Know them and practise them: then shall I give For this poore wreath, give thee a crown of praise.69 Making use of the poetic device of “reduplicatio,” Herbert contrasts his own corrupted Herbert’s plain style; see below. Helen Wilcox also notes in the Introduction to her edition of Herbert that “It is vital to make the distinction between poems that are simple (which Herbert’s are not), and those that arrive at simplicity through the use of, as well as the explicit rejection of, complex learning and rhetoric.” (Wilcox, xxxi.) 69 Hutchinson, 185. 76 poetic offering, a compromised “crown of praise,” with God’s incorruptible perfection (1 Corinthians 9:25).70 Michael Schoenfeldt describes the poem’s “irreconcilable aesthetic dilemma,” that “even as the impressive formal accomplishment of the poem is demeaned, it is paraded.”71 However, while the form of the poem calls attention to its artfulness, by the time Herbert cries out “Give me simplicitie, that I may live,” the poet seems caught in his own web. “A Wreath” is one answer to the question Herbert asks in “Miserie,” “How shall infection / Presume on thy perfection?”72 Simplicity, or the lack thereof, reflects the moral character of the artist; all earthly offering are compromised, “crooked and winding.” Judy Z. Kronenfeld, however, argues that Herbert’s “winding” in “A Wreath” refers to self-correction as well as error: The very winding of the poem, the intertwining of the wreathed garland, the artifice, the deceit moves it from praise to the prayer that precedes praise, serves not as more “trim invention,” but as a conscious process of self-correction . . . It is a process that amounts to a union of his own effort’s and God’s, one in which Christian and poet may be redeemed and reconciled.73 70 See Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, xliv, and Robert Southwell, “St. Peter’s Complaint,” cxiii. For other Renaissance wreath poems, see Donne’s La Corona sonnets, Vaughan’s “The Garland” and “The Wreath,” and Marvell’s “The Coronet,” discussed in Ceri Sullivan, “Seventeenth-Century Wreath Poems,” George Herbert Journal 19 (1996), 95–102. 71 Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 175. 72 Hutchinson, 101. And the following stanza: As dirty hands foul all they touch, And those things most, which are most pure and fine: So our clay hearts, ev’n when we crouch To sing thy praises, make them lesse divine. Yet either this, Or none, thy portion is. 73 Judy Z. Kronenfeld, “Herbert’s ‘A Wreath’ and Devotional Aesthetics: Imperfect Efforts Redeemed by Grace” in ELH 48, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 298. 77 Herbert’s request is for a profound simplicity “which must be given,” and which “transcends both naïve simplicity and the deceit that seems above it.”74 This kind of simplicity will be explored in a theological sense below, and is deeply connected to Herbert’s desire for a plain style. The poet longs for simplicity, but must make due with his “crooked and winding” poem as a stratagem for connection with God: the lines manage to imply that convolution, indirection, even perhaps, cleverness, are both deceitful and yet at the same time inevitably all that imperfect humans have to work with when they self-consciously try to work on their own.75 “Crooked winding wayes” must suffice until that time when the poet receives the divine simplicity he asks for, enabling him to “know and practise” God’s ways and offer a true “crown of praise.” A kind of imaginative depiction of the longing at the close of “A Wreath” is found in “The Starre.” Herbert apparently had a fascination with shooting stars as metaphors for spiritual enlightenment, and in two other poems imagined his clothes being lit on fire by one, and swallowing another.76 Here he invites a “Bright spark, shot from a brighter place,/ Where beams surround my Saviours face” to come down and “Take a bad lodging in my heart.”77 He asks the star to do some spiritual housework: to “with thy firework burn to dust” his heart’s folly and lust, and then to shine the heart with its light. After this purification and enlightenment, the poet asks the star to take him back to 74 Ibid., 297. 75 Ibid., 298. 76 See “Artillerie” and the Latin poem “Lucas, V: In S. Scripturas.” 77 Hutchinson, 74. 78 heaven with it (presumably in death), “Unto the place where thou / Before didst bow.” Grant me a standing there, and place Among the beams, which crown the face Of him, who dy’d to part Sinne and my heart: That so among the rest I may Glitter, and curle, and winde as they: That winding is their fashion Of adoration. Sure thou wilt joy, by gaining me To fly home like a laden bee Unto that hive of beams And garland-streams.78 Herbert desires to be placed within the corona of light surrounding Christ: “Among the beams, which crown the face.” Once placed there, he will “glitter and curle and winde” with the other stars, as “winding is their fashion / Of adoration.” Helen Wilcox notes that elsewhere (such as in “Constancie” and “Jordan (II)”), “glitter,” “curle” and “winde” have negative connotations and are “signs of excessive artifice and pretence in human beings.” However, “these actions are natural to beams of light.”79 The image of the poet in the corona around Christ’s face, the “crown” of “garland beams,” reads as a heavenly redux of “A Wreath.” Winding in “The Starre” is not a sign of errancy but the “fashion[ing] / Of adoration.” This winding is selfless (because it is incorporeal) and perfected. The poet has been “translated” (in the sense of Enoch), and so has his poetic gift: now he is able to fashion a true “wreathed garland of deserved praise” around the 78 Ibid. 79 Wilcox, 269, n. 26. 79 one “who dy’d to part / Sinne and my heart.”80 The closing image of the poem, the “hive of beams / And garland streams,” like the image of the celestial rose in the Paradiso, suggests that the poet is one among many co-fashioners of praise in the heavenly corona: the crown or garland is also a hive of adoring activity. The image of a buzzing hive of praise around the enthroned Christ may also relate to the honeybee as an ancient symbol of eloquence, and a Christian symbol of the resurrection.81 In “The Starre,” Herbert anticipates the “straightening” and perfection of his crooked life and lines as described in “A Wreath,” and he imagines the “translation” of his poetic activity to Paradise, where he can participate in the divine simplicity for which he has longed. Simplicity in Christian Tradition, Augustine, and Savonarola Both “plainly saying, My God, My King,” and giving one’s “utmost art” function, at different moments in The Temple, as moral imperatives. The moral imperative of plainness has to do with truth, and the traditional conception of “the naked truth.” The moral imperative of giving one’s utmost has to do with praise, thanksgiving and sacrifice (which are bound together in the theology of the Book of Common Prayer, in “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”). Though these imperatives often conflict (as sincerity and ambition are bound to do), they merge in the concept of simplicity. Simplicity in its theological fullness combines sincerity and truthfulness (what the Bible 80 81 “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death” (Hebrews 11:5). Angels hover like bees around the celestial rose in the thirty-first canto of the Paradiso. Bernard of Clairvaux was called “Doctor Mellifluous,” the “sweet-voiced” doctor; the bee was also an attribute of St. Ambrose, due to his eloquence. On the classical and Christian symbolism of the honeybee, see Louis Charbonneau-Lassay, The Bestiary of Christ, translated by D.M. Dooling (New York: Parabola Books, 1991), 319–329, and George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 12. 80 refers to as “purity of heart”) with perfection and completeness. Purity of heart and perfection are not earthly attributes but heavenly; in this way, Herbert’s conflicted plain style is one way in which he “uses” his poetry to chart a path back to God (“The Quidditie”). Previous studies have tended to focus on Herbert’s plain style in light of classical and early modern theories of rhetoric, to the layers and levels of style within the Bible itself, and to Augustine’s theology of Christian eloquence. They have mentioned in passing if at all any kind of theological understanding of simplicity or plainness. One reason for this is that Herbert was at one time a professional rhetorician; as the Orator of Cambridge University, he was responsible for addresses of welcome to visiting royalty and dignitaries, expressions of thanks for past favors and requests for new ones, and giving public lectures on rhetoric to the students.82 Another reason is the importance of Renaissance rhetoric as a subfield of early modern literature (as evidenced by the large number of surviving rhetorical handbooks); the wealth of studies on early modern rhetoric precludes in-depth discussion here.83 While Herbert employed the full range of his rhetorical training in his poetry, there is a great distance between his former occupation as official PR man and hired flatterer, and his latter vocation as divine poet of 82 Herbert was elected Orator in January 1619/1620, and did not officially resign the position until 1627, although he had not been active in the post for several years. Amy Charles sums up Herbert’s surviving official Latin letters as “official thanks for favors past or pending, artful flattery, and formal academic compliment,” and suggests that “Using the language of encomium and compliment expected in such official correspondence must rather shortly have become mere performance of duty”; Charles, 100, 99. On Herbert as Cambridge Orator, see Charles, A Life of George Herbert, 97-100; Helen Wilcox, “Herbert’s ‘Enchanting Language’: The Poetry of a Cambridge Orator,” George Herbert Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (Fall 2003/Spring 2004): 53–66; and Summers, 95–97. 83 See Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, and Thomas Sloan and Raymond Waddington, eds., The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry: From Wyatt to Milton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 81 praise. Cristina Malcolmson and Michael Schoenfeldt have suggested that Herbert was highly invested in seeking patronage for much of his short life (from his prominent kinsman William Herbert, from Francis Bacon, from Bishop John Williams).84 However, the manuscript of The Temple delivered to Nicholas Ferrar was dedicated to God alone (“Lord, my first fruits present themselves to thee”).85 That no earthly patron was named by his friend seems to have confused Nicholas at first, and Nicholas’ cousin Arthur Woodnoth (a mutual friend of Herbert’s and the executor of Herbert’s will) had to talk him out of dedicating the published version to Herbert’s elder brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury.86 That Nicholas, a renunciant, almost misread Herbert’s intention as an oversight demonstrates the entrenchment of the patronage system, and the boldness of Herbert’s statement. Nicholas begins his “The Printers to the Reader” with a meditation on this choice: The dedication of this work having been made by the Author to the Divine Majestie onely, how should we now presume to interest any mortall man in the patronage of it? Much lesse we think it meet to seek the recommendation of the Muses, for that which himself was confident to have been inspired by a diviner breath then flows from Helicon. The world shall receive it therefore in that naked simplicitie, with which he left it, without any addition either of support or ornament, more than is included in itself.87 Ferrar keeps his remarks to a minimum and dispenses with the usual tributes and other 84 See Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power. 85 Hutchinson, 5. 86 See Daniel Doerksen, “Nicholas Ferrar, Arthur Woodnoth, and the Publication of George Herbert’s The Temple, 1633,” George Herbert Journal 3 (1979/1980): 22–44. 87 Hutchinson, 3. 82 introductory material, instead emphasizing Herbert’s holiness and humility. Even before we come to Herbert’s own words, then, The Temple is presented in “naked simplicite,” unornamented. Peter Auski in his comprehensive study Christian Plain Style notes that throughout Christian history, The moral and aesthetic senses of simplicity are here closely intertwined; indeed . . . the created artifact becomes an emblem or symbol of the maker’s character, and hence artistic plainness scorning ornateness, and everything ostentatiously elaborate both in the making and in the effect, becomes a spiritual proclamation.88 Nicholas’ preface is a kind of “spiritual proclamation” of Herbert’s character as “a pattern or more for the age he lived in.”89 Leaving The Temple in its “naked simplicitie” is also a testament to the spiritual truth of the poems: “The naked, unaided, unadorned and bare quality of truth runs through Christian aesthetic theory like a first principle.”90 This “naked strength of truth” manifests itself in the literature of the Renaissance in two ways: [I]t implies, first, that stylistic adornment either is irrelevant to meaning or by its excesses is attempting to hide weakness in substance; and, secondly, it identifies verbal beauty with falsehood because error needs cosmetic, decorative coverings.91 This is certainly the line of argument taken by Nicholas at the very end of the dialogue called “The Winding Sheet” in the Story Books of Little Gidding. Speaking as the 88 Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 5. 89 Hutchinson, 3. 90 Auski, 15. 91 Ibid., 246. 83 Register, he responds with criticism to the Learner and the Apprentice (his nieces Mary and Anna Collett), who have concluded their stories with a witty summary of the interconnection of the tales they have told, as well as a pun on their opening subject (the winding sheet or shroud) with the quip, “Let vs wind vp the Bottome of this longsome Diuersion, & goe on where we left.” Nicholas interjects, I see you aime by keeping this Pedigree of your stories, to shew, that they descend in a lineall kind of Methode . . . Whether it be by Art or chance, that you make this agreement in matter & persons & so many other respects . . . I will not enquire. Nor to tell you true will I be bound to the imitation thereof. These exact connexions are but Flourishes of witt, Gracefull when they fall in naturally of themselves, but otherwise vnworthy the thoughts of them, that are in pursuit of sollid Notions. If the matter be vsefull or excellent, I shall take the Libertie to bring it vpon any ground, that offers it self, & as if I had done a good seruice without any solicitous complement or curious deuise return plainly & directly to the principal discouse. You haue my opinion & purpose & I think it to be sutable to that, which wee intend. That is, the bettering of our selues by the knowledge of truth & practize of vertue. The least progresse in which is more to be esteemed then the perfection of all Arts and Learning.92 This statement, which concludes the dialogue (which took place after 1634 and includes a reference to Herbert’s death), while bold in its denunciation of rhetorical ornament and flourishes (or at least of constructed rather than “natural” devices), itself ends up as an example of conflicted style, since the sisters’ witty summary remains in the text. As Nicholas attempts to overwrite his nieces’ eloquence with an insistence on plain truth at the dialogue’s close, so he opens The Temple, full of a dizzying array of verse forms and poetic techniques, by describing its “naked simplicitie.” Herbert, too, will distance himself from artifice while simultaneously employing it. He has the same goal for his 92 B. Blackstone, ed. The Ferrar Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 200–201. 84 readers that the Ferrars had for themselves in their dialogues: “the bettering of our selues by the knowledge of truth & practize of vertue.” It is for this reason that all contrived eloquence is viewed with suspicion: At the heart of the plain style, there is thus a ubiquitous sense that art can serve materialistic and idolatrous patterns of response, enticing common believers into a diversionary worship of false gods and a distracting attentiveness to false objects of desire, rather than to the first end of spiritual desire. It is for this reason to be limited, restricted, controlled, lessened, and directed, or eliminated.93 Art, artifice, ornament, decoration, studied eloquence: all can too easily become distractions from the plain truth.94 But apart from the dangers of art, eloquence, and ornament as a distraction from truth (and especially from religious truth), there is another and perhaps even more important reason to pursue plainness and simplicity as an artistic and spiritual ideal: simplicity is an attribute of God. This motivation for the pursuit of simplicity, in life and in art, are discussed by Augustine and Savonarola, two theologians whose writings were important to Herbert. Auski notes the paradox of theological simplicity: while in “biblical terms the simple are innocent and harmless, and derided as such . . . to the world the same may appear simple-minded . . . ignorant, credulous, and unsuspecting . . . To the worldly, 93 Auski, 77. See also Richard F. Jones, “The Moral Sense of Simplicity” in Studies in Honor of Frederick W. Shipley (St. Louis: Washington University; Lancaster, PA: Lancaster Press, 1942), 265–288. 94 This was the criticism of some puritans to Richard Hooker, attacking his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–97) not only on theological but stylistic grounds. His eloquence, according to the writers of the tract A Christian Letter of Certain English Protestants (1599), “seemeth to carie another kinde of stile more befitting the glorie of the Romish character, then the simplicitie of our ministerie,” and differs “from the simplicitie of holie Scripture” and the “learned Fathers of our church, as of Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer . . . &c.” His critics urge Hooker to write and argue “without those hugie embossements of stuffed bumbasing” so that simple souls might gain something. Cited in Auski, 242–243. 85 simplicity typically signifies a defect of knowledge, skill, or cunning.”95 Though synonymous with “simple” in many ways, the term “plain” “happily avoids the connotation of mental deficiency.”96 The simplicity that is in God, however, forces the theologian to confont the paradox that, while in normal experience, complex entities are of a higher order and more perfect than the simplicity of inanimate objects, in religious experience the simplicity of God is perfection itself.97 Auski argues that the plain style derives from the presence in the Bible of the two polarities of human and divine simplicity.98 St. Augustine discusses this divine simplicity in The City of God. God is “simple” because God is indivisible and unchangeable, even though this simplicity contains the multiplicity of the whole created order: There is, accordingly, a good which is alone simple, and therefore alone unchangeable, and this is God. By this Good have all others been created, but not simple, and therefore not unchangeable . . . It is for this reason, then, that the nature of the Trinity is called simple, because it has not anything which it can lose, and because it is not one thing and its contents another, as a cup and the liquor, or a body and its colour, or the air and the light or heat of it, or a mind and its wisdom. For none of these is what it has . . . And hence they can be deprived of what they have, and can be turned or changed into other qualities and states . . . According to this, then, those things which are essentially and truly divine are called simple, because in them quality and substance are identical, and because they are divine, or wise, or blessed in themselves, and without extraneous supplement . . . For neither are there many wisdoms, but one, in which are untold and infinite treasures of things 95 Auski, 4. 96 Ibid., 7. 97 Ibid., 13. 98 Ibid., 31. 86 intellectual, wherein are all invisible and unchangeable reasons of things visible and changeable which were created by it.99 Herbert asks for “simplicitie” from God in “The Wreath” because God is the source of it, as the only truly simple entity in existence. As Augustine notes, human beings can never attain this level of simplicity (even in the resurrection), but they can participate in it, especially in the next life: “The soul itself, too, though it be always wise (as it will be eternally when it is redeemed), will be so by participating in the unchangeable wisdom, which it [the soul] is not.”100 God’s simplicity constitutes ultimate wisdom, the “one wisdom” that contains “untold and infinite treasures of things intellectual.” Christians can participate in this simplicity by applying themselves to the study of wisdom. This link in Augustine’s thought between wisdom and simplicity brings us to his extremely influential work On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina Christiana). In Book IV, Augustine discusses how and in what style(s) Christians are to teach and preach, and gives guidelines on how to appropriate certain aspects of rhetoric from the ancient world (which Augustine famously termed “plundering the Egyptians,” Bk 2.40.60). Herbert shared with Augustine a former career in rhetoric. Augustine assures his audience that this work is not a reprise of his former lectures: 99 Saint Augustine, The City of God, translated by Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), 354–356. Herbert left his volumes of Augustine’s works to one of his two curates in his will; see Hutchinson, 382. On Herbert and Augustine, see William H. Pahlka, Saint Augustine’s Meter and George Herbert’s Will (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987). 100 Augustine, The City of God, 355. 87 At the outset I must curb the expectations of any readers who think that I am going to present the rhetorical rules which I learnt and taught in pagan schools, and warn them . . . not to expect that sort of thing from me.101 This is not because these rhetorical rules are not useful, but because they are not necessary for wise or eloquent teaching, which can be learned from reading and absorbing the writing of the best Christian authors, as infants learn language not by studying rules but by listening to speech.102 The source of all wisdom is the Bible: “The wisdom of what a person says is in direct proportion to his progress in learning the holy scriptures,” truly understanding them and investigating their meaning.103 “Eloquent speakers give wisdom, but wise ones salvation.”104 Augustine adopts the Ciceronian formula of docere, delectare, movere, that the eloquent should speak so as to teach, delight, and move their hearers.105 Augustine discusses the plain, middle, and grand styles, which are used for different purposes: the plain, subdued, or restrained style is the best for argument; the middle or moderate style for delighting; and the grand style for moving an audience. For Augustine, the three styles are fluid, and the good orator should combine them as they suit his purposes (even while working predominately in one style), since giving a speech in a single style is less absorbing for the listener, but transitioning 101 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, translated by R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 101. 102 Ibid., 101–102. 103 Ibid.,104. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 117. 88 from one style to another gives the discourse a smoother flow and is more engaging.106 Though Augustine adapts Cicero’s identification of the plain style for teaching, the middle style for delighting and the grand style for moving, he does not follow the great Roman orator in connecting the plain style with the treatment of small matters, the middle with intermediate matters, and the grand style with important matters. This is because “in our situation, since we must relate everything especially what we say to congregations from our position of authority, to the well-being of human beings not in this temporary life but in eternity, where there is the added danger of eternal perdition, all matters that we speak of are important.”107 Jesus said that a person who gives a cup of cold water to one his disciples will not lose their reward; since Jesus did not consider such a small thing to be trivial, preachers should not, either.108 Augustine then describes the uses of each level of style, with numerous examples. He has the least to say on the middle, intermediate, or mixed style, which is best for praising or censuring.109 The grand style, for Augustine, is about “heartfelt emotion” more than ornament: It has room for almost all those ornaments, but if they are not there they are not missed. It is borne along by its own momentum, and derives its beauty of expression, if indeed this emerges, from the power of its subjectmatter, and not the pursuit of elegance. It is sufficiently equipped for its 106 Ibid., 137. 107 Ibid., 124–125. 108 Ibid., 125. 109 Ibid. 89 purpose if appropriate words follow not from a search for elaborate vocabulary but from the promptings of a passionate heart.110 Augustine gives examples of appropriate scenarios for the grand style, such as the occasion when he persuaded the people of Caesarea in Mauretania to abandon a bloody civic tradition of ritualized gang warfare, or (in a less violent but no less serious case for Augustine) when the Apostle Paul and Cyprian condemned women who use cosmetics.111 The grand style, then, is not linguistically florid, but pulls out all the emotional stops for the sake of immediate change in behavior. The success of this kind of speech is measured not by the amount of applause, but by the copious tears of the convicted audience.112 In describing the plain style, Augustine uses Cicero’s phrase “contrived casualness,” which in the interest of clarity “disposes of ornament without exposing itself to squalor.” The plain or restrained style has its own power, which comes not from a heightened emotional pitch, but from intellectual acumen. It often happens that a discourse in the restrained style, as it solves very difficult problems and explains things by means of startling proofs, or uncovers and reveals some very penetrating ideas from an unexpected source (rather like treasure from a cave), or refutes the error of our adversary and teaches that something apparently irrefutable said by him is false . . . elicits such cheers of approval that it is not easily recognized as the restrained style. Just because it marches to battle without embellishment or armour, and apparently defenceless, this does not prevent it from crushing the enemy with the strength of its sinewy hands and disabling its opponent and demolishing falsehood with its mighty limbs.113 110 Ibid., 129. 111 Ibid., 139, 135–137. 112 113 Ibid., 139. Ibid., 141. 90 Another translation of this passage reads, “It does not come forth armed or adorned but, as it were, nude.”114 The naked truth of the plain style is described as a powerful and skilled wrestler. Augustine’s “treasures from a cave” is linked to one of Cicero’s characteristics of the plain style, as “penetrating and frequent points . . . unearthed from some unexpected sources.”115 This “sinewy,” deft, and agile plain style is here being used for philosophical argument, but it is easy to see why it is so suitable for metaphysical religious poetry, with its conceits and displays of wit, leading to the revelation of a spiritual truth. From this brief survey, Augustine can be said to have influenced Herbert in matters of style in several ways. The Christian poet should have a somewhat paradoxical ambition towards the attainment of simplicity, as this virtue represents a striving after truth, perfection, and the undivided wisdom of the One who is the source of all creation; the reward for this striving after wisdom is participation in the simplicity and unity of the triune God. In terms of the Christian teacher’s relationship to formal rhetoric, Augustine does not denounce his rhetorical training, but he says it is not essential to Christian eloquence. In terms of the levels of styles, the plain style derives a certain power and athleticism from its leanness that makes it well suited for argument or revelation. The grand style is not cluttered with ornament, but derives its grandness from its emotional pitch; this grand style, which appeals to the emotions, can be interwoven with the plain style to great effect. 114 115 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, translated by D.W. Robertson (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 163. Augustine, On Christian Teaching, Green, trans., 160, n. 141. 91 Another important influence on Herbert’s thinking about simplicity was the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola’s De Simplicitate Christianae Vitae, first published in 1496.116 After visiting Herbert, Arthur Woodnoth wrote to his cousin Nicholas Ferrar, “Sauonorola in Latine he hath of the Simplicity of Chr. Religion and is of great esteem with him.”117 This is one of the few works for which we have direct evidence of Herbert’s commendation. Savonarola appeared in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, so English readers would have been somewhat familiar with him as a heroic figure, if not directly with his works. His sermons, treatises, and meditations constituted something of a publishing phenomenon in Paris, Antwerp and Cologne, and an English translation of one of his works was bound with the first Book of Common Prayer. His works were used to further both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe; this quality puts him in league with several of the Ferrars’ favorite Catholic authors, such as Juan de Valdés and Pico Mirandola, who had reforming impulses. His works were also placed on the Index by the Roman Catholic authorities.118 Unlike Augustine, Savonarola directly attacks rhetoric, rejecting the claims for it made by Cicero and the Renaissance humanists. Scriptural poetry is merely a decoration for truth; as Clarke summarizes, “The ornaments are not the temple, he argues, in an 116 Savonarola (1452–1498) was a controversial Dominican friar, preacher, reformer and prophet in Florence. For Savonarola and Herbert, see Chapter 1, “Herbert and Savonarola: The Rhetoric of Radical Simplicity” in Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry:‘Divinitie, and Poesie, Met’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), and Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 282–287. 117 Printed in Blackstone, The Ferrar Papers, 268. 118 Clarke, 27. 92 image the George Herbert could have used of his own volume.”119 Poetry is wisdom’s “handmaid,” a concession to weaker minds. However, Savonarola was himself a poet; one, like Herbert, who harbored a suspicion of poetry.120 Savonarola in De Simplicitate describes simplicitas as a comprehensive principle, defined as “Sincerity or purity of heart, integrity of conversation, together with neglect or renouncing of whatsoever is superfluous.”121 Simplicity embraces both internal purity as well as externals such as sincerity of words and actions and a frugal lifestyle, and Clarke connects this vision of it to the chapter “The Parson’s Life” in Herbert’s The Country Parson.122 Savonarola includes a lengthy section on attire in De Simplicitate, as one important area of expression of exterior simplicity (see below). Book II provides a description of what perfect simplicitas or union with God would look in the individual psyche: The intellectus should perceive or contemplate nothing but God. Everything loved by the voluntas must be chosen and loved by God. The memoria will always retain God and his mercies. The imagination will constantly picture the Cross: and the net result is ‘that the whole clean man may be made the sanctified temple of God.’123 The principal of simplicitas within the spiritual man allows him to speak without effort. 119 Clarke, 28. Clarke mentions several times that Savonarola takes an Augustinian approach to rhetoric (and he does quote from De Doctrina); however his critique of secular rhetoric seems much harsher to me than Augustine’s. Augustine adapts elements of ancient rhetoric for Christian purposes, rather than rejecting it outright. 120 Ibid., 30. 121 Quoted in Clarke, 31. 122 Clarke, 31. 123 Summary in Clarke, 38. 93 To struggle for the right words is a sign of artificial speech, which is laborious and distracting; this is the language of duplicitas.124 Savonarola wrote his own treatise on poetry, Apologeticus De Ratione Poeticae Artis, which contrasts spiritual discourse with classical rhetoric, and praises the divine discourse of the Bible for taking its readers straight to the kernel of truth.125 For Savonarola, then, simplicity is an orientation; the closer one gets to God, the less “struggle” in speech and artificiality in language there will be. Poetry, though characterized ambiguously, can be a useful tool for leading readers to divine truth, but only if the poet follows the example of the Bible rather than that of secular eloquence. Herbert’s plain style, influenced by Augustine, Savonarola and others and modeled in part after biblical style, achieves a richness and dynamism from the competing desires within it to, on the one hand, express the “naked truth” of the gospel, and, on the other, to sing God’s praises with “utmost art.” These two desires are manifest in the ideal of simplicity, which in Christian tradition represents both humility in thought and deed but also the completeness and perfection found in God. However, true simplicity is something to be sought and longed for in this life, a future destination. Clothing, such a constituative element of human identity, has long been associated with artifice and complexity in itself and as a metaphor for language and writing style. Herbert, while striving for this higher simplicity, used images of clothing to express the conflicted nature of earth-bound devotional poetics. 124 Clarke, 44. 125 Ibid., 45. 94 II. Herbert and the “Garment of Style”: Confused Clothing and Ruined Finery In a 1962 essay, T.S. Eliot, noting that “it was most unusual that a man of George Herbert’s social position should take orders and be content to devote himself to the spiritual and material needs of a small parish of humble folk in a rural village,” quotes an anecdote from Walton’s Life of Mr. George Herbert.126 Walton writes that on his way to attend services at Salisbury Cathedral and then to “sing and play his part at an appointed private Musick-meeting,” as he did twice a week, Herbert saw a poor man, with a poorer horse, that was fall’n under his Load; they were both in distress, and needed present help; which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his Canonical Coat, and help’d the poor man to unload, and after, to load his horse: The poor man blest him for it: and he blest the poor man; and was so like the good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself, and his horse; and told him, That if he lov’d himself, he should be merciful to his beast. —Thus he left the poor man, and coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert which us’d to be so trim and clean, came into that company so soyl’d and discompos’d; but told them the occasion: And when one of the company told him, He had disparag’d himself by so dirty an employment; his answer was, That he thought of what he had done, would prove Musick to his soul at Midnight; and that the omission of it, would have upbraided and made discord in his Conscience, whensoever he should pass by that place; for, if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound so far as it is in my power to practise what I pray for. And though I do not wish for the like occasion every day, yet let me tell you, I would not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or shewing mercy; and I praise God for this occasion: And now let’s tune our Instruments.127 126 T.S. Eliot, “George Herbert” in John Donne; George Herbert; Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, By Frank Kermode, T.S. Eliot, and Margaret Willy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 59. 127 Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson, intro. by George Saintsbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 305. 95 Eliot also refers to this story during one of his Clark lectures on metaphysical poetry at Trinity College, Cambridge; Ronald Schuchard, the editor of those lectures, describes it as a “favourite anecdote” of Eliot’s.128 This story, of course, demonstrates Herbert’s piety, his commitment to his flock, and his willingness to “condescend” (a word with positive instead of negative connotations in the seventeenth century) to those of inferior social status. It shows the Country Parson in action, helping, blessing, and admonishing on the spur of the moment; but also Herbert’s refinement and artistry, as he continues on to his music gathering. The same man that gets dirty helping man and beast out of the mud is in the next scene is the “sweet singer of The Temple,” as an early edition of his works referred to him. But there is another reason that this story may have, to Eliot, encapsulated Herbert the priestly poet. Herbert, according to Walton, was very particular about his clothing; Eliot quotes Herbert’s instructions on canonical clothing from The Country Parson. The image of Herbert, his fine clothes filthy, defending his good deed even as he tunes his lute or viol, is therefore striking. However, it is also similar to a series of images in The Temple itself, of fine articles of clothing that have been ruined in some way. These images, as well as other images which depict garments being used in ways that contradict their intended purpose, make a theological statement about the paradoxical nature of the Christian life akin to St. Paul’s phrase “sorrowful but always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10). They also, I argue, describe Herbert’s conflicted poetic style, and the precarious 128 T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, edited by Ronald Schuchard (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1996), 45. 96 mixed position he has decided to take as a “virtuous virtuoso,” combining humility with artistry. Mary Ellen Rickey notes that Herbert was interested in images of clothing and dressing; like Donne, he “was fascinated by humanly determined symbols of value— jewels, coins, clothes—and he used them both to show the slight worth of much earthly traffic and, conversely, to familiarize his statements about spiritual matters.”129 Rickey describes a fairly typical use of images of clothing that any number of poets have adopted: clothing as vanitas, as the shell rather than the kernel, and/or pressed into service as the homely depiction of abstract or religious truths. However, in examining this series of images, one begins to surmise that something is wrong with Herbert’s clothes; there are a number of “wardrobe malfunctions” in The Temple. Garments are used in ways that are the opposite of their intended purpose, or they frequently constitute what I call “ruined finery.” There is evidence from within The Temple that these images are connected to the Renaissance commonplace of “the garment of style,” the conceit of language as the clothing for thought. There are also clothing references beyond these two uses; however even these are surprising and often do not really conform to a stock use of sartorial imagery. Herbert notes in “Providence,” Nothing wears clothes, but Man; nothing doth need But he to wear them. Nothing useth fire, 129 Rickey, 153, 158. 97 But man alone; to show his heav’nly breed: And onely he hath fuell in desire.130 Herbert here connects the Genesis story of the clothing of Adam and Eve, after their eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, with the Prometheus myth; desire for knowledge is both shame and glory, earthly and heavenly. Clothing is often connected with fire for Herbert, as in “Artillerie,” where a shooting star almost sets his clothes ablaze; “The Priesthood,” where he fears that if he takes holy orders and wears the minister’s “habit,” “thy severe attire/ My slender compositions might consume”; and “Jordan (II),” where the poet in his eagerness for divine praise recounts his lily-gilding attempts to “clothe the sunne.”131 Clothing is a marker of character, and Herbert plays with imagery of the inner person revealed in exterior garments, or vice versa, the outer garments somehow influencing the nature of the wearers. In “Giddinesse,” he imagines O what a sight were Man, if his attires Did alter with his mind; And like a Dolphins skinne, his clothes combin’d With his desires!132 In “The Church Porch,” he condemns the English people for the sin of sloth, saying, “Thy Gentrie bleats, as if thye native cloth / Transfus’d a sheepishnesse into thy storie.”133 In 130 Hutchinson, 120. 131 See Hutchinson, 139, 160, and 102. 132 Hutchinson, 127. Hutchinson notes that “Not the mammal like a porpoise, but the dorado (Coryphaena hippuris), popularly called a dolphin, a fish like a mackerel; its metallic colours undergo rapid changes on its being taken out of the wather and about to die, but it cannot be inferred that the changes have any relation to its desires (l. 20). 133 Hutchinson, 10. 98 “Frailtie,” what begins as a confident diatribe on worldly vanity ends with a plea for help in resisting the charms of what the poet calls “fair dust” and “guilded clay”: But when I view abroad both Regiments; The worlds, and thine: Thine clad with simplenesse, and sad events; The other fine, Full of glorie and gay weeds, Brave language, braver deeds: That which was dust before, doth quickly rise, And prick mine eyes.134 The poet has firmly resolved to choose the “simplenesse, and sad events” of God’s “regiment,” but the “Frailtie” of the title refers to his eyes’ succumbing to the worldly attractions that his mind knows are worthless. Herbert in “Frailtie” connects “glorie and gay weeds” with “Brave [in the obsolete meaning of ‘finely dressed, splendid, handsome’] language, braver deeds.” The connection of linguistic style to clothing has a long history. Changes in clothing are referred to, of course, simply as “fashion,” and the roots of the words “simplicity” and “complexity” actually relate to the folds in cloth.135 The Herbert scholar Rosamond Tuve includes a chapter on “The ‘Garment’ of Style and Functional Sensuous Imagery” in her study Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, where she argues that there are two ways of understanding this metaphor. Alongside the injunction of ut pictura poesis (“poetry should be like painting,” or poetry as a “speaking picture”), this 134 135 Hutchinson, 71. “The etymology of the Latin root simplex involves an implicit metaphor: sem- means ‘one,’ and the second element, -plex, derives from plicare, ‘to fold,’ as in clothing or bed-sheets, for example.” The cognate verb plectere, meaning to weave, plait, or entwine, “lead to terms such as duplex or twofold, supplication (with legs folded under one), complicated (with many folds), and many others (explicate, implicate, replicate, complex, perplexed.” Auski, 3. 99 Renaissance commonplace adumbrates a whole theory of ornament: the metaphor of ‘style as a garment.’ Such a conception could be vicious. Like the analogy with painting, it would seem to tempt poets to think of imagery as something added onto meaning, and of ‘embroidered’ prettiness as a desideratum, with one added temptation—to make garments that could stand alone, so stiff with ‘external Gorgiousness’ that they needed no body within. This is only one way of understanding the metaphor, the one responsible for most modern aspersions cast upon it. Another traditional meaning seems to help explain the character of much Elizabethan imagery, both bad and good: the notion of style as a garment in the sense that the flesh is the soul’s garment, its bodying-forth or manifestation. The separableness of ornament from meaning would obviously be the chief differential here between two somewhat different conceptions implied in ‘style as a garment of thought.’136 So there are two understandings in play regarding “style as garment”: in the first, style in poetry or prose is viewed as external embellishment and thus not integral to meaning; style is, to use another image expounded to proponents of the plain style in religious writing, the husk rather than the kernel.137 Herbert seems to be using the “garment of style” metaphor in this way in “Jordan (II),” where he describes himself as a novice poet employing “trim invention,” (“trim” was often used to refer to neat clothing or appearance) and “Curling with metaphors a plain intention,/ Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.” Poetic success requires the deflation of this over-zealous aesthetic, which he parodies as “Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sunne.”138 While “Jordan (II)” 136 Rosamond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 61. 137 This understanding of metaphor as something added to the meaning to “beautify” it implies the existence of a kind of pure language of thought, with metaphor as an “afterthought” or something extraneous and distracting. Among linguists, George Lakoff has disputed this claim and argued that metaphor is intrinsic to language and cannot be separated out from it; Sally McFague has made a similar argument from a theological standpoint.See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Sally McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). 138 Hutchinson, 102-103. 100 does not condemn metaphor and other poetic devices outright, it is certainly suspicious of ornament and urges restraint. The poem also appears to adopt a theory of poetic and moral simplicity inspired by Savonarola: after describing the needless embellishment of his earlier efforts, he says “I often blotted what I had begunne,” and at the end (in a Sidneyan echo) recounts his “friend” telling him to copy out only love’s “sweetnesse readie penn’d.” Savonarola in De Simplicitate posits two modes of speech, “artificial,” that of the classical orator, and “natural,” the spiritual manner of speaking of those who have internalized simplicitas. Elizabeth Clarke summarizes, The spiritual man speaks without effort from the principle of simplicitas within him. Because he is allowing that principle to express itself freely with no obstruction in the form of human effort, he is said to speak by the Spirit of God. This model of speech, says Savonarola, is the pattern for all external ‘works and motions.’139 The poet who wrote out of simplicitas, by this theory, would not need to so often blot what was begun; this poet would easily “copie out” only the “sweetnesse readie penn’d.” As the two manuscripts of The Temple demonstrate that Herbert was an assiduous editor, and other poems (such as “A Wreath”) describe the poet continuing to struggle with stylistic “working and winding,” we cannot take “Jordan (II)” as a face-value description of Herbert’s “reformed” compositional process. Instead the poem describes a spiritual ideal of simplicity which, when realized, would encompass this process. When the poet has attained true simplicitas, the plain intention will come forth naturally; until then, simplicity is a destination the poet works towards with much “winding.” However, this “decking of sense,” as Tuve notes, is only one approach to the 139 Clarke, 44. 101 “style as garment” idea. In the second, “flesh is the soul’s garment, its bodying-forth or manifestation.” In this conception, style is integral to substance and not a veneer, intrinsic rather than extrinsic; style, as Peter Auski noted, and as Nicholas Ferrar expressed in his preface to The Temple, expresses the moral character of the artist. Here, husk and kernel are inseparable, just as body and soul are in life. Herbert uses this image in his Latin poem Memoriae Matris Sacrum (“In Sacred Memory of My Mother”), when he describes his mother’s writing style as “Beauteous the shell,/ most beauteous the kernel—/ Thought and word exactly in accord.”140 According to this model, there is no “plain intention” waiting to be “decked,” only thoughts that are already “burnished” before they are, in Tuve’s phrase, “bodied-forth” by language. Language is thought made manifest, and not a mere “decking” or “curling” of thought. It is this second notion of the garment of style that Herbert employs more frequently. Tuve notes that “Any understanding of the metaphor [of the garment of style] would have been almost subconsciously acted upon by practicing poets . . .”141 However, Herbert used this metaphor explicitly in several cases (including “Jordan (II),” as we have seen), and, I will argue, implicitly in many others. Herbert begins “The Sonne” with an apologia for English: 140 “Bellum putamen, nucleus belissimus,/ Sententiae cum voce mirè conuenit.” Mark McCloskey and Paul R. Murphy, translators, The Latin Poetry of George Herbert: A Bilingual Edition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1965), 127. 141 Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, 61. Tuve’s chapter does not look at clothing images per se in the poems she examines; instead she focuses on the relationship between ornament and style in a more indirect fashion by examining a series of sonnets. Her study of George Herbert does not examine his clothing imagery. 102 Let forrain nations of their language boast, What fine varietie each tongue affords: I like our language, as our men and coast: Who cannot dresse it well, want wit, not words.142 This sonnet begins as a defense of the vernacular; English has a rich wardrobe for writers and rhetors to choose from; any weakness is the fault of the crafters of language and not the language itself. Through exploiting the “sun/son” pun so popular in the Renaissance (especially since “sonne” was used as a spelling for both), the poem arrives at an ending that celebrates Christ’s paradoxical nature as at once lowly and exalted: For what Christ once in humblenesse began, We him in glorie call, The Sonne of Man.143 In this way, the poem celebrates simplicity: English, a language which many considered too rough and unrefined for decorous expression, still collapses into one word the earthly humility and the cosmic glory of Christ. In “Prayer (I),” prayer, among many other evocative images, is described as “Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest.”144 Prayer has a complicated relationship to language, and for Herbert takes a variety of forms, including divine service as found in the Book of Common Prayer, colloquies with God, as well as unarticulated sighs and groans of the heart. Prayer as “man well drest” refers to spiritual preparedness, but also may refer to the “putting on” of prayers from the prayer book or the Psalms, the 142 Hutchinson, 167. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., 51. 103 appropriation of biblical language for praise, repentance and self-examination.145 Herbert, then, employs the garment of style metaphor in his own poems, which is not surprising due to its pervasiveness in the period. In examining the next series of images, however, I will argue that in Herbert’s repeated description in The Temple of articles of clothing that are either confused in some way or represent “ruined finery,” there is an implicit allusion to his own mixed and paradoxical poetic style even though language is not directly mentioned. This stylistic subtext also connects to a larger theme in Herbert’s poetry of the mixed and paradoxical nature of the Christian life, which is subject to extreme fluctuations in joy and sorrow, spiritual exaltation and humiliation, liberation and shame. Through this conflicted imagery, Herbert does not solve the problem of the Protestant artist; instead he represents it. “Excesse of Apparell” Before exploring these images, however, we must briefly survey the religious significance of clothing and attire in the Renaissance and early modern period. Clothing, as Rickey noted, is a “humanly determined symbol of value.” However, it is unlikely that many of Herbert’s contemporaries would have fully agreed with that statement, as clothing was a signifier of the natural order and social hierarchy as determined by God. For example, in De Simplicitate Christianae Vitae, a work esteemed by Herbert, Savonarola spends the bulk of the section on external simplicity on manner of dress, down to the appropriate fabrics and amount of jewelry to be worn by queens and 145 Herbert urges examination of conscience in “The Church-Porch” by saying, “Dresse and undresse thy soul: mark the decay / And growth of it.” Hutchinson, 24 lines 453-454. 104 duchesses. Clothing is a sign of rank, and one’s actual rank and sign of rank must be congruent. Both extravagant dressing and deliberate meanness of attire are condemned as ostentation, because they mislead.146 For Savonarola, sign of rank is “natural,” a given, and not socially constructed, and so to wear apparel that gives the sign of a rank that is not one’s own would be artificial, and therefore false. This applies not only to those of a lesser rank appropriating the fashions of their betters, but also to those “persons of quality” who might want to humble themselves by dressing below their class. According to Savonarola, the former are exhibiting false pride and the latter false humility. In Tudor and Jacobean England, clothing was strictly regulated via the sumptuary laws. Savonarola’s line of reasoning (which is not unique to him but pervasive in Christian tradition) is present in Elizabethan and Tudor sermons on apparel, as we shall see, and was also used by John Donne is his memorial sermon for Herbert’s mother, Lady Danvers: And for her Attire . . . it was never sumptuous, never sordid; But always agreeable to her quality, and agreeable to her company; Such as she might, and such, as others, such as shee was, did weare. For, in such things of indifferency in themselves, many times, a singularity may be a little worse, then a fellowship in that, which is not altogether so good. It may be worse, nay, it may be a worse pride, to weare worse things, then others doe. Her rule was mediocrity.147 146 147 This section found in Conclusion 7 of Book III; see Clarke, 58-59. “A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers, late Wife of Sir John Danvers. Preached at Chilsey, where she was lately buried. By John Donne Dean of St. Paul’s, London. 1 July 1627.” in George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds. The Sermons of John Donne, Vol. 8, no. 2 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1953-1962), 88-89. Donne had been asked to preach Lady Danvers’ funeral sermon in Chelsea Parish Church on June 8, 1627, but he was prevented by prior obligations, and so instead preached in Chelsea on July 1. (Potter and Simpson, 3.) Donne’s sermon was published in 1627 with Herbert’s Latin poem “Memoriae Matris Sacrum”, in A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Dauers. By Iohn Donne. Together with other Commemorations of Her; By her Sonne G. Herbert. London, Printed by I.H. for 105 The first sumptuary laws in England took effect in 1363, enacted in order to construct a set of dress codes that would maintain a strict social hierarchy under threat from increasing social mobility and changes within the status structure. Further statutes issued by Parliament over the next several hundred years were augmented by royal proclamations, especially from Elizabeth I. The sumptuary laws combined social control with trade regulation, as the wearing of imported luxury goods was restricted to certain social classes.148 The crown sought to limit “status forgery,” as the gentry and emerging middle class imitated the fashion of their betters; the only way to counter this mimicry was increased displays of opulence by the nobility and monarchy, as well as restrictive legislation.149 Bolstered by biblical verses denouncing extravagant dress and praising humble attire (especially for women, though women were exempt from many sumptuary laws in England), the kind of aspirational dressing that the sumptuary laws sought to control was widely preached against as sinful, with one sermon in the second Book of Homilies dedicated to this topic.150 John N. Wall notes that Philemon Stephens, and Christopher Meredith. 1627. 148 Rachel Shulman, “Sumptuary Legislation and the Fabric Construction of National Identity in Early Modern England,” Constructing the Past 8:1 (Spring 2007), 74. 149 Shulman, 75, 78. The term “status forgery” is from Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 33, quoted in Shulman, 78. 150 John N. King calls the Books of Homilies one of the two most powerful channels for government propaganda in early modern England, the other being St. Paul’s Cross, the outdoor wooden pulpit in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The first Book of Homilies was issued under Edward VI in 1547, and the second under Elizabeth I in 1563, expanded in 1571. John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 132. 106 If Elyot’s Governour and Ascham’s Scholemaster are private “courtesy books” which seek to educate Christian princes through imitation, then the Book of Homilies is a national “courtesy book” which presents an image of a Christian society so that all Englishfolk could realize the Christian commonwealth by imitating it. By repeated reading of these sermons, the vision of that commonwealth was presented over and over again for imitation.151 “An Homily Against an Excess of Apparel,” attributed along with the homily “Against Gluttony and Drunkenness” to Bishop Pilkington, gives four rules for proper apparel: the first, “we make not provision for the flesh, to accomplish the lusts thereof, with costly apparel,” urges modest dressing that does not encourage occasions for sin.152 The second, “to use this world as though we used it not,” urges the English Christian to resist letting worldly concerns like clothing distract from spiritual matters.153 The third urges acceptance of one’s circumstances, “that we take in good part our estate and condition, and content ourselves with that which God sendeth, whether much or little.”154 The fourth orders adherence to the status quo: that every man behold and consider his own vocation, inasmuch as God hath appointed every man his degree and office, within the limits whereof 151 John N. Wall, “Godly and Fruitful Lessons: The English Bible, Erasmus’ Paraphrases, and the Book of Homilies” in The Godly Kingdom of Tudor England: Great Books of the English Reformation. By John E. Booty, David Siegenthaler, and John N. Wall, Jr. (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow Company, 1981), 93. Wall also notes that the Homilies themselves “exhibit great variety and flexibility in the use of the plain style.” The Homilies’ “range includes restrained and formal eloquence and strident denunciation, fervent exhortation and tranquil reassurance. In the hands of Cranmer and his fellow homilists, the possibilities of an English plain style for didactic purposes were fully explored.” (Wall, The Godly Kingdom, 95, 97.) 152 John Griffiths, ed., The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), 308. 153 Griffiths, 309. 154 Ibid. 107 it behoveth him to keep himself. Therefore all may not look to wear like apparel, but every one according to his degree, as God hath placed him.155 There is no one standard for modest dress, therefore; proper attire is heavily dependent on one’s station in life. However, all can practice sartorial temperance to some degree. The homily contrasts the frugal Israelites, whose clothing and shoes lasted forty years while they wandered in the wilderness (and who passed down articles to their children), to the indulgent English who pursue wasteful excess and foreign fashions: But we are never contented, therefore we prosper not; so that most commonly he that ruffleth in his sables, in his fine furred gown, corked slippers, trim buskins, and warm mittons, is more ready to chill for cold than the poor laboring man, which can abide in the field all the day long when the north wind blows, with a few beggarly clouts about him.156 Pursuit of foreign fashions make the English look silly and changeable; women who dress extravagantly and use cosmetics look like strumpets; men who dress extravagantly look like women; and all who spend great sums on clothing rob the poor. I speak not against convenient apparel for every state agreeable, but against the superfluity, against the vain delight to covet such vanities, to devise new fashions so to feed thy pride with, to spend so much upon thy carcasse, that thou and thy husband are compelled to rob the poor to maintain thy costliness.157 Vanity leads to dissatisfaction with one’s estate and vocation, which in turn leads to a forsaking of one’s true status and even nationality, through the assumption of a false identity. This in turn upends the social hierarchy, hastens economic disaster, and provokes God’s wrath. 155 Ibid., 310. 156 Ibid.,, 311. 157 Ibid., 318. 108 In 1619, while he was Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, Herbert’s friend and patron John Williams preached before King James I on Matthew 11:8 (“What went yee out to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they that beare soft clothing are in king’s houses”).158 Williams interprets Jesus’ proclamation about John the Baptist to the crowd as a justification for the sumptuary laws. Fine clothes are forbidden as wasteful vanity to all except persons of high degree: They [fine clothing] are not for every sole and private man, to gather about him a gaping multitude, but for Magistrates and other remarkable persons, imployed in gouerning Estates, and seruing of kings, Behold they that beare soft cloathing are in king’s houses.159 For the “private man,” clothes are “shelters of necessity,” but for the “public man,” they are “scutchions [heraldic signifiers] of his dignity.”160 Williams cites biblical examples of the finery of those in authority: Abrahams’ jewels, Jacob’s perfumes, Joseph’s ring and fine linen, David’s changes of apparel, the silk of the good wife in Proverbs, etc.161 And therefore if any saucie tongue shall one presume, reprehendere vel iudicare, to controule or censure, the honourable clothing of men in place, let him know he is cursed, by an ancient Councell of the Church, to wit, that at Gangra . . . because, such are so cloathed, non propter mollitiem, sed propter professonem, not for the cockering and cherishing of their bodie, but for the credit and countenance of their place and dignitie . . . 158 John Williams, A Sermon of Apparell Preached before the Kings Majestie and the Prince his Highnesse at Theobalds, the 22. of February, 1619 (London: Robert Baker and John Bill, 1620). This sermon was published in 1620, so it is conceivable that Herbert was familiar with it, as he certainly was with the homily “Against Excess of Apparel.” 159 Williams, 25. 160 Ibid., 26. 161 Ibid., 28. 109 And therefore, let no man of place, make scruple of his cloathing, how ever in others it may prove offensive.162 This is clearly a rebuke to puritans’ insistence on plainness and their critique of the pomp and circumstance of the court; however Williams himself was a staunch Calvinist, and Laud’s archenemy.163 Women, as seems to have been mandatory in sermons on apparel since the earliest days of Christian preaching, are censured by Williams for arriving to divine service dressed in a way that attracts attention to their persons and distracts men from the contemplation of heavenly things. But as men’s extravagant dress leaves them open to charges of being effeminate, in Williams’s sermon, as in the homily “Against Excess of Apparel,” women’s extravagant dress makes them somehow more masculine. For a woman therefore to come unto a Church, Chimaera-like, halfe male, and halfe female; or as the priests of the Indian Venus, halfe black, halfe white, as it were, And there (it is S. Chrysostoms observation) first to professe repentance and remorse for sin.164 But the Chimera-woman repents “by holding vp vnto God a paire of painted hands,” lifting up “plaister’d eies” and a “polled head.” She humbles herself in satin instead of sackcloth, and pearls instead of ashes. She asks God to be gracious “with a face and a countenance he neuer saw before, composed for smiling more then for sorrowing, and 162 Ibid., 28–29. 163 He was also a notorious high-liver and also approved of and even participated in lavish church decoration. As one who held high office, having served as Keeper of the Great Seal and later Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York, he could number himself among the company entitled to “soft raiments.” See Chapter 3, “Liturgy at Little Gidding.” 164 Williams, 20–21. 110 purl’d with vnions instead of teares.”165 To come to church in this manner is “To come thus a begging (saith Theophilact) as if she came a marrying, and to enter Gods house, as if it were a Play-house.”166 This image of the chimera symbolizes the great threat of excess of apparel to those in authority, and why it is not just, in Williams’s words, “a vanitie onely, to be thus derided, but a sinne (in the highest degree) to bee lamented and deplored.”167 Excess of apparel (which includes conspicuous restraint of apparel for high-status persons) represents confusion of the social order and a kind of “identity theft”: the new middle class assuming the fashions of their betters, and in effect usurping their place. Chimeras are imaginary; made of composite parts that do not belong together; and monstrous. This is, in effect, how those whose attire does not precisely match their estate or vocation (both determined and fixed by God) are viewed: imaginary in the sense of assuming a false or deceitful identity; composite in the sense of combining what does not go together (luxurious clothing on a lower-status person); and monstrous in the sense of dangerous to the status quo. The sermons of the period are very clear: no poor dressed as rich or rich as poor; no men dressed as women or women as men; no English dressed as Spaniards or Italians or French; no ugly faces disguised as beautiful faces. Clothes must be allowed to do their work of clearly communicating the God-given order, status, gender, and nationality of his servants, from the least to the greatest. God’s house, as John Williams 165 Ibid., 21. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., 18. 111 declaims, must not be a “Play-house,” a theater, where men play women and English play Italians and everyone is disguised as someone they are not. However, this tirade against deceitfulness in apparel (which in many ways is more at issue than “excess”) is pointless, as deceit, concealment, invention, and novelty, are in the very nature (or “fabric”) of clothing itself. As one of Herbert’s collected proverbs says, “Ever since we weare cloathes, we know not one another.”168 Confused Clothing In light of the severe and dogmatic homiletic condemnation of confused apparel, then, Herbert’s clothing imagery is significant. There is something chimera-like in many of the articles of clothing he describes, something confused, contradictory, counterintuitive, ruined, or simply strange. In these images, Herbert is depicting the conflicted nature of his own poetic style, the position of the Protestant artist, and the emotional experience of the Christian life. One series of images involves articles of clothing that are being used inappropriately or for the opposite of their intended purpose. “The Dawning,” an Easter poem addressed to the grieving soul, begins innocuously enough: Awake sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns; Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth; Unfold thy forehead gathere’d into frowns: Thy Saviour comes, and with him mirth:169 However, the final figure, as Joseph Summers notes, “has been considered one of the 168 Hutchinson, 326, line 168. 169 Hutchinson, 112. 112 most tasteless examples of the ‘metaphysical conceit.’”170 Arise, arise; And with his burial-linen drie thine eyes: Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief Draws tears, or bloud, not want a handkerchief.171 Summers acknowledges that to modern readers, “‘handkerchief,’ as word and object, is essentially trivial and slightly ludicrous.”172 However, he also notes that handkerchiefs were the means of miraculous healing in Acts 19:11–12, and Christ’s grave clothes, as one of the first signs of his resurrection, renewed the disciples’ hope. The book of Revelation promises that after the Christians come out of the great Tribulation, “God shal wipe away all teares from their eyes” (Rev. 7:17). However, while Herbert’s first readers might have made these connections more readily than his modern ones, he is still exploiting the expectation that burial-linen is used to wrap corpses and not to wipe eyes; it is an article which signifies mourning and not comfort. Herbert is interested in how Christ tangibly remains with the believer even after his resurrection and ascension: the continuity here, of the burial-linen as still available even now, is reminiscent of Jesus in “The Bag,” saying of his wounded side, which has been converted into a sort of letterbox for believers’ prayers, “the doore / Shall still be open.”173 A counter-image to “The Dawning” is found in “Mortification,” which begins, How soon doth man decay! 170 Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art, 114. 171 Hutchinson, 112. 172 Summers, 114. 173 Hutchinson, 152. 113 When clothes are taken from a Chest of sweets To swaddle infants, whose young breath Scarce knows the way; Those clouts are little winding sheets, Which do consigne and send them unto death.174 This poem is an expansion on the phrase from the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer, “In the midst of life we are in death.”175 However, the idea of infants, “whose young breath / Scarce knows the way” wrapped in miniature shrouds is certainly a melancholy one, especially considering the mortality rate for babies and children in this period. This image of swaddling clothes as a shroud is common in Eastern Orthodox icons of the nativity, where the infant Jesus’ bands often resemble grave cloths, and the stable is depicted as a tomb-like cave. Whereas Christ’s burial-linen in “The Dawning” is meant to comfort the Christian and recall the joy of the resurrection, Herbert in “Mortification” ties each of the “ages of man” to death as a reminder of mortality. Even the joyful birth of a child wrapped in sweet-smelling cloth is not immune; as the child is figured as a wrapped in grave-clothes from a coffin-like chest, with a sweet scent not from cedar, but tomb-spices. The sartorial tug-of-war between sorrow and joy continues in “Death.” Death was previously . . . an uncouth hideous thing, Nothing but bones, The sad effect of sadder grones: 174 Ibid., 98. 175 John Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer, 309. 114 Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.176 Since the Incarnation and the Passion, however, the grim reaper has gotten a makeover: “our Saviours death did put some bloud / Into thy face.” For we do now behold thee gay and glad, As at dooms-day; When souls shall wear their new array, And all thy bones in beautie shall be clad.177 In “Mortification,” a beautiful newborn wore Death’s clothing; but now it is Death himself who has a “new array” and is beautifully clad. Death has been reanimated; the resurrection extends even to him, and he joins the joyful procession of souls in their heavenly garments. Herbert employs the biblical parallels of the earthly robe of flesh and the heavenly robe of glory in “Sunday”: The brightnesse of that day We sullied by our foul offence: Wherefore that robe we cast away, Having a new at his expence, Whose drops of bloud paid the full price, That was requir’d to make us gay, And fit for Paradise.178 Herbert combines multiple biblical passages in this stanza: the old man and the new man (2 Corinthians 5:17; Romans 6:6); the robes washed in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7:14); the suffering servant (Isaiah 53); and the parable of the wedding feast, where no guests are allowed to enter without a wedding garment (Matthew 22:1–14). This new 176 Hutchinson, 185. 177 Ibid., 186. 178 Ibid., 76. 115 unsullied robe is beautiful, but it was paid for with drops of blood instead of coins. In “Marie Magdalene,” which references Luke 7:37–50, Herbert juxtaposes the stained/cleansed motif with one of humility and exaltation.179 When blessed Marie wip’d her Saviours feet, (Whose blessed precepts she had trampled on before) And wore them for a jewell on her head, Shewing his steps should be the street, Wherein she thenceforth evermore With pensive humblenesse would live and tread: She being stain’d her self, why did she strive To make him clean, who could not be defil’d?180 Herbert answers his question in the third stanza: Mary washes Jesus, and not her sinful self, because she knows that he has deigned “to bear her filth”; by washing him, she is washing both him and herself. However, the poem begins with the odd meditation on Jesus’ feet: Mary (because she is drying them with her hair), wears them as “a jewell on her head.” Whereas previously she had “trampled” on his precepts, now her action shows that “his steps should be the street” she humbly walks. Mary is wearing her discipleship like a crown or a tiara, and has therefore become a model for all other Christians. Where Mary readily embraces Jesus’ feet and “wears” them, the poet in “The Priesthood” would “Fain put thee [God] on [in ordination], exchanging my lay-sword/ For that of th’ holy Word.” But thou art fire, sacred and hallow’d fire; And I but earth and clay: should I presume 179 Mary Magdalene was often conflated with the unnamed penitent prostitute who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. 180 Ibid., 173. 116 To wear thy habit, the severe attire My slender compositions might consume.181 Wilcox cites as a source for this poem Psalm 104:4, “He maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire.”182 I think there may also be a reference here to the blue ephod with bells on the hem that Aaron is instructed to wear in Exodus 28, when he ministers in the Holy Place in the Temple: And it shall be upon Aaron to minister: and his sound shall be heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD, and when he cometh out, that he die not.”183 This verse gives the ominous sense that the priest could be “consumed” by the presence of the Lord while serving him. However, despite his fear of consumption, at the end of the poem he is in the same position as the Magdalene: Onely, since God doth often vessels make Of lowly matter for high uses meet, I throw me at his feet.184 Consenting to wear the habit of fire allows the transformation of useless earth to useful and beautiful vessel, following the many biblical images of God as potter and human beings as clay (Isaiah 64:8; Jeremiah 18:6; Romans 9:21–23). He is not worthy, but he allows himself to be made worthy. To wear the habit of flame is an act of exalting humility, not unlike Mary “wearing” Christ’s feet as a jewel or crown of her discipleship.185 181 Ibid., 160. 182 Wilcox, 553 n. 7. 183 Exodus 28:35. The Holy Place was distinct from the Holy of Holies, and separated from it by thick curtains. 184 Hutchinson, 161. 185 See T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” IV: 117 These “confused” or misused articles of clothing, then, are meant to demonstrate the extremes of the Christian life, how the soul vacillates from one to the other (what Herbert often calls “tempering,”) and also how embracing the Christian faith means holding opposite emotions simultaneously, because although Christians are redeemed, they have not yet received their heavenly reward.186 This is why the burial-linen can be a handkerchief, offering the comfort of the resurrection in the midst of grief, and conversely why the baby’s swaddling bands are its winding sheet, since on earth, “In the midst of life we are in death.” However, all earthly robes will be discarded for the dearlybought heavenly robes at the Day of Judgment. Next to joy and grief, exaltation and humiliation are interwoven throughout Herbert’s clothes. All references to the Passion and Resurrection contain this implicitly, but other times this is made explicit, as in “Marie Magdalene” and “The Priesthood.” Ruined Finery In the next series of images of apparel in The Temple, the articles of clothing have Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire.” Though the “shirt of flame” is widely identified as referring to the infamous Robe of Nessus that killed Hercules, I can’t help but think it has some of Herbert’s “severe attire” in it. 186 See “The Temper (I),” Hutchinson, 55: Stretch or contract me, thy poore debter: This is but tuning of my breast, To make the musick better.” 118 not been misused (in the sense of used for an unintended purpose), as much as they have been abused: torn, soiled, or bloodied. The craft of the workmanship has been allowed to stand though the garment is ruined, creating a powerful contrast. There are two primary biblical images of ruined finery: Joseph’s coat of many colors (Genesis 37); and Jesus’ seamless tunic, “woven from the top,” for which the soldiers cast lots at the foot of the Cross in order to avoid tearing it (John 19:23). Herbert makes use of both of these. Only the title of the poem “Joseph’s coat” directly references the coat of many colors, which was given by the patriarch Jacob to his son Joseph as a sign of his love, and ruined by Joseph’s jealous brothers as part of their plot to sell him into slavery. Joseph’s story, which eventually leads to the salvation of Israel, became a type for Christ’s suffering.187 As F.E. Hutchinson summarizes, the sonnet presents life as the coat of many colors, variegated by different kinds of joy and pain. Relief comes for the poet in his ability to make music out of his checkered experiences, for if even one grief were to absorb him, both his body and his heart would fall victim to it.188 Wounded I sing, tormented I indite, Thrown down I fall into a bed, and rest: Sorrow hath chang’d its note: such is his will, Who changeth all things, as him pleaseth best.189 The poem shares with “The Flower” amazement at the abruptness of the shift from sorrow to joy (“It cannot be / That I am he / On whom thy Tempests fell all night.”190 187 Joseph Summers, “From ‘Josephs’ coat’ to ‘A true Hymne,’ George Herbert Journal 1:2 (Fall 1978), 1. 188 Hutchison, 533. 189 Ibid., 159. 190 Ibid., 166. 119 Because God knows that “if but one grief and smart / Among my many had its full career,” the poet would fall body and soul into despair and even death, he has . . . giv’n to anguish One of Joyes coats, ticing it with relief To linger in me, and together languish. I live to shew his power, who once did bring My joyes to weep, and now my griefs to sing.191 Mary Ellen Rickey makes a convincing case that Herbert in these last lines is quoting the Fool in King Lear, who, while replying to Lear’s question of how anyone can be tuneful in the throes of misfortune, breaks into a song which includes the lines, Then they for sudden joy did weep. And I for sorrow sung . . . (II.166–177) Rickey concludes that “Josephs coat,” then, denotes not only the parti-colored nature of life, and the Old Testament type of Christ’s body torn to give joy, but also the motley of the fool enabled, through imitation of Christ, to change from weeping in joy to singing in grief. It denotes, even more specifically, the mark of those who are fools for Christ’s sake, the apostles which St. Paul describes as capable of glorifying all adversity [in 1 Cor. 4:10-13a].192 Josephs’ coat, then, presents a double image of joy and sorrow, through its motley pattern (the alternating colors of which designate opposite emotions), but also through its beautiful workmanship marred by blood and grime, the luxurious gift that becomes an accessory to betrayal. The multicolored coat that is at once ruined and beautiful expresses the simultaneity of extreme states in the Christian life, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:10, “As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” But this sonnet is also about the “relief” of poetry: 191 192 Ibid., 159. Mary Ellen Rickey, “Herbert’s Fool for Christ’s Sake: A Note on ‘Joseph’s coat,’” George Herbert Journal 1 (Fall 1979), 58. 120 the ability to “sing” and compose verses in the midst of sorrow. Herbert says in “The Quidditie” that poetry is “that which while I use/ I am with thee.” This “use” brings Herbert back to God from the brink of despair; even singing of grief is still singing. For this reason, it is not outside the realm of possibility to see the title image of Joseph’s coat as an image of poetry or poetic craft, and especially devotional poetry, the exquisitelymade garment that is stained by sin and sorrow but still testifies to Christ’s redemption. Joseph’s coat shares with Christ’s tunic the betrayal, and ultimate exaltation, of their wearers. The tunic is mentioned by the figure of Jesus in his long monologue on the Passion, “The Sacrifice”: They part my garments, and by lot dispose My coat, the type of love, which once cur’d those Who sought for help; never malicious foes: Was ever grief [like mine].193 This coat, spared by the Roman soldiers, is rent by the Church’s own divines in “Divinitie,” a poem that laments the subtle arguments and lack of plain style in theological discourse. Could not that Wisdome, which first broacht the wine, Have thicken’d it with definitions? And jagg’d his seamlesse coat, had that been fine, With curious questions and divisions? But all the doctrine, which he taught and gave, Was clear as heav’n, from whence it came. At least those beams of truth, which onely save, Surpasse in brightnesse any flame.194 193 Hutchinson, 34. 194 Ibid., 134. 121 If the wine of salvation had needed “thickening” via theological definitions and explications, in other words, holy Wisdom itself would have accomplished this. Likewise, if Christ’s seamless coat, the “type of love,” had needed ornamentation (to make clothing “jagged” was to add ornament with slashing or pinking, OED 2), it would have had this at the beginning; there is no need for “curious (overly subtle or intricate) questions and divisions.” This “jagging,” meant to be decorative, functions instead as a schismatic tearing, as in Herbert’s title “Church-rents and Schisms.” By elaborating or embroidering the gospel message (which was already perfect and complete in itself), the divines have turned simplicitas into duplicitas, and have caused confusion, division, and arguments which have rent the Church. “The Forerunners,” like “Divinitie,” centers around the use of language, and it and the two “Jordan” poems are often considered the most important for understanding Herbert’s style. In “The Forerunners” the debate is over poetic rather than theological language, and the attitude towards ornamentation is quite different from “Jordan (I and II).” The poem begins with the poet noticing the “harbingers” of old age and death, who have left their white “mark” on his head, the way that the harbingers of royal visitors chalk the doors of houses that have been selected to entertain the arriving party. Fearing the loss of his poetic powers, he asks, . . . must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred? Must dulnesse turn me to a clod? Yet have they left me, thou art still my God.195 195 Ibid., 176. 122 Though the harbingers have claimed his head, or wit, they have left him his heart, his “best room,” and “what is lodged there,” namely, Christ. If all he has left is his simple refrain from the Psalms, He will be pleased with that dittie; And if I please him, I write fine and wittie. However, imagining his future “dulnesse,” the poem turns valedictory: Farewell sweet phrases, lovely metaphors. But will ye leave me thus? when ye before Of stews and brothels onely knew the doores, Then did I wash you with my tears, and more, Brought you to Church well drest and clad: My God must have by best, ev’n all I had. Herbert, who asked as a young man in one of the two sonnets sent to his mother, “Doth Poetry/ Wear Venus livery? only serve her turn?” now reflects back on his commitment to religious verse, how he “dressed” poetry for Church.196 Whereas in the “Jordan” poems ornament is suspect and frequently obscures the plain meaning, here Herbert laments the loss of his “sweet phrases, lovely metaphors.” He echoes the Lord speaking to Jerusalem in the book of Ezekiel: I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with badgers' skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered thee with silk . . . Thus wast thou decked with gold and silver; and thy raiment was of fine linen, and silk, and broidered work; thou didst eat fine flour, and honey, and oil: and thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou didst prosper into a kingdom. And thy renown went forth among the heathen for thy beauty: for it was perfect through my comeliness, which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord God.197 Herbert has rescued and rehabilitated Poetry, transferring her from the “stews and 196 197 Ibid., 206. Ezekiel 16:10, 13–14. 123 brothels” of secular verse (thereby making her faithful, with the double meaning of not promiscuous and also spiritually-oriented), decking her in Sunday best, and bringing it to Church. “The Forerunners” is clearly of the “utmost art” poetic mode, as “My God must have my best, ev’n all I had.” Still, he imagines that after his powers fail, Poetry will return to the old neighborhood: Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, Hony of roses, whither wilt thou flie? Hath some fond lover tic’d thee to thy bane? And wilt thou leave the Church, and love a stie? Fie, thou wilt soil thy broider’d coat, And hurt thyself, and him that sings the note. Poetry, like the Prodigal Son, will leave the Father’s house and “love a [pig]stie,” ruining the gorgeous outfit in which she has been attired. Unlike in “Divinitie,” where the seamless coat would have been better off left alone, here the embroidery is a sign of favor, and of spiritual truth. In the next stanza, Herbert sounds a bit like the Tudor homilist or John Williams, as he decries deception in language in terms of apparel: Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung, With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame: Let follie speak in her own native tongue.198 If Poetry insists on mucking about in the pigsty of secular lyrics on unwholesome topics, it should give up its pretensions of beauty, to which it is not entitled. Secular love poetry, Herbert argues, has no right to “arras,” sumptuous tapestry; to be decked out in this kind of language amounts to a kind of “status forgery.” True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame But borrow’d thence to light us thither. 198 Hutchinson, 177. 124 Beauty and beauteous words should go together.199 The beauty of secular lyrics is second-class, since “True beauty dwells on high.” Herbert is, in effect, enacting a kind of “garment of style” sumptuary law: “Beauty and beauteous words should go together,” like with like. Arras is reserved for holy beauty; anything less should be content with canvas, and to “speak in her own native tongue,” without appropriating, for example, the language of religion to praise a mistress. Similarly, the Ferrars (no lovers of romance literature) object in their dialogue “On the Austere Life” to the love poet’s appropriation of divine imagery, though, as usual, there is debate in the community. The Guardian (John Ferrar) agrees with the others that chivalrous poetry is deleterious, because it incites Christians to revenge, but he argues that “Amourous” poetry is harmless and has some redeeming virtues, such as acting as an enlivening agent on the intelligence. There is nothing that so much quickens the witt as Loue doth. Why Experience shows, that a little of this Ingredient sublimates the dullest Capacitie to such a height of Finenes & quicknes as no Art nor Studie can reach vnto; how much more then when it comes vpon a Rich foundation of Natural Abilities perfected by Learning & Art shall it not eleuate the vnderstanding, Affections & conceits to the loftiest pitch, that humane Nature can sore vnto.200 The Guardian quotes Sidney elsewhere in the dialogues; perhaps he is one of the poets he 199 200 Ibid. A. M. Williams, Conversations at Little Gidding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 208. On the Little Gidding dialogues and Story Books, see Chapter 5, “Storying at Little Gidding.” 125 had in mind.201 However, the Mother (John’s niece, Mary Collett) objects that not only do love poets celebrate and proclaim their lusts, which Christians ought to repent of, But this is nothing in regard of that transcendent bolnes, which thy vse with God, investing their Mistresses with those diuine Attributes, which wee tremblingly lift vp our eies to look vpon. As for their souls, because they be their own, they think they may dispose of them as they please. But truly they prize them not as Christian men ought to doe, when they offer them vp in Vassalage to filth & Rottenness; For no better is the Beauty & the Pleasures they professedly adore, & aime at in & by their Compositions.202 The Ferrars would agree with Herbert’s metaphor of canvas and arras; one of the many reasons they valued The Temple so highly. Herbert throughout “The Forerunners” is defining his own poetics against the dominant “prodigal” poetic of love poetry. “The Forerunners” is structurally complex. It begins with the meditation on encroaching old age and dimming of the intellectual powers, the fuel of wit that makes the poet’s “sparkling notions” possible. After he bids farewell to the sweetness of language, the poem could have continued on in a very different mode. However, his inability to let language go (“But will ye leave me thus?” With everything I’ve done for you?) takes the poem in a very different direction, one that combines the prophet’s metaphor of Israel as a faithless prostitute-turned-wife and Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son (in both cases, the poet stands in for God). This in turn leads to a stern condemnation of secular poetry as inferior to religious verse, a far cry from “I envie no man’s nightingale or spring,/ Nor let him punish me with losse of rhyme, who 201 Sidney celebrated energia, the quickening agent of poetic languge. See Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, edited by Forrest G. Robbinson, (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 81. However, John’s mention of Sidney is his death-bed recantation of his secular verse. 202 Williams, 208–209. Mary, unlike her twice-married uncle, was committed to life-long celibacy. 126 plainly say, My God, My King.” in “Jordan (I).” “Let follie speak with her own native tongue” is, in effect, punishing with loss of rhyme verse whose subjects are not “truly” beautiful, because their beauty is earthly and not heavenly. After this long detour, Herbert returns to his initial meditation, the potential loss of his poetic gift due to the approaching “dulnesse” of age. Yet if you go, I passe not; take your way: For, Thou art still my God, is all that ye Perhaps with more embellishment can say. Go birds of spring: let winter have his fee; Let a bleak palenesse chalk the doore, So all within be livelier then before.203 As Louis Martz notes about the “Perhaps,” “What a world of reservation lies in that one word, so emphatically placed.”204 Herbert began the poem with anxiety about old age, but with confidence in his own verse and in the truth and beauty of religious poetry itself. He ends by tentatively reducing his whole poetic project to “embellishment” on a simple refrain from the Psalms. The last two lines embrace the coming “winter” of old age, but act as a recommitment to wit and a summoning of the powers that remain: the “door” of his intellect may be chalked and the poet graying, but this sense of impending loss will make “all within be livelier then before”: what is “within” in the poem is Herbert’s mind and heart. What “The Forerunners” has in common with the two “Jordan” poems is the sense of poetry, in its various “garment of style” get-ups, getting away from Herbert, 203 204 Hutchinson, 177. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 314. See also Fish 1972, 222. 127 moving beyond his full control. “Fictions and false hair” obscure it, his own attempts to “clothe the sun” are an exercise in futility, and prodigal Poetry leaves him to soil her “broider’d coat” after all his holy ministrations. The desire for plain style, for truth in beauty, is a desire for simplicitas, for clarity instead of changeability, and for full artistic control. The image of the beautifully embroidered coat soiled represents the impossibility of this desire in this life. As the figure of Jesus says in “The Sacrifice,” all “mans scepters are as frail as reeds,/ And thorny all their crowns, bloudie their weeds.”205 Jesus in the poem says that the soldiers’ mocking of him represents the reality of the human situation: “I, who am Truth, turn into truth their deeds.” Because of sin and the fallen state of the world, even the highest signifiers of authority are compromised; even the finest human “weeds” are bloody. The repeated image of ruined finery in The Temple in one sense represents the human poetic offering, compromised by sin. In another sense, however, the blood is Christ’s: one of Herbert’s favorite sayings, as recorded by Nicholas Ferrar, was, “It is a good work, if it be sprinkled with the bloud of Christ.”206 Herbert’s poetic works are all sprinkled with this blood, all attempts to imitate “Thy fair, though bloodie, hand” (“The Thanksgiving”); by this reading, the blood or filth or tearing that has appeared to have ruined the various garments have in fact improved them, since these stains and signs of damage are representative of Christ’s suffering and therefore also of the promise of redemption. Finally, the ruined garments can be said to represent Herbert’s predicament as a Protestant artist: an offering of the best and utmost that is also a sign of the poet’s 205 Hutchinson, 32. 206 Quoted by Nicholas Ferrar in “The Printers to the Reader,” Hutchinson, 4. 128 recognition of the need for humility in artistic endeavors, and of the impossibility of perfection in this life; the “garment of style” equivalent of the “crooked winding wreath” he offers instead of a laurel crown in “The Wreath.” “The British Church” and “Aaron” By now it should be plain that clothing in The Temple is a complicated business, relating to conflicted poetic style, variegated emotional pitch, and an unattainable desire for a kind of ultimate truth and simplicity in art and life. With this in mind, we will conclude with Herbert’s two best-known poems about clothing and dressing, “The British Church” and “Aaron.” In “The British Church,” Herbert compares his “Mother” church to the churches of Rome and Geneva, each allegorized as female figures. He describes the British Church’s “perfect lineaments and hue/ Both sweet and bright,” and states that A fine aspect in fit aray, Neither too mean, nor yet too gay, Shows who is best. Outlandish looks may not compare: For all they either painted are, Or else undressed.207 This description of proper apparel echoes Donne’s words from his memorial sermon for Herbert’s mother, Magdalen Danvers, that her attire was “never sumptuous, never sordid.” It also echoes guidelines for dress from the homily “Against Excess of Apparel” and John Williams’ sermon before the king that clothing should not be so revealing as to incite lust, or extravagant beyond one’s station, but that neither should it exhibit a false humility. Then Herbert applies this formula to the three churches, beginning with Rome: 207 Hutchinson, 109. 129 She on the hills, which wantonly Allureth all in hope to be By her preferr’d, Hath kissed so long her painted shrines, That ev’n her face by kissing shines, For her reward.208 The Roman Church, depicted as a prostitute (or the Whore of Babylon), instead of a “Mother,” uses a strange kind of cosmetics: she has kissed her “painted shrines” (religious images and objects, taboo in Protestant England) so often that their color has rubbed off onto her face. This showy devotion has earned her the same critique that Jesus gave to the Pharisees who prayed loudly and in public: “Verily I say unto you, they have their reward” (Matthew 6:5). The “painted shrines” have become a kind of golden calf, leading to idolatry, a primary Protestant objection to Roman Catholic devotional practices in this period.209 However, the Church of Geneva errs and causes scandal on the other extreme: She in the valley is so shie Of dressing, that her hair doth lie About her ears: While she avoids her neighbours pride, She wholly goes on th’ other side, And nothing wears.210 The puritans’ false humility leads them to denude themselves and their worship, of religious imagery of all kinds, instrumental (especially organ) music, stained glass, incense, and richly decorated church interiors. Herbert was writing during a lull between 208 Ibid., 110. 209 See Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, and John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 210 Hutchinson, 110. 130 two major periods of English iconoclasm, the English Reformation and the Civil War. The memory of the destruction of the first was in many cases still visible; as tensions built throughout the 1620s and into the 1630s, moderates like Herbert may have feared another wave of violence against images and church furniture. In addition to church decoration, puritans had their own personal aesthetic of plainness; John Williams anticipated the puritan reaction to his sermon when he spoke against the “saucie tongues” who would deny those in authority the right to sumptuous clothing. Herbert in his description of “She in the valley” seems to be echoing criticisms of puritans by ceremonialists and others that their plainness was wholly reactionary. King James I remarked on one occasion that he was surprised that Puritans didn’t go barefoot, since Catholics wore shoes and stockings.211 The puritan emphasis on plainness for everyone in all things was ultimately a challenge to the authority of the monarchy: if the King himself did not have the right to dress “in soft raiments,” what else did he not have the right to do or to proclaim? Herbert alludes to the danger of their position in his Latin poem Musae Responsoriae. Just as Caesar determined that the island of Britain would be easily conquered because of the primitive nakedness of its natives, And so the Puritans, While they are covetous of a Lord’s bride bare of sacred rites, And while they wish All things regressed To their fathers’ barbaric state, Lay her, entirely Ignorant of clothing, bare to conquest 211 David Harris Willson, King James VI & I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 200. 131 By Satan and her enemies.212 “Nakedness” makes the British Church vulnerable to attack and division. William Laud used a version of this conceit to defend the retention of some religious ceremonies in the Church of England: Too many [religious ceremonies] overburden the church of God, and too few leave it naked. And scarce anything hath hurt religion more in these broken times, than an opinion in too many men that because Rome had thrust some unnecessary and many superstitious ceremonies upon the Church, therefore the Reformation must have none at all, not considering therewhile, that ceremonies are the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities that profanenesse and sacrilege too commonly put upon it.213 By contrast, the British Church is the example of the via media, like Magdalen Danvers, whose “Rule, was mediocrity.”214 But, dearest Mother, what those misse, The mean, thy praise and glorie is, And long may be. Blessed be God, whose love it was To double moat thee with his grace, And none but thee.215 Herbert offers a similar council on church decoration in Chapter XIII of The Country Parson, “The Parson’s Church.” He advises that “all things be in good repair,” with plastered walls, glazed windows, a paved floor, good seating, proper placement of the pulpit, desk, communion table, and font. The church should be kept clean, and “at great 212 Musae Responsoriae xxv; Translation in McCloskey and Murphy, 39. 213 William Laud, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God William Laud, D.D., Volume 2: Conference with Fisher (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1849), xvi. 214 215 Donne, Sermons viii, 90. Hutchinson, 110. Wilcox suggests that the “double moat” refers to God’s grace alongside the water of the seas around Britain, which protect it from foreign influences. Wilcox, 394 n.29. 132 festivals strawed, and stuck with boughs, and perfumed with incense.” Texts of scripture should be painted on the walls, and “all the books appointed by Authority be there” in clean and undamaged copies. And all this he doth, not as out of necessity, or as putting a holiness in in the things, but as desiring to keep the middle way between superstition, and slovenlinesse.216 Herbert’s manner of church decoration is indeed a middle way in the period, as he advocates for both “strawing” the church and incense, and painted texts on the walls.217 He feels it is important also to instruct the manner in which these things be done: “not out of necessity, or as putting a holiness in the things.” Interior conformity, and not just outward, is important. The via media is the mean that brings peace; it is “mediocrity.” And perhaps that is why, ultimately, “The British Church” does not fully succeed. Helen Vendler is unrestrained in her extreme dislike of it: [Herbert’s] affection for the British Church, as the entire Temple shows, was deep, confident, and exclusive. What then could have played him so false in this poem? This poem, in its description of the two rejected damsels, is both simplistic and grotesque—and not with an imitative grotesquerie, but with simple ineptness.218 The English church historian Horton Davies also views “The British Church” with disapproval: “George Herbert, the poetical rector of Bemerton, celebrated the Church of England as the happy medium between the splendour of Roman Catholicism and the 216 Hutchinson, 246. 217 For the custom of strawing, see the second part of “Easter”: “I got me flowers to straw thy way;/ I got me boughs off many a tree . . .” Those scholars who advocate for a stricter Calvinist interpretation of Herbert must reckon with his affirmation of strawing and the use of incense. 218 Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 65. 133 squalor of Puritanism, and succeeded in being unfair to all three traditions.”219 Critics read it to try to determine Herbert’s theological leanings and his views of church decoration.220 As a poem, however, it is unsatisfying. Perhaps this is because stock allegorical figures are not Herbert’s forte (his other explicitly allegorical lyric, the beast fable “Humilitie,” is not a success) and his chosen conceit, a combination of ecclesiastical beauty pageant with Goldilocks and the Three Bears, is awkward; the end result is smug. However, the main difficulty with “The British Church” is that the portrait that it paints isn’t true. As Achsah Guibbory notes, The Temple “expresses not a harmonious, peaceful middle way, but rather the deeply conflicted via media . . . that would not fully survive either the Revolution or the Restoration settlement.”221 The English Church in this period was not a golden mean, but a ticking time bomb, vexed by contradictory forces that would shortly prove irreconcilable, leading to open war.222 The image presented of the British Church as “A fine aspect in fit aray” is especially notable in light of Herbert’s many images of confused, conflicted and ruined clothing elsewhere in The Temple. The British Church in Herbert’s historical moment was being “crushed by contraries,” as he says of himself in “The Crosse,” but instead he depicts it as “neither too mean, nor yet too gay,” a happy medium—on the verge of implosion. 219 Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England. Volume II: From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 16031690 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3. 220 See Wilcox, 390 for a summary of modern criticism on the poem. 221 Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 45. 222 “The British Church” is from W, the later of the two manuscripts of The Temple, and was therefore not an early poem of Herbert’s, though it cannot be dated precisely. 134 Herbert is unable, it seems, to write about clothing without contrast: he uses articles of clothing to contrast joy and sorrow, life and death, simplicity and complexity of style, pride and humility, exaltation and humiliation, truth and falsity.223 “The British Church” is not fully successful in part because of the “mediocrity” of its central figure. Conversely, the quiet power of “Aaron” stems from Herbert’s effective and moving use of contrast, coupled with his masterful plain style. Though Herbert in the “Jordan” poems and “The Forerunners” may use a serpentine syntax to discuss plain language, in “Aaron,” as in “Love (III),” “the thought unto the line accords,” and the result is a remarkable simplicity, the closest to true simplicitas Herbert achieves this side of the veil. “Aaron” is a vesting prayer without any vestments. No specific articles of sacerdotal attire are mentioned by name, though Aaron’s garments in Exodus 28:2–38 are alluded to (and form the central figure of the whole poem); but only the bells on the hem of his robe are specifically named. The reasons for this, I believe, are twofold: the first has to do with Mary Ellen Rickey’s observation that Herbert shies away from classical or technical terminology, unless these words have multiple meanings (and can therefore be exploited as puns).224 The second is that vestments were a point of controversy in Herbert’s era, the age of “surplice riots” and the “vestarian controversy.” Words like ephod, surplice, and tippet were everything Herbert avoided in vocabulary: foreign, overly learned, hyper-specific, and controversial. Herbert does not even mention a robe, 223 There are, of course, passing references to clothing that I do not mention here, such as the rainbow as the lace of Peace’s coat in “Peace”; however, nearly every kind of extended metaphor of clothing is used to present some contrast as described above. 224 Rickey, 55–56, 163. 135 as he has in other contexts; though surplices were canonically required in this period, the “priest” in the poem could be of any persuasion. Or could he? The word “priest” was one of the many things puritans found inadequately reformed and therefore objectionable about the Church of England. “Minister” or “divine” were widely used in this period and the title of address for a clergyman was “Mr.” Herbert himself uses the homely term “Parson” in his courtesy book for clergy (etymologically derived from the idea of “God’s person”); the published title, A Priest to the Temple, is not thought to be Herbert’s intended one.225 That Aaron is an Old Testament priest, in fact, the first priest and therefore a type of Christ (“our great high priest” in Hebrews 4:14) and forerunner of all priests, removes the distinction from contemporary debate. “Aaron” has not, to my knowledge, previously been discussed in light of English sumptuary laws and the religious condemnation of excess of apparel, but it shares many of the same concerns of the homiletic treatment of this topic as described above. The poem turns on the issue of “status forgery.” In “The Priesthood,” the potential ordinand is hesitant to put on the Lord’s “severe attire” lest his “slender compositions” be consumed, but he talks himself into it by reasoning that “God doth often vessels make/ Of lowly matter for high uses meet,” using the metaphor of God as a potter and human beings as clay to be molded and fired.226 “Aaron” takes place after Herbert’s priestly ordination, when he must confront that fact that many of his imperfections seem not to have been 225 On possible reasons for the delayed publication of The Country Parson (1652), see Elizabeth Clarke, “The Character of a Non-Laudian Country Parson” (Review of English Studies; Sept. 2003, Vol. 54 Issue 216), 479-496. 226 Hutchinson, 160. 136 blasted away by God’s consuming fire after all. As in “Love (III),” the poet’s sense of unworthiness is profound, and profoundly moving. Holinesse on the head, Light and perfections on the breast, Harmonious bells below, raising the dead To leade them unto life and rest: Thus are true Aarons drest. Profanenesse in my head, Defects and darknesse in my breast, A noise of passions ringing me for dead Unto a place where is no rest: Poore priest thus am I drest.227 Herbert gives a powerful and evocative picture of Aaron even without mentioning his mitre with “Holiness to the Lord” inscribed on it, or his breastplate with the Urim and Thummim and stones of the twelve tribes of Israel, or his blue ephod with embroidered pomegranates and bells on the hem; all these have become spiritualized. However, in one sense Herbert didn’t need to describe Aaron, because the Geneva Bible contained a woodcut of him in his garments, which was in fact the only woodcut of a human figure in it.228 Next to this glorious figure, the poet feels his unworthiness very keenly; he has committed “status forgery.” “Thus are true Aarons drest,” he says at the conclusion of his description of the holiness, light, perfection, harmony and resurrection power of this exemplar. By comparison, he is such a “poore priest,” that he is no priest at all. But Herbert finds a solution to his dilemma, which could have quickly led to despair: he grows another head; or rather, he remembers that he has a second one. 227 Hutchinson, 174. 228 Wilcox, 602 n.1. 137 Onely another head I have, another heart and breast, Another musick, making live not dead, Without whom I could have no rest: In him I am well drest. He has this head not by virtue of his priesthood, but by virtue of his baptism: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). “Christ is the head of the Church: and he is the savior of the body” (Ephesians 5:23). Despite the “noise of passions” that still plague him, there is “another musick,” that is life-giving and restful, available to him. However in the next stanza Herbert corrects himself: Christ is not a kind of holy doppelganger, but the one true authority: Christ is my onely head, My alone onely heart and breast, My onely musick, striking me ev’n dead; That to the old man I may rest, And be in him new drest. Having put on Christ, the “old man” is dead. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). “My alone onely heart and breast” (my emphasis) now overwrites the “another” of the previous stanza. By “putting on Christ” in baptism and dying to the old self, the poet is regenerated. He is “new drest,” and this elevation means that he is able to wear his priestly garments not as a fraud or a usurper, but as one who has received a new title. It is important, however, that this regeneration is common to all Christians, and has nothing to do with Herbert’s ordination; this is the theology of the “priesthood of all believers” (2 Peter 2:9) emphasized by Luther. So holy in my head, Perfect and light in my deare breast, 138 My doctrine tun’d by Christ, (who is not dead, But lives in me while I do rest) Come people; Aaron’s drest. At the end of “Aaron,” the fears from the beginning of “The Priesthood” have been both realized and put aside. The poet has in fact been “consumed,” not by his ordination, but by the presence of Christ within him; but this has led to rebirth rather than perishing. Christ has authenticated his identity as a priest, and now his status and his signifying garments are aligned; he has become “Aaron.” He is able to lead his people “unto life” by calling them to worship, and to the communion table; he is able to accomplish the work he has been set apart to do. Finally for Herbert, “the soul unto the line” accords, the suit fits, and contraries meet in one in the putting on of Christ, in whom the poet is “well drest.” 139 CHAPTER 3: LITURGY AT LITTLE GIDDING: “THE WORD CONTINUALLY” In 1641 in London an anonymous pamphlet appeared, titled The Arminian Nunnery: or, A Briefe Description and Relation of the late erected Monasticall Place, called the Arminian Nunnery at little Gidding in Huntington-Shire. Its title page bears a crude woodcut of a nun in habit and veil fingering a rosary next to a small church. The pamphlet describes an unnamed visitor’s tour of a private house set up as a secret convent by “a Company of Ferrars.” Though this family claims to be faithful to the Church of England, the narrator condemns their decision “to have no particular Callings, or to quit their Callings and betake themselves to I wot not what new forme of Fasting and Prayer,” arguing that their “contemplative idle life” “complieth with the superstitious Nunneries in Popish places beyond the Seas.”1 The charge of a convent comes from the fact that several young unmarried women in the family (biological sisters) have decided to remain unmarried virgins. This and the family’s practices of night-watches, the decoration of the church next to their property with candles and rich tapestry, their bodily gestures such as bowing in worship, and their use of the monogram IHS on an inscription in their house, are cause for the writer’s livid indignation. The “fond and fantasticall Family of Farrars” have a copy of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, beloved of Protestants, in their church not because they read it, but “kept for a shew,” to draw attention away 1 The Arminian Nunnery; or, a briefe description and relation of the late erected monastical place called The Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, humbly recommended to the wise consideration of this parliament. The foundation is a company of Ferrars at Gidding (London: Thomas Underhill, 1641), 3, 4, hereafter cited as The Arminian Nunnery. 140 from their “lip-labour of trolling out the Letanie foure times a day” and their “promiscuous private Prayers all the night long.”2 Even their charity to the poor is suspect, as it is done “in a meritorious way.”3 The text wonders with mock irony why the Archbishop of Canterbury, “as he profeseth [to be] such an Anti-Papist and enemy to Superstition and Idolatry, should permit this Innovation.”4 The Archbishop in question, William Laud, had been imprisoned the year before following a trial during which he was accused of similar forms of religiosity; he would be executed in 1645, and his see would remain vacant until the Restoration in 1660. “This Fryer like Familie” is part of a dangerous Arminian faction, a “bridge to Popery” that has recently been undermined by Almighty God, who also set up “the high, and thick wall of the late Parlamentary nationall Protestation.”5 Copies of The Arminian Nunnery were distributed to members of the Long Parliament and to soldiers passing by the village of Little Gidding, in the hopes that it would incite them to violence against the community. But the scandal blew over, and the “friar-like family” was left unharmed.6 It is the times in which the Ferrars of Little Gidding lived and worshipped that 2 Ibid., 9. 3 Ibid., 8. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Ibid., 10. Arminianism, the theological counter-argument to Calvinism born in the Lowlands and imported to England, was condemned in 1618 at the Synod of Dort. It asserted the Christian’s free will to choose salvation over Calvinism’s predestination, and emphasized the sacraments, derided by Calvinists (though not by Calvin himself), as vehicles of God’s grace. On English Arminianism, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 6 For many years it was believed that Little Gidding had been ransacked by parliamentary soldiers in 1646; recent research by Trevor Cooper and Joyce and David Ransome disproves this. See “Alleged ransacking— an update” at http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk/lgchtmlfiles/detailfiles/lgcpopuptextpage1.html. 141 make a study of their liturgical theology worthwhile; they also complicate it.7 In 1625, the year of King James I’s death, Nicholas Ferrar—Cambridge scholar, continental traveler and onetime deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company—with his mother, brother John, and sister Susanna and their families, moved from London to Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, in order to devote themselves to prayer and good works.8 When King James died, so too did his policy of patronizing clerics of a variety of theological leanings and not enforcing ceremonial rubrics too strictly, which had allowed moderate puritan ministers to remain in the Church of England without violating their consciences.9 That same year, William Laud was made Bishop of St. David’s, Wales, and began his meteoric ascent; he would become Bishop of London in 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Though divines such as Richard Hooker, in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Lancelot Andrewes, in his sermons, had promoted the sacraments as vehicles of God’s 7 Trevor Cooper’s forthcoming essay “‘As wise as serpents’: The Form and Setting of Public Worship at Little Gidding in the 1630s,” in Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, edited by Alec Ryrie and Natalie Mears (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), primarily has an ecclesiological focus, in the older meaning of that term, i.e., concerned with church architecture; he does not discuss the community’s private devotions or the offices said in their house. Many thanks to Mr. Cooper for making this essay available to me in advance of publication. After Cooper, the most in-depth discussion of the Ferrars’ worship can be found in A.L. Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding (1938; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1980). Kate E. Riley, in “The Good Old Way Revisited: The Ferrar Family of Little Gidding c.1625–1637” (PhD diss., University of Western Australia, 2007), discusses the family’s worship schedule with little reference to contemporary liturgical controversy. 8 The extended family at Little Gidding was made up of both Ferrars and Collets, since Susanna Ferrar, Nicholas and John’s elder sister and mother of most of the children and young people at Little Gidding, married John Collet; but following custom and for the sake of convenience, I refer to them as a group under one surname. To avoid repetition, I refer to Nicholas Ferrar simply as Nicholas. For a family tree of the Ferrars, Collets and Mapletofts, see Joyce Ransome, The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2011) 258–260, hereafter cited as Ransome, Web. 9 “For much of his reign, James I has claims to be regarded as the ‘common and ameliorating bond’ who could favour both the Calvinist James Montagu and the anti-Calvinist Lancelot Andrewes, who was a patron of preaching yet questioned excessive preaching, who castigated Puritanism but tolerated moderate puritans, who could denounce the pope as Antichrist and yet seek confessional unity.” Kenneth Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Standord: Stanford University Press, 1993), 12. 142 grace from the 1590s, the sacramentalists as a party were in the minority. They were still a minority when Laud came to power, but now they had the royal support necessary to enact their agenda of moving and railing altars, beautifying and restoring churches, and increasing ceremony, which they did aggressively. Laud and King Charles’s determination to impose on Scotland a ceremonialist Book of Common Prayer in 1637 is cited as one of the contributing factors to the English Civil War. The period when the community at Little Gidding was most vibrant, from the mid-1620s to the mid-1640s, coincided with the greatest period of English liturgical turmoil since the middle of the sixteenth century. The community embodied many of the paradoxes of its age, but also of what came to be thought of as Anglican identity. The via media that the Ferrars stood for was more of a crossroads than a golden mean, and their liturgical theology demonstrates the tension inherent in an expression of Christianity that affirms Catholic tradition and the availability of grace through the sacraments, but that is also word-centered and world-renouncing. This paradox is especially evident in their association with both Archbishop Laud (who ordained Nicholas a deacon in 1626 and who, with John Cosin, presented the community’s Gospel Harmony to King Charles I in 1636) and his arch-nemesis, the Calvinist bishop John Williams (later Archbishop of York), who defended Little Gidding against detractors and was also a patron of their friend George Herbert.10 A comment by Nicholas Ferrar himself suggests that he felt unfairly caught 10 For more on Laud and Williams, as well as how Little Gidding does and does not fit into a larger Laudian framework, see the Introduction. 143 between two opposed and competing modes of religious expression. Nicholas was reported by Barnabas Oley to have lamented the contradictory criticisms and rumors that found their way to his ears: “He was torn asunder as with mad horses, or crushed betwixt the upper and under millstone of contrary reports: that he was a papist, and that he was a puritan.”11 Ferrar’s complaint echoes a statement of Laud’s, that “Truth usually lies between two extremes and is beaten by both, as the poor Church of England is at this day by the Papist and the Separatist.”12 Ferrar (or Oley) may also have had a phrase from George Herbert’s “The Crosse” in mind: These contrarieties crush me: these crosse actions Do winde a rope about, and cut my heart: And yet since these thy contradictions Are properly a crosse felt by they Sonne, With but foure words, my wordes, Thy will be done.13 We would do well to approach the accusations of puritanism directed at the Ferrars with a hermeneutic of suspicion (especially in light of the hyperbole of The Arminian Nunnery); the only other description of the Ferrars as “orthodox, regular, puritan protestants” is not negative and also comes from the Barnabas Oley’s preface to Herbert’s The Country Parson. Still, these statements, if nothing else, demonstrate the Ferrars’ palpable sense of being caught between two extremes in a religio-political landscape where the middle 11 Barnabas Oley quotes this comment in his 1652 preface to The Country Parson; John Ferrar quotes Oley in Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar: A Reconstruction of John Ferrar’s Account of His Brother’s Life Based on All the Surviving Copies (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996), 95, hereafter cited as Muir and White. 12 E.C.E. Bourne, The Anglicanism of William Laud (London: SPCK, 1947), 79, quoted in Horton Davies, From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1534–1690, vol. 2 of Worship and Theology in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3. 13 The Works of George Herbert, edited by F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 165, hereafter cited as Hutchinson. 144 ground was rapidly eroding, and where tolerance for unusual devotional practices was wearing thin. It may suggest that despite their disagreements with puritans over set forms of worship and church decoration, they recognized other points of sympathy with them, especially with the many moderate puritans who conformed to the Established Church but sought its further reform. John Donne, speaking of these conforming Puritans in a sermon, exclaims “Let me live the life of a Puritan,” defining this as “zeal to the glory of God,” objections to “blasphemous oaths,” special observance of the Sabbath, and an emphasis on religious study.14 Clearly, Donne was not speaking of the sort of separatist puritan who penned The Arminian Nunnery. But even this polemical document has its roots, surprisingly, in a respectful inquiry into life at Little Gidding that sought to distinguish fact from rumor. In 1634, a barrister named Edward Lenton visited Little Gidding unannounced, in order to determine for himself if the rumors he had heard about the community were true, namely that it was a secret convent. He made a full description of his visit in a letter to Sir Thomas Hetley.15 Unfortunately for Edward Lenton and the Ferrars, at some point a copy of his letter fell into the wrong hands. The anonymous and sensationalist redactor edited Lenton’s letter, retaining much of the original phrasing but at times changing the meaning to the opposite of what Lenton had reported. Upon seeing The Arminian Nunnery, John Ferrar (Nicholas had died in 1637) guessed its source and wrote to Lenton, demanding an 14 Quoted in Daniel W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 20. 15 The full text of the letter is printed in Appendix II, “The Letter of Edward Lenton,” in Muir and White, 128–137. 145 explanation; Lenton wrote back expressing his own astonishment at the tract and providing a copy of his original letter, which is now preserved in the Ferrar Papers archive at Magdalen College, Cambridge. This remarkable document provides an independent account of the worship at Little Gidding (apart from family correspondence and the materials John Ferrar compiled for a biography of this brother in the 1650s) that allows the Ferrars to defend their religious aesthetics against a challenger. The aim of this chapter is to consider the Ferrars’ worship and devotional practices both in church and at home, and to place these practices in the context of the seventeenth-century conflicts over worship. After following Lenton on his guided tour of Little Gidding, we will move to the Ferrars’ own description of their Sunday and weekday church worship and private devotions, and explore the liturgical function of the Gospel Harmonies they assembled. Finally, the community’s restoration of two local churches—St. John’s, Little Gidding, and St. Mary’s, Leighton Bromswold (the second a collaboration with George Herbert)—will be considered as a manifestation of their aesthetics in architectural form. I. Edward Lenton’s Visit to Little Gidding At the beginning of his letter, Lenton describes how, upon his arrival at Little Gidding, a “fair house” pleasantly situated among “a fine grove and sweet walks, latticed and gardened,” he is cordially received by Nicholas, whom he describes as “the mouth for them all,” and conducted to Mary Ferrar, Nicholas’s mother; his brother John; sister Susanna; and their families. Lenton requests that he be allowed to speak freely to them, 146 describing what he has heard of the nuns of Gidding; of their too much watching and praying all night, of their canonical hours, of their crosses on the outside and inside of the chapel, of an altar there richly decked with tapestry, plate, and tapers, of their adorations and geniculations at their entering therein. Which, I objected, might savour of superstition and popery.16 Nicholas responds that he believes the Pope to be the Antichrist, and that “the name of nuns is odious.”17 While Nicholas does admit that two of his nieces have committed themselves to remaining unmarried virgins, “the better to give themselves to fasting and prayer,” he notes that they have made no vows.18 He describes the family’s regimen of prayer, twice in the chapel after the order of the Book of Common Prayer, and four times in their house, daily “particular prayers for a private family.” Lenton responds that “if they spent too much time in praying, they would leave little for preaching or for their weekly callings.” Nicholas assures him that they often heard two sermons on Sunday, and responds that their calling is to serve God. When Lenton retorts that the contemplative life is little better than “a specious form of idleness,” Nicholas replies that “they had found divers perplexities, distractions, and almost utter ruin in other of their callings,” but that they have found comfort and contentment in their religious retirement. Not satisfied but moving on, Lenton attacks the Ferrars’ practice of rising at four a.m. for prayer, which he feels is overly ascetic for the young and elderly of the family. 16 Muir and White, 129. 17 The identification of the Pope with the Antichrist was a common belief during this period, though not one that Laud or his allies held or thought productive. See Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Ch. 1, “‘This Immortal Fewde’: Anti-Popery, ‘Negative Popery’ and the Changing Climate of Religious Controversy,” and Ch. 2, “The Rejection of Antichrist.” 18 Nicholas does not mention his own commitment to celibacy to Lenton; see Muir and White, 58. 147 Nicholas responds that since they all go to bed at seven, they get plenty of sleep, and that only two members of the family, on an alternating basis, continue the vigil all night. As for the crosses they display, “he [Nicholas] made the usual answer that they were not ashamed of that badge of Christian profession which the first propugners of the faith bare in their banners, and which we in the church discipline retain to this day.”19 Nicholas’ answer is “usual” in that it recalls the Book of Common Prayer baptismal service, when, as the priest makes the sign of the cross on this child’s forehead, he says: We receive this child into the congregation of Christ’s flock, and do sign him with the sign of the cross, in token that hereafter he shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified, and manfully to fight under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil . . .20 The making of the sign of the cross was a controversial practice, one of the three most hated things about the prayer book for puritans, the others being the giving of the ring in marriage, and kneeling at communion. Nicholas makes use of this rationale not for making the sign of the cross, but for the display of physical crosses. He moves from a defense of gesture to artifact (though it is unclear to what physical crosses Nicholas and Lenton are referring). In the parlor, Lenton notices the large plaque hanging by the chimney with the 19 20 Muir and White, 130. The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (1975. repr. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 2005), 275, hereafter cited as Booty, BCP. The Ferrars would have used the 1604 revision of the Book of Common Prayer, which had so few changes from the 1559 BCP that liturgists such as Brightman in his edition of prayer book parallels do not even include a separate column for it. For this reason, and for the convenience of the reader, I have chosen to cite John Booty’s edition of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, which has modernized spelling and ample notes and introductory materials. On the 1604 BCP, see F.E. Brightman, The English Rite, vol. 1 (London: Rivingtons, 1921), clxxix–clxxiv. Davies, From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox includes a photograph of a prayer book with an embroidered cover worked at Little Gidding, in the Page liturgical collection of the Huntington Library; see Plate 2 and 106. 148 inscription by Mary Ferrar. What troubles him is not the “with us or against us” message, but the Greek abbreviation for Jesus Christ over the inscription, IHS, famously used by the Jesuits as a heading on all their books. This controversial motif, “a distinguishing feature of those who associated themselves with the forms of devotion practiced by Lancelot Andrewes [and] Matthew Wren . . . from the 1620s onward” was prominently placed in a sunburst and held by angels on the title-page of John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions, which first appeared in 1627 and was influential among those who favored a more formal, ceremonial style of piety.21 It was used in religious engravings by Boetius Bolswert, imported to England from the Low Countries by Robert Peake, Jr., who supplied many of the prints used in the Ferrars’ Harmonies.22 At Laud’s trial, the puritan polemicist William Prynne cited the disgraced Archbishop’s use of the IHS symbol as evidence of Laud’s intention to restore Roman Catholicism in England.23 The Ferrars used this insignia on almost all of their documents, in many of the books they bound at Little Gidding, and at the top of every page of their Story Books. Nicholas responds that the name of Jesus is worthy to be written everywhere (as in fact it seems to have been at Little Gidding), but Lenton would prefer that it be “written at length, or in any other way,” rather than “that the papists use, but not Protestants.”24 After enjoying the refreshment of a glass of sack and a piece of cake to break up 21 Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 144 and 115; on Cosin, see below. 22 Ibid., 129–130. 23 Ibid., 144. 24 Muir and White, 131. 149 the somewhat tense tenor of their conversation, Lenton accompanies the Ferrars to a service in the church, read by the deacon Nicholas.25 He dislikes Nicholas’ three bows on entering the church, but finds the rest of the service without fault, and is relieved to see that the communion table is placed “table-wise” and not “altar-wise,” as he had heard.26 He notes that the pulpit and reading desk are the same height. The boys all wear black gowns, and, indeed, all of the family are dressed in black, “save one of the daughter’s daughters, who was in a friar’s grey gown.” The family’s apparel perhaps does little to dispel the monastic atmosphere. Nicholas “with a very loud and distinct voice began with the litany and read divers prayers and collects in the Book of Common Prayer, and Athanasius’ creed, and concluded with ‘The peace of God,’ etc.”27 Lenton has apparently joined the Ferrars for their mid-morning recitation of the Litany, an integral part of Elizabethan and Stuart formal worship. Although it is described as one of the four distinct parts of the weekly sequence of worship (alongside Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion), it was not generally prayed in parishes at its own separate service, but more commonly said or sung on Sundays between Morning Prayer and Holy Communion or Ante-Communion 25 Lenton refers to it as “the chapel,” but St. John’s is a church. Since the village was depopulated, the Ferrar/Collet family essentially comprised the whole parish. On Sundays the parishioners and minister of nearby Steeple Gidding walked over to Little Gidding for the first service, and in the afternoon the Ferrars walked to Steeple Gidding; this was perhaps to avoid the appearance of St. John’s as a private chapel, especially after 1629, when Charles I’s opposition to such chapels became clear. Ransome, Web, 64. 26 If the chancel area is at the east end of the church, an altar or communion table placed “table-wise” has its short ends facing east/west, while one facing “altar-wise” has its short ends facing north/south. 27 Muir and White, 142. 150 without pause.28 The Prayer Book rubrics indicate that the Litany, which is followed by several collects as Lenton describes, is to “be used upon Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and at other times, when it shall be commanded by the ordinary.”29 The Ferrars settled at Little Gidding during a time of plague in London. Because of this, Nicholas requested the permission of their diocesan bishop John Williams to pray the liturgy every day as a part of their public worship in church.30 “Athanasius’ Creed” is found at the end of Evening Prayer.31 Lenton’s comment on Nicholas’ “loud and distinct” voice is another way in which he signals that the Ferrars’ worship conforms to the Book of Common Prayer, as the Prayer Book rubrics indicate in several places that the minister is to read “distinctly with a loud voice,” or “standing and turning him so as he may best be heard of all such as be present.”32 Item 53 of the Royal Injunctions of 1559 ordered “that all ministers and readers of public prayers, chapters and homilies shall be charged to read leisurely, plainly and distinctly.”33 Worship in the language “understanded of the people,” as the ThirtyNine Articles terms it, is of no use if services are read in a way that is rushed or inaudible; the English reformers want to abolish what John Hooper in 1548 called “the 28 Booty, BCP, 266, 327, 393. 29 Ibid., 68. 30 Muir and White, 65. 31 Ibid., 65. It begins Quincunque vult, “Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith.” “Quincunque vult is neither Athanasian nor a creed.” E.C. Ratcliff, “The Choir Offices,” in Liturgy and Worship, edited by W. K. Lowther Clarke (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 280. 32 Booty, BCP, 49, 53, 58. 33 Quoted in Booty, BCP, 392. 151 massing and mumbling of canonical hours.”34 The church at Little Gidding is so small that it is difficult to imagine inaudibility being a problem; Lenton’s description of Nicholas’ reading style, therefore, is meant as a proof of his Protestantism. George Herbert in The Country Parson gives an amusing description of the balanced tenor of the Parson’s voice at prayer: Accordingly his voyce is humble, his words treatable, and slow; yet not so slow neither, as to let the fervency of the supplicant hang and dy between speaking . . . but with a grave livelinesse . . . he performs his duty.35 In contrast, Nicholas is described in The Arminian Nunnery (“this priest-like pregnant Prolucutor”) as “with a very loud and shrill voyce [he] began and trolled out the Letanie.”36 After the service, Lenton asks to stay behind to view the church, and, in a moment of social awkwardness, decides to salute the virgin sisters from afar, “not knowing whether they would have taken a kiss in good part or no.” He observes that the church is adorned with flowers and herbs, both natural and artificial, and with large tapers on the pillars on the sides of the church, as in cathedrals. The communion table stands on a carpet and is covered by a tapestry, with a chalice and candlesticks on it. He notes that the font is by the pulpit, and “the laver had the bigness of a barber’s basin.” Lenton asks “for the organs,” the instrument hated by puritans, and Nicholas notes that they have a pair in the house. When he asks why they have so many candles, the deacon’s coy reply 34 Quoted in John H. Primus, Holy Time: Moderate Puritanism and the Sabbath (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989), 2. 35 Hutchinson, 231. 36 The Arminian Nunnery, 6. 152 is, so they can see. In the final part of their interview, Lenton challenges Nicholas about his three bows on entering the chapel, and on whether or not he believes the church to be more holy than the Ferrars’ manor house, where they hold their other prayer services. On his bowing, which Lenton says is the same custom of idolatrous papists, Nicholas quotes 1 Cor 14:40, much beloved of Laudians, “do all things with decency and order.” As for the holiness of churches as opposed to other places, Nicholas answers that the church is not more holy, but the divine service there is more solemn because “God was more immediately present, while we were worshipping him in his temple.”37 Lenton concludes by telling Nicholas that since the Ferrars’ devotions are “more strict and regular than usual,” he finds the family very clever in complying so strictly with church ceremonies “that they might the safelier hold on their course without exception,” since they are unlikely to be censured for Prayer Book worship (though he notes that at cathedrals, they only make one reverence, and not three, as Nicholas did). He is implying that, in effect, they know just where the liturgical line is to be drawn, and go right up to it without crossing it. Nicholas tells him that he speaks “like one who seemed to have had experience in the world,” a somewhat backhanded compliment. The last question Lenton asks Nicholas speaks perhaps to the discomfort that some felt at a gentry family that had left London and broken with many of the social customs of “persons of quality” around hospitality, visiting, amusements and apparel. Lenton asks if it is true that at their monthly receiving of communion, 37 Muir and White, 133. 153 whether their servants (when they received) were attended by their masters and mistresses and not suffered so much as to lay and take away their own trenchers, as I had heard? Whereat he smiled, as at a frivolous fable, and said the only difference from other days was that the servants, that day that they received, sat at the same table with them.38 Though this image of a sort of Communion carnival with masters serving the servants is a “frivolous fable,” like many of the other things Lenton has heard, it turns out to be based in some truth. Reception of the sacrament does break down some social divisions temporarily, and all eat at one board, as they had received at one board.39 Despite the inquisitional nature of the interview, Lenton still seems genuinely surprised that Nicholas does not invite him to stay for dinner; indeed, he walks him to his horses. But, he notes, “as we friendly met, we friendly parted,” commenting that all their discourse was conducted “with mildness and moderation (on his part at least).”40 Lenton’s account of his visit to Little Gidding matches the description of the house, church, and order of worship that John Ferrar would assemble in the 1650’s in his materials for the biography of his brother, who died three years after Lenton’s visit. Lenton, whose views, by his own description, seem to be of the dominant moderate Calvinist or conforming puritan variety (though he writes to Hetley that “My opposing of some of their opinions and practice, as you may see in this my relations . . . was only by way of argument”41). Though Nicholas wins points with Lenton for conformity to the 38 Muir and White, 133. 39 According to John Ferrar, the servants stand at the table while Mrs. Ferrar, and presumably the family, sit. So, though all are at one table, class distinctions are still acknowledged; Muir and White, 133. 40 Ibid. 41 Muir and White, 134. 154 Prayer Book rubrics, the latter nonetheless keeps pointing out the similarity between the Ferrars’ aesthetic choices or religious practices and that of what he calls papist idolatry or superstition. Lenton does not understand why the Ferrars would use liturgical accoutrements, gestures, or symbols that to him so obviously to him demarcated Roman Catholicism. But Nicholas is unwilling to relinquish the inheritance of the early church just because, in the minds of many, that inheritance is Roman. During his four years of travel through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain, Nicholas experienced the cultural achievements of the Counter-Reformation, visited Rome during Holy Week, and observed Anabaptist, Roman Catholic and Jewish worship.42 Upon his return to England, he threw himself into the colonial project of the Virginia Company, a large part of which was focused on conversion of the Native Americans to Protestant Christianity. At Little Gidding, where the aim was Christian perfection, the Ferrars were engaged in the creative recovery of Christian practices which had largely fallen out of favor with English Protestants, but which they still found efficacious. The clarity and succinctness of Nicholas’ answers to Lenton demonstrate the catholic (lowercase “c,” as in the Athanasian Creed) theology that is at its root. In a brief interview (Lenton says he was at Little Gidding “not two hours”), this uninvited guest managed to touch on nearly all of the religious controversies of the 1620s and 1630s. One set of charges revolves around the Ferrars’ proximity to Roman Catholic 42 See Joyce Ransome, “Prelude to Piety: Nicholas Ferrar’s Grand Tour,” in The Seventeenth Century 18 (Spring 2003), 1–24; also Ransome, Web, 30–38. 155 practice: he has heard that there are nuns there, as well as practices like “watching and praying,” use of canonical hours and embodied worship such as bowing (“geniculations”).43 Two kinds of bowing irritated those of a more reformed persuasion. The first, bowing at the name of Jesus, was required by canon 18 of 1604. Fincham and Tyacke point to a sermon preached by Matthew Wren (bishop of Ely, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and uncle of the architect Christopher Wren) at Whitehall on Sunday 17 February 1628, in the presence of Charles I, as the start of an Arminian campaign to enforce bowing at the name of Jesus. Preaching on the text, “Fear God, my son, and the king,” Wren was particularly concerned with the deportment of puritans rather than the irreligious, saying that although “We have a great deal of religion in our ears . . . we have . . . none in our knees to bow at his blessed name.”44 Lenton does not comment on whether or not Ferrar bowed at the name of Jesus, but he does remark on Nicholas’ threefold bowing on coming into the church: a “low obeisance” as he enters, a lower one fo ur paces on, and then bowing to the ground “coming to the half-pace which was at the east end (where the table stood).” This second kind of bowing, by the minister and people towards the altar as they entered and exited the church and when they approached the communion table, had no canonical basis, but did spread as a practice in the 1630s, advocated in printed literature and used in 43 44 Muir and White, 131. Proverbs 24:21. Cited in Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 134, hereafter Fincham and Tyacke. 156 cathedrals, college chapels, and the chapel royal.45 A description survives of William Laud’s prostrations towards the altar during his consecration of the church of St. Catherine, Cree on Sunday, 16 January 1630/1, from the juicily vitriolic William Prynne: [W]hen the Bishop approached neare the Communion Table, he bowed with his nose very neare the ground some six or seven times; Then he came to one of the corners of the Table, and he bowed himselfe three times; then to the second, third and fourth corners, bowing at each corner three times, but when he came to the side of the Table where the bread an wine was, he bowed himselfe seven times, and then, after the reading of many praiers by himself and his two fat chaplins (which were with him, and all this while were upon their knees by him, in their Sirplisses, Hoods, and Tippits), he himself came neare the Bread . . . After these and many other Apish Anticke Gesturs he himselfe received [the sacrament].46 However, Laud himself, no stranger to colorful language, in his speech at the trial of Prynne, Bastwick and Burton in 1637, says of bowing, this is the misery, ’tis superstition now-a-days for any man to come with more reverence into a church than a tinker and his bitch come into an ale house . . . the comparison is too homely, but my just indignation at the profaneness of the times makes me speak it.47 Less metaphorically, Laud said, “I take myself bound to worship with Body, as well as in Soule, whenever I come where God is worshipped.”48 For Lancelot Andrewes, worshipping in body and soul was tied to humans’ creation by God: If He breathed into us our soul, but framed not our body (but some other did that), neither bow your knee nor uncover your head, but keep on your hats and sit even as you do hardly. But if He hath framed that body of 45 Fincham and Tyacke, 251–252. 46 Quoted in Davies, From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 19. 47 Quoted in Fincham and Tyacke, 156. 48 Quoted in Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20. 157 yours, and every member of it, let Him have the honour both of head and knee, and every member else. To worship God inwardly only—“with our hearts and not our hats,” in Andrewes’ phrase—is to act as if God had no authority over our whole being.49 But bowing is in a sense a cover for a much larger issue: as for Prynne and Laud, the debate for Lenton and Ferrar concerns the sanctity of churches over and above other places, especially other places where Christians gather. Lenton challenges Nicholas on his beliefs about the sanctity of the church as opposed to the house, the other location where they worship, asking “whether he thought the chapel more holy than his house?” and saying “that I thought God was as present at Paul’s Cross as in Paul’s church; and at the preaching-place at Whitehall and Spital sermons as elsewhere.” In other words, it is the gathering of the Christian assembly, and especially the gathering of Christians to hear the preaching of the Word, that lends sanctity to the place of meeting.50 The counterargument is that the church building is to the Christians what the Jerusalem Temple was to the Israelites, a place set apart and adorned for worship, prayer and sacrifice. Horton Davies, in his chapter on the theology of church architecture from 1603 to 1690, notes that it is “significant how far the sense of the inherent holiness of a church had developed under the impetus of Archbishop Laud and his supporters by the end of the fourth decade of the seventeenth century.”51 In a sermon preached in 1624 at the consecration52 of the 49 Lancelot Andrewes, Sermons, I 263–264, quoted in G.W.O. Addleshaw, The High Church Tradition, (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 78. 50 Muir and White, 133. 51 Davies, From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 16 158 Exeter College Chapel, Oxford (which, Davies says, “looks like a diminutive Sainte Chapelle”), John Prideaux, argues from his text (Luke 19:46 “My house is a house of prayer”) for specific structures set apart specifically for Christian worship, but not for the inherent sanctity of church buildings. He finds it necessary in a marginal note in the printed version to repudiate Cardinal Bellarmine’s De Cultu Sanctorum: Not for the inherent sanctity of the place (which our Adversaries presse too far) but through the obiective Holinesse adherent to it, by Christs promises, sacred meetings, united devotion, ioynt participating of the Word and Sacraments, lively incitements through others examples.53 However, ten years later, Nicholas’ answer is perhaps closer to Bellarmine’s theology than to Prideaux’s. Nicholas’ response to Lenton, “that God was more immediately present, while we were worshipping him in his temple,” is much more than Prideaux’s “obiecive Holinesse” which adheres to the church by the actions and devotion of the assembled believers. After all, the actions and prayers of the Ferrar family at worship in the church and in their house are remarkably similar; yet, as Lenton is quick to point out, Nicholas does not use the same solemnity in his house that he does in the church. This “belief in the unequal distribution of God’s presence,” as Achsah Guibbory phrases it, may have been due to the influence of Lindsell or Laud, but was also a view shared by John Donne. A sense of the sacredness of the physical church building alone is not necessarily a Laudian characteristic.54 George Herbert, in a moment of casuistry in The 52 There is no Book of Common Prayer service for the consecration of a church. The service was designed by John Cosin and was controversial 53 Quoted in Davies, 16–17, and Fincham and Tyacke, 124. 54 Guibbory, 19. 159 Country Parson demonstrating the difference between “necessary” and “additionary” prayer, commends the example of “a godly man,” who not out of superstition, but of reverence to Gods house, resolves whenever he enters into a Church, to kneel down, and pray, either blessing God, that he will be pleased to dwell among men; or beseeching him, that ‘whenever he repairs to his house, he may behave himself so as ever befits so great a presence; and this briefly.55 Herbert makes the same distinction, between superstition and reverence, that Laud does, and he uses the language of “presence.” To not stop in to pray because “he spyes some scoffing ruffian” who is likely to deride him would be breaking his custom “for shame”; it would be incorrect to do this. But to stop in the church on his way to visiting the sick “in haste” would also be incorrect; the pastoral duty outweighs this “additionary” duty. The implication is that to stop to pray because of custom despite the need for haste would cross the line into superstition. This passage demonstrates that Herbert believes that the church does in fact possess inherent sanctity as “Gods house,” but that how the Parson demonstrates his reverence depends on the specific situation, as well as on other vocational responsibilities. For Laudians, the altar was the “holy of holies” within the sacred space of the church. With the sanctity of the church itself the subject of heated debate, everything about the altar became a site of theological contention. As Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke note at the beginning of their comprehensive and fascinating study Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700, 55 Hutchinson, 273. 160 Arguments about its positioning (east end or elsewhere), orientation (altarwise or tablewise), fabric (stone or wood), and very name (altar or table) reveal the deeper truth that the altar was a vital battleground, first between Catholics and protestants and then among protestants themselves, about conflicting beliefs on sacramental theology, imagery, sanctity, and reverence. These were matters of urgent concern not just to university divines, but to laity and clergy in organizing their parochial worship, and to the ecclesiastical establishment which attempted to regulate this worship.56 A good part of the reason that Lenton has made his visit concerns rumors he has heard about the church and especially the altar: “of an altar there richly decked with tapestry, plate, and tapers, of their adorations and geniculations at their entering therein.”57 When Lenton does come to the church, he calls it a “communion table,” which, although it does have tapestry, plate and tapers on it as reported, elicits no negative comments from him. Was the mere position of the table (the short ends facing east-west instead of north-south) enough to assuage him, or the fact that it was wood, or freestanding instead of fixed at the east end, or not railed in, or a combination of all of these factors? Lenton also makes a sort of “global” critique of the Ferrars’ way of life. He calls the draw of the contemplative life “a tempting of God” and “splendidum peccatum” and he is concerned that their asceticism and devotion to prayer is taking away from their attendance at sermons, and to their “callings,” their everyday vocations and duties as Christians in the world. Their very removal to this remote place for religious reasons is provocative for him, and raises doubts about their Protestantism. Horton Davies notes the importance in this age of the “Protestant conviction that God is to be served not per 56 Fincham and Tyacke, 1. 57 Muir and White, 129. 161 vocationem (through a special world-renouncing calling) but in vocationem (in one’s daily, secular calling).”58 Lenton here would agree with Theologus from Arthur Dent’s highly popular 1601 devotional The Plaine Man’s Path-way to Heaven, who says, God alloweth none to live Idlely: but all both great and small, are to be imployed one way or another: either for the benefite of the Churche, or Commonwealth: or for the good government of their own households: or for the good of Townes and parishes, and those amongst whom they doe converse [live]: or for the succour and reliefe of the poore: or for the furtherance of the Gospell, and the maintenance of the Ministery: or for one good use or another.59 The great spiritual writers of the Counter Reformation picked up on this theme as well. Francis De Sales writes in his Introduction to the Devout Life: Those who have treated of devotion before me have almost all attended onelie to the instruction of persons alltogether retired from worldly conversation . . . But my intention is particularly andprincipally to instruct such as live in cities and townes, busied with the affaires of their household, or forced by their place and calling to follow their princes court, such as by the obligation of their estate are bound to take a common course of life, in outward shew, and exteriour proceedings.60 The Introduction to the Devout Life was a favorite book at Little Gidding, and bound by Mary Ferrar.61 Nicholas, of course, had at one time “followed his prince’s court,” as part of the entourage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth from London to Germany, after her marriage to Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. He had also 58 Davies, 73. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 In the 1630s, Laud hastily recalled and burnt copies of an English translation of de Sales, after passages marked by his chaplain for omission were retained in the printed volume; Laud feared that he himself would be associated with this unexpurgated volume, as was the case during his trial. See Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 86. 162 taken on many of the callings that Dent has Theologus commended, as a Fellow at Cambridge; as Deputy Treasurer of the Virginia Company, which was established for king and country, for profit, but also for a furtherance of the (Protestant) Gospel in North America; and as a member of Parliament in 1624 (the same Parliament that George Herbert attended). In these previous callings, he tells Lenton, he and his family had found “diverse perplexities, distractions, and almost utter ruin.” The family’s “sequestration,” he tells Lenton, has brought about “incredible improvement of their livelihoods.”62 For Lenton, this “sequestration” seems to be monastic, contemplative idleness, though he later acknowledges that others speak well of their charity.63 Joyce Ransome’s recent biography of Nicholas Ferrar argues convincingly that although the Ferrars did, to use Reid Barbour’s term, “abdicate from Stuart society,” they still had plenty of employment: there were still children to educate, boys who needed apprenticeships, young women who needed to find good (clerical) husbands, business in London to attend to, marital conflicts to referee (especially between John Ferrar and his wife, Bathsheba), the manor lands to oversee, Gospel Harmonies to construct (sometimes with a royal deadline), the dispensary for the poor to maintain, widows to house and feed, and building projects to organize like the renovation of the manor house and the church and the nearby church at Leighton Bromswold (see below). All of this, moreover, was on top of their “more strict and regular than usual” set of devotional practices. Rather than cloistered recluses, the Ferrars seem like adherents of what the fourteenth century spiritual writer Walter Hilton 62 Muir and White, 129–130. 63 Ibid., 130. 163 termed “the mixed life,” which alternated back and forth between action and contemplation. The Ferrars were far too busy to be purely considered contemplatives (pace Lenton); they are the true inheritors of Hilton’s ideal for a householder of means who juggles many worldly responsibilities with a call to an expanded life of prayer. In fact they extend this ideal beyond what Hilton imagined, to include the entire household.64 The portrait Lenton paints of the family is ceremonialist but still decidedly conformist. Lenton himself, despite all his bluster in argument (which may have been only for argument’s sake, as he says later to his correspondent), is ultimately won over by the community: at the conclusion of his letter, he writes, “I find them full of humanity and humility. And others speak much of their charity . . . and therefore [I] am far from censuring them of whom I think much better than of myself.”65 If the only source available for a description of the Ferrars’ aesthetics was Edward Lenton’s letter, we might be hard-pressed to see why Nicholas Ferrar felt caught between “contrary reports.” However, one important room was left off Lenton’s tour of Little Gidding, the work room where Nicholas and several of his nieces spent an hour a day constructing various Gospel Harmonies, or concordances, for their own worship and as gifts for esteemed recipients such as King Charles I and George Herbert. The importance of these Harmonies, recombinations of the four gospels into one continuous narrative, 64 See Walter Hilton (d. 1396), Epistle on the Medled Life (London: 1530), also printed in Dorothy Jones, ed., Minor Works of Walter Hilton (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1929). This treatise does not seem to have been reprinted between the 1530s and the 1630s. 65 Muir and White, 134. 164 demonstrates an unusual combination of Protestant Word-centered piety with ritualized liturgical practice. II. Construction of the Gospel Harmonies as a Liturgical Practice The creation of the Gospel Harmonies demonstrates the extent to which the members of Little Gidding sought, in the words of the Collect for the second Sunday of Advent from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the scriptures.66 In fact, they did more than read, mark and memorize: they cut all four Gospels up with scissors and reassembled them. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, who also read the Bible with a pair of scissors in hand, the Ferrars’ aim was completeness and unity, rather than redaction. The Harmony project, which began in 1626 and continued after Nicholas’ death, was part monastic workshop and part Protestant work ethic, wholly centered on the Word. The Ferrars made their first Gospel Harmony to aid them in their devotional regimen. In their zeal the family had adopted the ancient monastic practice of reciting the entire Psalter by memory every day, with members of the family taking different shifts (described below). Along with the Psalter, they wanted to add readings from the Gospels, but desired these to form one continuous narrative. As Joyce Ransome notes, although 66 This chapter focuses on the liturgical function of the use and construction of the Harmonies. For detailed studies of them, see Joyce Ransome, “Monotessaron: The Harmonies of Little Gidding,” The Seventeenth Century 18 (Spring 2003), 1–24; Ch. 9, “Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud,” in George Henderson, Studies in English Bible Illustration, Vol. 1 (London: Pindar Press, 1985), 254–285; Ch. 3, “Herbert and the Harmonies of Little Gidding” in Stanley Stewart, George Herbert (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986); and Paul Dyck, “‘So Rare a Use’: Scissors, Reading, and Devotion at Little Gidding,” George Herbert Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (2003): 67–81. For the dramatic story of the rediscovery of the first Little Gidding concordance containing Charles I’s marginalia, see Leslie C. Craig, “The Earliest Little Gidding Concordance,” Harvard Library Bulletin 1 (1947): 311–331. 165 the ancient practice of compiling Gospel Harmonies enjoyed a revival during the Reformation, most of these were in Latin, or consisted of summaries, neither of which would suffice for daily household use.67 What the Ferrars compiled for themselves in their first attempt at harmonization was an edition of the four gospels synthesized, but retaining all the original words of scripture, and divided into 150 titled chapters (presumably to match the number of the Psalms). This was lavishly illustrated throughout with religious prints acquired both on Nicholas’ travels, and from engravers in London. They completed reading through these chapters once a month.68 John Ferrar notes in his biography of Nicholas that the Concordance Room was varnished a pleasant green color and that on the walls were various scripture passages and mottos to encourage the members of the family as they worked, such as, “Innocency is never better lodged than at the sign of Labor.”69 Nicholas, the “contriver” of the Harmony, determined how the various verses should be woven together, and then passed on his design to his nieces (primarily Mary and Anna Collett, but others as well). The young women then cut these passages out of Bibles with knives and scissors, expertly pasted them together, and bound the volume themselves. John Ferrar writes, “so artificially they performed this new-found-out-way, as it were a new kind of printing, for all that saw the books when they were done took them to be printed the ordinary way, so finely were the 67 Ransome, “Monotessaron,” 25. 68 Muir and White, 76. 69 Ibid., 80–81. 166 verses joined together.”70 The first concordance was a year in the making. Though this first harmony had a very straightforward function, later harmonies would contain more complex apparatuses as the Ferrars’ interpretive ambition increased. And so in the age of the printing press, a kind of Protestant scriptorium was born. The “holy industry” involved in the making of the first concordance was so pleasing to the members of the family that they decided to continue. According to John Ferrar, Herbert commented upon receiving a Harmony as a gift in 1631, that he most humbly blessed God that he had lived now to see women’s scissors brought to so rare a use as to serve at God’s altar and encouraged them to proceed in the like works as the most happy employment of their times and to keep that book always, without book, in their hearts as well as they had it in their heads, memories, and tongues.71 Somehow, perhaps through reports of some of the Ferrars’ high-placed ecclesiastical friends, their Harmony attracted the notice of the King.72 In the summer of 1633, on his progress to his long-postponed coronation as King of Scots, Charles I sent a courtier to Little Gidding who asked to borrow the book about which the king had heard, and promising to return it before Charles’ retinue moved on. The family initially tried to stall the messenger, being caught off guard and embarrassed that what they made for themselves should have a royal peruser; nonetheless, the king’s man eventually convinced them to lend it. When the courtier brought the Harmony back many months later, he told them that the King had expressed “his great good liking of it in all kinds,” 70 Ibid., 76. 71 Ibid., 76–77. 72 Ransome, Web, 160. 167 asked that another Harmony be made for Charles, and apologized for his royal marginalia.73 The Harmony’s illustrations, and not just the text, would have pleased Charles. George Henderson, in his article “Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud,” describes the controversy of illustrated Bibles in England and Scotland in the 1630s and ’40s, and notes that the charges that led to Laud’s execution in 1645 included his possession of many of the same kinds of prints as used by the Ferrars (possibly procured from the same print-seller, Robert Peake) as well as his supposed promotion of illustrated Bibles.74 The King’s concordance, as it was called, took another year to make, and was presented to him by Archbishop Laud and Dr. John Cosin in the spring of 1636.75 It is now in the British Library. A far cry from the comparatively spare prototype, the King’s Harmony included “colored inks, abundant illustrations, and a handsome binding,”76 as well as new textual apparatuses, such as the Comparison, “in which the relevant gospels are set beside each other in parallel columns;” the Composition, where the four gospels are woven into one narrative, and the Collection, the heart of all the Harmonies, whereby through the use of different typefaces one is able to follow one gospel or read all of them at once, but still trace what comes from where.77 Paul Dyck sums up the achievement of 73 Ibid., 77. 74 Henderson, 197. 75 Though it bears the date 1635. Muir and White, 77; Ransome, “Monotessaron,” 31. 76 Ransome, “Monotessaron,” 31. 77 Dyck, 71. 168 the King’s Concordance this way: The concordance delivers the fullest possible account of the life of Christ from the four stories, while both explicitly preserving the totality of each of those stories, and more notably, laying out their “agreements & differences.”. . . [T]he book suggests a unity that is necessarily expressed exactly through difference. The arrangement suggests distinct kinds of text and thus of reading: a liturgical and immediate story of Christ that invites a receptive response, and a scholarly and mediated story of Christ that exposes the multiple versions that constitute it, and that invites a critical awareness of the relations between the versions.78 Instead of pasting in large prints as in the first harmony, the Collet sisters got more elaborate in their illustration techniques as well, combining elements from many different prints to illustrate different passages. They may also have originated a genre. George Henderson describes “their painstaking techniques as the sublimation of scissors and paste, the art of decoupage at its highest, before that art is generally acknowledged to exist.”79 Loose prints survive in the Ferrar papers with holes where various images were pilfered from them, demonstrating the sisters’ working methods. The Ferrars would complete thirteen concordances, including a harmony of Kings and Chronicles and a version of Acts and the Apocalypse requested by the King.80 The first Harmony, which, while illustrated, is far more utilitarian and less intricate in design and workmanship than the other surviving concordances, was made for use during the brief offices the Ferrars prayed in their house (see below). As the construction of the Harmonies became more elaborate in both textual apparatuses and the 78 Ibid., 72. 79 Henderson, 187. 80 For a list of surviving Harmonies and their locations, see Ransome, “Monotessaron,” 44 note 34. 169 use of illustration, the quality of meditation on the scriptures also intensified, drawing in typology and allegory from the Old Testament and parallels with Foxe’s martyrology.81 Like Herbert, they wanted to see how all the “lights” of Holy Scripture “combined,” and they themselves devised new ways of combining and rearranging elements of the biblical narrative, drawing out different aspects of the text’s meaning.82 Paul Dyck describes the process of constructing the Harmonies as containing “both hand work and mind work,” and calls the elaborate Harmony made for the king “a sort of embroidered text.”83 When Herbert wrote that he was pleased to see women’s scissors turned to “so rare a use,” he is not just noting the curiosity of the project, but marveling that what is usually an instrument for fabricating housewares, clothing or decorative embroidery has now been transformed into an instrument in the study of scripture, in fact in the dissection and re-vivification of scripture. Scissors, used for domestic undertakings or expressions of personal vanity and skill, were now participating in revelation; “drudgerie divine” indeed.84 This idea of holy industry centered on the Bible might have appealed to more Calvinist or puritan neighbors. However, images were an important part of the Harmonies from the first one the Ferrars made, and this, as noted, was controversial. Illustrated books, such as Foxe’s 81 See Stewart, George Herbert, Ch. 3, and Margaret Aston, “Moving Pictures: Foxe’s Martyrs and Little Gidding,” in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, edited by Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 82– 104. 82 “The H. Scriptures (II),” Hutchinson, 58. 83 Dyck, 79, 80 note 4. 84 “The Elixir,” Hutchinson, 185. 170 Actes and Monuments, had long been popular, but the illustration of the Bible was a different story.85 Perhaps this is why the Concordance Room was left off Lenton’s tour. This does not mean, however, that the Ferrars had no sense of idolatry. Nicholas’ biography notes “That he wholly disliked, to have the Picture of God [the Father], to be made or used in any place or thing, saying, It was a breach of the 2.d Commandment, to make any such Resemblance.”86 And so, the Collett sisters, when they would encounter such an image in their continental prints, would snip it out and replace it either with clouds or the name of God in Hebrew letters.87 Stanley Stewart, in his essay on George Herbert and the Little Gidding Harmonies, writes, “Rather than an indication of a Puritanical preoccupation with “arts and crafts” intended to keep young hands busy, the “Harmonies were an integral part of worship.”88 By the Ferrars’ own account, however, the Harmonies served both purposes. The family had the problem of how to occupy all those young female minds and hands with virtuous activity; the construction of the Harmonies, along with and the dialogues of the Little Academy, were the answer.89 They were, after all, working in a room hung with mottoes extolling industriousness, and poring over Scripture for countless hours on end. The Ferrars were not puritans, but there is certainly something a bit puritanical, or 85 See Henderson, “Bible Illustration.” 86 Muir and White, 114. 87 Henderson, 191. On the Ferrars and idolatry, see Chapter 5, “Storying at Little Gidding.” 88 Stewart, 66. 89 On the Story Books of the Little Academy, see Chapter 5, “Storying at Little Gidding.” 171 “precise,” about the obsession with the Bible at Little Gidding. Graham Parry very sensitively parses out the various shades of Laudianism and the reaction to it in treatises, art, poetry and architecture; nevertheless, like most scholars of the period, he eventually makes the kind of Anglican/Puritan generalization that it is so difficult to avoid: For Laudians, ritual, ceremony and bodily gesture were appropriate and reverential ways of negotiating the mysteries of religion; for Puritans these actions were worthless flummery, distraction and idolatry. The word of God was everything to the Puritans, to be read in the Bible, listened to in sermons, and responded to in prayer. These two attitudes were essentially irreconcilable.90 This is a fair judgment for most of the parties involved in the early Stuart religious landscape, as long as we also keep in mind the minority of “uncategorizables” described by Peter White.91 That these two often-conflicting attitudes were reconciled in the Ferrars’ devotional life is perhaps why Nicholas felt caught between “contrary reports.” At Little Gidding, the Word was sacramentalized and ritualized both in the hourly house offices, and in the actual construction of the Harmonies themselves, which, just as reverent and edifying ceremonialist worship ought to do, engaged both body and soul, hands, hearts and heads. Their pattern of life may have come from an idealization of early Christian practice, but in their worship they bypassed the medieval liturgical developments or “accretions” which many other proponents of ceremonial worship in this period, such as John Cosin, were avidly reintroducing (see below). 90 Graham Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 6. 91 See Peter White, “The Via Media in the Early Stuart Church,” in Fincham, ed., The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 172 In studies of this period, “Word-centered” devotion is generally a synonym for preaching. Preaching was an important part of Sunday worship at Little Gidding, but even it was subservient to the Word itself. Barnabas Oley, in his preface to Herbert’s The Country Parson, quotes Nicholas on puritans and preaching: Mr. F., though he ever honoured their persons (that were pious and learned) and always spoke of them with much Christian respect, yet would he bewail their mistakes, which (like mists) led them in some points back again to those errors of Rome which they had forsaken. To instance in one: he says that preaching in the pulpit is absolutely necessary to salvation falls into two Romish errors: 1. that the scripture is too dark; 2. that it is insufficient to save a man . . . 92 Indeed, puritans and Roman Catholics were often very close on this point: William Perkins uses the same metaphor about preaching as Cardinal Bellarmine, that the bread of the Word is not nourishing until it is broken open in interpretation. William Laud commented that “the Jesuit in the Church of Rome, and the precise party in the reformed Churches” were paradoxically in agreement “that the sermons and preachings by word of mouth of the lawfully sent pastors and doctors of the Church, are able to breed in us divine and infallible faith: nay, are the very word of God.”93 Nicholas is, in one sense, taking a hard-line sola scriptura stance, whereby the power of the Word itself overshadows its interpretation. However he did not denigrate the place of sermons, and certainly did not make statements such as Laud’s about the subjugation to the Word of God to the flesh of God in the sacrament of Holy Communion. The members of Little Gidding heard two sermons on Sunday, presumably each about an hour in length (the 92 93 Muir and White, 96. Quoted in Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 40–41. 173 seventeenth-century preacher’s hourglass stand survives in the church). But the community’s priority was hearing, reciting, praying, and even cutting up and reassembling, the Word itself, almost continually, day and night. An emphasis on sermons, on the interpretation of Scripture rather than Scripture itself, led, according to Nicholas, to the figure of the preacher becoming a kind of puritan priestly intermediary necessary to understanding and therefore to salvation. At Little Gidding, each member of the community “marinated” in Scripture by storing it up in their memories, reciting it day and night, and engaging in the process of constructing the Harmonies. This biblical understanding, which is holistic and not of the intellect only, enables the individual Christian to not so much function as their own interpreter as to receive the revelation of Scripture on offer to the prepared soul. In this way, they fulfill Herbert’s vision of the Country Parson’s family: “So in the household of a Preacher, all are preachers.”94 Puritans have fallen into a “Romish error” by believing that the individual Christian can listen passively (the much-maligned “religion of the ears”) while someone else does the biblical heavy lifting for them, and that, in fact, someone else is necessary because the Bible itself is “dark” and not capable of this kind of transformative work on its own. This is another way that devotion at Little Gidding is collegiate rather than sacerdotallyfocused. It is no wonder then that the Ferrars viewed the creation of the Gospel Harmonies as at the heart of their devotional life; from his deathbed, Nicholas urged them to “Leave not the thoughts of them, though I be gone.”95 94 Hutchinson, 240. 95 Muir and White, 114. 174 III. Little Gidding and the Book of Common Prayer Having toured Little Gidding alongside Edward Lenton, we will now turn to the description of the family’s worship from their own sources, specifically, from the biography of Nicholas Ferrar by his brother John.96 While Nicholas’ continental travels had “confirmed him in the truth” of English Protestant Christianity, they had also given him wide liturgical experience on which to base his family’s practice at Little Gidding. This worship was centered on the Book of Common Prayer, but the Ferrars added other many devotional practices as well, some in fashion at cathedrals and college chapels during this period, others reclaimed from the monastic past (though no direct source for them is known). In a sort of inverse of Cranmer’s project to condense the monastic canonical hours from eight to two in number (Morning and Evening Prayer) in order to make the essence of monastic spirituality accessible to the laity, the Ferrars, using the Book of Common Prayer as their foundation, increased the number of offices in their own Protestant version of the breviary.97 These additional regular devotions (most of which took place in their house rather than the church) would only be feasible for a community whose life was organized around times of prayer (having moved from serving God in vocationem back towards per vocationem, as Lenton had criticized). However, this vocation, while “regular” in the sense of following a rule, was wholly Protestant; the 96 The Life of Nicholas Ferrar has a very complicated manuscript history; Muir and White is, as the title says, a “reconstruction” of John Ferrar’s original manuscript based on multiple surviving copies (the original is lost); see Muir and White, 3–22. Issues with the Life as a source are explored in the Introduction. 97 Cranmer combined the breviary services of Matins, Lauds and Prime into Morning Prayer; Vespers and Compline where combined to form Evensong/Evening Prayer, while Terce, Sext and None were simply discarded. Booty, BCP, 354. 175 Ferrars never showed a longing for the days of worshipping in Latin rather than the vernacular, or argued in favor of the celibate life over the married state, even though three Little Gidding residents (Nicholas and his nieces Mary and Anna Collett) were committed to lifelong celibacy. The additional offices, as we will explore below, were added in accordance with Cranmer’s aim of promoting “the continual course of the reading of the Scripture.”98 Other aspects of the Ferrars’ devotional lives are in alignment with Cranmer’s vision for the liturgical participation of English laypeople, if not in accordance with what became actual practice. Although daily recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer became a clerical obligation with the 1559 Prayer Book, and ministers were instructed to ring the church bell to call their parishioners to worship, it is unclear if lay participation in these weekday services became widespread. Walton’s mention of Herbert bringing “most of his Parishioners, “ both “Gentlemen” and “the meaner sort” to church at ten and four might be noteworthy because it was an exception to the rule (or an example of Walton’s myth-making).99 Cranmer also envisioned weekly communion as the ideal; the Ferrars in receiving monthly surpassed what was generally practiced in England at that time, which was reception at least three times a year, including once at Easter. As will become evident as we outline the Sunday and weekday devotional pattern 98 99 Booty, BCP Preface, 15. Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sire Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson, intro. by George Saintsbury (1927; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 302. On Walton’s reliability as a biographer, see David Novarr, The Making of Walton’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958) and Jessica Martin, Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemorations and the Rise of Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 176 of the Ferrars, the architecture of worship at Little Gidding suggests that the community was fully committed to Cranmer’s vision of Prayer Book worship in the vernacular, simplified from the breviary, centered on the reading of the Bible, and attended not by a class of religious elite but by ordinary men and women. However, they also felt that some elements of early church or monastic devotion should be restored to those laypeople who wished to take them on. Perhaps “restored” is not the right word here, as it implies a desire to return to what Eamon Duffy calls “traditional religion” as it existed before the English Reformation.100 The Ferrars re-visioned Cranmer, in a direction in which it was highly unlikely he ever would have gone himself had his thought not been cut off by martyrdom, and yet one which was impeccably faithful to his liturgical ideals. Cranmer translated, compressed, reformed, and adapted the medieval breviary into the Book of Common Prayer; the Ferrars, in their pattern of life and worship, extended and expanded Prayer Book worship so that it marked the hours of the day in much the same way as did the breviary, but in a stripped-down, Protestant liturgical style, where God and God’s Word were the only foci of devotion. They did this with an eye towards the early church and the spirituality of desert monasticism.101 For this reason, 100 See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 101 It is likely that the Ferrars possessed or had access to the large 1628 folio of Rosweyde’s Vitae Patrum; the Desert Fathers are the source of many of the stories in the Story Books. I am trying to determine if there is any direct influence of Basil or Benedict’s Rules on Little Gidding; it is extremely likely that Nicholas Ferrar knew them well. The writings of the early Christian ascetics were certainly influential on Nicholas; when, in the last years of his life, his friend and former tutor Augustine Lindsell questioned if his fasting and watching was too strict, he replied, “Nay, tutor, you are to answer to God for this. Why did you commend unto me and made me (being so young at college as I was) to read the lives of all the holy men of old time and saints of God, the good fathers of the church, and of those good men in our later times . . . Was it that I might only know the good things that they did?” (Muir and White, 100) 177 Nicholas Ferrar, while arranging and participating in hourly offices and night vigils, living a celibate life (and encouraging his two nieces to do so also), and functioning as the de facto abbot of a religious community,102 can also state, as he does to Lenton, that he believes the Pope to be the Antichrist, or, as he says to some “divines,” that if he found out that the Roman Catholic Mass had been said in his house, he would tear down the room where it had been said and build it up again.103 The description by their neighbors that Barnabas Oley and John Ferrar quote, of the family as “orthodox, regular, puritan Protestants,” is apt in so far as “puritan” denotes a desire for further reform of the church. For the Ferrars, this reform was not a “purification” in terms of church government (presbyterianism versus the episcopacy, for example), but reform on the level of the individual worshipper. In this way, the Ferrars have something in common with John Wesley a century later, a fellow Arminian who sought to add depth and feeling to the devotional life of the Church of England through frequent reading of scripture, hymnody, self-examination, and renewed engagement with the sacraments.104 IV. Sunday Worship By way of introduction to the description of worship at Little Gidding, John Ferrar notes, “And the loneliness of the place also gave them opportunity the more freely 102 See Riley, “The Good Old Way” Ch. 6, 169–185 on spiritualized relationships at Little Gidding; Nicholas was often called “father” by his nieces, and acted as spiritual director/confessor to several men and women, including his cousin Arthur Woodnoth. 103 104 Muir and White, 105. John Wesley’s father Samuel declared it admirable if “we had among us some places wherein those who were piously disposed might have the liberty for a time of a voluntary retirement, once practiced by Mr. Ferrar.” Quoted in Ransome, Web, 192. 178 and quietly to serve God for they were the whole parish in their own house.”105 Rural retirement had its privileges in terms of liturgical eccentricity or, to use Peter Lake’s phrase, “avant-garde conformity.”106 The rector of Little Gidding was non-resident, but the Ferrars had an arrangement with the minister of the neighboring village of Steeple Gidding that on Sundays, after Nicholas had read divine service, the minister and his small parish (most of them tenants to the lordship of Little Gidding) would walk over to Little Gidding for a sermon. In the afternoon the Ferrars would then travel to Steeple Gidding for another sermon; for which the family paid him. Communion was held on the first Sunday of the month as well as on Christmas, New Year’s Day, Easter, and Whitsunday, after Nicholas catechized the community on the previous afternoon.107 The Life of Nicholas Ferrar refers to “the Lord’s Day or Sunday,” indicating that the Ferrars were not offended by the pagan origins of the name as were many puritans.108 On Sundays, the family rose at five in the winter and four in the summer, had prayers in their private rooms, and then gathered in “a large great chamber fairly hung” to recite for Nicholas the psalms and Biblical chapters that they had memorized, and to receive the blessing of Mary Ferrar. Afterward they went back to their chambers to get ready for church, and, at the ringing of a bell at nine, gathered in the great room to sing a 105 Muir and White, 65. 106 See Peter Lake, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, edited by L. Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 107 Muir and White, 69, 74. 108 Ibid., 69. 179 hymn, which was followed by each person repeating a sentence of scripture. Then they “all went down to church in decent order, two by two,” first the two school masters and the boys in their gowns, then Nicholas Ferrar and his mother, John Ferrar and John Collet (husband of Susanna Ferrar Collet), then Susanna Collett, her daughters, and the servants.109 Notably absent from this procession is John Ferrar’s wife, Bathsheba, an unhappy and querulous resident of Little Gidding. Each made a “low obeisance” on coming into the church and took their places, the schoolmasters in the chancel and the boys kneeling on the steps that led to the chancel, and Mrs. Ferrar and her daughter and granddaughters “into the place appointed for the women” in the north aisle by the reading desk. Nicholas, in surplice and hood (“for so in it he always went to church,” in compliance with the canons) read Morning Prayer, and probably the Litany, from the reading desk, which was of the same height as the pulpit. The Life of Nicholas notes that “responses were made by all present.” The responses of the worshipping congregation were especially important in the English reformation; as Cranmer noted, “all the people, understanding what the priests say, might give their minds and voices with them, and say, ‘Amen,’ that is to say, allow what the priests say.”110 After returning home, the older nieces heard the psalms of the so-called “psalm children,” children from the village who, in exchange for memorizing psalms each week, were paid a penny per psalm and given dinner. At 10:30, the minister from Steeple Gidding and his parishioners would arrive and 109 110 Ibid., 70. Quoted in Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in early Modern England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), 47. 180 the family and psalm children would go back to church. Nicholas would read the “second service,” which on the first Sunday of the month was the order for Holy Communion and on other Sundays the Ante-Communion, a psalm would be sung, and the minister would preach. Having processed back to the house, the psalm children would be served their dinner of baked pudding and meat, which they would eat while standing at long tables set up on tressles in the great parlor. Meanwhile, the family would gather in the dining room to sing a hymn to the accompaniment of the organ, say grace, and have dinner. During the meal, one of the young people would read a chapter from the Bible “so that their ears and hearts might not want the best spiritual food.” After dinner, “all had liberty to depart where they pleased, some to walk in the garden, orchard, etc., and so to their closets and privacies.”111 The text notes that Nicholas, having made all accommodation for them (viz, his whole family’s worldly happiness), . . . fitted all his nieces with chambers and closets and other appurtenances, gardens and walks of pleasure and contentment, and so for all the rest of the family, each according to their degrees.112 The precise nature of individual prayers and devotions that might have been said in these “closets and privacies” are not specified, and it is unclear from the text if these spaces refer to “prayer closets” specifically. Richard Rambuss in Closet Devotions has analyzed what he describes as the prayer closet’s spatial “technology of the soul” in seventeenth century England, and describes the wealth of “prayer closet literature,” devotional treatises on private prayer.113 However, private prayer was not privileged over corporate 111 Ibid., 73. 112 Ibid., 82. 113 Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 167, n.10. 181 prayer at Little Gidding, and if anything was subordinate to it. “Chambers and closets” are mentioned in the same statement as gardens and “walks of pleasure.” People need places of privacy in the same way that they need recreation; both closets and garden walks provide some measure of respite from other family members in a large household. While it is clear from John Ferrar’s biography that Nicholas spent a significant amount of time each day in solitary prayer and study, congregational prayer was the community’s raison d’être. Despite the plethora of literature on the importance of solitary prayer (especially in the second half of the seventeenth century), which counseled, as Bishop Joseph Hall did, that “Solitariness of place is fittest for meditation,”114 there were still those, such as John Donne, who cautioned against placing too much emphasis on interior prayer. In a sermon, after noting how, praying privately, “I finde myself scattered, melted, fallen into vaine thoughts, into no thoughts,” he concludes, I beleeve in the Holy Ghost, but doe not finde him, if I seeke him onely in private prayer. But in Ecclesia, when I goe to meet him in the Church, when I seeke him where hee hath promised to bee found . . . instantly the savour of this Myrrhe is exalted, and multiplied to me; not a dew, but a shower is powred down on me.115 Nicholas Ferrar, in “The Printer to the Reader” in the first edition of The Temple, introduces George Herbert as one who “abounded in private devotions,” yet who also “went every morning and evening with his familie to the Church, and by his example, exhortations and encouragements” drew his parishioners to join with him in public 114 The Art of Divine Meditation, 1633, quoted in Rambuss, 105. 115 Donne, Sermons, 5:249–250, quoted in Rambuss, 115, 117. 182 worship.116 The same could certainly be said of Nicholas himself and his own family. At two o’clock on Sundays, the family walked to Steeple Gidding to hear the sermon there, and coming home, said psalms in the great room, “reciting all those psalms that day at one time which they said at the other days of the week at the set hours and times.” Then they had leisure time until supper, at five in summer and six in winter, singing a hymn in the parlor beforehand, and hearing a story from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments read during the meal (a rather gory accompaniment to dining). After supper they had more leisure time, to go out in the summer or sit by the fire in winter, or to go back to their rooms with candles; Nicholas Ferrar, his mother, and the older people finding “some good discourse or other to pass the time with.”117 At eight, a bell summoned them to the great room, and they sang another hymn and had prayers (again, the contents of which are not specified). Then the whole family asked Mary Ferrar’s blessing, and the children went to bed, while the elders were in their “chambers or closets” until they too retired to bed, for “it was an order that none must after prayers go up and down but keep in their chambers.”118 This “order” sounds like a domestic version of the monastic Greater Silence. After describing the order of the day’s worship and recreation, a description of Nicholas’ special concern is added, “that all in his family, high and low, children and servants, should have no occasion to be absent from church and as much freedom that 116 Hutchinson, 4. 117 Muir and White, 74. 118 Ibid., 70–71, 74. 183 day from bodily employment as might be.” To this end, meals were to be prepared in such a way that all the servants were able to attend church. Also noted is the fact that on Communion Sundays, the servants dined at the same table as the family, although standing instead of sitting, as Lenton had recorded.119 The Ferrars’ Sunday in Context: Sabbatarianism and Anti-Sabbatarianism As with nearly every other aspect of religious observance in this period, proper Sabbath-keeping was a subject of contentious debate. Kenneth L. Parker notes that ecclesiastical historians, “in attempting to make sense of religious attitudes in the postReformation period, have used sabbatarianism as a litmus test of ‘puritan’ and ‘Anglican’ leanings.”120 John Ferrar records a brief homily by Nicholas that clarifies his brother’s theology of the Sabbath. Parker and John H. Primus, the two primary historians of Tudor and Stuart English Sabbath observance, agree that, prior to the rise of Puritanism and the development of what was labeled derisively by conformists as sabbatarianism, England had a long history of “high Sabbath views” from the time of Elizabeth’s reign and perhaps even earlier during the reign of Edward VI.121 Puritan sabbatarianism grew out of what was widely accepted as Protestant orthodoxy, and was not a whole-cloth innovation, as the later Laudian writers Peter Helwyn (A History of the Sabbath, 1636) and John 119 Muir and White, 74. 120 Kenneth L. Parker, The English Sabbath: A Study of Doctrine and Discipline from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2. 121 Primus, Holy Time, 17. 184 Pocklington (Sunday No Sabbath, 1635), among others, would argue in their polemical treatises. However, while not an innovation, sabbatarianism, as it came to be defined beginning in the 1580s and 1590s, did emphasize several distinctive theological points, which, while traceable to earlier sources of theology such as “On the Place and Time of Prayer” from the Book of Homilies, were now presented in much sharper focus, and with broader implications for the authority both of the crown and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.122 Primus ties the rise of sabbatarianism to the suppression of Presbyterianism.123 According to the English Reformation scholar Richard Greaves, sabbatarianism had three components: the moral nature of the fourth commandment (that it is a perpetual moral law originating with Creation); Sunday absolutism (recognition of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath by divine and apostolic appointment, and not ecclesiastical tradition); and strict Sabbath observance (“the entire day had to be set aside for the public and private exercise of religion, with no time devoted to labor, idleness, or recreation”).124 Primus notes ironically that in many sabbatarian treatises, “the vision for a proper Sabbath involves almost ceaseless activity.”125 122 This is where Primus is a corrective to Parker; Primus feels that in Parker’s revisionist zeal to rescue the account of English Sabbath observance from distorting Laudians, he glosses over what was indeed distinctive about English sabbatarianism; see Primus, 3–4. 123 Primus, 3. 124 Quoted in Primus, 11. 125 Ibid., 63. 185 All parties—those with traditional “high” views of Sabbath observance, the sabbatarians, and the Laudian anti-sabbatarians—agreed that for all Christendom Sunday should be observed as a day of worship and rest from labor. Under contention was why the Sabbath should be observed, and how strictly. Was Sunday the Christian Sabbath by divine command, the day of Christ’s resurrection having displaced Saturday, the Jewish day of rest as set down in the Fourth Commandment? Or was Sunday the day chosen by Constantine and the Fathers of the Church, as a convenient time for the Christian assembly to fulfill its obligations to worship? In other words, what sanctified Sunday: God’s mandate in the Decalogue, or that of an imperial authority acting in accord with divine will? If the mandate was God’s alone, then, by extension, Church and Crown had no right to designate other feasts and holy days. As for how strictly the Sabbath should be observed, the question hinged on whether or not, after the evening service was concluded in the afternoon, certain recreations were permitted on Sunday. What constituted proper Sabbath rest? Was it a cessation of labor in order to engage more fully in religious exercises for the entire day, or was this cessation of labor also to act as a release valve for servants and the laboring classes, who had no leisure during the working week? These were the points of contention, broadly framed. Nicholas Ferrar, as we shall see, recognized more in common with the “precise people” on the theology of the Sabbath than with the Laudians who severely critiqued them. The “Homily of the Place and Time of Prayer,” possibly written by John Jewel, is an important source of a traditional English theology of the Sabbath. According to the homily, the fourth commandment perpetually binds Christians to keep one day a week for 186 rest from physical labor and for worship. The shift from the seventh day to the first day of the week appears to be framed as “an ecclesiastical tradition with biblical roots,” a response of the godly to God’s commandments.126 Because the homily acknowledges both the binding nature of the fourth commandment and ecclesiastical tradition in designating Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, both sabbatarians and anti-sabbatarians later appealed to it. The homily also describes in hyperbolic detail ongoing concern about Sabbath-breaking. After listing the activities of those who continue to ply their trade on Sundays, there are also those whose version of Sabbath rest is found wanting: [T]hey rest in ungodliness and in filthiness, prancing in their pride, pranking and pricking, pointing and painting themselves, to be gorgeous and gay; they rest in excess and superfluity, in gluttony and drunkenness, like rats and swine; they rest in wantonness, in toyish taling, in filthy fleshliness; so that it doth too evidently appear that God is more dishonoured and the devil better served on the Sunday than upon all the days in the week beside.127 The homily also refers to the warning about God’s capital punishment of Sabbathbreakers found in Numbers 15. Lancelot Andrewes in his catechetical lectures at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in the late 1570s stresses the uniqueness of the fourth commandment above all others, notes that the commandment originated before the Decalogue with God’s own pattern of work and rest, and calls a Sabbath spent attending plays, dancing, hunting, or at cards or dice “the Sabbath of the golden calf.”128 Duties to be carried out on the Sabbath include 126 Ibid., 27. 127 Quoted in Primus, 27–28. 128 Primus, 56. These lectures were collected in A Patterne of Catechisticall Doctrine, first published in 1630, with the 1650 edition reprinted in the Anglo-Catholic Library (Oxford: Parker, 1846). 187 prayer, public worship, meditation, conversation or “conference,” thanksgiving, and works of mercy. Andrewes’ Sabbath theology, which has many points of sympathy with sabbatarianism, is a reminder “that party lines may not be forced upon this period of English Reformation history,” and that “Puritanism and Sabbatarianism were hardly exceptions to the rule at this time.”129 Though in May of 1604, James I had issued a proclamation against the neglect of the Sabbath, viewed as a conciliatory gesture to puritans in the wake of their disappointment at the Hampton Court Conference, his Book of Sports, issued in May of 1618, was a stinging rebuke to them. Desiring to reprimand certain “Puritans and precise people” who prevented his subjects from engaging in lawful recreations on Sunday afternoon, he proclaimed that limiting Sabbath recreation would prove a stumbling block in converting recusant Catholics to Protestantism; would prevent common people from exercises that would make them fit soldiers, should the need arise; and would take away from servants their one opportunity for leisure. When, the king asked, “shall the common people have leave to exercise, if not upon the Sundays and holy days, seeing they must apply their labour, and win their living in all working days?” “Puritans and Precisians” must either conform themselves, or leave the country.130 Recreations that were encouraged on Sunday afternoon included piping, dancing, archery, vaulting, and 129 130 Primus, 57–59. Ibid., 96–97. For background to the issue of the Book of Sports and a fuller description of the reaction to it, see Parker, 149–160. Parker makes an interesting case for the Book of Sports having both sabbatarian and anti-sabbatarian elements. 188 rushbearing;131 this declaration overturned his instructions from May 1604, which had prohibited Sunday piping and dancing.132 Sabbatarians reacted to the Book of Sports with “stunned silence,” and its release was widely viewed as politically unwise.133 Its reissue by Charles I and Archbishop Laud in 1633 was even more unpopular. Ministers were, at both issuings, commanded to read the Book of Sports from the pulpit; many refused and were suspended. George Garrard, writing to Thomas Wentworth on 6 December 1633, described the controversy about the reissuing, “though it be the same verbatum that was published in King James’s Time.” He notes that One Dr. Denison . . . read it, and presently after read the Ten Commandments, then said, “Dearly Beloved, you have heard now the Commandments of God and Man, obey which you please.”134 The reissue of the Book of Sports was perhaps more polarizing than its first appearance due to the organization of an anti-Sabbatarian campaign in the early 1630s. This was launched 131 Rushbearing: an annual ceremony where garlands or rushes were carried to the church to be strewn on the floor and decorate the walls. Herbert refers to it in The Country Parson—the church should be “strawed” at great festivals, “and stuck with boughs, and perfumed with incense” (Hutchinson, 246)—and in the poem “Easter”: I got me flowers to straw thy way; I got me boughs off many a tree: But thou wast up by break of day, And brought thy sweets along with thee. (Hutchinson, 42) 132 Parker, 152–153. 133 Primus, 97. 134 Quoted in Parker, 195. 189 by a small group of Laudians, who claimed that Sunday observance was a human convention, and that its use was defined and regulated by the Church authorities. While their intention was to emphasize episcopal authority and defend Archbishop Laud’s role in reissuing the Declaration of Sports in 1633, their anti-sabbatarian assertions remained a minority view, even among Laudians.135 Though anti-Sabbatarianism may have been a minority movement within a minority movement (as most of the English church at this time, like Edward Lenton, was of a moderate Calvinist disposition), in the 1630s it was in the ascendancy, with the full backing of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Laudian polemicists such as Helwyn, Pocklington and others argued that the fourth commandment was not morally binding on Christians but part of Jewish law, from which Christians had been freed by the gospel; that Sunday was set apart for worship not because of divine command but due to ecclesiastical tradition; and that, therefore, strict Sabbath observance (meaning, the forbidding of recreation in the afternoon after divine service) was over-scrupulous and punative. While James in 1618 had been concerned that his subjects not be deprived of lawful recreation because of “precise people,” the anti-sabbatarians of the 1630s were convinced that this “precision” regarding the Lord’s Day was not a movement to increase devotion or decrease profanation, but a thinly-concealed plot to undermine the government and episcopal hierarchy. Behind the two movements, Parker sees two different visions of the English church: in support of the reformed tradition with its emphasis on scripture as the ultimate authority; and in defence of a “catholic” vision, with Church 135 Parker, 6. 190 authorities recognized as interpreters and arbitrators of doctrine and discipline.136 He views the anti-Sabbatarian Laudian minority as having “resorted to fraudulent means, distorting the doctrinal tradition of the English Church,”137 whose bishops and people from the time of the English Reformation supported, on the whole, a fairly strict observance of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath, and recognized this observance as scriptural. It is this religious landscape, where questions of Sabbath observance extend beyond the realm of personal piety and become questions of the scope and reach of political and ecclesiastical authority, to which Nicholas Ferrar responds in a homiletic statement copied into John’s biographical materials. He begins with a standard statement of the sanctity of the Sabbath: And for the Sunday’s employment thus Nicholas Ferrar expressed himself in brief: the Sabbath is a day of rest not of pleasure; it frees us from bodily labours but should the more intend the exercises of the mind. He blessed the day and he sanctified it: they must go both together. If we would have it happy we must make it holy.138 From this rather general opening statement on personal sanctity and discipline, Nicholas then addresses the sabbatarian controversy through biblical exegesis: The lending ear to evil counsel was the beginning of Eve’s overthrow; let every man therefore fly from it as from a serpent and indeed it is the selfsame serpent that still directs all wicked counsels; though they flatter and pretend our good and seem to show good reason yet if they do never so little entrench [encroach] either on God’s truth touching his reward and 136 Parker, 7. 137 Ibid. 138 Muir and White, 74. 191 punishment, or on the preciseness of our obedience to his commands, let us be assured that it is the old serpent that speaks through their tongues.139 In the context of a discussion of proper Sabbath observance, the above appears to be a biblically-veiled rebuke to the anti-sabbatarians. God’s commandment to Adam and Eve, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, though shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die,” is plain, direct, and unambiguous, much like the fourth commandment of the Decalogue: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”140 As with God’s commandment about the tree, the punishment in the Old Testament for Sabbath-breaking was death, as puritan authors were quick to point out.141 The serpent took a straightforward commandment and, through subtle argument, convinced the Eve the naïf that God did not really mean what he had said: that, in fact, that the opposite was true; eating the fruit of the tree would become a source of life and not death. Let us not therefore esteem counsels from the wisdom or seeming good will of the giver but from the rule of God’s word; for howsoever the beginning may be pleasant the end will be misery.142 Those who advise this improper and unbiblical Sabbath theology appear wise and of good will, though the result of their counsel parallels Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25, “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” The 139 Muir and White, 75. 140 Gen. 2:17; Ex. 20:6–11, elsewhere. 141 Numbers 15:32–36. Though, of course, the Pharisees accused Jesus of Sabbath-breaking on multiple occasions. 142 Muir and White, 75. 192 biggest strike against the anti-sabbatarian view of Sunday worship and the roots of that worship is that it contradicts scripture. Nicholas’ homily is pointed but does not take a polemical or hyperbolic tone; perhaps this implies that the Sabbath theology that he rejects is one that has found acceptance among some members of the Ferrars’ social circle. John’s life of his brother makes an interesting comment about his relationship with the unambiguously Laudian Augustine Lindsell: It is true he [Nicholas] loved and honoured his tutor exceedingly and bore great reverence to him, yet it was well known that he never heard his tutor say or do amiss at any time, but he would, before they parted, in some sweet good way let him know his mind, which was commonly in way of story. And he would beg of his tutor and friends to tell him also in what he did amiss at any time.143 What kinds of things Lindsell was saying or doing amiss is not specified, but this is a clear statement that Nicholas did not always agree with Lindsell, and that this was “well known,” at least in their circle; the status of the Sabbath seems like a good candidate for one difference of opinion among them. Nicholas, a great lover of stories and a great despiser of theological conflict, chooses to address disagreement indirectly through narrative, but address it he does.144 (That Nicholas himself was as open to criticism as John suggests is most definitely not borne out by the family’s correspondence.) Nicholas’ use of the word “precise” is an interesting feature of this homily. The “wicked counsels” he is exposing encroach “on the preciseness of our obedience to his commands,” namely, exactly how Christians are to keep the Sabbath holy. 143 Muir and White, 100. 144 See Chapter 5, “Storying at Little Gidding.” 193 “Precise/preciseness” in this period was a loaded term, implying fastidiousness, scrupulousness, rigidity or “puritanical propriety”; it was often used as a derogatory reference to Puritans (such as James I railing against “precise people” in the Book of Sports, above; “precisionists” was another term for puritans). However, Nicholas’ use of “preciseness” does not seem to have this negative shading, but instead refers to exactness and accuracy.145 Nicholas himself was nothing if not precise in his religiosity; the positive connotations in his use of this term in a period when it was widely employed as a slur against puritans would seem to further distance him from Laudian anti-sabbatarians (some of whom, as mentioned, were his friends), and place him firmly among those who held the traditional high view of the Sabbath. Nicholas concludes his meditation with a brief commentary on the Cain and Abel story from Gen. 4, focusing on the acceptance of Abel’s gift but the rejection of Cain’s. Nicholas follows the reasoning of 1 John 12 that Abel’s deeds were righteous while Cain’s were evil, and that this was the reason for the contrary response of God to their offerings. And it seems that the commendations of Abel’s present, that was of the first and of the fattest, doth insinuate Cain’s want of care of frame of mind to bestow of the best to God; he that gave all deserved the choice of all . . . Abel’s example instructs us that whatever we make tender of to God should be of the very principle in its own kind; and Cain’s miscarriage teaches us that the performance of outward duties (however pious they may seem) can procure no favour with God if we bring either unsanctified lives or insincere hearts thereunto.146 145 See the Oxford English Dictionary Online, “precise, adv. and adj.,” and “preciseness, n.,” accessed July 28, 2012. 146 Muir and White, 75. 194 In Nicholas’ reading, the moral of the story shifts from the proper material of physical sacrifice (meat vs. grain), to an emphasis on the spiritual state of the worshipper. In a move akin to George Herbert’s poem “The Altar,” sacrifice here has been spiritualized. Abel’s offering is correct because it is of “its own kind,” i.e., Abel, as a man, was flesh, and he offered flesh. Now that the sacrifice is a Eucharistic sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, we offer, in the language of the Prayer Book, “ourselves, our souls and bodies,”147 or, to use Herbert’s image found in the emblem tradition, we make altars of our own hearts. Cain’s “miscarriage,” according to Nicholas, resulted from his attempt to substitute something of a different kind for what should have been a self-offering. This is why the “performance of outward duties” alone will never please God. Both Puritans and Laudians, and, indeed, every variation of early modern Christian, would agree on the importance of offering worship with sincere hearts. The disagreement lies in how one arrives at that state of sincerity and spiritual preparedness, or, put another way, on the relationship between soul and body. For reformers and separatist puritans, external ceremonies can only direct attention away from the inward spiritual climate; moreover, it is too easy to “go through the motions” of devotion without any genuine feeling. This is why to William Prynne, Laud’s many bowings are ridiculous, futile, and demonstrate nothing about his faith; anyone could make a series of “geniculations” and feel his or her religious duties had been performed; the same holds true for prayers read from the Prayer Book. For Nicholas Ferrar, however, while it is true that “performance of outward 147 Booty, BCP, 264. 195 duties” in themselves “can procure no favour with God,” these outward duties, when combined with a sincere heart, i.e., the desire to worship sincerely combined with the previous confession of sin, become part of the soul’s preparation for worship and enable it to worship more fully. For their part, the Laudians could cite the many passages in the Bible about the embodied nature of worship—bending the knee, lifting hands, bowing— as the ancient Israelites had no notion of “disembodied” or purely intellectual worship (hence Laudian emphasis on the church as Temple). For separatist puritans, worshipping “in spirit and in truth” dispensed with all the externals of Old Testament Temple worship and sacrifice (the contemporary manifestation of these things being the Roman Catholic mass, with which the Book of Common Prayer was too intimately connected to be redeemed); worship and sacrifice were now internalized through the emotions and affections. Laudians and ceremonialists claimed this internalization as well, but they were unwilling to divorce the soul from the body, for “sacramental” reasons: outward actions are both an expression of one’s inward religious climate, but they also help the Christian to fulfill his or her intentions of sincerity of heart towards God. The question returns, as it so often does in this period, to the debate between the efficacy of the sacraments and free will (the Christian’s ability to contribute to the preparation of the heart for worship by engaging in certain practices) versus the notion of the elect who, according solely to the will of God and not any agency on the part of the individual Christian, are either imbued with God’s grace directly, or are not. For Nicholas Ferrar, as for puritans and others who held a “traditional” view of the Sabbath, the Bible alone is the source of Sabbath theology. Interestingly, the two 196 passages Nicholas cites are not the usual ones in Genesis used to support traditional Sabbath observance (namely, the Creation account and the giving of the Ten Commandments). Instead, Nicholas highlights two passages that, in the biblical narrative, occur before the giving of the Law. (Anti-Sabbatarians argued that the Israelites did not observe the Sabbath before the Exodus.) The temptation of Eve is used to describe the plainness of God’s commands, and the danger of theological subtlety and specious reasoning. The second becomes an exemplum not of proper sacrifice per se, but of what constitutes the core of proper worship. This brief homily, which reads as overwhelmingly Protestant in its emphasis on the Bible as the source of authority and the importance of the heart over the “performance of outward duties,” is the more striking when compared with Lenton’s description of worship at Little Gidding, with its orderly processions, bowing, candles, and scrupulous following of Prayer Book rubrics. What Lenton’s description leaves out (because he himself did not witness it directly, as he only observed their church worship), is the community’s complete devotion to the Bible, which, as in the first centuries of the church, was ritualized. For the Ferrars, the reading and recitation of scripture became a sacramental act, one that, as with the other sacraments (whether two or seven), takes place primarily in community. V. Weekday Worship: Praying the Hours Joshua Mapletoft, who married Nicholas’ niece Susanna Collett, called “devout psalmody” one of “the particular tessara of our family.”148 At six on weekdays, all would 148 Quoted in Ransome, Web, 66. 197 gather in the great room again, and the first “company” began reciting the psalms for that hour, “for each hour of the day had certain psalms to be said, and one of them repeated one of the heads of the concordance of the four evangelists without book.”149 Each of the one hundred and fifty chapters of the Gospel Harmony would be recited in a month, for twelve repetitions of the Harmony a year. Following the psalms and gospel chapter, the family would sing “a hymn of morning praise” accompanied by the organ. Then each came to the little table that stood in the midst of the room (at which stood a great chair) upon which table lay the Holy Bible and a Common Prayer Book. There, each standing at the back of the chair, said some one sentence of the scripture, such as they thought good at that time, everyone having a new sentence to say.150 Next, as on Sunday, they processed to the church, where Nicholas officiated from the reading desk. All returning home, at seven o’clock the second company “went to the great large compass-window at upper end of the room, which window looked upon the church which stood at the end of the garden,” said the psalms and the gospel chapter from memory, and then sang a short hymn, a paraphrase of the Gloria, which is quoted: Thus angels sang, and so sing we, To God on high all glory be, Let him on earth his peace bestow And unto men his favour show.151 Then the children and youths with the schoolmasters went down to breakfast, and then to their schoolhouse. This had formerly been a dove-cote, having been, as the text says, “dispigeoned.” It was open to children from neighboring towns as well “upon their 149 Muir and White, 76. 150 Ibid., 81. 151 Ibid. 198 parents’ request . . . where they not only learned letters but piety.”152 The 1630s saw an increase in concern that churches not be used for the activities of secular life, including being “prophaned with school keeping.” Laud inserted a clause into his visitation articles of 1634 inquiring if schools were held in any part of the church; complaints survive of students sitting around the communion table for instruction.153 With their high view of sacred space, the Ferrars clearly never considered holding school in the church as an option. Eight, nine and ten in the morning continued with a different company saying their office, and with the family engaged in various activities according to their station, Mary Ferrar in the parlor in her chair, the children too young to go to school sitting “in great silence” (!) at their books or “otherwise,” the women doing needlework, constructing the Harmonies, singing or playing on instruments, writing, etc., “and so never idle.”154 At ten they went to church to say the litany, and had dinner at eleven. Dinner (and supper, which took place in the same way) was preceded by the singing of a hymn, and was eaten while listening to a reading from a book, but unlike on Sundays, the reading was not from the Bible but from “either some chronicles of nations, journeys by land, sea voyages, and the like.” John Ferrar notes the reason for this custom for the benefit of the Historian: the community agreed that as silence at meals is “unpleasant,” and common conversation 152 Ibid., 82. 153 Fincham and Tyacke, 239. 154 Muir and White, 83. 199 “for the most part very unprofitable,” so a solution was found in the meal-time reading of books which could be considered lighter, but still profitable, fare.155 These readings were the task of the two younger girls and the four boys, who would also learn to read eloquently through this practice.156 And by this means it so came to pass that, though they seemed to live privately and had not much commerce with people, yet they were well acquainted with the former and latter passages of the world and what was done in it at home and abroad, and had gained knowledge of many actions of note and passages of consequence, and the manners of other countries and nations, and affairs of their own country.157 Little Gidding was a pedagogical community. Its members were removed from the wider world, but it was not Nicholas Ferrar’s aim to entirely shut the world out. In any case, this would have been impractical, as the boys were being educated for trades or professions, and the girls and young women were being trained to manage households as wives. The afternoon continued much like the morning, with leisure until one p.m., when the boys returned to school and one of the companies resumed the hourly office. At four the family processed to church for Evening Prayer, and at five the bell rang for supper. After supper there was leisure until eight o’clock, when the day ended with prayers as it had on Sunday. The Ferrars were not the only ones in the early Stuart church who were interested 155 This is an ancient custom carried over to the Christian Fathers: Jerome says that Origen always had an edifying text read during meals, and the 38th chapter of the Benedictine Rule prescribes such reading. Listening to reading during meals was a custom of Erasmus, John Colet and Thomas More as well; the guests in Erasmus’ colloquy “The Godly Feast” listen to a short scripture passage during part of their meal and then discuss it. See Craig R. Thompson, tr. The Collected Works of Erasmus vol. 39, Colloquies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 183 and 214 n.105. 156 Muir and White, 84. 157 Ibid. 200 in recovering the practice of praying the hours. Two influential English devotional classics from this period, Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces Privitae158 and John Cosin’s Collection of Private Devotions (1627) were both manuals of hourly prayer. The Ferrars very likely knew John Cosin; he and Laud presented the King’s Harmony to Charles I in 1636, and Cosin was also a member of the Durham House group, along with Augustine Lindsell. The Arminian Nunnery accuses “this Fryer like Familie” of taking some of the “promiscuous private Prayers” from “John Cozens his Cozening Devotions,” though there is no evidence of this.159 However, it would be surprising if the Ferrars did not possess a copy after its publication, as they certainly fit into its target audience. The Devotions were compiled at the request of Charles I via Laud in response to the accusation by the Catholic women in Queen Henrietta Maria’s circle that English Protestants were not personally devout, as they had no breviaries. The Primer had been a very important part of English devotional life from the Middle Ages through the early Reformation; indeed during this period, it was the book that oaths were sworn on. Several English versions were authorized by Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, and used to clarify the Crown’s ever-shifting theological positions. Elizabeth’s first primer was issued in 1559, and a Latin version known as the Orarium followed in 1560. This, and another primer authorized by Elizabeth in 1564, the Preces Privitae (not to be confused with Andrewes’), were models for Cosin. With the rise of the use of the Book 158 Published unattributed and in a heavily redacted form in 1630 and then in an edition closer to one of the original manuscripts in 1648; F.E. Brightman, ed. and trans., The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes (New York: Meridian, 1961), xxxii–xxxiii. Andrewes died in 1626. 159 Arminian Nunnery, 9. “Cozening,” i.e., “cheating, deceitful, fraudulent,” OED Online, accessed July 28, 2012. 201 of Common Prayer, the Primer’s popularity waned after 1564. Elizabethan and Jacobean private devotions became less liturgical and more informal, as evidenced by the numerous editions of books like Thomas Becon’s The Pomander of Prayer (1558) and Lewis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety (1612, which John Bunyan credits with beginning his conversion), which focused on prayers for the ordinary circumstances of everyday life. Cosin’s Devotions “represents a Caroline revival, the classical Anglican version of the Primer and the canonical hours of prayer.”160 The Devotions were admired in a relatively small circle, but stirred much controversy: two pamphlets, one by William Prynne, were published against it in 1628, complaining about the use of the IHS motif on the title page, the use of canonical hours, the inclusion of prayers for the dead and references to angels, and the number of sacraments.161 P.G. Stanwood describes the Devotions as the fullest Anglican version of the hours in Caroline times . . . Cosin’s particular achievement lies in providing a series of private devotions which are linked to the medieval offices and are alternative (in certain circumstances prescribed in the Preface) to the public prayers of the Church which derive from the same medieval sources . . . The Devotions thus provides and integral and homogeneous private complement to the common prayer of the Church.162 After the Restoration, Cosin would exert considerable influence over the revision of the Prayer Book. The Ferrars would certainly have appreciated the compilation of biblical and 160 John Cosin, A Collection of Private Devotions (1627), edited by P.G. Stanwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), xxv–xxvii. 161 Cosin, xxxvi. 162 Ibid., xxxiii. 202 patristic testimony of prayer that preceded each of the offices in the Devotions. Their own brief offices, however, differed from Cosin’s. Cosin had in mind a private complement to common prayer, especially for those whom “earnest lets and impediments” hindered from attending public worship.163 The Ferrars, of course, were not hindered from attending public worship, since the church was steps away from their house, and their whole day was organized around it. Their offices were said by a small “company” instead of privately. While in one sense these offices were private, as Lenton describes them, “particular prayers for a private family,”164 the purpose of these gatherings seems to have been to recite a certain portion of the Psalter and the Gospels (in their harmonized form). Completeness was important; the entire Psalter was to be said daily, and the Gospel Harmony said through in a month. There is no evidence that the Ferrars had any interest in medieval liturgy, or used any of the authorized Primers or the Breviary (except what portions had been adopted into the Book of Common Prayer).165 Aside from the recitation of the Psalms and the portion of the Harmony, the only other recorded detail of the offices is that they included a hymn (hymns are also included in the Devotions). We hear nothing in John Ferrar’s description of the “house offices” at Little Gidding about versicles, antiphons, canticles, collects or other aspects of Prayer Book worship. These 163 Ibid., 14. 164 Muir and White, 129. 165 The vast majority of the stories told by the members of the Little Academy and recorded in the Story Books are either Patristic or from more contemporary European history; with the exception of a few stories from Bede, the middle ages are not well represented. For a good summary of the sources of the stories in the Storybooks, see Pamela Tudor-Craig, “Charles I and Little Gidding,” in For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, edited by Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig (London: Collins, 1986), 179–181. 203 offices consist, as far as is known, almost entirely in the recitation of Scripture, and Scripture “straight up,” not woven into various traditional liturgical materials as in the Devotions (or as in the Prayer Book, for that matter). While these certainly could have been used (though not attested), the Bible was front and center. Unlike Cosin, the Ferrars did not seem to have a concern for “All the Ancient Formes of Piety and Devotion . . . all the Religious Exercises and Prayers of our Forefathers . . . all the old Ceremonies,” or with proving that the English Church had not abandoned them.166 Their primary models predated these “old” ceremonial materials. Though in theory the Ferrars could have encountered Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces Privitae in manuscript, as several copies in fact circulated among Andrewes’ friends, they were probably not familiar with it until its publication, which did not occur under Andrewes’ own name until 1647.167 This is unfortunate, as it would have been very interesting to know how they might have made use of it. Andrewes, like the Ferrars, was interested in biblical compilation and completeness. Though Andrewes circulated the Preces in several manuscript copies, he was the sole intended user, and his prayer book contains autobiographical details. The liturgical scholar F.E. Brightman’s translation from the original Greek, Latin and Hebrew preserves the line breaks and indentations of the prayers as they appear in the manuscript, rather than reordering them into paragraphs as in many editions. Brightman comments that in form and matter, Andrewes’ prayers are 166 Cosin, 13. 167 For details of the Preces’ complicated publication history, see Brightman, xxx–xxxv. 204 more like hymns, achieving a poetic effect with hardly any original lines.168 Take, for example, this portion of the prayer from the section on the Holy Mysteries, to be prayed during the offertory in preparation for receiving communion: Unto us a token of that fellowship, a memorial of the dispensation, a showing forth of the death, a communion of body and blood, a participation of the Spirit, remission of sins, a riddance of adversaries, quieting of conscience, blotting out of debts, cleansing of stains, healing of the sickness of the soul, renewal of the covenant, provision for the journey of ghostly life, increase of enabling grace winning comfort compunction of repentance, illumination of mind, a preparatory exercise of humility, a seal of faith, fullness of wisdome, a bond of charity, a sufficient ground of almsgiving, an armour of endurance, alertness for thanksgiving, confidence of prayer, mutual indwelling, a pledge of resurrection, acceptable defence in judgement, a testament of inheritance, a stamp of perfectness.169 Each of these phrases are either biblical, from the Liturgy of St. Basil, or from the Greek Horologion. Though this text is for use in a liturgical context (Holy Communion), it is 168 Brightman, lx. 169 Ibid., 122–123. 205 not so much a prayer as a sort of lectio divina exercise, phrases to be meditated upon slowly. The accrual of biblical and liturgical images forms the substance of the prayer, and one would not necessarily meditate on all the images in one sitting. The Preces point the way to a devotional concordance to the Bible; Andrewes develops whole subjects and turns them round, as it were, and observes them on all sides by collecting and arranging the allusions contained in the Holy Scriptures. 170 Andrewes’ precision in redacting biblical and patristic sources, and his skill in compiling texts grouped around a common theme in order to meditate on it from every angle, would surely have impressed the Ferrars, who devised elaborate interpretive schema for their Harmonies, and also told story after story on a given virtue in their dialogues. But above all, the central place of Scripture in the Preces, indeed, a form of prayer consisting almost entirely of Scripture, in the Preces would have resonated at Little Gidding. Of course, the Book of Common Prayer itself rests solidly on the Bible and scriptural language. However, there is a biblical bareness to Andrewes’ devotions, and a sense, amid his many lists (thankful, intercessory and especially penitential) of the search for liturgical origins, in language as well as in source, that characterizes his project and also the form of daily worship at Little Gidding. The Ferrars, like Andrewes, wanted to sacramentalize the Word. VI. Night Watches After giving an account of daytime worship at Little Gidding, John Ferrar turns to the family’s night time devotions, and anticipates the controversy of these practices. 170 Ibid., liv. 206 And some say it were a happiness if men and women were not to be found in the world that often turn nights into days and days into nights by many disorders in both committed too frequently. And therefore it is hoped that all those people have no great cause to be offended at others that do not sleep nights, but borrow part of them to a better use than they; they sure cannot be scandalized at a night’s watching, but will freely give, as all reason is, others their liberties in that kind of setting up some few hours about what pleaseth themselves, as they do for their pleasures and satisfactions, and that some few hours of the night spent from sleep in the saying of David’s Psalms and some other meditations of prayer, praises, and thanksgiving to God, to whom we owe all we have and by him live, move, and have our present being and the hope of everlasting well-being. And masking, dancing, carding, dicing etc. are something more blameable, if duly considered and weighed even in the balance of reason.171 The Ferrars’ practice of, as Lenton put it, “too much watching and praying all night” had apparently become the subject of rumor, with the implication that this kind prayer is a Roman Catholic, and not a reformed Protestant, practice. The suggestion of the night watches (the Ferrars do not use the term “vigil”) as “disordered” clearly rankles John. That rising to pray would seem scandalous, while staying up late for “masking, dancing, carding, dicing” is perfectly acceptable, is a sign to the Ferrars of the disorder of their times, and not of their practice. The Little Academy has plenty to say against these amusements; one of the Ferrars’ challenges as a gentry family in retirement was to find appropriately pious substitutes for the many entertainments and customs that they had jettisoned as unedifying. The suggestion that the night watches are disordered is also upsetting to John because, for the Ferrars, this devotional practice is the crown of their piety, and the primary example of the orderliness of their life and their commitment to religious discipline. Whether or not Little Gidding had a formal regula or rule of life, 171 Muir and White, 91. 207 they were certainly “regular” in their pattern of worship.172 Rising at night to pray is an example of piety that is above and beyond the normal requirements of devotion, and also a mark of the extent of their discipline that they are able to resist the draw of sleep in order to worship. Thomas á Kempis in The Imitation of Christ uses the example of the vigils of cloistered orders in this way to critique the lax discipline of the Augustinian novices to whom he is writing: They spend a great deal of time in prayer and in reading, but in all things, these religious always keep themselves under discipline. Think of the Carthusians, the Cistercians, and the monks and religious of the different religious orders who rise in the night to sing the Lord’s praises. Shame on you for growing lazy in so holy an exercise, choosing to remain in bed while other religious are rising to praise God!173 But there is a Protestant interpretation of the night watches as well. First, as a kind of time-thrift: the Ferrars “borrow” some of this fallow, empty time of sleep to make it pay religious dividends. John Ferrar also emphasizes the individual choice involved: surely the critics of this practice will not begrudge “others their liberties in that kind of setting up some few hours about what pleaseth themselves.” John relates that Nicholas was clear that participation in the night watches was voluntary: “for none should be enforced or the less well thought of that did not only like of it or would not be ready to take a part in 172 John Hacket, in his 1693 “memorial” to Bishop Williams, writes that the bishop, on his visit to Little Gidding, read “their Rules which they had drawn up for Fasts, and Vigils, and large Distributions of Alms” and that the community had been known to him “from the time that they sealed a Charter among themselves, as it were, to be constant and regular in their Spiritual Discipline”; John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: a memorial offer’d to the great deservings of John Williams, D.D. . . . (London, 1693), 52, 51. No such charter or rule of life is extant. 173 Thomas á Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, ed. and trans. by Joseph N. Tylenda, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 42. 208 it.”174 At the same time, then, the practice of night watches suggests both Roman Catholic communal piety, and Protestant individualism and industry. It is “counter-cultural,” to the point that it attracts both positive and negative attention from those around them. It is also the practice that exemplifies their dedication to the precise (again, with faint echoes of “precisionist”) ordering of the devotional life. But more than all of these things, the practice of night watches connects the Ferrars to scriptural examples of piety and to the early church. On his deathbed, Nicholas Ferrar tells his family to “be constant, steadfast in the good old way.”175 This seems to be a reference to Jeremiah 6:16, “Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.”176 The devotional practices of Little Gidding, especially the night watches, do not so much reclaim a lost monastic heritage as the pattern of life of the exemplars of scripture and the early church. John Ferrar gives the example of King David and quotes some of the Psalms (“At midnight will I rise and give thanks unto thee. Seven times a day will I praise thee. Awake lute and harp, I myself will awake right early”); he also mentions Paul and Silas praying and singing at midnight in prison.177 He emphasizes that this practice, which does go beyond the usual measure of devotion, is appropriate for their family because of the “no less than a miraculous way” that the family was delivered 174 Muir and White, 92. 175 Ibid., 113. 176 It is also similar to Laud’s motto, Stare super antiquas vias, “To stand upon the old ways.” 177 Cf. Herbert in “Easter”: “Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part / With all thy art,” Hutchinson, 41. 209 out of “so many eminent dangers,” so that it was their part in some measure to show more and more thankfulness to God for them and that in a more than ordinary or usual way or custom than was practiced by most, none having more cause than their family to love and serve God, at all times and in all places, in such manner as was pleasing to them and agreeable to the doctrine of the Church of England and to the laws of the land, and hereupon with the advice, consent, and approbation of both religious, grave, learned divines and upon the invitation of that worthy servant of Christ, Mr. George Herbert (his most entire friend and brother, for so they styled each other) . . .178 The night watches took place, according to John Ferrar’s notes, as follows: at least two members of the community watched at a time; the companies were segregated by gender, and the text notes that women watched at one side of the house and men on the other, “in their several apartments and oratories appointed for the same.” In other words, it seems like the watches took place upstairs in the bedchambers or closets near the chambers, and not in the great room or by the window where the offices were said during the day. The men were sometimes joined by the two older boys, Nicholas Ferrar III or Ferrar Collett, while the Collett sisters were sometimes joined by one of the maidservants.179 Those participating watched once a week; the vigils began at nine and concluded at one in the morning. Occasionally the organ was moved upstairs and “tuned low” (apparently the volume could be adjusted), so that the watchers could use it as accompaniment. These vigils were strenuous affairs, since the watchers were, in the course of four hours, to say “carefully and distinctly” all 150 Psalms responsively, while kneeling. However, the text notes that in the winter they did pause to warm themselves by the fire, 178 Muir and White, 92. 179 Ibid., 92. 210 so as not to risk their health by catching cold.180 The vigil ending at one a.m., the watchers would knock on Nicholas’ door and leave him a candle, as it was his custom to rise every night at that time for prayer and meditation in his study. Initially Nicholas watched twice a week, but in later years he increased this to three times a week. Once a week he was joined by his two nephews, and in the summer they would watch in the church, the boys laying down on the benches at one while their uncle continued his prayers. The text implies that on the nights Nicholas watched, he did not sleep at all; so, in the last years of his life that would mean that he did not get any sleep three nights out of the week; it is difficult to imagine that this was not a contributing factor to his death at the age of 44. The night watches were the most distinctive of the Ferrars’ devotional practices. They bore the stamp of approval of no less than George Herbert and were joined in by Richard Crashaw; they were celebrated by Isaak Walton,181 disparaged by the anonymous author of The Arminian Nunnery, and the focus of interrogation by Edward Lenton in his interview with Nicholas. John Ferrar mounts a full-scale defense of them in his notes, whereas he says nothing at all about the activities of the Little Academy. The amount of notice taken of a group of relatives staying up to pray the Psalms on a rotating basis communicates the extent of the Calvinist atmosphere in England during this period.182 180 Ibid., 93. 181 Walton, Lives, 311. 182 Even religious practices within the family unit were monitored by the authorities during this period. Whitgift’s Articles of 1584 declared that “all preaching, reading, catechizing and other suchlike exercises in private places and families whereunto others do resort being not of the same family be utterly inhibited”; such practices were “a manifest sign of schism and a cause of contention in the church.” Quoted in Kenneth 211 Herbert’s commendation of the night watches poses an interesting dillema to those critics who view him as purely Calvinist in his religious practice, especially as the watches were viewed with such suspicion not only by polemicists (The Arminian Nunnery) but by moderates such as Edward Lenton. VII. The Ferrars and Herbert as “Re-edifiers”: The Restoration of St. John’s, Little Gidding, and St. Mary’s, Leighton Bromswold, and the Little Gidding Glebe-Lands We are fortunate in our discussion of the Ferrars’ liturgical theology to have not only texts by and about them at our disposal, but also still-extant brick-and-mortar examples of their church renovation.183 The Ferrars were responsible for the renovation, from a ruined state, of two churches: St. John’s, which stood practically on the doorstep of their manor house at Little Gidding, and St. Mary’s at Leighton Bromswold, less than five miles away, which they renovated in collaboration with George Herbert, who had been named prebendary there by Bishop John Williams. (The raising of funds for Leighton-Bromswold began in about 1630, and was completed late in 1633.) These two churches, because of their renovations, are considered architecturally significant, and are Charton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1999), 106. This dictate was to prevent the forming of conventicles and was primarily aimed at the “godly,” or puritans. Perhaps this is why a ceremonialist family like the Ferrars was such an appealing target for the author/redactor of The Arminian Nunnery. It is certainly one reason why the Ferrars made a clear division between worship in the church and in their home, and was likely a contributing factor to why, even though the family had been paying local children small sums of money to encourage them to learn the Psalms by heart, Nicholas refused to catechize them when asked to do so by their parents (Muir and White, 72). 183 See Appendix 1 for photographs; see http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk and http://www.leightonbromswold.org.uk/parish_picture_album.asp for additional photographs. 212 included in major studies of Anglican ecclesiology.184 As church renovators, the Ferrars and George Herbert were part of a larger movement in the 1620s and 1630s, which was broader in composition than just those who might be termed “Laudians.” Though the Elizabethan Book of Homilies included a “Sermon for Repairing and Keeping Clean of Churches,” which declared that “It is a sin and shame to see so many churches so ruinous, and so foully decayed, almost in every corner,” and urged that churches be “well adorned, and comely, and kept clean,” its instructions seem to have been generally ignored until well into James I’s reign, when the situation of many houses of worship was finally recognized as truly dire.185 According to historian Kevin Sharpe, in this period “The parish churches of England . . . were themselves monuments not to the beauty of holiness but to the poverty of the church and years of neglect.”186 In October of 1629 Charles I, probably at the prompting of Archbishop Laud, issued a proclamation “for preventing the decays of churches and chapels.”187 Graham Parry, in his survey of Laudian art, literature, and architecture, notes “how difficult it is sometimes to distinguish between the general movement towards renovation and Laudian improvements,” since “even in churches which had no Laudian 184 See G.W.O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London: Faber and Faber, 1956); Nigel Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Niklaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Bedfordshire and the County of Huntingdon and Peterborough, vol. 34 (Hammondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1968). Pevsner includes a photograph of St. John’s, Little Gidding on the cover. 185 “The Sermon for Repairing and Keeping Clean of Churches” in The Book of Homilies (1832), 252–253; also quoted in Parry, 22. 186 Sharpe, 317. 187 Ibid., 318–319. 213 rector, pulpit, paneling, pews and pavement were renewed from the second decade of the century onwards, and even painted glass might be introduced as the inhibitions against images weakened.”188 The fact that church renovation was happening across ecclesiastical party lines means that the Ferrars’ own renovations cannot in themselves be used as proof of their approval of the Laudian reforms. As we shall see, neither Little Gidding nor Leighton Bromswold was renovated in a way that fully reflected Laudian aesthetics, in terms of the altar, or the addition of religious imagery in stained glass, tapestry, or on communion silver. St. John’s Church, Little Gidding The renovation of the church at Little Gidding was begun as soon as Mary Ferrar arrived there in the spring of 1625. Nicholas had come from plague-infected London, where he had been sorting out his brother John’s tangled business affairs, which had threatened the family with bankruptcy. (The rest of the family usually in London had gone to stay with John and Susanna Collett in Bourne.) Nicholas wanted to stay by himself in quarantine for a month, but Mary Ferrar insisted on riding out to Little Gidding as soon as she heard he was there, and upon arriving, wanted to give thanks in the church. However, the church had been used for some time as a barn for pigs and cattle, and the hay and muck had not yet been cleared out. At her insistence, the workmen who were readying the house were ordered instead to clear out the church (throwing the hay and dung out the empty windows), and to renovate the church and dilapidated house 188 Parry, 22. 214 simultaneously.189 From the summer of 1625 through Easter of 1626, the family attended church at Steeple Gidding, the neighboring village, though they appear to have been using the Little Gidding church for their daily worship as soon as it was cleared out.190 The Ferrars renovated the church in two stages, since Mary Ferrar, not satisfied in her mind of the neatness of the church she had put it in at first repair (though by most it was thought very comely and decent), she caused all to be taken away and contrived to have it all wainscoted with boards, walls, with pillars and arches, and the floor of it to be boarded for more warmth and cleanliness as at this day it is.191 Maycock notes that it took about three years for the heavy reconstruction of paneling, flooring and seating to be completed; the “interior decoration” with fine fabric occurred after that. Maycock cites an undated letter, which he places at around 1629, from Nicholas to his mother, which lists the price he paid for green curtains and valence, and blue silk with fringes; another undated letter to John Ferrar references the theft of some of these blue cloths and fittings from the church.192 The church does not have a screen (and never did have one, as far as is known), and the chancel is distinguished visually from the nave by one step and a fine carpet. There are still a set of commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer hanging in the chancel, delivered from London in 1630.193 The Ferrars introduced twin pulpits into the 189 Muir and White, 64–65. 190 Ibid., 65; Maycock, 130. 191 Muir and White, 69. 192 Maycock 132, 131. 193 Cooper, 5. 215 nave, which have not survived (discussed below). The one on the north side, used by the minister to read the service (as Lenton noted Nicholas Ferrar reading the Litany), would have more usually been a reading desk.194 In addition to the twin pulpits, a medieval eagle lectern supporting a great Bible also stood in the nave; this survives as well. Cooper notes that only about forty of these lecterns survive in England, and that they were not normally found in parish churches, but rather in religious foundations such as greater churches, monastic houses, cathedrals and university colleges.195 Four of the sixteen Cambridge colleges had medieval eagle lecterns while Nicholas was a student there; Cooper interprets the Ferrars’ acquisition of one for their church as a sign that they were “constructing a church interior to reflect their life of corporate prayer.”196 The Ferrars’ choice of collegiate seating, arcade stalls facing each other down the long walls of the nave, also seems to emphasize the community as, in Izaak Walton’s words, “a little Colledge,” bound together by daily prayer.197 An additional speculation of my own for why the Ferrars added an “extra” lectern, and an unusual one at that, in so small a church is that they may have desired to promote the Bible visually, the recitation of which was such an important part of their worship throughout the day. In 1634, Edward Lenton was pleased to find that the altar at Little Gidding, about 194 Ibid. 195 Cooper, 8. Eagle lecterns are common today, having been reintroduced by Victorian high churchmen. 196 Cooper 8–9. 197 Walton, 310; Cooper, 6. 216 which he had heard rumors, was placed “table-wise,” i.e., east-west as a communion table, instead of north-south, and pressed up against the east wall. Lenton does not mention any altar rail. Cooper notes that the Ferrars, by virtue of their geography, would have been caught in the “altar wars” of Laud, now Archbishop of Canterbury, and his longstanding nemesis, John Williams (bishop of Lincoln from 1621 and the Ferrars’ diocesan, as well as their friend and likely protector). Williams had ruled against placing communion tables “altarwise” in 1627 at Grantham. Over Williams’ protests, Laud in 1634 announced a two-year visitation of all the southern dioceses, and included Lincoln in the first round. In 1635, he required railedin east end altars. Williams, in 1635 during his own visitation, tried to undermine Laud by requiring rails around altars, but not their altar-wise placement. By the time of Williams’ next scheduled visitation in 1638, he was in prison, and Laud took over. This means that either in 1635 or 1638, Little Gidding was required to introduce a railed east end altar. Cooper has identified a triple arch at the east end of the chancel, “a visual frame for a table which for the first time was placed flat against the east wall,” which suggests that at some point, the altar was moved to comply with Laud’s regulations. This whole episode illustrates the ways in which the arrangement of the church interior may not be the result of personal choice or theology at all, but rather obedience to (evershifting) ecclesiastical authority.198 The font at Little Gidding (which was never thrown into the pond by parliamentarian soldiers, as legend has it) is idiosyncratic: “the family seem to have taken 198 Cooper, 6–7. 217 a brass bowl of reasonable quality, screwed it to an Elizabethan fire iron to act as a stand, and attached as decoration a crown circlet amateurishly snipped from sheet metal.” It was also placed unusually, permanently fixed next to the preaching pulpit (Cooper, 9). Cooper is unclear on what theological statement is meant by this placement; but perhaps it is just another example of the Ferrars’ “Do It Yourself” commitment to craft and industry on all levels, from the creation of the Harmonies and their mastery of bookbinding, to their several surviving works of embroidery, to their creation of salves and herbal remedies for distribution in the dispensary. If a new font was indeed required, it would have been a considerable expense, so perhaps it was a good candidate for home fabrication. As Nicholas’ niece Anna Collett wrote, In those additions of structure and ornament that have been made to the material of our church, there was none of our family that had not their share, and they that through age or absence could not do it themselves, had a brick laid by some other hands.199 The family is very clear that they have put “sweat equity,” and not just cash, into the church, and that this is part of their offering to God. The church was decorated with fresh and artificial flowers and with candles on pillars (which Lenton noted were more common in cathedrals or colleges than in parish churches). For Sundays, there was a blue silk and gold hanging for the communion table, which stood on a carpet, and the twin ambos each had blue hangings with silver lace. The benches were covered with blue silk cushions. The color for weekdays was green.200 199 “Religious Exercises of Little Gidding,” British Museum, Add. MSS. 34659, f.15, quoted in Maycock, 130. 200 Muir and White, 69. 218 During this time period, there was no attempt to follow a liturgical color sequence.201 The communion plate, a gift from Sir Edwyn Sandys, has no religious imagery. The Ferrars, as noted previously, had an organ in their house, installed March 1631/32, and this may have been installed in the west end of the church several years afterward.202 Cooper thinks they may have moved the organ into the church for special occasions.203 Organs were being introduced in college chapels and some parish churches in this period, but were still controversial among puritans. Only metrical psalm-singing is documented during the Ferrars’ church services. Maycock notes a “Metrical Version of the First Six Psalms” among the Ferrar papers, possibly in the handwriting of Mary Collett, so it is possible that they may have sometimes used their own versification.204 Though there is no evidence of hymns sung in their church worship, the texts of several hymns are quoted as having been sung by one or more members of the Little Academy in their dialogues, and several of these are from George Wither’s Hymnes and Songs of the Church from 1624, which was unpopular with many Calvinists as it included a section of hymns for feast days.205 As mentioned above, the Ferrars have historically been claimed by the “high church” party, their Laudianism assumed, with the restoration of their church as one 201 Addleshaw, Architectural Setting, 167, also cited in Charles H. E. Smyth, “Little Gidding and Leighton Bromswold,” Church Quarterly Review 165 (July–September 1964), 303. 202 Maycock, 130. 203 Cooper, 13. 204 Maycock, 220; Cooper, 13. 205 Cooper, 3, 16 note 13. 219 piece of evidence. However, a few scholars (such as Parry), in studies that embrace the complexity of the period, have begun to question this assignment. Trevor Cooper concludes his study by noting that the Ferrars were creative in their liturgical planning, but not extreme. They were never near the cutting edge of liturgical innovation . . . They beautified their church, but not with religious imagery . . . Although they were formal in public worship, and their church interiors reflected much of the thinking of the Durham House group, they did not introduce items offensive to the puritan conscience. All this is very different from their private lives of prayer, where they were certainly pushing the boundaries.206 John Ferrar relates a conversation between Nicholas and a Dr. Morison, the Archdeacon’s Commissary, on the latter’s annual visit. The doctor, admiring the church, said that “there wanted one thing that would do well in the chancel window . . . Painted glass and in it, a crucifix.” Nicholas replied that, “if there had been any when they came, he would not have pulled it down except authority had commanded. So neither would he set up anything without command of authority.”207 The Ferrars in their public worship may have had “a desire to keep a low profile and reduce risk at a time when boundaries were uncertain and the consequences of overstepping them significant.”208 Still, though they may have been “playing it safe” in terms of their choice of furnishings and fittings, this does not mean that we cannot draw any theological conclusions from the renovations of their worship space, as will be discussed below. 206 Cooper, 14. 207 Muir and White, 104. 208 Cooper, 14. 220 St. Mary’s Church, Leighton Bromswold It is very difficult to assign with certainty any specific autobiographical content to George Herbert’s poems. However, “The Crosse,” which recounts frustration with poor health and thwarted desires to serve God, does seem to fit what we know of Herbert’s circumstances in the 1620s, when he was ill, lost several close friends and patrons, and also endured a long lack of promotion after an initial flurry of appointments at Cambridge. From this emotional nadir, he imagines a solution to his dilemma in the poem’s opening stanza: What is this strange and uncouth thing? To make me sigh, and seek, and faint, and die, Untill I had some place, where I might sing, And serve thee; and not onely I, But all my wealth and familie might combine To set thy honour up, as our designe.209 Because of these lines, Amy Charles in her biography of Herbert dates this poem to 1626, two years after the dissolution of the Virginia Company and the year after the Ferrars settled at Little Gidding, when as a deacon Herbert, through Bishop Williams’ appointment, became canon of Lincoln Cathedral and prebendary for the church of Leighton Bromswold (Leighton Ecclesia) in Huntingdonshire.210 Even if Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar were not exchanging regular letters by this point, Herbert would have heard through his stepfather John Danvers, who had worked closely with John and Nicholas in the Virginia Company, about the Ferrars’ decampment to Little Gidding, where the family pooled together their resources and “designed” to worship God through 209 Hutchinson, 164–165. 210 Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 112, 127. 221 the renovation of the church and their daily round of worship. The church at Leighton Bromswold was a victim of the Elizabethan and Jacobean epidemic of lax church repair, so that parishioners had been meeting for divine service in the manor house. Izaak Walton writes, the greatest part of the parish church was fallen down, and that of it which stood, was so decayed, so little, and so useless, that the Parishioners could not meet to perform their Duty to God in publick prayer and praises; and thus it had been for almost 20 years.211 The physical space of the parish church had much symbolic power for Herbert and is, of course, the central conceit of The Temple. In 1630, when Herbert was granted the living of Bemerton and Fugglestone, he offered Nicholas Ferrar the Leighton Bromswold living, which was only a few miles from Little Gidding (but quite far from Bemerton, which is near Salisbury). Though Herbert had held the living as a deacon, it seems that he hoped that Ferrar would end the absenteeism and be ordained a priest, having the cure of souls for the village. Nicholas, however, had no desire for this second ordination, and, presumably, for responsibilities that would distract his attention from his nascent community. John Ferrar writes, “The one urged with much earnestness, the other as eagerly put all off.”212 Ferrar told his friend that he would not accept the living, but promised him that if he used his aristocratic Herbert family connections to raise the necessary funds (a considerable 2,000 pounds), Nicholas would organize the parish’s rebuilding. He 211 Walton, 278. 212 Muir and White, 93. 222 (characteristically) volunteered his brother John to personally supervise the workmen.213 According to Izaak Walton, Herbert agreed to these terms over the objections of his mother, who told her son that “it is not for your weak body, and empty purse, to undertake to build Churches.”214 Herbert’s weak body would indeed prevent the work from being completed in his lifetime; in his will he left a bequest for it, and it was finished later in 1633.215 Despite his mother’s concerns, the money was raised, with generous contributions from the Duke of Lenox, who was the Lord of the Manor of Leighton Bromswold (and who doubtless wanted to get the villagers out of his house on Sundays). Herbert’s brother Henry, Master of the Revels, helped to solicit funds, and the Ferrars’ trusty cousin Arthur Woodnoth (who also worked for Herbert’s stepfather John Danvers) helped from London with the business end. In July of 1632, John Ferrar wrote to Nicholas, “We have 18 Masons and Laborers at worke at Layton Church, and we shall have this weeke 10 Carpenters. God prosper the work and send mony in.”216 These workmen were likely the same ones who had refitted St. John’s Church at Little Gidding. At St. Mary’s, the Ferrars carried over their design of twin ambos: the reading desk is on the right hand in the nave and the pulpit is on the left at the entrance to the chancel, and both are of the same height, as at Little Gidding. Each ambo has a sounding- 213 Ibid. 214 Walton, 279. 215 Charles, 174. 216 Quoted in Smyth, 298, and Maycock, 274. 223 board, like early Christian ambos.217 The church is paved with bricks, and there are three steps up to the communion table, which was not then railed. The windows are large, with “some remnants of painted glass.” The seats in the chancel resemble cathedral stalls, but with little ornament; the seats in the nave are simple oak benches with backs; an eighteenth-century source writes, “It was evidently the intention of Mr Herbert that there should be no distinction between the seats of the rich and those of the poor.”218 The chancel screen, which, like the seating, the ambos and all but the top of the communion table, dates from 1632, is unusual in that it is “half-height,” about five feet.219 Perhaps the goal was to make a visual demarcation of the chancel without the sense of complete separation. The walls, which are now bare, would have been plastered and decorated with texts during the seventeenth century.220 Of the twin ambos, Walton writes, By his [Herbert’s] order, the reading pew and pulpit were a little distant from each other, both of an equal height; for he would often say, They should neither have a precedency or priority of the other; but that prayer and preaching, being equally useful, might agree like brethren, and have an equal honour and estimation.221 Since the twin pulpit and reading desk of the same height was the same as at Little 217 Pevsner, 283. 218 Quoted in Smyth, 299. 219 Cooper, 10; Addleshaw, 51. 220 Smyth, 299. 221 Walton, 278. This part of Walton’s description is accurate, but Smyth, from some inconsistencies in Walton’s description of Leighton Bromswold, does not think that Walton ever actually visited Leighton Bromswold, and may have confused it with St. John’s, Leeds, which was also renovated in 1632–1633, and was far more elaborate in furniture and woodwork than St. Mary’s. Smyth 298–299. 224 Gidding, this may have been a Ferrarian order rather than an Herbertian one. Regardless, these were likely the first two churches to have this arrangement, and the sentiment must have resonated with others, since it was imitated elsewhere.222 The result of this collaboration between Herbert and the Ferrars was “that a handsome and uniform and, as the country termed it, a fine, neat church was erected, inside and outside finished.”223 In addition to the renovations at Leighton Bromswold, Herbert preserved his vision of church furnishing and decoration in The Country Parson, in the chapter “The Parson’s Church.” The Country Parson “hath a speciall care of his Church,” making sure that all things are in good repair, with the walls plastered, windows glazed, floor paved, and the seats, pulpit, desk, communion table and font “be as they ought.” The church should be free of dust and cobwebs, and “strawed” at festivals and “perfumed with incense.” “Proper texts” of scripture should be painted on the walls in a grave style, and not with “light colours, or foolish anticks.”224 “All the books appointed by authority” should be there, clean and well-bound. The communion cloth should be of fine linen, and the carpet (to go either under the communion table or on top of it; the same word was used for both) “of good and costly Stuffe.” “And all this he doth, not as out of necessity, or as putting a holiness in the things, but as desiring to keep the middle way between superstition, and slovenlinesse.”225 Herbert’s Parson exhibits the same preference for 222 Addleshaw, 76; Smyth 300. 223 Muir and White, 94. 224 Hutchinson: “grotesque representations of animals and flowers.” 225 Hutchinson, 246. 225 simple formality and good order, with a dash of ceremonialism (the strawing and incense), that the Ferrars set up in their church. Glebe Lands The Ferrars, in addition to their “re-edifying” of the physical structure of the two churches, completed one more act of restoration that they considered very important.226 In 1632, Mary Ferrar, the owner of the manor at Little Gidding, decided to return the glebe lands that, like many in England, had at some point in the distant past been appropriated from the church by the lord of the manor. She drew up a memorandum that was presented to Bishop Williams, and the complicated legal details sorted out. Two pastures were set aside, and the income from the rents was paid annually to the rector or resident vicar.227 More than just an act of generosity, this restoration of the glebe lands was viewed as putting right an act of sacrilege against the church. As Graham Parry notes in his study of the period, a concern with the sanctity of the physical structure of the church, with ecclesiastical items and even with the vocation of the priesthood itself, led also to a concern with its opposite, sacrilege committed against these things. Lancelot Andrewes viewed sacrilege, which Parry defines as “the misuse, devaluing, or violation of things belonging to the Church,” as the cause of many of the evils afflicting both the nation and individual families, many of whom, of course, had profited from the confiscation of lands from the religious orders and their redistribution to the gentry under 226 Muir and White, 101. 227 Ibid., and Maycock, 275. 226 Henry VIII.228 Mary Ferrar may well have been influenced by the tract De Non Temerandis Ecclesiis, or by another writing in a similar vein, by the Norfolk lawyer and antiquary Sir Hentry Spelman, published in 1613 and 1616. Spelman argued with numerous examples from the Old and New Testaments and from the Church Fathers that lands and goods dedicated to God belonged to God forever, and that “it was Sacrilege and Impiety to pull them back again.”229 In a prayer at the conclusion of her account of the restitution, Mary Ferrar wrote, Be graciously pleased, O Lord, now to accept from Thy handmaid the restoration of that which hath been heretofore unduly taken from Thy ministers . . . And let this outward seizure of earth be accompanied with an inward surprisal of the heart and spirit into Thine own hands; so that the restorer, as well as that which is restored, may become and be confirmed Thine inheritance.230 Summary of Restorations Horton Davies, in the second volume of his magisterial Worship and Theology in England, lists five interrelated factors that influenced the selection of church architecture and fittings in this period. They are: the nature of holy community as envisioned by the worshippers; the location of the dominant foci of worship (either on sacraments, sermons, praises and prayers, or a combination of each); whether the sacred space is planned functionally, or with a view to its numinous or symbolic quality; “sociopolitical” factors (whether it is built and furnished ornately in its desire to express the social prestige of the 228 Parry, 171–172. 229 Quoted in Parry, 172. 230 Quoted in Maycock, 276. 227 donors or worshippers, or with a simplicity that suggests the irrelevance of such considerations); and economic consideration (what resources were available in finance and materials, and how much a desire for grandeur, a love of simplicity, or pure economic necessity is responsible for the design).231 Though Davies uses his criteria to make distinctions between Anglican, Roman Catholic, Puritan, and Quaker buildings, they are also useful in summarizing the Ferrars’, and George Herbert’s, ecclesiology.232 In terms of the nature of holy community envisioned by the worshippers, we know that both the Ferrars and Herbert placed a very high value on corporate prayer, even above, as noted earlier, private prayer. The Book of Common Prayer provided the community with its voice, and through it the individual joined with his or her community and the entire nation in supplication. For this reason, it is important that these prayers be heard, as evidenced by the soundboards over the pulpit and reading desk at Leighton Bromswold. Both churches have collegiate seating (in the nave at Little Gidding and in the chancel at Leighton Bromswold), which suggests the importance of the communal discipline of prayer. In both of the Ferrars’ churches, there is no one dominant focusing element. Prayer and preaching are given equal weight, as demonstrated by the twin ambos. The fact that Herbert’s comment about this, as recorded by Walton, became famous, and that the twin pulpits were imitated elsewhere, demonstrates how contentious the rivalry 231 232 Davies, 3–4. Since there is evidence that Herbert and the Ferrars corresponded about the specifics of the design at Leighton Bromswold, although those portions of their letters were not preserved, it is safe to assume that the vision expressed in the outcome was shared. 228 between Word and Table had become in this period. Yates notes that a popular trend in the early seventeenth century was to combine the pulpit and reading desk into one piece of furniture.233 But this kind of collapsing apparently did not appeal to either the Ferrars or Herbert: it would have obscured the symbolism and sense of balance they were after. The chancels in both churches are demarcated, but not ostentatiously, by a step or a few steps, and the altars/communion tables were placed where they authorities required them, and followed the rubrics in terms of their adornment. Speaking of functionality versus “numinous symbolism,” the emphasis seems to be instead on reverence and decency, which contains elements of both. As Herbert writes in “The British Church,” “A fine aspect in fit array / Neither too mean, not yet too gay,/ Shows who is best.”234 Both spaces are carefully planned, but ornament is restrained, especially compared to more Laudian innovations elsewhere during this period (and Bishop Williams’ own elaborately decorated chapel at Bucken Palace down the road).235 Both churches exhibit “comlieness,” a favorite word for liturgical beauty in this period, while retaining a certain austerity. John Ferrar notes that visitors from across the county admired the church, and also that all who came to Little Gidding found nothing to object to in the way the church had been decorated. The “sociopolitical” statement the Ferrars seem to be making, through their desire to have their servants not kept from church by their work, and by the plain seating at 233 Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship, 34. 234 Hutchinson, 109. 235 Fincham and Tyacke, 186 n. 44. 229 Leighton Bromswold, is that all are equal before the eyes of the Lord, even though class distinctions are real and important in the world; and that even humble people deserve a carefully planned, well-maintained, and beautiful place of worship. This may seem obvious today, but was by no means assumed in the early seventeenth century. God, also, deserves such a place to be worshipped in. For this reason, what Davies calls “socioeconomic,” the monetary giving towards each of these restoration projects was sacrificial. Herbert, as Nicholas wrote in the Preface to the Temple, “spared not his own purse,” and neither did the Ferrars spare theirs, as we can see from the records of their accounts in their archive. The Ferrars also placed great importance on doing the work with their own hands, both in laboring for their own church, or in supervising the workmen at Leighton Bromswold. In “The Printers to the Reader” which opens The Temple, written by Nicholas Ferrar but not signed, he mentions how his departed friend tried to give away an “Ecclesiastical dignitie.” But, Ferrar writes, “God permitted not the accomplishment of this desire, having ordained him his instrument for reedifying of the Church belonging thereunto, that had layen ruinated almost twenty years.” By his example as a priest and as a “reedifyer,” Herbert was “justly a companion to the primitive saints, and a pattern or more for the age he lived in.”236 “Edification” was an important liturgical concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and meant “something far more than mental or moral uplift; it is the building up of the whole personality in Christ, the development of the process of sanctification, begun in us at our baptism and which ends at the beatific 236 Hutchinson, 4. 230 vision.”237 Cranmer, in the section “Of Ceremonies” in the Book of Common Prayer, quotes 1 Cor. 14:26, “Let all things be done unto edifying,” alongside 1 Cor. 14:40, “Let all things be done decently and in order.” Herbert, alluding to this preface, quotes both verses in The Country Parson, saying that these two rules summarize the Christian’s duty to God and neighbor. So that they excellently score out the way, and fully, and exactly contain, even in externall and indifferent things, what course is to be taken; and put them to great shame, who deny the Scripture to be perfect.238 This sentence nods to both those who feel that adiaphora (“things indifferent”) still matter a great deal, and to those (often at odds with the former), who emphasize the Bible over set forms of worship. By re-edifying physical churches, Herbert and the Ferrars hoped to build up the spiritual Church as well. In their renovations, they expressed the theological value they placed on moderation, order, simplicity, and the inherent dignity, and even sanctity, of the ecclesiastical space as gathering place of the Christian assembly and house of God. Herbert’s desire in “The Crosse,” then, is fulfilled: for both the Ferrars and Herbert, church re-edifying does prove to be the antidote to personal failure; setting up “some place” where God will be honored and worshipped brings about spiritual healing. 237 Addleshaw, The High Church Tradition, 72. 238 Hutchinson, 246. 231 Conclusion Perhaps the most splendid day of liturgy at Little Gidding was in 1634, when Bishop Williams visited to preach and to confirm some members of the household. This visit is described by his chaplain and biographer John Hacket in Scrinia Reserata, and serves well as a capsule summary of the Ferrars’ devotional life. Williams, in recognition of the Ferrars’ generosity in returning the glebe lands to the church, wanted “to give them Reputation, against all Detraction.”239 Hacket notes the many rumors in the air about Little Gidding: A Crew of Bawds, or Gamesters might have set up a Standing with less prejudice than these Devotionaries. But God help us, if the best Protestants (for these may be called so) do look like Papists.240 Since many people from the surrounding towns would gather to hear the Bishop preach, his visit would function as a sort of “open house” where the Ferrars’ manner of life received his imprimatur. John Ferrar notes that “the singing men of Peterborough and their music were not wanting in the church.”241 Williams, a notorious high-liver, preached a sermon “what it was to die unto the World” and approved “the dutiful, and severe Life of the Farrars, and of the Church that was in their House.”242 The Bishop dined with the family, and Hacket notes that “they were so strict to keep that day holy, that they left not a Servant at home to provide for the Table”; the family served baked 239 Hacket, 52. 240 Ibid., 51. 241 Muir and White, 101. 242 Hacket, 52. 232 and boiled dishes that did not require attendance, not deviating from their usual Sunday practice, even for the Bishop. Hacket notes, “Their Bread was course, their Drink small, and of ill relish to the Taste,” but takes this as a sign of their holiness, “that it was sure they strived for nothing, that a dainty Appetite might long for.”243 In describing their life, he says, Their business was, either they were at Prayer, or at work; nothing came in between . . . As Alms and Fasting were frequent with them, so Prayers and Watching, with Reading and Singing Psalms, were continually in the Practice. Note, The Word continually: For there was no Intermission, day, nor night.244 Is this Benedictine ora et labora, or an industrious puritan “hands to work, hearts to God”? The Ferrars claimed a core of Christian tradition in a way that made it difficult to parse their practice along party lines. Above all, it is “the Word continually” that, even in a Bible-saturated age, marked their life as distinctive. However, in a period that frequently pitted Word against Table and preaching against prayer, the Ferrars, like their friend George Herbert, strove for balance and harmony, as expressed in their church renovations. They had a high view of sacred space, of the church as “the house of God and the gate of heaven” (as is inscribed above the door of their own church), and subscribed to the notion of “the beauty of holiness” promoted by Laudians (though in a much more modest way than Andrewes, Laud or even John Williams in terms of church decoration). Their worship was formal and of a ceremonialist bent, but there was also a simplicity and directness about it—their pattern 243 Ibid., 50. 244 Ibid. 233 was far more patristic than medieval. George Herbert wrote two love sonnets to the Bible; the Ferrars spent two decades slicing it up and painstakingly reassembling it, collating it, weaving it together while also pulling each strand apart. At the heart of both their devotional lives was the Pauline admonition to “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.”245 The Ferrars lived in a time when polarities of religious expression were felt to be very real, even as lived examples intermingled many disparate threads of Christian identity. They were perhaps a different kind of “avant-garde conformists,” concerned less with enforcing national religious uniformity, involvement in theological controversy, and the shoring up of ecclesiastical and state authority, and more with the devotional life on a much smaller collective scale. Their reconciling impulse was not in step with their age. As Hacket notes, “It was out of season to confine themselves to Holy rest, when Civil Dissentions began to flame, and there was no rest in the Land.”246 245 Col. 3:16. 246 Hacket, 53. 234 CHAPTER 4: STORYING IN THE TEMPLE: RANGING FREELY WITHIN THE ZODIAC OF CHRIST’S WIT In October of 1631, Arthur Woodnoth, a cousin and close friend of Nicholas Ferrar who was also in the employ of George Herbert’s stepfather Sir John Danvers, wrote to Nicholas about his recent visit with Herbert at Bemerton. In his letter, he notes that Herbert has a copy of Savonorola’s De Simplicitatae Christianae Vitae, and that it is “of great esteem with him.” He tells of Herbert’s “high prizeing . . . and thankfull acknowledgmt” of “my Cosens Concordance,” the Gospel Harmony which Woodnoth had conveyed to him. He passes on a request from Mrs. Herbert for a recipe for a salve from the Collett sisters’ dispensary, and then asks And if to it Each of my Cosens wold be pleased to add one of theire Storyes I conceau it wold be receaud with very great acceptation this I haue all most promised and it was the last thing mr Herbert put me in mind of 1 This letter provides a glimpse into the exchange network between Little Gidding and Bemerton: religious treatises, the Ferrars’ scriptural handiwork, herbal remedies, and stories; a year and a half later, the manuscript of The Temple itself would be sent to Little Gidding as its author lay dying.2 That Woodnoth has “all most promised” the stories demonstrates Herbert’s status as an adopted family member, since the Story Books did 1 2 Printed in B. Blackstone, The Ferrar Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 268–269. There is textual evidence that Ferrars responded to this request for stories. Herbert passed on a story from the desert father/exemplum tradition called “The Anchoret and the Angel” to one of his kinsman, saying he had received it from Nicholas (Blackstone 207–210). After Herbert’s death, a volume of the Ferrars’ Story Books was returned to Nicholas’ niece Susanna Collett Mapletoft, from whom he had borrowed it (Charles, 125). 235 not circulate beyond the Ferrars’ inner circle.3 Storytelling, what the Ferrars simply called “storying,” was an integral and shared part of Herbert and the Ferrars’ theological aesthetics.4 Herbert’s eagerness to receive the Ferrars’ stories (“it was the last thing mr Herbert put me in mind of”) is another example of the importance of narrative in his ministry and poetry. He extols the use of stories and anecdotes in sermons and catechizing in The Country Parson; about a fifth of the lyrics of “The Church” portion of The Temple assume a fictional context.5 From “Redemption,” where the frustrated tenant sets out in search of his lord in order to negotiate a new lease, to “The Pulley,” where we learn, in an etiological fashion, just why it is that, in the words of Augustine, “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” to “Love (III),” where a guest, overcome by feelings of unworthiness, struggles with whether or not to cross the threshold and join Love at the heavenly banquet, Herbert’s stories exhibit incredible range. Scholars have long noted Herbert’s use of fictional contexts and have classified these in various ways, as allegory, parable, or fable, even as they acknowledge, with Helen Vendler, that Herbert is “neither parabolic nor allegorical in any ‘pure’ way” 3 When Mary and Anna Collet decided to send the first volume of the Story Books to their sister Susanna Collett Mapletoft via Arthur Woodnoth, Nicholas wrote to Arthur that though he was allowed to read the book himself, he was forbidden to show it to anyone else. Ferrar Papers 838 6 Feb 1631/2, quoted in Ransome, Web of Friendship, 237 n. 85. Nicholas, according to John Ferrar, called Herbert “his most entire friend and brother, for so they styled each other”; Walton notes that Herbert called Nicholas “my dear brother Farrer.” Muir and White, 92; Walton, 314. 4 The Ferrars’ use of stories in the religious dialogues of the Little Academy, and how this use compared to Herbert’s, will be explored in the following chapter. See Muir and White, 102 for the term “storying.” 5 For a list, see Robert L. Montgomery, Jr., “The Province of Allegory in George Herbert’s Verse,” in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 1 (1960), 461. 236 (Vendler, 59). However, these studies have generally focused on tying a select group of poems to earlier uses of a genre, for example, to biblical parable, medieval allegory, or the emblem tradition (as many of Herbert’s narratives feature emblematic images). Left unasked are two questions: Why was narrative such an appealing device for Herbert, and what was its function in his poetry? This chapter will address these questions, which are especially pertinent since Herbert’s tightly woven and highly symbolic fictions are largely without precedent in religious lyric. In his seminal study of the parables of Jesus, C.H. Dodd argues that they “represent the interpretation which our Lord offered of His own ministry,” and that “the parable has the character of an argument, in that it entices the hearer to a judgment upon the situation depicted, and then challenges him, directly or by implication, to apply that judgment to the matter in hand.”6 I argue that, in imitation of Jesus (whom Herbert was reputed always to refer to as his “Master,”) Herbert’s stories function in a similar fashion. Herbert uses stories, often constructed from unusual re-combinations of biblical material, to define Christian identity, especially the way in which the everyday life of the believer relates to God’s ultimate purpose for humanity. However, these stories, often centered around a crisis of belief or understanding, go beyond static description; they also model for the reader how the Christian is to act while facing trials of many kinds. Through poems that tell a story, Herbert engages in “sincere role-playing,” to use Stanley Fish’s term, and creates a “genuine persona,” to use Helen Vendler’s, in order to enact and resolve different challenges, frustrations, and (to invoke an especially Herbertian word) 6 C.H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom, rev. ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961), 158, 11. 237 the “afflictions” faced by followers of Christ.7 I. The Role of Stories in The Temple Like Sir Philip Sidney, Herbert and the Ferrars wanted to harness the power of fiction “to move, to delight, to teach,” to win to virtue and, beyond that, to convert. “Harness” is perhaps the most appropriate term here, because the disarming and engaging force of fiction that so takes in readers or listeners can draw them towards vice as easily as it can pull them towards virtue. The Christian storyteller must choose stories carefully, and keep a tight hold on the reins. For all their love of storying, however, Herbert and the Ferrars also demonstrated serious anxiety about the potentially dangerous power of fiction. For Herbert, this led to his self-dedication to religious verse, and an almost obsessive concern with simplicity and plain style so as to avoid the idolatry of the poet who rejoices more in his own creations than in the Creator.8 In their dialogues the Ferrars condemn certain genres outright, especially romance and chivalry, because they glorify violence and warfare. As Herbert writes in “The Church Porch”: “Pick out the tales of mirth, but not the sinne/ He pares the apple, that will cleanly feed” (Hutchinson, 9). While critics have described Herbert’s narrative lyrics as parables, allegories, or fables, they have heretofore not used the term for this category of poems that Herbert himself employed, namely, “stories.” Perhaps the word seems too obvious for the 7 Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 27. Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 92. 8 This is explored in Chapter 2, “‘In him I am well-dressed’: George Herbert and Plain Style Revisited.” 238 attention of literary criticism.9 However, its simplicity, neutrality and open-endedness allow it to encompass the variety of genres present in these poems. Stories are tied both to conversational speech and to enjoyment or delight. However, they can also be pressed into service beyond entertainment, to correct, to teach, to persuade or influence. The casual nature of stories in speech, and the curiosity and interest they invoke, make them the perfect double agents, as it were, in the service of both conviviality and pedagogy. The Christian teacher, especially, needs “the pleasantness of telling stories,” as the Ferrars say, in his or her arsenal (Muir and White, 102). From the opening stanza of The Church Porch, Herbert makes plain his intention to “delight, move, and teach” his reader: Harken unto a Verser, who may chance Ryme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure. A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies 9 For studies on the fictional elements of Herbert’s poetry, see the following: Ch. 9, “Allegory and the Sonnet: A Traditional Mode and a Traditional Form” in Joseph Summers, George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954); Robert L. Montgomery, Jr., “The Province of Allegory in George Herbert’s Verse,” in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 1 (1960), 457–472; Ch. 3, “Beauty in Discovery: Emblems and Allegories,” in Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Saad El-Gabalawy, “Personification and Fable in George Herbert’s Allegories,” in English Studies in Canada 5, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 24–35; Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Esther Gilman Richey, both “‘Wrapt in Nights Mantle’: George Herbert’s Parabolic Art,” in John Donne Journal 9, no. 2 (1990): 157–171, and “‘Small Rent”: Seventeenth-Century Parable and the Politics of Redemption,” in Studies in Philology 92, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 102–117. For studies of specific poems that deal with the issue of narrative in Herbert, see Robert Kilgore, “Rereading Ourselves in ‘Redemption’” in George Herbert Journal 26, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall 2002/Spring 2003): 1–14, and Anne Williams, “Gracious Accommodations: Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’,” in Modern Philology 82, no. 1 (August 1984): 13–22. Each of these terms (parable, allegory, fable), while accurately descriptive to a certain extent, carries its own baggage, which then tends to influence the direction of the criticism. For example, the term “allegory” has the weight of medieval tradition behind it. “Fable” recalls Aesop’s fables or tales that come from a sort of timeless, mythic past, and brings to the fore the naïve posture of the poet as tale-teller. “Parable” points directly to the parables of Jesus as a model; highlighting this biblical precedent has a way of making a Protestant end-run around possible allegorical or mythic components. Choosing any one of these terms over the others subtly delimits the scope of Herbert’s influences. 239 And turn delight into a sacrifice.10 The “delight” of the verse is contrasted with the less-compelling exhortation of the sermon; delight stems from the poem as invention, as something made up by the poet using what Herbert elsewhere calls “lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane” (“The Forerunners”). Being rhymed to good certainly sounds more fun than being preached to good, though in fact Herbert the preacher incorporates many of the same strategies as Herbert the poet. Almost immediately, however, the Christian verser who aims to entice with pleasure runs into a problem, because much of the Christian story is not “delightful.” In “The Thanksgiving,” Herbert asks the crucified Christ, “Shall I then sing, skipping thy dolefull storie,/ And side with thy triumphant glorie?”11 If the Christian poet acts as a “reteller” of the Christian story, both in the sense of composing a poem and composing a life of faith, how does one “imitate” the pathos of the Passion? Herbert decides that Christ’s suffering is the core of the Christian narrative and cannot be sidestepped, but he will “read thy book” until he has “found therein thy love.” This is a story that must be taken entire. This desire to see across the whole of the Christian narrative is addressed in “The Holy Scriptures (II),” when Herbert longs to see how all the different “lights” of the Bible combine, “Seeing not only how each verse doth shine,/ But all the constellations of the 10 Hutchinson, 6, stanza 1. The couplet beginning “A verse may find him . . .” was the most frequently cited extract of Herbert in the seventeenth century; see Helen Wilcox, “In the Temple Precincts: George Herbert and Seventeenth-Century Community Making,” in Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson, eds., Writing and Religion in England, 1558–1689 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 259. 11 Hutchinson, 35, ln. 11–12. 240 storie” (58, ln.1–4). This desire for narrative completeness is really a longing for selfknowledge, since, “Thy words do find me out, and parallels bring,/ And in another make me understood.” (58, ln. 11–12) Story, especially the biblical story, is not just a rhetorical strategy for enticing or delighting an audience; it is a powerful tool for self-knowledge. Reading scripture is reflexive; the Bible is the book that reads you back. Layering the biblical story over the believer’s own life allows that life to expand, and to become a thing of beauty. Man is just a “brittle crazie glasse,” as Herbert says in “The Windows,” But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie, Making thy life to shine within The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie More rev’rend grows, and more doth win: Which else shows waterish, bleak and thin.12 The preacher’s life and words become “more rev’rend” when he has the biblical story annealed onto him, when he “wears” the gospel. In fact, the influence of this story is impossible to escape. In “The Bunch of Grapes,” Herbert writes of the hold that the Old Testament travails of the ancient Jews have on Christians: “Their storie pennes and sets us down.”13 Again, Herbert implies that the reader is being written while he or she reads. Over and over, Herbert equates the biblical story with Christian identity. The figure of Death responds to the character of the Christian in “A Dialogue-Anthem,” after the Christian has echoed 1 Corinthians 15:55 (“O Death where is thy sting?”), by saying, Alas poore mortal, void of storie, 12 Ibid., 67, ln. 6–10. 13 Ibid., 128, ln. 10. 241 Go spell and reade how I have kill’d thy king.14 To be “void of story” is to be doomed, or damned; to be lost, to have no history. Void of story is void of existence. Of course, it is really Death who is void, canceled out by Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection; even his mocking instruction betrays his own destruction and the Christian’s key to life: “Go spell/gospel.”15 Just about every instance of the word “storie” in Herbert’s poetry refers directly to the Bible. In The Country Parson, however, Herbert discusses the Parson’s use of stories or anecdotes to illuminate the scriptures to his congregation. Sometimes he tells them stories, and sayings of others, according as his text invites him; for them also men heed, and remember better than exhortations; which though earnest, yet often dy with the Sermon, especially with Country people; which are thick, and heavy, and hard to raise to a point of zeal, and fervency, and need a mountain of fire to kindle them; but stories and sayings they will well remember.16 Even the glorious biblical story (and it really is glorious, since “glorie” is Herbert’s only rhyme for “storie”) needs other tales to help break it open for the community of believers. Stories do more “work” than earnest exhortations and reproofs; they help both the preacher (earnest, but dry) and the congregation (believing, but “thick”) transcend their limitations to in order to penetrate God’s word. Stories stay in mind as the parishioner leaves church, as opposed to evaporating as soon as the service ends. This is what Herbert means when he says in “The Windows,” “. . . but speech alone / Doth vanish like 14 Hutchinson, 169, ln. 3–4. 15 This pun echoes both “The Flower” (“Thy word is all, if we could spell”) and “The H. Scriptures II,” (“This book of starres can spell eternall blisse”). 16 Hutchinson, 233, Ch. 7, “The Parson Preaching.” 242 a flaring thing.” Stories, of course, count as speech in one sense, since they are spoken or written, but they are imbued with action, which gives them added dimension and resilience. So the Story, the Bible, requires other stories for its explication; story begets story. Herbert the preacher collects “stories and sayings of others,” and seasons his exhortations with them. Herbert the poet, however, uses stories, often of his own invention though obviously constructed from biblical raw materials, as the focal point of many of his poems. Though allegory and elements of fable abound in them, the genre of parable resonates most with Herbert’s short lyric stories. C.A. Patrides, in his introduction to Herbert’s poetry, notes that “the literary dimension of the parables is severely circumscribed: their claim as art cannot be pressed very hard.”17 Biblical scholars would disagree with this assessment, however; Jesus’ parables in the New Testament have been “pressed very hard” for quite a long time, and they still retain plenty of their original juice: “The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed,” “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves,” “Behold, there went out a sower to sow,” and “A certain man had two sons.”18 Jesus’ parables contain many of the elements for which Herbert’s poetry is famous: directness and homeliness of phrase but complexity of ideas; extreme compactness of language coupled with startling imagery; abrupt and revelatory conclusions that leave the reader’s head spinning. These similarities 17 C.A. Patrides, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1974), 10. 18 Matthew 13:31; Luke 10:30–37; Mark 4:3; Luke 15:11. 243 are not surprising, since Herbert has appropriated Jesus’ favored genre. What better way to “imitate thy fair, though bloodie, hand,” as Herbert writes in “The Thanksgiving,” than to work in the same style? (After all, as they say on the Antiques Roadshow, it has “excellent provenance.” The imitation of Christ down to his preferred genre is one way to resolve anxieties about the composition of imaginative verse which in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was being defended by Sidney, Puttenham, Harington, and others.19 Parable as a genre also made use of one of Herbert’s poetic gifts, what Coleridge, discussing “Love Unknown” in the Biographia Litteraria, described as his ability to convey “the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language.”20 As Anne Williams notes, although the concrete level of the biblical parable deals with the world of ordinary experience, there is nevertheless within the course of the narrative some reversal or disjunction that signals to the listener the special otherworldly significance of the story. This is the everyday world we see, but turned “inside out or upside down.” (Even the phrase “Good Samaritan” would have been heard as an oxymoron by Christ’s audience.)21 Herbert revels in this parabolic reversal or disjunction in his storying poems, as we will see. Both the Hebrew word mashal and the Aramaic mathla could refer 19 See discussion of Sidney below. For Renaissance defenses of literature, see Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and the anthology edited by Gavin Alexander, Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York: Penguin, 2004). 20 Coleridge considers this ability “the characteristic fault of our elder poets.” Quoted in Hutchinson, 522, notes to p. 129. 21 Williams, 20, quoting Robert. W. Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and the Word of God (New York, 1966), 161. 244 interchangeably to allegory, parable, illustration, and proverb; this kind of expansiveness of definition is also necessary when considering Herbert’s poems.22 Esther Gilman Richey, in her study of Herbert’s parabolic technique, argues against the notion that these poems are “exercises in self-representation and self-consumption”; she emphasizes instead that Herbert exploited the parable’s ability to be understood at different levels depending on the ability and particular situation of the hearer. He wrote his parables “for a range of spiritual aptitudes.” She cites the patristic examples of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Chrysostom, and Augustine who held that Christ, through the Word, appears to each seeker differently. In this way, the hearer receives custom-made spiritual counsel: “The fiction thus becomes an educational ‘remedy’ which the reader or listener must interpret and apply, the minister merely providing the prescription.”23 The engagement of the reader is paramount to the effectiveness of the remedy, however: As we move from these miniature fictions to the lyrics which frame them, we find clues for their decoding, often discovering in the emotional reactions of the next speaker an index for our own responses . . . in this way Herbert makes the hermeneutic process a gradual recovery of meaning, allowing us to evaluate each narrative through additional corrective lenses.24 Though Richey at the outset resists the characterization of “self-consuming artifacts” for Herbert’s story poems, her description of his parabolic technique in many ways echoes Stanley Fish’s argument throughout The Living Temple; namely, that even 22 Richey, “Wrapt in Night’s Mantle,” 170 n.3, and Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, rev. ed. (London: SCM Press, 1963), 20. Herbert was also a collector of “Outlandish Proverbs” and exchanged them with his brother; he incorporates proverbs into “Charms and Knots.” 23 Richey, “Wrapt,” 157–159. 24 Ibid., 160. 245 when he seems to be at his most meditative and introspective, Herbert is always catechizing the reader. Though, as will be discussed below, Fish in this work is actually dismissive of the narrative frame of reference for Herbert, his thesis is still very important in considering Herbert’s stories. What I am suggesting then is that Herbert’s poetry is a strategy, and that as a strategy it shares with the catechetical practice of his parson a shape and a goal: the goal is the involvement of the reader in his own edification (a word, as we shall see, that is precisely intended) and the shape is the bringing of the reader “by questions well ordered” to “that which he knows not.”25 Fish’s emphasis on the poet as catechist solves the problem of what he calls “the two Herberts,” namely, how Herbert’s poetry is at once orderly, even virtuosic in form and confident in its doctrinal assertions, but at other times unpredictable, uncertain, and full of reversals (he is especially responding to Helen Vendler’s idea of “the reinvented poem.”)26 Fish’s solution moves the focus from a solo, meditative Herbert ruminating by himself or to God in prayer to a Herbert who is unceasingly in dialogue with the reader, leading and guiding, as a good catechist, through questions, puzzles to solve, and arresting images to unpack, all towards the goal of spiritual enlightenment or edification. Because the catechetical “situation is at once both structured and open,” order and spontaneity, firm faith and agonizing doubt, can exist simultaneously.27 Fish’s emphasis on Herbert as catechizing poet is important for our understanding of his story poems because it highlights, as Richey notes above, the importance of what 25 Fish, The Living Temple, 27. 26 See Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert, Ch. 2. 27 Fish, The Living Temple, 25. 246 might be termed “audience participation” to the whole enterprise of The Temple. Storytellers must have someone to listen to them; telling stories to oneself alone can be a sign of mental instability. The stories Herbert tells are still meditative, ruminative, searching, questioning; but they have an outward focus. This outward focus, however, is sometimes so intimate as to become almost invisible in the telling: “Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back/ Guilty of dust and sin.” The power and intensity both of Love’s welcome, and the soul’s shame, involves the reader in the drama of these two characters from the first line of the poem. However, Fish unnecessarily dismisses the frame of story in favor of the frame of dialogue. He is seeking a unifying theory of The Temple, and resists dialectics such as Montgomery’s categories of “meditative mode” versus “allegorical mode.” He argues that Herbert’s poems are catechetical in an over-arching way.28 As noted, I find Fish’s framework very useful in thinking about Herbert’s poetry. However, there are reductive aspects to placing all the poems under the catechistical umbrella. For instance, emphasizing dialogue over story in the group of poems I will discuss below essentially shelves questions about the function and meaning of the device of narrative itself, in favor of the poet-reader relationship and the reader’s journey of discovery. This laying aside of narrative questions also seems unnecessary, since story is such a natural part of dialogue, and therefore fits well into his catechetical frame rather than competing with it. Fish goes to great pains to demonstrate from The Country Parson that Herbert’s model of catechizing is not one of “examination,” but a strategy that, unusual for the time, 28 Ibid, 5, 35. 247 included the continued growth of the catechist himself. However, catechizing as a pedagogical strategy works best for certain topics, namely, doctrine and ethics. I argue that Herbert’s stories are less prescriptive and more descriptive than catechesis would allow: in other words, rather than leading the reader on a process of discovery which ends in right belief or right practice, or even in some personal religious insight, Herbert’s stories often describe the Christian condition more broadly, the straits and graces that the long-haul follower of Christ is sure to face. Rather than asking questions of the reader, many of his stories are etiological, in the sense of answering a larger question, for example, “Why do I feel abandoned by God? Why am I suffering so much? How can a sinful human being possibly be made worthy of God’s love?” (This is another trait of parables: Jesus often told them in response to a question: “Who is my neighbor?” “How many times should a man forgive his brother?” etc.) Often, the story in Herbert’s poem is not so much about discovering something new about oneself as it is about seeing something afresh or from a radically different perspective. Fish, describing “the two Herberts,” uses the terms “order” versus “spontaneity,” but he also could have discussed being “oriented” versus being “disoriented”: Herbert’s story poems often take the reader through a process of disorientation, examining the present situation of the Christian (as despairing because of sin, ashamed, unheard by God or separated from him) and then reorienting the reader, opening up another, wider, perspective. The story is told to help make sense of what seems to be a pointless, unjust, or bizarre devotional predicament. Herbert, through his story-telling lyrics, is seeking, in miniature, to “justify the ways of God to man.” It is vital to the Christian project to correct misapprehensions about the 248 ways of God, and the relationship of God to the soul. Without a proper understanding of why things are the way they are, Christians cannot claim their full identity; they remain “void of storie” in crucial areas. The story poems are certainly catechetical in the sense of their reliance on a dialogue with an audience (which plays out in several fashions, as we shall see). However, in this group of lyrics the burden of answering questions (especially the framing question that prompts the story) is actually on the poet more than on the reader. The reader is pulled in by the story and stays engaged through the surprising imagery presented, but it is ultimately the reader who will decide if the poet’s tale has been successful, if it offers a satisfying solution to the problem being presented. The reader will decide if the invented story rings true. However, when I speak of the story poems answering a question about the broader Christian situation, I do not mean to minimize the importance of the personal, meditative mode that has so captivated readers of The Temple. Too much emphasis on Herbert as catechist, even a catechist engaged in his own spiritual development as well as his pupils’, can undercut Herbert’s artfulness with didacticism. As Helen Vendler notes, in those lyrics that tell a story, Herbert is allegorizing not only his experiences but also himself. To allegorize oneself is different from writing about Everyman: it means to take one’s own personality, exaggerate it, broaden it, delete its more eccentric specificities while retaining its individual character . . . many of the characteristics of the narrator in Love Unknown remind us of Herbert: the liking for colloquy, the tendency to complain, the naiveté, the childlike speech, the forthrightness, the attacks of misery.29 This is what Vendler means when she says that Herbert creates a “genuine persona,” that 29 Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert, 91–92. 249 this persona is crucial to the success of the story told. But Herbert was not only influenced by genre (biblical, medieval, or otherwise) in his use of narrative; there were likely two major contemporary (or near-contemporary) influences on Herbert’s thinking about fiction and lyric: his primary poetic model, Sir Philip Sidney, and his close friend, Sir Francis Bacon. Sidney’s theory of fiction and the poet as semi-divine Maker, and Bacon’s interest in the hidden truth of ancient myth, resonate with Herbert as story-teller in The Temple. II. Sidney, Bacon, and the Truth of Fiction Herbert’s patrons and distant cousins, William and Philip Herbert, Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, were Philip Sidney’s nephews; as Joseph Summers notes, “it is unlikely that the vicar of Bemerton and Fuggleston St. Peter (which served as a chapel for Wilton House) could escape an intimate knowledge of Sidney’s work,” arguing that Herbert “echoed him more frequently” than any other English poet.30 Perhaps Herbert was familiar with Thomas Moffet’s tribute to Sidney, Nobilis, or a View of the Life and Death of a Sidney, written for William Herbert, in which Moffet suggests that William “embrace, cherish, and imitate” his uncle, finding in him “a second self.”31 Sidney does seem to have been an exemplum for Herbert not just of gentility, but of poetic practice. Herbert, of course, was never knighted, never traveled to the continent or 30 Joseph Summers, “Sidney and Herbert: Sir Calidore and the Country Parson,” in Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert, edited by Edmund Miller and Robert DiYanni (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 207. 31 Quoted in Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England, 56. 250 did any soldiering; still there are notable similarities in the biographies of the two poets. Sidney died even younger than Herbert did, in 1586 at age 31. His modern editor and biographer Katherine Duncan-Jones notes that Despite, or even because of, the high hopes placed on him both at home and abroad, life was not particularly comfortable for Sidney . . . The glittering career as the Queen’s ambassador which seemed to lie before him at the age of 22, never really took off, for several reasons.32 Like Herbert, whose own more modest “court hopes” also seem to have been frustrated, it does not seem that Sidney ever had a home of his own and, again like Herbert, though from a wealthy extended family, he was always short of money. During the years of his poetic creativity (1577 to 1584/5), he “was rich in promise but—for a man of his exceptional talent and energy—severely underemployed and underappreciated, at least in England.” In the Defense of Poesy he celebrates the ability of the poet to deliver a “golden world” of art, but his own poetic persona is often melancholy, and his lyrics offer “repeated images of paralysis and stagnation.”33 Herbert shared a melancholic disposition with his famous kinsman. Sidney’s poetry, especially the sonnets of Astrophel and Stella, is often seen as a model for Herbert in terms of experimentation with and virtuosity of form, and the quest after sincerity of expression and simplicity of style.34 Certainly the first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella was an influence on The Temple: 32 Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), xiv–xv. 33 34 Ibid., xiv, xii. On Sidney and Herbert, see also Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 259–282. 251 But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay; Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame study’s blows. And others’ feet still seemed but stranger in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throwes, Biting my truant pen, beating my self for spite, ‘Foole’ said my muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’35 Herbert’s “Jordan (II),” concludes this way: As flames do work and winde, when they ascend, So did I weave my self into the sense. But while I bustled, I might heare a friend Whisper, How wide is all this long pretence! There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d. Copie out onely that, and save expense.36 Clearly, a focus on crafting poetic “inventions” that rang true and sang with simplicity rather than artifice was at the heart of both Sidney’s and Herbert’s lyrics. True, they versified at the behest of different muses; but, as Mary Ellen Rickey notes, though “Herbert felt, of course, that all love songs were intrinsically subordinate in importance to divine poetry” and that “love of God was for him the highest possible theme for the lyrist,” he did not condemn writing about love outright but rather quarreled with “glib, cliché-ridden amorous verse, prompted not by genuine sentiment, but by the desire to imitate other imitations . . . representing the exercise of wit for its own sake.”37 In this regard, he is in complete agreement with Sidney. However, does this agreement imply that Herbert also concurs with Sidney’s 35 Duncan-Jones, 153. 36 Hutchinson, 103. “Jordan (II),” in the earlier W manuscript of The Temple, bore the Sidneyan title “Invention.” 37 Mary Ellen Rickey, Utmost Art: Complexity in the Verse of George Herbert (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), 30. 252 philosophy of poetry and poem-making? Critics are silent on Herbert’s possible reactions to The Defense of Poesy. This text, however, is important to our consideration of Herbert’s use of stories, as it celebrates the creative license granted the poet (as opposed to the philosopher or historian), and argues that it is the very fictional nature of poetry (which in Sidney is not limited to verse, but extends to all imaginative literature) that makes it more able than philosophy or history to lead the reader to virtue.38 One of Sidney’s main lines of defense of poetry against its detractors is the very existence of religious poetry. What are the Psalms but a heavenly poesy, wherein [the Psalmist] almost showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith? But they that with quiet judgments will look a little deeper into it [poetry], shall find the end and working of it such, as being rightly applied, deserveth not to be scourged out the Church of God.39 The fact that “the Holy Scripture (wherein there is no uncleanness) hath whole parts in it poetical, and that even our Saviour Christ vouchsafed to use the flowers of it” lends credence to it as a genre and acts as divine authorization even for the secular poet.40 Poetry is also the most effective form of teaching, which is why Jesus taught in parables: Certainly, even our Saviour Christ could as well have given the moral commonplaces of uncharitableness and humbleness as the divine narration of Dives and Lazarus; or of disobedience and mercy, as that heavenly discourse of the lost child and the gracious father; but that His through38 William Pahlka argues that although Herbert’s debt to Sidney is great, “there are several points on which Herbert is directly at odds with Sidney,” namely that Sidney abandons the idea of “copying,” or artistic imitation, in favor of the poet as maker and artistic invention. William H. Pahlka, Saint Augustine’s Meter and George Herbert’s Will (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), 6–10. 39 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, edited by Forrest G. Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 12. 40 Ibid., 50. 253 searching wisdom knew [that these stories] would more constantly (as it were) inhabit both the memory and judgment.41 Invented parables can also convict the listener and bring about justice, as in the prophet Nathan’s parable about the stolen lamb, told to the adulterous King David.42 As opposed to the philosopher, who “teacheth obscurely” and only to the learned, “the poet is the food for the tenderest stomachs” and “the right popular philosopher,” as demonstrated by the wisdom of Aesop’s fables.43 A “feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example,” and, in fact, more, since “the feigned may be tuned to the highest key of passion.”44 The power of poetry lies in its imagery. Whereas the philosopher sets down “with thorny argument the bare rule” in an abstract and general sense which is difficult to apply, and the historian is tied “not to what should be but to what is,” the poet by contrast “giveth a perfect picture” of what should be.45 Poetic or fictional examples, because they are perfect and “speaking pictures,” are also much more engaging and easier to listen to, “even as the child is often brought to take most wholesome things by hiding them in such other as have a pleasant taste,” as if they took “a medicine of cherries.”46 This “medicine of cherries” parallels Herbert’s “bait of pleasure” in the Perirrhanterium of The Chuchporch (Hutchinson 6; “a verse may find him who a sermon flies”). With his emphasis on 41 Ibid., 30. 42 Ibid., 41. 43 Ibid., 30. 44 Ibid, 33. 45 Ibid., 27. 46 Ibid, 28, 38, 40. 254 the Psalms and the parables of Jesus, which demonstrate the range of emotion and intricacy of form found in poetry, as well as the use of imaginary or invented stories to move the readers or hearers to virtue, Sidney argues for the value of poetry by using the two biblical genres that were the most influential on Herbert. But Sidney describes the persona of the poet himself in ways that might be troubling to the poet-parson of Bemerton. Every practitioner of the liberal arts, Sidney argues, is dependent on “the works of nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth.”47 The astronomer is dependent upon the stars; mathematicians on “their diverse sorts of quantities,” the physician on the human body. The poet, however, is the sole exception to this dependence: Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.48 This bold assertion is startling for a poet as fiercely Calvinist as Sidney, and himself a practitioner of religious verse.49 Though much of the Defense rests on poetry’s use in 47 Ibid., 13. 48 Ibid., 14. 49 See Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978); Brian Cummings, Grammar and Grace: The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 264–270; and J.C.A. Rathmell, ed., The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and The Countess of Pembroke (New York: New York University Press, 1963). 255 sacred scripture, when Sidney comes to define the poet it appears that the gods are more present than God. The poet is a sort of demigod himself, able to manufacture from “the vigor of his own invention” images that surpass Nature in beauty: “Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.”50 Both the throwing off of subjection and the “growing of another nature” would almost certainly raise warning flags for the author of The Temple. For Herbert, freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit frequently leads to despair. The word “invention” is usually suspect in The Temple.51 Presumably, this divided meaning was what was intended in the first draft title of the sonnet that became “Jordan (II)”; invention, necessary for poetic expression, but duplicitous, so often “working and winding”—Herbert’s favorite phrase to describe the progress of sin. It is only the presence of Christ’s nature, grafted on to human nature, that can salvage the products of the poet’s imagination and enable them to be “poor wreaths” of praise.52 Instead of double-edged invention, a creator of the “speaking pictures” which can cross over into artifacts of vainglory and idolatry as easily as they can lead to the divine, Herbert chose to name his sonnet after the font of his inspiration, the river Jordan. The Christian poet is necessarily a subjected poet, subject to the divine Creator. This secondary status is not restrictive, however. Herbert’s fashioning of stories of his own invention, using the genre of biblical parable as a model, is his way of ranging freely and 50 Ibid., 15. 51 See “Jordan (II),” “Sinne’s Round,” “Love (I),” “Love (II).” 52 See “The Wreath.” 256 joyfully within the zodiac of Christ’s wit. The truth of the “feigned example,” especially in terms of the inventions of the ancients, or classical myth, was a preoccupation of Sir Francis Bacon. In 1625, the last year of his life, Bacon dedicated his Translation of Certaine Psalmes to “his very good friend, Mr George Herbert,” in acknowledgment of “[t]he paines, that it pleased you to take, about some of my Writings,” namely, Herbert’s contribution to the project of translating The Advancement of Learning into Latin.53 Herbert wrote three letters and three Latin poems to Bacon between June 1620 and May 1621. The longest, “In Honorem Illustr. D.D. Verulamij,” “far surpassed in scope and intensity anything required of the Latin Orator in his official capacity, but if the poet hoped for advancement through Bacon’s influence, he was disappointed,” as it was written “embarrassingly near the time when Bacon was charged, convicted, and sentenced for bribery.”54 Herbert also contributed a verse to a memorial volume after Bacon’s death.55 Bacon’s comments on poetry in the second book of The Advancement of Learning are bound up with his interest in the function of parable, an interest he had explored previously in The Wisdom of the Ancients. Bacon’s definition of poetry owes something 53 Quoted in Hutchinson, xl. On Herbert and Bacon, see Charles Whitney, “Bacon and Herbert as Moderns,” in Like Season’d Timber, ed. by Miller and DiYanni, 231–339; Joseph Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and His Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 97–99, 195–197; Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968) xxx–xxxviii; William A. Sessions, “Bacon and Herbert and an Image of Chalk,” in “Too Riche to Clothe the Sonne”: Essays on George Herbert, ed. by Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1980), 163–78; and Ch. 5 and 6 in Greg Miller, George Herbert’s Holy Patterns: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007). 54 Summers, 40. 55 Hutchinson, 438. 257 to Sidney’s Defense: Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the Imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things: Pictoribus atque poetis, &c. [Painters and Poets have always been allowed to take what liberties they would.]56 Bacon emphasizes Sidney’s emphasis on poetry’s imaginative license, but highlights its paradoxical nature given that since it is restrained in its meter and form. This “Feigned History” gives “some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it,” since the world is inferior to the soul; “by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things.” Therefore, poetry “was ever thought to have some participation of divineness,” because it submits the appearance of things in nature to the desires of the mind, thus elevating the intellect. Reason, on the other hand, “doth bow and buckle the mind unto the nature of things.”57 Of the three kinds of poetry Bacon names (Narrative, Representative, and Allusive), he is most interested in the third, also called “Parabolical.” He defines it as “a narration applied only to express some special purpose or conceit.” This kind of “parabolical wisdom” was the special vehicle of the ancients: [A]s hieroglyphics were before letters, so parables were before arguments: 56 Francis Bacon, Works, Vol. 3, ed. by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denton Heath (Reprint, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Fromann Holzboog, 1961–63), 343. 57 Ibid., 343–344. 258 and nevertheless now and at all times they do retain much life and vigour, because reason cannot be so sensible, nor examples so fit.58 The ancient parables and myths fascinate Bacon, and in his mythography, The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609), he describes fragments of lost knowledge, “sacred relics and light airs breathing out of better times.”59 Between the vanished world of prehistory and the dawn of recorded tradition, “there is drawn a veil, as it were, of fables, which come in and occupy the middle region that separates what has perished from what survives.”60 Parables have been used in two contrary ways, Bacon argues in both works: “For they serve to disguise and veil the meaning, and they serve also to clear and throw light upon it.”61 This gives parables and myths a sort of mystical, sphinx-like status. Nevertheless, Bacon the natural philosopher feels he can crack their code (at least of the ones made by “human wisdom only”), which is his declared project in The Wisdom of the Ancients.62 In a sort of parallel with Sidney’s idea of the poet’s “fore-conceit,” Bacon argues that the ancient myth-makers knew what they were doing: . . . but the truth is that in some of these fables, as well in the very frame and texture of the story as in the propriety of the names by which the persons that figure in it are distinguished, I find a conformity and connexion with the thing signified, so close and so evident, that one cannot help believing such a signification to have been designed and 58 Ibid., 344. The paradoxical (to us) idea of reason not being “sensible,” i.e., able to appeal to the senses the way the speaking picture of poetry can, is a glimpse into the shifting history of that word, which now has a primary meaning of able to be grasped by the mind (to “see reason”). 59 Bacon, Works, Vol. 6, 698. 60 Ibid., 695. 61 Ibid., 698. 62 On this text, see Howard B. White, “Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients,” in Interpretation 2 (Winter 1970): 107–129. 259 meditated from the first, and purposely shadowed out.63 For example, Metis, Jupiter’s wife, “plainly means counsel; Typhon [the rebellious son of Juno conceived without Jupiter] swelling,” and so on. The phrase “purposely shadowed out” has a wonderful double meaning, in the sense of both filling in or shading a drawing but also obscuring what is plainly visible, exactly the paradoxical action of parable. Parables and myths announce themselves by some of their more fantastic elements: one sign that fables “contain a hidden and involved meaning” (as opposed to just being fanciful stories for entertainment only) is that “some of them are so absurd and stupid upon the face of the narrative taken by itself, that they may be said to give notice from afar and cry out that there is a parable below.”64 Parables, fables and myths are especially effective at teaching “inventions that are new and abstruse and remote from vulgar opinions . . .” In fact, this is the most natural way of teaching, since “even now if any one wish to let new light on any subject into men’s minds, and that without offence or harshness, he must still go the same way and call in the aid of similitudes.”65 In Sidney and Bacon, then, Herbert had two encouragements toward embracing fictional and parabolic elements in his poems. Sidney emphasizes the poet’s freedom and creativity, describing “what should be” by summoning all the powers of the imagination. Although Herbert, who from his youth dedicated his poetic efforts exclusively to God, would likely decline Sidney’s suggestion that the poet throw off all subjugation, the fact 63 Bacon, Works Vol. 6, 696. 64 Ibid., 697. 65 Ibid., 698. 260 that his imagination is somewhat circumscribed does not make it any less potent. In fact, in harnessing many of the elements of the parables of Jesus to his own verses, Herbert summons their power by osmosis, touching them to the hem of Jesus’ garment, as it were. Bacon’s fascination with myth as “parabolical wisdom” may have inspired Herbert to try inventing some of his own parables, which do not seem to have a clear precedent in English lyric. Summers notes that it was at Bacon’s suggestion that Herbert began collecting the parabolic sayings that became “Outlandish Proverbs”; could they also have conversed about the parabolic in lyric?66 Whatever the answer to this question, Herbert as a translator of The Advancement of Learning was familiar with his powerful friend’s thoughts on the subject. Neither Sidney nor Bacon find any conflict between a “feigned” story and the truth that leads to virtuous action; in fact, the exemplary qualities in fiction or myth make them especially valuable for teaching. Having explored Herbert’s own “theology of story,” the importance of the parables of Jesus, and the possible influence of Sidney and Bacon on his poetic technique, we now turn to the poems themselves. III. Herbert’s Storying Poems Herbert’s story poems range freely throughout the zodiac of Christ’s wit, or, to use Walton’s phrase, are a product of “Christian intelligence.” They demonstrate that a subjected imagination is nonetheless capable of prodigious powers of invention. The poems under analysis here are those in which a story or narrative is the driving force of the poem; Robert Montgomery describes them as allegorical lyrics, and Anne Williams 66 Summers, George Herbert, 196. 261 as “lyric parables”.67 While technically some of Herbert’s lyrics that have been read more autobiographically (such as “The Collar” and “Affliction (I)”) could be included here, for the purposes of this essay I will focus on poems that have a more purely fictional structure, i.e., not a narrative which could plausibly relate the poet’s own experience.68 This group of poems could be categorized in a number of different ways; the discussion below is descriptive rather than definitive. The following characteristics recur and often overlap in the storying poems of the Temple, delineating the features of narrative that Herbert found most conducive to his project, as well as setting certain aspects of Christian identity (often troubling or paradoxical) into high relief. These characteristics are: the story poem asexample of multum in parvo; the use of dialogue to foreground the presence of the reader; Herbert’s play with the reader’s expectations; and his recasting of the pilgrimage or quest narrative. Story and the World “contracted to a span” Robert Higbie argues that Herbert was “especially attracted to the idea of enclosure and confinement,” and explores the many images of enclosure in The Temple, from boxes and cabinets to locked doors, walls and houses, and, of course, the Temple itself. Accepting God’s control for him seems to have meant accepting some boundaries within which God would protect him . . . the temple . . . represents for him God’s perfect enclosure, the ideal of which all his 67 68 Montgomery, 461, and Williams, 20. In other words, Herbert could conceivably have struck a table and cried, “No more! I will abroad,” as in “The Collar,” but could not have presented his heart on a dish of fruit to his master, as in “Love Unknown.” 262 earlier enclosure images are imperfect reflections.69 Several of Herbert’s story poems create allegorical enclosures, contracting broad narratives about creation or fundamental aspects of human nature down to a highly symbolic few stanzas. These poems function as examples of multum in parvo, lyric miniatures standing in for the larger world in a parabolic way. In “The World,” both the whole created order and humanity as a microcosm of it are shrunk down to sixteen lines. “Love built a stately house,” the poem begins, echoing Paul’s description of the believer as “God’s building.”70 Various figures move in and threaten the house’s stability, but at first they are quickly dispatched. Fortune, “spinning phansies,” has her cobwebs swept away by Wisdome. Pleasure, who “liking not the fashion,” starts building Italianate balcones and terraces that weaken the foundation, is evicted by “rev’rend laws, and many a proclamation.” Sinne presents the first serious challenge, “working and winding slily evermore” as a sycamore tree that begins to grow inside the house, pushing apart the supporting walls and beams. This organic image of sin is unexpected, since it is not a speaking figure like the others. Herbert also ties it to the fig leaves in Genesis that covered Adam and Eve (“whose leaves first sheltered man from drought & dew,” ln. 12). Sin (in this poem at least) is a good thing in the wrong place: a tall tree growing outside functions as a shelter, but planted inside would, over time, wreak havoc on a building; this is sin as “trespass,” as in the Lord’s Prayer, disorder rather than depravity. Sinne’s “slily winding” branches, 69 Robert Higbie, “Images of Enclosure in George Herbert’s The Temple,” in Essential Articles for the Study of George Herbert’s Poetry, ed. by John R. Roberts (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979), 268. 70 1 Corinthians 3:9. 263 growing every which way, contrast with the order and symmetry of the “stately house.” Grace comes in the form of a gardener, cutting back the branches and pruning it “as it grew”; what cannot be eradicated can at least be managed and held at bay.71 However, Sinne then combines with Death “in a firm band/To raze the building to the very floore:/Which they effected, none could them withstand.” This complete destruction is accomplished suddenly and with little drama. All along, the house has been condemned, and the interventions just measures to buy time. But just as quickly, . . . Love and Grace took Glorie by the hand, And built a braver Palace then before. This is Glorie in the sense of that word in the Gospel of John: the glory of the crucifixion, the raising up of Christ that redeems the world, and raises up anew what had been “razed.” The point of the creation, and destruction, of the house has from the beginning been its recreation, its regeneration (to use the language of the Book of Common Prayer) into a “braver Palace,” heavenly rather than earthly.72 This little wonder cabinet of a poem paints a double-sided portrait of the Christian life: while there are remedies for the individual temptations faced and the compromising behaviors adopted by the Christian, sin (the menacing houseplant gone awry) cannot be fully eradicated in this life, only somewhat contained. Ultimately, the Christian is doomed; sin and death combined form an unstoppable wrecking ball. However, Christ’s sacrifice translates this doom into a new edifice, now invulnerable to destruction. The 71 72 The seven deadly sins were often illustrated as a tree with branches, offshoots, and leaves. “We call upon thee for these infants, that they coming to thy holy Baptism may receive remission of their sins by spiritual regeneration.” Booty, BCP, 271. 264 Christian life is an endless series of home repairs, none of which will stave off decay and finally utter ruin. But this very ruin allows for the possibility of a complete overhaul, where the Christian can fulfill his or her potential to be a palace for Love, echoing the biblical language of believers’ bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. “The Pulley” is another poem where the narrative is so “contracted,” to use a word from the poem itself, so as to create an enclosure. Like “The World,” “The Pulley” contains echoes of the creation story and makes claims about the ultimate ends of humanity. It is more directly etiological, and answers the question, “Why are human beings so restless?” The poem begins as a sort of inverse of the myth of Pandora: When God at first made man, Having a glasse of blessings standing by; Let us (said he) poure on him all we can: Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie, Contract into a span. (1–5) God speaks in the plural, as in the first Genesis creation account.73 Thus, strength, beauty, wisdom, honor, and pleasure are all given away from the vial of blessings, but “When almost all was out, God made a stay,” noticing “Rest” at the bottom (ln. 10). God decides that giving this last “jewell” would cause the creature to “adore my gifts in stead of me,” which would make both losers. Humans would be “resting” in the created order, a mere image of the Creator (a form of idolatry), while God would lack the praise of his creation. He concludes, Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessnesse: Let him be rich and wearie, that at least, 73 As in Genesis 1:26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness . . .” 265 If goodnesse lead him not, yet wearinesse May tosse him to my breast. This ending clearly echoes Augustine’s opening statement in the Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till we rest in thee.”74 Yet Herbert tells a very odd creation story: sin, such a large and memorable presence in “The World,” destroying the house from within with its kudzu-like growth, is entirely absent from “The Pulley.” For that matter, so too is Christ. Humanity’s “repining restlessnesse” is not due to transgression or to waiting on the promises of redemption to be fulfilled, but because God has held back something necessary for human happiness; human suffering is by design. The Garden was not forfeited due to a violation of God’s law; the Garden was never complete to begin with. There may also be echoes here of Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium, the etiology of why human beings seek their “other halves,”; except in Herbert’s poem the lost half, or missing piece, is God. Human restlessness and longing is the pulley of the title, “tossing” us back up to God; restlessness is the mechanism of return. Obviously, in light of the other poems in The Temple, “The Pulley” does not demonstrate Herbert’s complete thoughts on creation, sin, and the devotional relationship. It is an invented myth or fable about one facet of human existence, our unceasing restlessness. But it is an example of how Herbert is able to suspend major Christian narratives (Creation, the Cross) temporarily when they don’t help him to make his point. The poem shows how he can range widely throughout the zodiac of Christ’s wit. 74 Augustine, Confessions, Book I.I. For a summary of the numerous invocations of Augustine in Herbert studies, see Pahlka, Saint Augustine’s Meter and George Herbert’s Will, xiii. 266 Restlessness and longing, the result of withholding a blessing, becomes a blessing itself by luring us back to God. Paradoxically, humans are ultimately blessed by what is withheld from them; this abundance even in lack is part of God’s essential goodness, and becomes important in understanding Herbert’s theology of affliction.75 In addition to these poems functioning as enclosures, images of enclosure are featured prominently in both “The World” (the house itself, first undermined from within and then destroyed from without) and “The Pulley” (the “glasse” or container of blessings that is almost emptied). The storying poems “Christmas” and “Love (III)” also take place in enclosed areas (a stable, the non-descript room from which Love calls to the guest); many others contain the element of highly contracted narrative that positions the poem as a sort of diorama of the particular aspect of the Christian life Herbert is exploring. These simple compressed set pieces described, as Coleridge would say, in “natural” language, open out with fantastic implications; however, each fantastic scenario ultimately corresponds to the Christian situation. Story and Dialogue Onto these allegorical or otherwise implausible fictions, Herbert overlays the most natural and comprehensible element of storytelling, conversation and dialogue. Much critical attention has been focused on Herbert’s dialogue with God.76 Stanley Fish, as mentioned above, sees the catechetical dialogue between poet and reader as 75 76 See Herbert’s five poems titled “Affliction.” See especially Ch. 1, “George Herbert and God,” in Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 267 foundational to the poems in the Church section of the Temple, even in poems where no conversation is described. Herbert’s story poems, however, include many examples of conversations that are neither colloquies with the divine nor explicitly catechetical. Some of the poet’s interlocutors are quite unusual, and include Time himself, a shooting star (“Artillerie”) a disembodied voice (“The Pilgrimage”) and a secret cave (“Peace”). Herbert uses conversation in his storying poems to invite the reader into the lyric in a more explicit way than is possible in his “vertical” addresses to God. The three poems discussed below are widely divergent in terms of how each conversation develops: in “Time,” the poet subdues Time with his lengthy philosophizing, while in “The Quip” he refuses to answer for himself; in “The Bag” it is Jesus who, after a long silence, delivers a surprising soliloquy. However, these three poems use the art of conversation to discuss the same thing, namely, Christian belonging. F.E. Hutchinson comments on “Time” that there “is a curiously light, bantering tone about this grave subject . . .” and Mary Ellen Rickey notes that the poem avoids “the moralizing tone often found in such allegorical encounters.”77 The poet certainly responds to Time, portrayed as a kind of Grim Reaper with a scythe, not out of fear but with ribbing and jest: Meeting with Time, Slack thing, said I, Thy sithe is dull; whet it for shame.78 Time replies to this insult that for every one man, like the poet, who wants his scythe 77 Hutchinson, 520; Rickey, 132. 78 Hutchinson, 122. 268 ground sharper, there are twenty who find it too sharp, i.e., who don’t want to lose their lives. The poet replies that this may have been true in olden times, but Christ’s coming has transformed the scythe from a hatchet to a pruning knife. He has made Man a debtor to Time, “Since by thy cutting he grows better” (lns. 9–11). In fact, this blessing actually includes Time, the former enemy. Whereas before Christ’s coming, Time was an “executioner at best,” he is now a gardener, and An usher to convey our souls Beyond the utmost stares and poles. The poet continues in this meditative vein, expounding on the idea that, in keeping us from God (since alive we are separated from him), Time in a sense acts as a bulwark against eternity (“Of what strange length must that needs be,/ Which ev’n eternitie excludes!”). However, the poet’s philosophizing is cut short by his addressee: Thus farre Time heard me patiently: Then chafing said, This man deludes: What do I here before his doore? He doth not crave lesse time, but more. Time has decided that his time is being wasted by the poet’s speculations. Further, the poet “deludes,” meaning he is either deluded (by thinking he wants a quick end to his life to meet his Maker sooner) or he is trying to deceive Time (by talking at length to distract him from his purpose). The last line could refer to the poet’s desire for eternal life, or to the fact that he is trying to talk his way out of being at the other end of Time’s scythe at that moment. Perhaps it means both. The reader is invited into the poem as audience, to hear the story of the poet’s one-upmanship of Time, in a kind of cross between fable and pub story. There are no 269 hints of memento mori or carpe diem, no exhortations to use one’s time well or to live a disciplined life. Indeed, Herbert departs from Christian exempla on this subject, as well as from other poems in the Temple. As in both “The World” and “The Pulley,” Herbert suspends traditional Christian narratives when they do not suit him. “Time,” in its bantering way, puts forth another paradoxical element of Christian identity: although completely vulnerable to mortality, the believing Christian is nonetheless fearless in the face of death. The earthly house will be razed, but it will also be raised up. “He doth not crave lesse time, but more.” The blessing of the resurrection extends to Time, the instrument of death and destruction, but also (as with restlessness in “The Pulley”) a vehicle for God’s grace. Time’s transformation from executioner to gardener recalls Adam and Eve’s first occupation in the Garden of Eden; indeed, Time’s gardening ushers souls back to paradise. As in “The World,” the fact of death has not been altered. However the poet in his dialogue with Time provides a model of how the Christian is to face the end of his or her time on earth: fearlessly, with good humor, in “sure and certain hope” of the redemptive, regenerating promises of God through Christ. In “The Quip,” the poet is on the receiving end of jibes and insults rather than delivering them. The merrie world did on a day With his train-bands and mates agree To meet together, where I lay, And all in sport to geere at me.79 The fact that the poet is lying down suggests that he is either ill or incapacitated; perhaps 79 Hutchinson, 110. 270 he is daydreaming.80 In any case, the mockers are coming to hit him while he’s down, whether physically or spiritually. First, “Beautie crept into a rose,” and asked him, when he refuses to pluck the flower, “Whose hands are those?” In other words, “Aren’t you your own man? Who is stopping you from taking what you want?” Herbert’s answer, “But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me,” is taken from Psalm 38:15, “For in thee, O Lord, have I put my trust: thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.” His answer is at once a rebuke, but also confirmation that Beautie is correct; he is not his own.81 Next Money comes, “chinking still” with the sound of coins, and asks, What tune is this, poore man? said he: I heard in Musick you had skill. But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. He gives the same reply to both “brave Glorie puffing by/ In silks that whistled,” who “scarce allow’d me half and eie,” and “quick Wit and Conversation,” who insists on using his oratory skills to “a comfort be.” Whereas in “Time” the poet sparred and philosophized at length with what should have been a fearsome interlocutor, in “The Quip,” he answers his far less intimidating insulters in brief and, significantly, in words that are not his own. Though the poem is allegorical, these figures are not straw men for Herbert; this is definitely an example of his “self-allegorization,” in Vendler’s phrase. Beauty, double-edged, is always alluring, especially for an artist. Herbert, a younger son in a large family, was perpetually short of 80 Helen Vendler notes that the “dramatis personae actually live within Herbert’s own consciousness,” Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert, 184. 81 Helen Wilcox notes that this refrain was printed in italics from the second edition of The Temple on. Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 396 n.8. 271 money. Amy Charles in her biography suggests that one reason for his delayed marriage was that he could not afford to set up his own household until his late thirties.82 Herbert put “quick Wit and Conversation” to professional use in pursuit of professional “Glorie” in his role as Orator of Cambridge University. It remains a matter of debate how much of Herbert’s self-rustication from Cambridge Orator to Country Parson was due to disgust with court life or parliament, as opposed to the debilitation of illness, and resignation at the failure of his connections to provide him with desired levels of advancement. Cristina Malcomson in her recent biography suggests that Herbert never gave up his ambition for preferments and professional advancement.83 In any case, Herbert’s break with the pursuit of “Glorie” was not an easy one. The barbs of “the merrie world” still sting him, even though he is firm in his resolve not to give in to or chase after the pleasures confronting him. Though resolved and resigned, the tone of this mostly one-sided dialogue is clearly tinged with sadness. The poet has chosen not to trade in any of the currencies of the world, the literal currency of money but also other kinds of important social capital: attractiveness (of persons or possessions), achievements, intellectual competitiveness. To remove oneself from these avenues can be isolating and humiliating. Unlike in many allegories, these figures are never demonstrated to be bankrupt in some way (the rose is not revealed to be decayed or rotten, for example); they just walk on and out of the frame, passing him by. However, “The Quip,” as all the poems discussed in this chapter thus far, is not 82 Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 143. 83 Cristina Malcolmson, George Herbert: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2004), ix. 272 really about this world, but about ultimate ends: Yet when the houre of thy designe To answer these fine things shall come; Speak not at large; say, I am thine: And then they have their answer home. At the hour of God’s “designe,” Judgment Day or the Day of Reckoning, God will speak for the poet and claim him once and for all. The poet has been withholding himself, and experiencing deprivation and isolation on earth as a consequence, in order that he may be utterly possessed by God. “The Quip” of the title is not the various jabs thrown at the poet, but rather his reply, “But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.” There are many layers to this quip: first, his scriptural reply is an answer that is not an answer. It is addressed to God alone and does not acknowledge the questioner, yet it forecasts the conversation into the future, when God will give the ultimate answer on behalf of his servant. The answer it projects, “I am thine,” is irrevocable and definitive. There is no besting this quip. Here, as in “Time,” the poet is modeling a way of confronting challenges along the Christian journey. Whereas previously it was fear of death, here it is the temptation to worldliness, and the disappointment that creeps in about what might have been, had one chosen to play on the world’s team instead of God’s—had one chosen, as Herbert threatens to do in “Affliction (I)”, to “seek some other Master out.” But the tactics involved in this face-off are very different: Herbert had a jesting, humorous tone with Time, but he does not allow himself any conference, humorous or otherwise, with Beauty, Money, Glorie or Wit and Conversation. The only allowable response to this kind of temptation is to let the Word speak through the poet. Or, to put it another way, the Holy Spirit speaks on behalf of the 273 believer.84 The Christian’s answer is only partial, and it does not make complete sense in this world. It requires a reckoning, and for God to intervene, to interject and speak on the soul’s behalf. Christians are not “void of story,” but they do not possess the story in its entirety—yet. Believers are waiting, like the narrator of “A True Hymne,” for God to fill in the blank space and write, “Loved.”85 Perhaps the strangest of Herbert’s poems involving dialogue or conversation— and perhaps the strangest poem in The Temple—is “The Bag.” The narrator himself says, “Hast thou not heard, that my Lord Jesus di’d?/ Then let me tell thee a strange storie.” This could have been the poem’s opening, fitting given Herbert’s pattern of abrupt beginnings to his storying poems. But this is, in fact, the second stanza; the first begins, “Away despair! my gracious Lord doth heare,” and uses maritime imagery of a distressed storm at sea that, though assaulted by wind and waves, is rescued from sinking: Storms are the triumph of his art: Well may he close his eyes, but not his heart.86 Only now is the “strange storie” begun. The narrative, then, has a specific purpose that is given at the outset: it is told against despair. “Ev’n when the boat seems most to reel,” the soul has not been abandoned. However, the image of a God who closes his eyes (if not his heart) is hardly comforting; apparently His eye is not necessarily on the sparrow. “The Bag” goes unflinching to the heart of Christian fears of abandonment. Though Helen Wilcox cites the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 as a 84 As in Luke 12:12, “For the Holy Spirit shall teach you in that same hour what ye ought to say.” 85 Hutchinson, 168. 86 Hutchinson, 151, lines 5-6. 274 biblical precedent for this poem, I do not think this connection is a very strong one apart from genre; rather, Herbert has conflated and “parable-ized” the accounts of the Incarnation and Passion.87 These are “strange stories” to begin with; Herbert has made them even stranger by recasting them in an almost folktale-like way (the prince disguised as a pauper being a major theme in such tales). However, two other biblical ideas loom large behind this de-familiarized account of Christ’s birth and death: the Johannine idea of Jesus as “the stranger from heaven” (M. de Jonge’s phrase), and also the early Christian kenotic hymn quoted by the Apostle Paul in Philippians 2.88 Numerous biblical materials, therefore, are repurposed into a deceptively simple and colloquial narrative, which, we’ve been told, will function as an effective bulwark to the poet’s encroaching despair: Hast thou not heard, that my Lord Jesus did? Then let me tell thee a strange storie. The God of power, as he did ride In his majestick robes of glorie, Resolv’d to light; and so one day He did descend, undressing all the way.89 Jesus is going to “light” on earth, in the sense of landing but also of becoming “a light to enlighten the nations,” and an epiphany to the Gentiles. Never in the Christian 87 Wilcox also lists the “bag” of sins in Job 14:17, the piercing of Christ’s side after the crucifixion, and Jesus as intercessor for humanity in Hebrews 7:25. Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert, 518. 88 Philippians 2:5–19: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of me: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name. . . .” Wilcox cites Philippians 2 in reference to line 12, but doesn’t seem to consider it a major influence on the poem (521). 89 Hutchinson, 151. 275 imagination has Christ moved from cosmic to homely and familiar in so short a span, or has Jesus’ kenosis been portrayed as a kind of strip-tease: as he empties himself, the stars, clouds, lightning and sky are each given a part of his attire (robe, rings, bow, spear, and mantle). These elements finally ask Jesus what on earth (no pun intended) he will wear: He smil’d and said as he did go, He had new clothes a making here below. Jesus’ smile includes a wink at the reader. This is about as saucy as Herbert gets, but considering its Pauline source and the subject, it is provocative. Arriving on Earth, “as travelers are wont,/ He did repair unto an inne,” where he endured “many a brunt” to cancel out human sin. Having given everything else up already, he finally gives up his life “to pay our score.” Thus the Cross is alluded to, but never mentioned by name. Instead, the focus is on the spear, with which, in the Gospel of John, Christ is pierced in the side by the Roman soldiers to make sure that he is dead.90 In Herbert’s telling, however, “as he was returning,” someone “ran upon him with a spear,” implying betrayal. This event causes Jesus to turn and deliver a startling soliloquy to his followers: If ye have any thing to send or write, I have no bag, but here is room: Unto my Fathers hands and sight, Beleeve me, it shall safely come. That I shall minde, what you impart, Look, you may put it very neare my heart. Or if hereafter any of my friends Will use me in this kinde, the doore Shall still be open; what he sends 90 John 19:34. 276 I will present, and somewhat more, Not to his hurt. Sighs will convey Any thing to me. Harke, Despair away. The dramatic speech act that concludes this poem is remarkable in light of the silence that has come before it. Jesus speaks (briefly) to the cosmos and its constituent parts inquire about his lack of clothing, yet his entire earthly ministry is recounted as if he had lived a solitary existence; as Herbert says, “He, who came hither all alone,/ Bringing nor man, nor arms, nor fear . . .” At the last minute, however, Jesus offers himself in an extremely intimate way, having made himself vulnerable (wounded) for his “friends.” The wounds transformed into the vehicle of grace and connection to God follows a familiar Herbertian pattern. The image of Christ’s side as a mail slot is bizarre, but having it offered as such, Jesus intensifies it. This “doore” is open permanently; Jesus’ physical body has become cosmic once again. The immateriality of the “sighs” of Jesus’ friends taken alongside the wound-as-door, is a compelling juxtaposition of Christianity’s tendency to spiritualize all aspects of life with its undeniable physicality of the Incarnation. Jesus has taken over the poet’s tale, and with his last words it is he who answers the need that has given rise to the story: “Harke, Despair away.” As in “The Quip,” when confronted by challenges (temptation, despair), the Christian does not need to generate answers for him- or herself. Through the words of scripture, or through Jesus as intercessor and mediator, the answer is given. The conclusion that Herbert reaches in this poem—that the Christian’s feelings of abandonment or of not being heard by God are actually illusory—is very different from what we find in “The Pilgrimage,” for example. 277 In “The Bag,” the gospel story is told as medicine, as a remedy for ailing souls. But this story must be told so that it can be heard in all its strangeness and mystery, if the medicine is to do its work. Sidneyan invention and Baconian parabolic poetry combine with Herbert’s deceptively simple conversational style and gift of interweaving various biblical elements to produce a startling and fresh telling of one of the most-repeated stories in the world. Rather than having been abandoned by God, the faithful are the ones for whom Christ has given everything. The reader is thus reoriented from despair into hope, and finds that she didn’t know this supposedly familiar story, after all. The only thing odder than a mail slot in the side of the crucified Christ is that it is actually true; Jesus does “carry” the Christian’s prayers to God. Herbert plays with our expectations, but in the end, the truth (of the Christian life) is stranger than fiction. Story and Expectation Stories are an especially good vehicle for the kind of play with readerly expectations that Herbert relishes. Where invention rules, rather than a kind of meditative naturalism (as in Donne), anything can happen. Donne, for example, might wish for dramatic and outrageous things to happen, as a beginning to a meditative flight, as in Holy Sonnet XIV (“Batter my heart, three-person’d God,”) but the battering is described as an optative: would that it might happen. Herbert, in his storying poems, simply says, this happened. The narrator of “Love Unknown” does have his heart battered (and drowned, fried, and pierced). Moving the fantastic or fabulistic elements of the poem from the realm of the imagination into the narrative action (even when this creates a kind of fantasy that is clearly metaphorical or allegorical) pulls the reader into the poem more 278 directly. The storying poem makes the claim that it is not a meditative or intellectual exercise, but the recounting of an actual event. It is for the reader to sort out this claim. The welding together of fantastic and naturalistic language, a poetic “fault” according to Coleridge, is a classic technique for heightening spiritual intensity as we find throughout metaphysical poetry. Herbert’s storying poems exploit the reader’s expectations by harnessing the power of narrative to excite interest in what will happen next. Even the barest of scenarios can provoke curiosity, which is piqued by the unfolding of curious events, which in turn serves to illustrate the curious aspects of the Christian’s relationship of God. This “curiouser and curiouser” technique is at work in the one-stanza poem “Hope,” which has the slimmest of narrative threads: a gift exchange between the poet and Hope, following the emblem tradition and the custom of lovers to exchange presents with symbolic meaning. I gave to Hope a watch of mine: but he An anchor gave to me. Then an old prayer-book I did present: And he an optick sent. With that I gave a vial full of tears: But he a few green ears. Ah Loyterer! I’le no more, no more I’le bring: I did expect a ring.91 The disappointment in the poem is played out even in its formal structure; the first, expectant line of each couplet is longer, and the colon marks a pregnant pause as the reader waits to see how the last gift will be reciprocated. The rhythm of the first line is 91 Hutchinson, 121. 279 uneven if the reader tries to scan it in the traditional way, but if the name of the gift in each line is read with special emphasis, the meter evens out (i.e., “I gave to Hope a watch of mine: but he,” “Then an old prayer-book I did present:” “With that I gave a viall full of tears:” “Ah Loyterer!”) The gifts are each announced with excitement, but the short, three-iamb second line of each couplet expresses the poet’s disappointment with his return gift. Indeed, Hope does not give anything remotely appropriate for a lover. The gifts form a silent conversation with a consistent theme: delay. In exchange for the watch (Hurry up! It’s time!) Hope gives an anchor (a standard symbol of hope in Hebrews 6:19) that, when dropped, stops forward movement. In response to the devotion symbolized by the old prayer book (presumably worn with use) and the vial of tears (wept in longing repentance), Hope gives a telescope (Keep searching the horizon! The time has not yet come) and green ears of wheat (No harvest yet). The poet is being strung along by Hope, which of course, is precisely what Hope does: the hopeful person, like a diligent jobseeker in a tough market, is by definition always making the best of a lack of momentum, scanning the horizon for possibilities, seeing potential in under-ripe situations. The problem, of course, is that Hope is also Christ (1 Corinthians 15:19), the promised bridegroom of the soul, and he is very slow to propose.92 The poet is impatient for his “ring,” the symbol of commitment but also eternity. He calls Hope a “Loyterer” and loses his temper (as in the opening of “The Collar”). However, the poet, in waiting for Hope, 92 1 Corinthians 15:19. William Empson misses this when he says that “there is an irony in that [Herbert] treats only with Hope, not with the person or thing hoped for; he has no real contact with his ideal but only with its porter.” William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1953), 119. 280 has become a loiterer as well; in fact, the Christian life on earth is a kind of loitering, a perpetual waiting for the fulfillment of the promises of scripture, which will never be completed in this life. This is why each of Hope’s gifts point to a future realization, when the anchor will be lifted, the telescope will spy land, and the wheat will turn gold and be ready for harvest. The poet’s puzzlement and disappointment, shared by the reader, is representative of normal Christian experience, which is always “to be continued.” The life of faith is, in one sense, a life of frustrated expectations and deferred hopes, and the long-haul follower of Christ is going to have to come up with a strategy for dealing with this disappointment. Herbert, in his “Affliction” poems and many others, prays a version of St. Theresa of Avila’s oft-quoted prayer: “God, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few of them.” In his storying poems, however, disappointment is more of a reality to be grappled with than a misfortune to be lamented (despite the fact that his frustration is still present and palpable through to the end of the poem). Mystical union with God is postponed, and so there is no answer to the problem of Christian disillusionment and suffering—no answer, that is, than the suffering of Christ. As at the end of “The Bag,” it is Jesus, not yet gloriously ascended but still wounded and bleeding, who chases away despair. What is offered by the poet is not a change in circumstances, but a change in perspective made possible by putting on the “mind of Christ.”93 “Artillerie” begins with a parable that is illustrative of Herbert’s transformation and tempering (a favorite Herbertian word) of expectations. The story does not comprise 93 Philippians 2:5. 281 the entire poem, but serves as the jumping-off point for a meditation on prayer, and the covenant between God and the Christian. As I one ev’ning sat before my cell, Me thoughts a starre did shoot into my lap. I rose, and shook my clothes, as knowing well, That from small fires comes oft no small mishap. When suddenly I heard one say, Do as thou usest, disobey, Expell good motions from thy breast, Which have the face of fire, but end in rest.94 The poet, sitting alone in his scholarly or monastic cell, has the unlikely experience of having to put out a shooting star that threatens to set his clothes on fire. Herbert has used star imagery in other poems to refer to inspiration or a sign from heaven.95 This star, while still symbolic, is also “real” in the sense that it could set his cell ablaze; it is more assault than whisper from a divine Muse. While he is attempting to stamp out the star, a voice from heaven reprimands him, identifying the star as a “good motion” though threatening in appearance. He is to accept its threat rather than reject it, as he has apparently done before. Self-preservation (or what the poet perceives as selfpreservation) is actually disobedience. This choice to accept what threatens destruction is paralleled in “The Priesthood,” where Herbert debates taking holy orders: “But thou art fire, sacred and hallow’d fire . . .” Should the poet “presume / To wear thy habit, the severe attire / My slender compositions might consume.”96 As we have seen in The Temple, what seems harmful at first glance is often revealed to be, in fact, a heavenly gift. 94 Hutchinson 139. 95 See “The H. Scriptures (II),” “The Starre,” and the Latin poem “Lucas.” 96 Hutchinson, 160. 282 Where the poet’s (and the reader’s) instincts tell him to resist or move away, he is called to rush in or embrace what is offered, which usually looks like the last thing likely to lead to the elusive and much-sought-after “rest.” This is the case at the end of “The Pilgrimage,” a poem that not only anticipates Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) but counters it. Unlike Christian, Bunyan’s protagonist, the reader meets Herbert’s pilgrim in the middle of his journey; the poem begins, “I Travell’d on, seeing the hill, where lay / My expectation.” When scaled, however, the top of the “gladsome hill” turns out to contain “a lake of brackish waters” and nothing else. “My hill lies further,” the pilgrim concludes with some railing, but a voice calls out . . . None goes that way And lives: If that be all, said I, After so foul a journey death is fair, And but a chair.97 And the pilgrim trudges on defiantly to face certain death in pursuit of his destination, without reaching the Celestial City or its Herbertian counterpart, leaving the reader completely unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction is precisely the point, as “The Pilgrimage,” of course, is emblematic of the Christian life, in which there is no resolution on this side of the vale. It is interesting that Herbert denies the reader a beginning to the journey as well as a proper ending to it; perhaps this is to underscore the point that the primary activity within the body of Christ is pressing on. Again, the pilgrim is fearless in the face of death, responding with wearied petulance to the ominous voice that warns him, “None goes that way / And lives.” Death is a relief from constant striving towards the divine goal. “The 97 Hutchinson 142. 283 Pilgrimage,” by its very title, sets up expectations and disappoints them, just as the narrator is disappointed in his quest and then resigns himself to his fate, stumbling on out of the frame in search of his “chair.” It is a profoundly pessimistic poem, but its pessimism is pure doctrine: this world is a vale of tears. Herbert’s other poems of search or quest continue to thwart the expectations of this genre. The poet in “Peace,” who asks, “Sweet peace, where dost thou dwell?” discovers that it does not dwell in any specific location, but has been dispersed “Through all the earth,” and is only available through the mystical repast of communion, figured by bread made from the twelve stalks of wheat that sprang from the grave of the Prince of Peace.98 In “Christmas,” instead of an Advent of waiting for the birth of Christ, the narrator, “tir’d, bodie and minde” from a long journey, stops at an inn, and is surprised to find that Christ has been waiting there for him: There when I came, whom found I but my deare, My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief Of pleasures brought me to him . . .99 The tenant in “Redemption” who, “not thriving,” seeks out his Lord in order to renegotiate his lease, also finds at last that the Lord had anticipated his desire and was ahead of him. In fact, he had already altered the terms at the price of his own life, “Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.”100 Robert Kilgore comments on the poem’s 98 See Michael West, “Ecclesiastical Controversy in George Herbert’s ‘Peace’,” in The Review of English Studies, New Series 22, no. 88 (November 1971): 445–451, which argues that the poem “draws upon thoroughly traditional symbolism to comment on ecclesiastical controversies of growing prominence in early-seventeenth-century England” (446). 99 Hutchinson, 81. 100 Ibid., 40. 284 ending that “we are simultaneously smug about the whole affair (we knew it all along) and shocked that it has come to this, so soon . . . We, like the speaker, stumble into this crime scene unaware and unprepared.”101 “Seek, and ye shall find” is not such a straightforward proposition in The Temple. Christ often shows up when and where he is least expected, while chartered journeys to God fail to reach their destination in this life. Perhaps no poem in The Temple plays with, and recalibrates, expectations like “Love Unknown.” The fact that it is among Herbert’s most-analyzed poems is fitting, since it is about analysis itself; namely, how Christians make spiritual sense out of what befalls them. This is the “question” the poem answers: “Why, when I am doing everything I should, do I still feel ill-used by God?” The poem begins, “Dear Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad.”102 The narrator gives fair warning that, as Joseph Summers says, “he wants to complain and he wants an audience.”103 This tale is also highly allegorical and emblematic.104 As in “Redemption,” at the poem’s center is the relationship between a tenant and a Lord.105 The terms of the lease are somewhat complicated, and the tenant, hoping to improve them, 101 Robert Kilgore, “Rereading Ourselves in ‘Redemption.’” George Herbert Journal 26, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall 2002/Spring 2003): 9. 102 Hutchinson, 129. 103 Summers, George Herbert, 177. 104 On Herbert and the emblem tradition, which he appropriated throughout The Temple, see Ch. 6, “George Herbert,” in Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948); Freeman comments that “Love Unknown” “versifies the material of [the School of the Heart emblem books] consistently and obviously. It is the Schola Cordis in little” (166–167). 105 For the use of tenant parables in seventeenth-century ecclesiastical politics, see Esther Gilman Richey, “‘Small Rent”: Seventeenth-Century Parable and the Politics of Redemption,” in Studies in Philology 92, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 102–117. 285 makes an offering: To him I brought a dish of fruit one day, And in the middle plac’d my heart. However, his master’s servant, rejecting the fruit, grabs the heart and throws it into a font, where it is washed in a stream of blood “which issu’d from the side/Of a great rock.” The heart, after being washed, is painfully wrung out and dried. The narrator’s emblematic misadventures continue: as he is trying to make another offering, his heart is thrown into a boiling cauldron marked “AFFLICTION,” and when he recovers his damaged heart and flees to his bed, he finds that “some had stuff’d the bed with thoughts,/ I would say thorns.” Only one person, his Master, had been given the key to his rooms; therefore the one he serves and trusts must have cruelly robbed him of his rest. The listening “Friend” interjects after the recounting of each insult: after the font, “Your heart was foul, I fear”; after the cauldron, “Your heart was hard, I fear”; after the thorns, “Your heart was dull, I fear.” This friend, who at the end of the poem unlocks with his insight the mystery of the narrator’s tribulations, is frequently identified as Christ; however, there are internal (in the poem itself) and external (in the larger context of The Temple) reasons to question this assumption. My feeling is that the identity of the Friend is ambiguous, and could certainly refer to a human (as opposed to divine) Christian friend.106 Regardless, his is not the sympathy the narrator was expecting, and he 106 Louis Martz notes that “when the whole tale has been told, it appears that he has been conversing throughout with ‘Love unknown’; the friend is indeed his other self: the Christ who at the close reveals the full counsel of his ‘inward speaking’” (Martz, 309). Helen Wilcox, citing Ira Clark’s Christ Revealed, comments “As so often in The Temple, this is Christ, who ‘knows the persona infinitely well,’ and thus ‘reveals him’ to himself” (Wilcox, 455 n. 1). Helen Vendler makes this identification a centerpiece in her chapter on “Herbert and God” in Invisible Listeners. Joseph Summers describes the “external dialogue” of the poem as “an image of the interior dialogue between the natural and the spiritual man”; this still does not 286 has a rejoinder to each comment. While his heart was indeed foul, and he did commit “Many a fault more than my lease will bear,” he still “askt pardon, and was not deni’d.” Though his hard heart, covered by “a callous matter,” did need softening in the cauldron, the narrator had “with a richer drug than scalding water/ . . . bath’d it often, ev’n with holy bloud . . . to supple hardnesses.” And while the thorns did pierce through the dullness and “slack and sleepie state of mind” with which he was often possessed (his lips moving in prayer while his heart stayed behind), he protests that “all my scores were by another paid,/ Who took the debt upon him.” The narrator has been engaging in all the practices expected of a Christian: confession and penitence for wrongdoing, reception of Communion (and presumably attendance at worship), and private prayer. He believes the biblical promise of redemption, as indeed he states. And yet, his heart suffers abuse at the hands of the one he serves, despite his best intentions of making good on his lease. allow for the possibility that the Friend is an actual human friend (Summers, George Herbert, 178). To be clear, I am not questioning Jesus’ identification with the “friend” mentioned in other Herbert poems such as “Jordan (II)”, or even in line 43 of “Love Unknown” (a separate reference, discussed below), or disputing Vendler’s overall thesis in “Herbert and God,” that Herbert revises “the conventional vertical address to God until it approaches the horizontal address to an intimate friend,” which I believe to be accurate (9). Several points within the poem, however, suggest that the “Friend” is not Jesus. In the poem’s opening, after asking the friend to “sit down” and listen to the long, sad tale, the narrator comments, “in my faintings I presume your love / Will more complie than help.” The narrator expects sympathy, but little else. This would be an odd thing to say to Jesus, in prayer or otherwise; over and over in the poems of The Temple (as in “The Bag”), Jesus is the one who makes sure prayers are heard. The other main internal suggestion is in line 43, where the narrator, describing an emblematic image for communion wine, says, “A friend did steal into my cup for good.” It would also be strange to refer to the “friend” listening to the tale in the third person in this way, when he has been actively listening and responding all along. The “friend in the cup” is certainly Jesus; this suggests that the friend listening to the tale is actually someone else. Wilcox, as most critics, sees this as a further identification of Jesus with the friend (Wilcox, The English Poems, 455 n. 1), but it is problematic. I would like to question this identification with Jesus as the Friend in a longer essay, especially since I have recently come upon another possible source for “Love Unknown,” which has been overlooked by critics: a story called “The Anchoret and the Angel,” which was sent by Nicholas Ferrar to George Herbert, and shares some parallels with the narrative in the poem. Freeman in English Emblem Books also notes, interestingly, that the Ferrars used images from Schola Cordis emblems to illustrate the Book of Revelation in one of their Harmonies, which is now at the British Museum (Freeman, 166). 287 At this point the friend moves out of his role as reflective listener and into exegesis: Truly, Friend, For ought I heare, your Master shows to you More favor than you wot of. Mark the end. The Font did onely, what was old, renew: The Caldron suppled, what was grown too hard: The Thorns did quicken, what was grown too dull: All did but strive to mend, what you had marr’d. Wherefore be cheer’d, and praise him to the full Each day, each houre, each moment of the week, Who fain would have you be new, tender, quick. The friend demonstrates that not only are all the inexplicable abuses really signs of favor and of the Lord’s concern for him, but they are also the direct result of his offering of his heart. The tenant undergoes trials of purgation, affliction and meditation (battling inner demons and doubts) that are extremely painful, but ultimately refining and perfecting. Becoming “new, tender, quick,” returning to a state of innocence, is not possible without suffering. The “favour” shown by the Lord to the tenant is painful, but necessary if the goal is regeneration. As in “Artillerie,” what looks dangerous and threatens to consume is ultimately what must be embraced: the wound is the blessing. As in “The Pulley,” rest is the elusive goal; as in “The Quip,” the story cannot be understood in media res and doesn’t make sense without the final, ultimate chapter—one must “Mark the end.” “Love Unknown,” as the title suggests, points to the Christian’s partial understanding of the narrative in which he or she is involved. The Master in the poem never speaks or even is seen acting directly; the only way the tenant can be sure of the “favour” he is being shown is that, despite the seemingly sadistic methods he endures, his heart does experience some form of renewal after every “affliction.” To claim Christian 288 identity is to sign oneself up for, to offer one’s heart (whether on a dish of fruit or not), to a lifetime of refining pain, purgation and restlessness, all of which ultimately leads to a perfect end in eternity.107 As mentioned above, I believe the identity of the friend in the poem is ambiguous. For all its colloquial drama and oddity, or perhaps because of it, this is clearly a therapeutic conversation. Does that conversation necessarily have to take place between the soul and Jesus? If so, then in one sense the project of the Temple is negated. But other friends can put on “the mind of Christ” without actually being Christ; indeed, the Apostle Paul enjoins the Corinthians to put on the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:14–16). The tradition of conversations with spiritual directors, confessors and chaplains was a long one in England and by no means limited to Roman Catholicism.108 Herbert himself had a number of spiritual friends: Nicholas Ferrar, and Francis Bacon (discussed previously), John Donne, who sent him an anchor ring as a token of their friendship, as well as an unnamed “friend in Kent” with whom he lived while recuperating from an illness. Herbert himself served as chaplain at Wilton House. As poet-catechist, Herbert seeks to 107 Noel Kinnamon argues that Herbert in “Love Unknown” is alluding to two verses from Psalm 51, themselves major sources of Reformation theology: verse 10, “Make me a clean heart, O God: and renew a right spirit within me,” and verse 17, “The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise” (Coverdale). Noel Kinnamon, “Notes on the Psalms in Herbert’s The Temple,” George Herbert Journal 4, no. 2 (1981): 10–29. For the idea of perfection throughout Christian history, see Anthony D. Baker, Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011). 108 See John T. McNeill, A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper, 1951) and Annemarie S. Kidder, Making Confession, Hearing Confession: A History of the Cure of Souls (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010). Nicholas Ferrar, while traveling through Italy, served as a confessor to a young Englishman who had killed a man in a duel and whose remorse had turned suicidal; after his ordination as deacon, Nicholas served as a spiritual director to several of his family members, including his nieces Mary and Anna Collett and his cousin Arthur Woodnoth. See Ransome, Web of Friendship, 36. 289 act as a spiritual friend to his readers. One of the jobs (and often one of the hardest jobs) of true friends is to help each other to see clearly. Throughout Herbert’s fantastic, colloquial stories, he points out the irony that what at first appears to be cause for despair is actually “love unknown.” This is a collaborative project; the one who “mends the lookers eyes” (“The H. Scriptures (II)”) can help us sharpen each other’s vision. Though more circumspect in their use of fiction, this is the Ferrar family’s goal in the dialogues that comprise the Story Books. No analysis of Herbert’s use of story would be complete without consideration of the greatest of Herbert’s storying poems, “Love (III),” placed conspicuously as the final lyric in the Church section of The Temple. Love (III) Love bade me welcome: yet my sould drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne. But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing. A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here : Love said, You shall be he. I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve. You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat. This poem has commanded attention for nearly four hundred years, and is the kind of 290 masterwork which critics are wise to approach with humility; as Arthur Kinney says, “We may think we know what ‘Love (III)’ means, but we are always being invited back to the Feast to reconsider, relearn, and be taught anew.”109 “Love (III)” exhibits all the characteristics of Herbert’s storying poems under discussion in this chapter: it functions as a contraction, or miniature, of a larger reality; the use of dialogue in the poem gives an immediacy to the action and pulls the reader into the story; and the poem plays with the reader’s expectations as the typical quest narrative is recast. In eighteen short lines, “Love (III)” manages to invoke an impressive number of biblical passages; but, as Chana Bloch notes, “the presence of Scripture is as unobtrusive as it is pervasive; indeed, one must overcome a certain reluctance to unravel what appears to be a seamless unity.”110 These passages include the lovers’ banquet in Song of Songs 2:4 (“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love”); Psalm 23:5 where the Lord promises to prepare a table for the believer; Luke 12:37 (“Blessed are those servants, whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.”); the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22:1–10 (“And [he] sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come”); as well as passages of eschatological feasts in Revelation 3:20 (“Behold: I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”) and 19:9. The poem also recalls the minister’s 109 110 Arthur F. Kinney, “George Herbert’s Early Readers,” in Ben Jonson Journal 16 (2009): 96. Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 99. 291 exhortation to the Lord’s Supper, and the Prayer of Humble Access from the Book of Common Prayer (“Wee be not worthy so much as to gather up the crummes under thy Table . . .”).111 All of this evocative biblical material and liturgical text is collapsed down into a room with a table, a host, and a guest in the doorway: “contracted to a span,” indeed. The setting of the poem is so compressed, and the story so resonant, that one of the main critical issues of the poem is whether it is about communion, or the soul’s reception into heaven; critics tend to feel that it is about one or the other, or “more” about one than the other. This dilemma was noted by a very early reader of Herbert, George Ryley, who published his commentary on The Temple in 1715. Of “Love (III)” he wrote, “A Christian’s coming to heaven is the effect of divine love . . . This I think is the genuine scope of the poem, though the matter of it is equally applicable to the entertainment we meet with in divine ordinances.”112 Following Ryley, Joseph Summers argued that “The banquet at which Love serves personally is not that of the earthly church, but that final ‘communion’ mentioned in Luke xii.37, of which the present Communion is but an anticipation.”113 Rickey, Vendler and Anne Williams, among others, follow Ryley and Summers, citing as evidence the placement of “Love (III)” at the end of The Church, as the last in a sequence of poems on last things (“Death,” 111 Poetic precedents include Sidney’s translation of Psalm 23 and Southwell’s “St. Peter’s Complaint”; see Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert, 658. For an exhaustive list of biblical references, see Chana Bloch, 98–112. 112 Maureen Boyd and Cedric C. Brown, eds., George Ryley, Mr. Herbert’s Temple and Church Militant Explained and Improved (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 265. 113 Summers, George Herbert, 89. 292 “Dooms-day,” “Judgement,” “Heaven”). Bloch, Shoenfeldt, Fish and Kinney are among the commentators who see “Love (III)” as more about communion than heaven. Bloch and Kinney are the most convincing, as they make their cases from the Bible and the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer (discussed below). However, I view this debate as a false divide: the communion service itself was constructed by the early church of composite biblical materials, and several of these are distinctly eschatological in thrust (the Last Supper, the heavenly banquet in texts noted above). Contra Summers, the communion celebrated by the earthly church always looks to the final Communion in the next world. Wilcox calls this a “composite reading” of the poem that allows “the Eucharistic and eschatological significances but also [goes] beyond them to a wider sense of divine love.” Richard Strier argues for this position in declaring that the poem is “about agape.”114 It is the very compression of so much biblical and liturgical material that has given rise to “the tension of ideas in ‘Love (III).’”115 The critical temptation is to latch on to one source over others (such as Luke 12:37 for Summers et al) as a sort of release valve. However, Herbert in his theological aesthetics is a “both/and” poet; to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he contains biblical and liturgical multitudes, which cannot all be reconciled with one another. The power of the image of the soul’s invitation to the heavenly banquet, communion in the next world, was, of course, compacted in the 114 See Rickey, 37; Vendler, George Herbert, 275; Anne Williams, “Gracious Accommodations: Herbert’s ‘Love III’,” in Modern Philology 82, no. 1 (August 1984): 13; Bloch, 101; Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 224–227; Fish, The Living Temple, 119; Kinney, 80; Wilcox, The English Poems, 659; Strier, Love Unknown: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 78. 115 Bloch, 108. 293 popular imagination as well. Nicholas Ferrar, on his deathbed in December of 1637, had a vision of a heavenly banqueting house. Awaking suddenly from sleep, he, on a sudden casting his hands out of the bed with great strength and looking up and about, with a strong voice and cheerful said: “Oh, what a blessed change is here! What a change is here! What do I see? Oh, what do I see? O, let us come and sing and praise the Lord and magnify his holy name together. I have been at a great feast. O magnify the Lord with me.” One of his nieces presently said, “At a feast, dear father?” “Aye,” replied he, “at a great feast, the great king’s feast.” And this he uttered with a sound and perfect voice as in time of his health.116 Ferrar does not seem to have any reservations about his place at the table; in “Love (III),” on the other hand, the courteous conflict between the reluctant speaker and the insistent Love is the hinge of the poem’s drama. One way of measuring the effectiveness of dialogue and story in “Love (III)” is to compare it to another of Herbert’s poems with which it shares a number of themes, “The Invitation.” For some reason critics, as far as I can tell, have not discussed these poems together; however, they certainly seem to bear a family resemblance, at least outwardly.117 “The Invitation” begins, Come ye hither All, whose taste Is your waste; Save your cost, and mend your fare. God is here prepar’d and drest, And the feast, God, in whom all dainties are. The poem is clearly spoken by a minister, exhorting his congregation to come forward to 116 Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996), 117–118. 117 “The Invitation” appears to be a later poem than “Love (III),” as it is only in the B manuscript of The Temple, and not also in W, as with “Love (III).” Hutchinson, 179. 294 receive communion. He includes a number of different groups of people in his call: drunkards (“whom wine / Doth define”), fearful sinners (“whom pain / Doth arraigne,”), pleasure-seekers (“whom joy / Doth destroy,/ While ye graze without your bounds”), and carnal lovers (“whose love / Is your dove . . . Here is love, which having breath / Ev’n in death / After death can never die”). In the final stanza turns his address to God: Lord I have invited all, And I shall Still invite, still call to thee : For it seems but just and right In my sight, Where is All, there All should be. This invocation to the Lord to be present among the gathered faithful functions as a kind of poetic epiclesis, a liturgical calling down of the Holy Spirit on the offered gifts of bread and wine. All are welcome. This embrace leads in to the next poem, “The Banquet,” the next poem in sequence in The Temple. As in “Love (III),” here we have an invitation to the mystical feast, in which those invited are recognized as unworthy, and yet where God’s love trumps that unworthiness. “The Invitation” shares a liturgical source with “Love (III),” namely, the first exhortation to Holy Communion spoken by the priest in the Book of Common Prayer: We be come together at this time, dearly beloved brethren, to feed at the Lord’s Supper, unto the which in God’s behalf I bid you all that be here present, and beseech you for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, that ye will not refuse to come thereto, being so lovingly called and bidden of God himself. You know how grievous and unkind a thing it is, when a man hath prepared a rich feast, decked his table with all kind of provision, so that there lacketh nothing but the guests to sit down; and yet they which be called without any cause most unthankfully refuse to come. Which of you in such a case would not be moved? Who would not think a great injury and wrong done unto him? Wherefore most dearly beloved in Christ, take ye good heed lest ye, withdrawing yourselves from this holy supper, 295 provoke God’s indignation against you . . . I for my part am here present, and according unto mine office, I bid you in the name of God.118 Both “Love (III)” and “The Invitation” assume the use of this exhortation from the Prayer Book, but radically change its tone. Instead of guilt and the threat of God’s wrath against those who do not receive, Love “sweetly questions,” smiles, and takes the poet’s hand. The priest in “The Invitation” recognizes his flock’s shortcomings, but his emphasis is on tempting them to the feast (“God, in whom all dainties are,”) while presenting it as a great opportunity to “Save your cost, and mend your fare.” In the Chapter 8 of The Country Parson, “The Parson on Sundays,” Herbert describes the Parson springing out of bed, “so as a Market-man is, when the Market day comes, or a shopkeeper, when customers use to come in.”119 Herbert is definitely in “Market-man” mode here; he wants to win souls to the feast, not bully them to it. This wooing disposition runs counter to the tone of the exhortation in the Book of Common Prayer, however. Furthermore, that tone becomes even more dispiriting in the second (optional) exhortation, in which the priest, quoting 1 Corinthians 11:28-29, reminds the congregation of the dangers of receiving communion unworthily. “For then we be guilty of the body and blood of Christ our Savior. We eat and drink our own damnation, not considering the Lord’s body.”120 The writing of “Love (III)” and “The Invitation” may well have arisen out of the 118 John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559. (Charlotttesville, VA: The Folger Shakespeare Library for the University of Virginia Press, 2005), 254–255. 119 120 Hutchinson, 235. Booty, The BCP 1559, 258. On worthiness in “Love (III)” and Renaissance devotional literature and theology, see Parker Johnson, “‘Worthy to be here’: Protestant Sacramental Devotion and Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’,” George Herbert Journal 13 (1989–1990): 49–62. 296 need to address a pastoral situation: the priest’s office, as noted above, is to be “present,” and to bid all present to come to the table; and yet the words in which he is to do this are far more fear-mongering than loving. Both “Love (III)” and “The Invitation” are, in a sense, rewrites of the exhortation to communion, in which perfect love casts out fear. However, one of these poems is far more successful than the other; story and use of dialogue, I would argue, are largely responsible for this. In “The Invitation,” Herbert reforms the tone of the exhortation, but not the setting: he still has the priest speaking to a silent congregation. One party is mute; we presume that some of them accept the invitation, since “The Banquet,” which appears to be a companion poem, follows next. If this is indeed one of Herbert’s rewrites of the exhortations, he is still undoubtedly in the same ecclesial space: standing at the communion table or behind a reading desk, looking out at the congregation who are seated in pews. There is a liturgical distance between the two parties, as well as silence from one of them. In his re-imagining of this liturgical situation into “Love (III),” Herbert makes a number of notable changes: the first is “cutting out the middleman,” the priest, and having the invitation come from Love itself. The next is giving both parties a voice, and narrating not in the voice of exhorting/inviting Love, but in that of the ashamed soul. The priest in the Book of Common Prayer imagines, in the first exhortation, a number of excuses that parishioners might give for remaining seated during communion: It is an easy matter for a man to say, I will not communicate, because I am otherwise letted [hindered] by worldly business, but such excuses be not so easily accepted and allowed before God. If any man say, I am a grievous sinner, and therefore am afraid to come: wherefore then do you not repent and amend . . . Consider earnestly with yourselves how little such fained excuses shall avail before God. They that refused the feast in 297 the Gospel, because they had bought a farm, or would try their yokes of oxen, or because they were married, were not so excused but counted unworthy of the heavenly feast.121 The priest puts words in the mouths of the seated parishioners only to rebut their supposed arguments; he also compares them to the unworthy invited guests in the parable of the wedding feast (“A guest, I answered, worthy to be here”). Of course, those with the “fained” excuse of being grievous sinners, as they well know, will be reminded shortly that coming forward as such will only result in their eating and drinking their own damnation. In “Love (III),” the setting is radically simplified, from “the house of the Lord,” a church, to an actual home, even as we turn a public speech made by an officiant to a gathered assembly to an intimate conversation between two figures. Herbert retains the imagined reasons for unworthiness named in the Book of Common Prayer; however, they are now spoken by the soul. Aside from the emphasis on unworthiness noted above, other vocabulary from the exhortation is retained: And whereas you offend God so sore in refusing this holy banquet, I admonish, exhort, and beseech you that until this unkindness ye will not add any more. Which thing ye shall do, if ye stand by as gazers and lookers on them that do communicate, and be no partakers of the same yourselves.122 In the emphasis on unkindness (which is repeated in the exhortation) and gazing and looking, we can hear “I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,/ I cannot look on thee,” and the description of Love as “quick’ey’d,” and reminding the soul, “Who made the 121 Booty, The BCP 1559, 255. 122 Ibid., 255–256. 298 eyes but I?” The Book of Common Prayer puts potential communicants in a somewhat tenuous position. Not surprisingly, the numbers of those who chose to communicate in this period seem to have been fairly low. Writing about preparation for communion in the late sixteenth century, John Booty concludes, The tragedy of the Elizabethan ecclesiastics . . . seems clear. They tended to obscure the central meaning of the Supper by overemphasizing the necessity for penitential preparation. They discouraged some from attending the Supper by placing too much emphasis upon the importance of adequate preparation . . . They understood the importance of penitential preparation, but at times they tended to view it in isolation from the central activity of Divine Grace from which come true penitence and thanksgiving together in one complete experience.123 The activity of Divine Grace within the conversation of the poem, intimate and solicitous, is what makes this joining together of penitence and thanksgiving possible, which is what makes the soul’s final ability to accept God’s love so profoundly moving. What in the mouth of the minister sounds scolding and harsh, is powerfully affecting when spoken by the afflicted soul. Love’s response moves the energy of the conversation away from the question of punishment or damnation towards, well, love. Nor is the soul’s feeling of unworthiness in any way “fained.” Fear is a misapprehension that Love must correct. The soul’s eyes, which have been “marr’d” by sin and are presently downcast because of profound guilt, will now be mended, so they can look Love full in the face. Helen Vendler notes that “The distance between God and the soul, so distressing in many poems in The Temple, here shrinks, during the actual progress of the poem, to nothing: 123 John Booty, “Preparation for the Lord’s Supper in Elizabethan England,” Anglican Theological Review 29, no. 2 (April 1967): 148. 299 “Love . . . drew nearer . . ./ Love took my hand.”124 In “The Invitation,” the priest can speak with love, but remains behind his reading desk; Love, however, comes closer and reaches out to the soul, thereby collapsing the distance between them. Perhaps, in light of this extended discussion of Herbert’s stories, what is most remarkable about “Love (III)” as the last lyric in The Church section of The Temple, is that Herbert’s manipulation of the reader’s expectations, especially as regarding the Christian’s pilgrimage, extends right up to the long-awaited moment of union with the divine. After all the pining and passionate calls for death to take him soon and unite him with his Lord that make up a not inconsiderable part of The Temple—all the frustrations and delay, all the holy loitering—the poet is finally standing at the door of Love’s house, about to sit at Love’s table and enjoy the heavenly banquet for which, on page after page and in lyric after lyric, he has been longing. And yet, he cannot go in. He is caught, frozen, paralyzed. “Guiltie of dust and sinne,” he is afraid that his journey, his own story (which is inextricably bound up with the story of Adam’s fall), has made him ineligible to cross Love’s threshold and partake. He is the guest who refuses to sit down. Now it is the poet, and not Hope/Christ, who has dropped anchor and delayed the consummation. His own sense of unworthiness makes him pull back, just at the moment when the pulley has “tossed” him back to his Creator; the longed-for ring has been received; just as “Loved” is about to be written the blank space (“A True Hymne”). Because at the poem’s end, as in “The World,” it is Love, Grace and Glorie that must combine to pull the soul over from unworthiness to worthiness, from death into life, from the dust and sin of corporeal 124 Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert, 274. 300 existence to the regenerated and resurrected body. Love must take the poet’s hand. And Love has the last word in the dialogue: “You must sit down, and taste my meat.” How can the poet respond at this point but to assent? “So I did sit and eat.” The Christian’s story has belonged entirely to God all along. 301 CHAPTER 5: STORYING AT LITTLE GIDDING: DIALOGUE, EXEMPLA, AND “THE LYING PATTERNES OF ORLANDO” I. “A school of Christian religion” Erasmus, writing to Johannes Faber at the end of 1532, described the household of Sir Thomas More as alteram Platonis Academiam. But, he continued, I do the house injury in likening it to Plato’s Academy. I should rather call it a school or university of Christian religion . . . Their special care is piety and virtue.1 It was well known that More had given his daughters, both biological and adopted, a classical humanistic education.2 This gymnasium Christianie religionis during the beginning of the “long” English Reformation could well have influenced the formation of another such school of young women and their guardians a century later, with Britain on the verge of Civil War. While the six Collet daughters living at Little Gidding (Nicholas Ferrar’s nieces by his sister Susanna, with a seventh married sister living away) were likely not educated in Latin and Greek as More’s daughters were, the stories they told as members of the community’s “Little Academy” demonstrate their wide reading in European history, Patristic literature, and contemporary spiritual works such as Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life. That their conversations were recorded in shorthand, transcribed, edited, and bound for the community’s future use in volumes 1 Quoted in Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education (New York: Routledge, 1999), 110. Letter in P.S. Allen, ed., Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, Vol. 10, ed. H.M. Allen and M.W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941, 139. 2 Erasmus describes the accomplishments of More’s four daughters (Margaret, Cecily, Elizabeth, and Margaret Giggs, an adopted kinswoman) in his letters: they read Livy, were shrewd critics of sermons, and wrote excellent Latin letters. He called More’s eldest daughter, Margaret Roper, “the glory of Britain.” Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, vol. 39, trans. by Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 514 n.33. 302 called the Story Books has preserved the voices involved in this unique educational experiment: an early-modern family attempting to self-catechize their way to Christian perfection—and enjoy themselves while doing it. After summarizing the history of and previous scholarship on the Little Academy, this chapter will consider the Story Books in light of recent work on Renaissance dialogue and exempla; will discuss special issues relating to collaboratively or communally authored texts; will propose possible literary models for the Story Books which have not yet been considered by scholars of the community; and will explore the Ferrars’ complicated and at times incendiary relationship with fiction. Even before the formation of the Little Academy, storytelling, or storying, was an important activity at Little Gidding. At the beginning of his biography, Nicholas Ferrar is described as being from his very infancy a lover of stories; while his fellows kept holiday he would be at his books, and by candlelight, for he would hide himself and would lose his meals rather than not finish his story. The Book of Martyrs he took great delight in and the story of Bishop Ferrar he had perfect as for his name’s sake.3 Foxe describes how Bishop Ferrar, whom the Ferrar family claimed as an ancestor, had the distinction of having been persecuted both under King Edward VI for popish leanings and under Queen Mary for Protestant ones; this narrative that Nicholas memorized as a child was to resonate with him life-long, as someone who was himself accused of both 3 Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar: A Reconstruction of John Ferrar’s Account of His Brother’s Life Based on All the Surviving Copies (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996), 43. Afterward Muir and White. 303 papism and puritanism.4 Nicholas continued to enjoy stories and storytelling as an adult. John Williams, the Ferrars’ diocesan bishop and later Archbishop of York, commented after a visit to Little Gidding, I must confess I thought myself pretty good at storying, but never met with my match till then and let me say truth, [Nicholas] matched me. But commend me to him and tell him, the next time I come we will have another game at storying.5 But “storying” could act as gentle admonishment as well as entertainment, especially where theology was involved. Even though Nicholas Ferrar “loved and honoured his [Cambridge] tutor” Augustine Lindsell, member of the Durham House group and wellknown for promoting Laud’s ecclesiastical agenda, if he heard Lindsell “say or do amiss at any time,” he would “in some sweet good way let him know his mind, which was commonly in way of story.”6 When asked by some “divines” what he would do if the Roman mass was said in his house against his will, “[h]is answer was by a known story” of a Spanish peer who, forced to lodge the Duke of Bourbon by the King, declared that he would burn his house down after the known traitor left. (Nicholas does concede that he himself would only be able to tear down the hypothetical offending room, since he 4 On Foxe’s account of Dr. Robert Ferrar, Bishop of St. David’s, and on Foxe’s influence on the Ferrars generally, see Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46–37. On the Ferrars’ use of illustrations from Foxe in their Gospel Harmonies, see Margaret Aston, “Moving Pictures: Foxes’s Martyrs and Little Gidding,” in Baron, Sabrina Alcorn, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin, Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth Eisenstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 82–104. 5 Muir and White, 102. 6 Ibid., 100. 304 couldn’t afford to rebuild his whole house.)7 In addition to this sort of casual conversation with friends, the Ferrars told and used stories for more formal and explicitly didactic ends. After dinner and supper at Little Gidding, one of the boys would repeat a story from memory from a collection Nicholas had compiled for this purpose: They were short, pleasant, and profitable, good language and no less good in matter, teaching them something of worth, exciting to virtue and the hatred of vice, and by this the young ones learned to speak gracefully and courageously.8 This sort of declamation was a commonplace of Renaissance English education for boys. More unusually, as we will see below, the Ferrars felt that the art of rhetoric (speaking “gracefully and courageously”) was also an essential part of education for the young women of the community as well. The Oxford English Dictionary lists two definitions for “story” as a verb: the first is “to record historically; to relate the history of”; the second, later use is “to tell as a story, to tell the story of.” A note indicates that the “original sense appears occasionally down to the end of the 17th c., but from the middle of the century, or even earlier, it is often difficult to determine whether the older or the newer use is intended.”9 For the Ferrars, the use of the term “storying” is somewhere between these two meanings. Unlike George Herbert, who revels in parabolic invention and in the recombination of biblical 7 Ibid., 105. 8 Ibid., 84. For a selection of these “Short Moral Histories,” see B. Blackstone, ed., The Ferrar Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 203–221. 9 “Story,” v.1 in The New Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed December 2, 2012. 305 materials for heightened narrative effect, the Ferrars are concerned with the historical truth of their stories, and tend to note in the dialogue if they feel a particular story to be a pious fiction, as will be explored below. By1630, the major undertakings that had occupied the Ferrars in their first years at Little Gidding were now complete: the church had been restored in two phases; the manor house had been repaired and renovated and the estate reclaimed from neglect; a school for boys from the family and the surrounding villages had been established in a former dove-cote; and a dispensary for distributing salves and other basic medical treatment to the poor had been set up. In addition, the family had worked out its basic rule of life and pattern of worship, and had also initiated the controversial night watches.10 Maycock estimates that the family began work on the first of their Gospel Harmonies (compiled for their own use in worship) in 1629, and that it took them about a year to complete. They did not begin their work on the King’s Harmony until 1633.11 Therefore, by 1631 this industrious family was likely casting about for a new project, one that would engage Susanna Ferrar Collett’s many daughters, most of whom were “awaiting marriage but too old for the schoolroom.”12 The Little Academy, the brainchild of Mary Ferrar Sr., was formed primarily as an educational exercise for this group. The proceedings of the Little Academy were transcribed into five volumes called 10 A. L. Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding (1938; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1980), 261. 11 See Joyce Ransome, The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2011), Ch. 6, “Harmonies Royal.” 12 Kate Riley, “The Good Old Way Revisited: The Ferrar Family of Little Gidding c.1625–1637” (PhD diss., University of Western Australia, 2007), 201. 306 the Story Books. It is clear from the dedicatory epistle in the first volume and from family correspondence that these volumes were never intended for publication; they were prepared for the community’s own use, and were circulated only to the family’s closest confidants. George Herbert had a borrowed volume of one of the Story Books in his possession when he died.13 The initial volume of the Story Books begins with several dedicatory epistles. The first is to Mary Ferrar, Sr. from her granddaughters Mary and Anna Collett, thanking her for “bestowing the best of your Roomes and Furniture upon us for the Performance of this and other good Exercizes” and naming the purpose of the dialogues as . . . the Discoverie of those false Opinions wherewith the world misleads all Mankind, especially our weaker sex,—wee have received both by your precepts and example, if not the greatest and weightiest, yet surely the most proper and effectual Arguments and Motives that could have beene brought . . . You have taught us often that which wee hope shall ever remaine as firme written in our minds as in this Book, That there is nothing but the Practizes of Vertue and Religion that can in the end yeeld comfort . . .”14 Their grandmother is the first exemplar of many named in the Story Books. More than merely illustrating a virtuous life, her actions are themselves arguments; the sisters are setting out to prove the reasonableness of Christian virtue. Mary Ferrar replies to Mary and Anna with her own letter inscribed into the volume, telling them that “What I have 13 Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 125. The five manuscript volumes of the Story Books are published piecemeal in: in E. Cruwys Sharland, ed., The Story Books of Little Gidding (London: Seeley, 1899), B. Blackstone, ed., The Ferrar Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), and A. M. Williams, Conversations at Little Gidding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). The original manuscript volumes are held in the British Library, MSS Additional 34,657–34,659 [Listed in the British Museum, Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years 1894–1899 (London, Trustees of the British Museum, 1901), 32–33.] See Williams on the publication of the Story Books. 14 Sharland, li–lii. 307 taught is true,” urging them to make careful use of God-given opportunities “for the attainment of wisedome and encrease of Vertue,” and saying that “although I have heard you very jealously deny the communicating it with any,” desiring to send the volume on to their married sister Susanna Collett Mapletoft at Margetting in Essex, since it will be “both of Profit and comfort to her.”15 The first entry in the volume, dated the Feast of the Purification 1630 (February 2, 1631) was almost certainly composed by Nicholas Ferrar, and describes the formation and design of the Little Academy, continuing with the emphasis on the pursuit of wisdom and virtue which granddaughters and grandmother had named above. It was the same Day wherein the Church celebrates that great Festivall of the Purification, that the Mayden Sisters, longing to bee Imitatours of those glorious Saints by whose Names they were called (for all bare Saints Names, and shee that was elected CHEIFE, that of the Blessed Virgin Mary) having entered into a joynt Covenant betweene themselves and some others of nearest Blood (which according to their several relations they stiled FOUNDER, GAURDIAN, and VISITOUR) for the performance of divers religious exercizes . . . searching and enquiring diligently into the knowledge of those things which appertaine to their Condition and Sex. Finding in themselves, and observing in others that doe sincerely pursue verture, that the greatest barre of Perfection was Ignorance of the truth, whereby through misapprehension many prejudiciall things were embraced, and many most behovefull to their ends and most delightfull in performance were not onely neglected but abhorred . . . they determined with firme promises each to other to make a particular survey of those opinions and practizes which the world recommends or disallows, weighing them not in the scales of common Judgement, but of true and right Reason, according to the weights and by the standard of the Scripture; wherein being excellently versed, so as they were able to repeat by heart both the Booke of Psalms and most part of the New Testament, they found that there was neither Action nor Opinion that could bee 15 Sharland, liii. 308 propounded but might receive a clear solution and direction from that Booke.16 The importance of the covenant between participants is highlighted, and though the nucleus of the group consists of the “Mayden Sisters,” storying is an intergenerational and mixed-gender activity from the first. The Little Academy is dedicated to reasonable inquiry, and the Bible is the ultimate philosophical text; through their storying, the Ferrars will prove the reasonableness of the Christian life. As Bernard Blackstone notes, the dialogues emphasize “the folly of sin, its entire unreasonableness.”17 The introduction closes by noting that “as Artists upon the full accomplishment of their workes cast aside the first draughts, so silencing what was lesse exactly done,” the earliest few conversations have been omitted.18 As their grandmother’s life acts as an exempla to the sisters, so too do their given names, which are all after biblical saints. In addition to these, the “Actours,” as they are called, have taken on other names, aspirational or descriptive. Though the reader is warned not to guess the true identity behind each name, some of these are fairly obvious, and scholars have made educated guesses as to the rest. Mary Collett (age thirty in 1631) is first called the Chiefe, after Humility, the chief of the theological virtues, but also in recognition of her leadership role in the Little Academy. Later when her grandmother retires from the group due to advanced age, Mary is then elected “Mother” with much 16 Sharland, 1. 17 Blackstone, 99. 18 Sharland, 2. 309 fanfare and many symbolic gifts.19 Her sisters are also named after virtues, though there is the suggestion that each has been given a moniker derived from a quality they lacked: Anna (twenty-eight) is the Patient, Hester (approximately twenty-four) and Margaret (approximately twenty-three) are the Cheerefull and the Affectionate, and Elizabeth and Joyce, approximately nineteen and sixteen, are the Obedient and the Submisse. Susanna Collett Mapletoft, living with her husband Joshua at Margetting, was given the honorary title of Goodwife. There is no contemporary identification of which sister acted under which name; Joyce Ransome speculates that Hester may have been the Cheerful, based on family letters implying that cheerfulness was not her forte.20 The names of the elders who participate are more descriptive: John Collett is the Guardian; Nicholas Ferrar is the Visitour, perhaps in recognition of his many trips to London during the meetings of the Little Academy; John Collett, husband of Susanna Ferrar Collett, is the Resolved (the Resigned might have been more fitting), and Susanna herself is the Moderatour, appropriate for one who, as mother of a large family, doubtless had a judicial and mediating influence. Mary Ferrar Sr. is the Founder, though even before her resignation she is a silent participant. In the second series of dialogues, after a lapse of some years, the Little Academy is reorganized, and the philosophy around names undergoes a reversal. The membership of this reconstituted group has shrunk considerably; the four remaining participants sign a covenant committing themselves to the exercises and promising to practice what they 19 See “All Saints Day 1632” in Sharland, 173-184. 20 Ransome, Web of Friendship, 130. 310 preach. Nicholas took the name “The Register, John Ferrar “The Repeater,” Anna was likely “The Learner” and Mary “The Apprentice,” though it is unclear exactly which sister is which. The introduction to “The Winding Sheet” notes that “Which of the Former Actors these were is not to be enquired,” and the names are no longer those of virtues to which the actors aspired, as it was agreed that instead of spurring the sisters to this virtue, hearing themselves referred to in this way made them complacent, as if the virtue was already achieved.21 The participants in the Little Academy present themselves as performers making use of historical material (of which the Ferrars’ library was well-supplied). The actors were to come to their sessions prepared to tell a story from memory on a given theme. Many of the dialogues open with one of the actors singing a song or hymn accompanied on the viol by the boys’ music master; several of these hymns come from George Wither’s Hymnes and Songs of the Church (1622/3), which was criticized by puritans for containing a section dedicated to hymns on church feasts and festivals.22 Sometimes the dialogue among participants after the telling of a story serves only as a segue to the next one; other times there is pointed questioning of the storyteller, discussion and debate. On one occasion, the stories are preceded by a long homily on the day’s subject, Patience.23 Though the actors begin their exercises with a stiff formality, as the storying continues, the interactions between the participants become more relaxed, and traits of personality 21 Blackstone, 111–112. 22 Such as the hymn sung in honor of St. Stephen’s Day, “Lord, with what zeal did thy first martyr breath,” of which the Chiefe sings the second and third verses, Sharland, 20. 23 Christmastide, 1631, printed in Sharland, 103–153. 311 begin to shine through. Sometimes what seems to be a rather abstract discussion of virtue is revealed to have a familial subtext, as when in Part X of the dialogue on the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s renunciation of his throne, the conversation turns to the question of the Submisse’s (probably Joyce Collett) desire to serve as a ladies’ maid, which, needless to say in this ascetic gathering, is not received well.24 In their storying, the Ferrars share Herbert’s aim to “turn delight into a sacrifice.” Their stories are substitutionary; they are taking the place of the usual pastimes of persons of quality, such as gaming, cards, and the enjoyment rich foods, all of which the Ferrars have decided are incompatible with their communal life of austere devotion. They are trying to “story themselves to good” as opposed to “rhyme themselves to good”; and they acknowledge that this is a challenge. The Chiefe opens the dialogue of St. Stephen’s Day 1631 (during the Christmas season) with the rueful admission, It is a hard task that is imposed on us, most honoured GRANDMOTHER and FOUNDER of our little Academy, that wee should make supply of delights to your Family for those vaine pastimes of Cardes and the like, which you have so Christianly deprived them of. But when it is added that wee must likewise endeavour to profit them in the way of vertue, as well as to please them, in requiring of two things that scarce stand together, there is made a great surcharge of Difficulty to the work and paines to us.25 However, the Ferrars felt, despite these pains, that they had achieved their goal: during the next day’s dialogue John Ferrar boasts that “. . . I do not think any Gamesters within twenty Miles more eagerly bent upon their Play than our Family on their Stories.”26 24 Williams, beginning on 135. 25 Sharland, 19. 26 Sharland, 39. 312 The competitive aspect of storying survives in the Little Academy. About halfway through the 1631 St. Stephen’s Day dialogue, the Patient introduces her tale of King Henry IV of France by saying that it “deserves, in my opinion, to wear the crown of the daies Stories,” for “both the excellency of the Action and the admirable Conclusion which it inferres . . .”27 Other stories, however, fall flat. When the Submisse tries to answer the Moderatour’s desire for a story about a virtuous woman with her own version of Katharine of Aragon’s interrogation before Cardinal Wolsey, the Guardian comments, “This Story . . . is indeed an Honour to your sex, but a shame to your Age.” Then he moves on.28 Even as they participate in what were extremely unusual intellectual exercises for young women during this period, the sisters still subscribe to the traditional role of women as doers of the word and not preachers of it. As the Cheife says in the Dialogue on the Austere Life in 1632, Let us not blame either our sex or condition, as disabled for the advancement of Gods Kingdome. Wee have a Talent and a great one committed to us, if we bee careful to imploy it, Not in the Tongue, No, that belongs to the Ministry but in the hands and in the feet, that’s common to all Christians. Wee may tread out the way to heaven and wee may lead on by good works, though wee cannot teach by wordes. And perhaps that Real kind of Instruction hath in all Ages beene the most forcible, is in this the most Necessarie.29 The Ferrars agree with George Herbert that the example of a holy life speaks louder than the “flaring thing” of speech alone. But, of course, their Storying is a kind of preaching: 27 Ibid., 33. 28 Ibid., 37. 29 Williams, 171–172. 313 all the selections they present can fall under the genre of exemplum, and collections of exempla from Gregory the Great onward were primarily for use as sermon illustrations by preachers (see below). What the Ferrars have done is edit out much of the exhortation and scriptural interpretation of a sermon, add certain performative elements (allegorical names, artful delivery, music) and then pile story on top of story for a cumulative effect, creating in effect a living commonplace book. It is easy to see why Herbert would have read the Story Books with interest. II. Previous Scholarship on the Little Academy While the Ferrars’ Gospel Harmonies have attracted far more scholarly attention than their Story Books, the latter have not gone completely unnoticed; however, there is a great deal of work left to be done on them. As noted above, the Story Books have been published only piecemeal and out of sequence. No critical edition of them exists, nor any index of the many stories the Ferrars tell or the topics they cover. The sources for a number of stories have been identified, but many more have not. The Story Books are anomalous as texts even among works in a similar genre (moral dialogue or collections of exempla), and they are communally authored; both of these factors complicate the task of criticism. They are only now coming to the notice of scholars of religious texts by early modern women. The name, “Little Academy” was given by Francis Peckard, an early biographer of Nicholas Ferrar; boarding schools for girls were called academies in this period.30 The 30 Maycock, 262. 314 Ferrars themselves do not seem to have given this group a particular name, which is odd, considering all the effort they put into presenting the dialogues and then preserving them. The volumes are beautifully bound and tooled in gilt, and the monogram IHS heads every page. John Ferrar does not include a description of the Little Academy in his Life of his brother. Alan Maycock, Nicholas Ferrar’s first modern biographer, describes the formation and purpose of the Little Academy as well as a chronology of its activities, but does not go into much detail about the content of the dialogues.31 In 1938, the same year in which Maycock’s biography appeared, Bernard Blackstone published selections from the Magdalen College archives as The Ferrar Papers. Among these was the dialogue he named The Winding Sheet. For Blackstone, the Little Academy was “in many ways the most important and characteristic institution of the community at Little Gidding” for several reasons: it was inward-focused instead of outward-focused, it served as “a clearing house for ideas, a means of spiritual refreshment and recreation,” and it offered opportunities for creative activity. He notes that the Academy conducted itself as “an elaborate allegory,” and that it granted Plato a measure of “admiration accorded to no other philosopher.” He connected the community’s “insistence on the Light of Reason” with the Cambridge Platonists.32 A. M. Williams edited and published the dialogues missing from Sharland and Blackstone in Conversations at Little Gidding (1970). His introduction clarifies the 31 See Maycock, 261–270 and 284–288. 32 Blackstone, 97–99. 315 chronology of the dialogues, and gives valuable information on the historical sources of many of the stories and possible models for the Little Academy itself. In addition, he makes an argument for which family member corresponded with which alias, and gives a somewhat psychological analysis of the actors, as well as summarizing the themes of temperance and renunciation under discussion. Over thirty years separate Williams from Blackstone and Maycock, but the tone of Anglican apologetics is still strongly present. Reid Barbour in his study Literature and Religious Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (2002) counts the Ferrars among Caroline Protestants who “respond to the past of their own faith with an acute skepticism toward its myths and with richly inventive revisions of the heroic pomp and circumstance of faith.” He argues that “in their staged dialogues the Ferrars epitomize the arduous and multifaceted Caroline search for the elusive marks of the genuine church heroic.” The community strives “to rebuild epic religion through discourse, ceremony and action.”33 Barbour identifies Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as a model for the portraits of Christian heroism found in the Story Books, and examines their lengthy dialogue on the renunciation of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V; this famous abdication was “a widely celebrated emblem in the seventeenth century of contempt for the world . . .”34 This dialogue (published in Williams) is atypical for the Little Academy because of its great length and because it has only one storyteller, the Cheife, Mary Collett. Barbour gives an insightful analysis of why 33 Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21–22. 34 Barbour, 39; c.f. George Herbert’s “Content”: “Give me the pliant mind, whose gentle measure / Complies and suits with all estates;/ Which can let loose a crown, and yet with pleasure / Take up within a cloisters gates.” Lines 13–16, Hutchinson, 69. 316 Charles V’s abdication held so much fascination for the family as they ruminated on their own “abdication from Stuart society” in the wake the dissolution of the Virginia Company (while Nicholas Ferrar was Deputy Treasurer) and John Ferrar’s bankruptcy. However, while he makes his case for the Ferrars as proponents of “heroic Christianity,” even if this is a much quieter heroism than what is found in many of the tales they tell, his suggestion that they were somehow involved in envisioning anything that might constitute “epic” religion seems like overreaching. Barbour does concede that the Ferrars, after the massacres, diseases, and politics of Virginia, came away from that endeavor with “a disenchantment about epic religion.”35 In his conclusion he argues that the Ferrars’ “preoccupation with epic religion” shifts away from “grand designs” and towards a heroism that is “quieter, more local, and less sure of itself: it involves a small community staging, strengthening, and enriching its covenant with a God who expects an all-consuming—yet by no means perfect—devotion.”36 This seems accurate, but hardly epic.37 In her recent and somewhat revisionist biography of Nicholas Ferrar, Joyce Ransome describes the Little Academy as “not seeking ‘perfection’ through the individual route of contemplation as in traditional mysticism but rather through the active 35 Barbour, 46. 36 Ibid., 55. 37 For another literary analysis of a single dialogue, see Greg Miller, George Herbert’s “Holy Patterns”: Reforming Individuals in Community (New York: Continuum, 2007), Chapter 4, “The Winding Sheet: Little Gidding, George Herbert, and the Rewards of Holiness.” 317 and collective pursuit of virtue through discussion.”38 Her interest in the Story Books relates to how they became the vehicle for the family’s larger project of temperance, especially as it relates to diet.39 Critics have finally begun to pay attention to gender issues in the dialogues, of obvious interest to contemporary historical and literary criticism. Kate Riley in “Playing with Worldly Things: The Dialogues of the Little Academy” sets the Story Books in the context of early modern pedagogical practices. Though she makes the case for the sisters, rather than Nicholas, as the authors of the dialogues (discussed below), she emphasizes these exercises as instruments of familial subjection and religious conformity: The dialogues are an example of a mechanism through which values were internalized in an early modern domestic context, one to which female literacy was critical; the reader observes how the sisters learned and moreover became advocates for the discourses that effected their subjugation. Both the medium and the context of their “playing” were controlled. Generic convention was deployed with acute effect to shape their sense of proper conduct and achieve conformity, at least of mind, with “family” values. And the routine of composing and then reciting their stories before an audience, comprising supervisors of the parental generation and younger children in whom virtue had to be instilled by example, bound the young women with the threat of charges of failure or hypocrisy if they did not apply in their daily or future actions the principles they championed. As the Cheerefull said, “To know these things and not to follow them will procure double stripes.”40 Far from being a “clearinghouse for ideas” or an opportunity for creativity, Riley views the Little Academy as a “mechanism” by which the Collett sisters became agents of their 38 Ransome, The Web of Friendship, 128. 39 See Ransome, Web of Friendship, Chapters 4 and 5. 40 Kate Riley, “Playing with Worldly Things: The Dialogues of the Little Academy,” in Andrew Lynch and Anne M. Scott, eds., Renaissance Poetry and Drama in Context: Essays for Christopher Wortham (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 201. 318 own submission to family norms. She emphasizes the punitive aspects of failing to meet the requirements of the sisters’ covenant, calling into question the insistence that this activity, as with other practices such as the night watches, was truly voluntary. By contrast, Debra Shuger makes a quite different case in her talk, “The Girls of Little Gidding: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Radical Feminism.” Shuger begins by setting the Collett sisters’ aims as stated in their letter to Mary Ferrar, Sr. and in the introduction to the first volume (cited above) next to the “epistemic radicalism” of the Discourse on Method, in which Descartes doubts much of what is “by common consent received and approved” and decides to suspend belief in anything “the truth of which I had been persuaded merely by example and custom” (chap. 1). She ultimately concludes that The radicalism of the Little Academy is thus not, at bottom, epistemic but social. Here one needs to be careful, since a certain sort of cultural critique (the jeremiad) shows up everywhere in early Stuart preaching, Laudians and puritans finding common ground in their disapproval of excess, luxury, ambition, irreverence, and unbelief. In part, the critique of the maiden sisters belongs to this genre, although the fact that they are not preachers chastising their flock (which is, after all, what preachers are supposed to do) but young women condemning the accepted practices and pastimes of their own class, does give an edge to even their fairly standard criticisms. The radicalism lies not in the basic values (radicalism rarely does) but in the taking them seriously and following out their implications. The radicalism of their position is implicit in the fact that it requires over a hundred pages for Hester, Mary, and Anna to convince the others (and they never convince their mother) to forgo any sort of Christmas feast.41 While for Riley, “generic convention . . . deployed with acute effect” results in conformity and the sisters’ obedience to familial authorities, for Shuger this is a mark of a 41 Debora Shuger, “The Girls of Little Gidding: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Radical Feminism,” talk delivered at UCLA on April 15, 2010, manuscript via personal correspondence. 319 radical break with the norms of the larger Stuart society. In an odd way, they are both right. There is evidence, after all, that the sisters (and potentially others in the community) wore habits; conformity and harmony within the family was highly prized, as it is in any religious community, and difficult to achieve, as Ransome’s biography (with its emphasis on family correspondence) makes clear.42 There is no doubt that the Collett sisters were being prepared to be devout and capable wives to clergymen; even after Mary and Anna Collett committed themselves to lifelong celibacy, they were certainly no less committed to “housewifery” and household management. Little Gidding was indefatigably industrious and scheduled its contemplation around its many other activities. Shuger also notes the equality of the participants, which she feels is increased by the use of allegorical names: “equality in the sense that the biological and social factors that ordinarily determine status—seniority, gender, parenthood—matter virtually not at all; an equality consistent with their views on lineage-based status hierarchies.” While the context Riley provides in terms of early modern pedagogy is a necessary one, and her point that the Little Academy was a “controlled” experiment is well-taken, the best evidence for the Collett sisters as more “radical” than subjected comes from the texts themselves. As noted above, the sisters often push for more asceticism than their mother or uncle (John Ferrar) are comfortable with. Whether or not the Collett sisters can be claimed as proto-feminists (which frankly seems doubtful, given their conventional views on gender roles), the free and lively debate among participants, the earnestness with 42 The Guardian, in his criticism of the Submisse and her desire to serve as a lady in waiting, notes that she does not want to wear a habit like her sister; Williams, 136; see also Ransome, Web, 129. 320 which they make their commitment to Christian perfection, as well as their emphasis on the voluntary nature of the reconstituted and much smaller group in 1634 (which alludes to the fact that one really could “opt out” of participating) suggest that the Little Academy was founded on more than a sense of duty or desire to please elders, and was in fact driven by the (verbose) passion that the participants display in the dialogues. Recent scholarship on the Story Books has raised a number of salient points, moving away from Anglican apologetics and the focus on Nicholas Ferrar as a sort of puppeteer for the dialogues (as in earlier studies), and towards a recognition of the paradox and earnest skepticism at the heart of the Little Academy: ardent royalists highly critical of courtly culture, attempting to humbly conform themselves to what was in many ways a traditional vision of Christian virtue, while simultaneously taking a radical stand that placed them apart from the prevailing norms of their Christian society. As Reid Barbour states, the Ferrars operate “in imitation and in opposition” to major shifts in the Caroline religious landscape.43 Possible historical influences on the Little Academy have been mentioned in previous studies in passing, such as the Oratories of Philip Neri, and the circles gathered around the Spanish theologian Juan Valdés (whose One Hundred Ten Considerations was translated by Nicholas) and the French priest and spiritual director Francis de Sales.44 43 44 Barbour, 22. St. Philip Neri (1515–1595), a priest, founded his Oratory in Rome beginning around 1557; he was canonized on the same day as Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, and so is part of the larger Counter Reformation movement. His spirituality and style of evangelism was highly influential on John Henry Newman during the Oxford Movement. What began as a daily discussion group on the Bible and the spiritual life for young laymen grew within a few years to involve thousands of people in listening to lay-led lectures, readings from spiritual classics such as the mystics and Cassian, meditative prayer and 321 However, not much has been made of the fact that the Story Books are completely anomalous texts. Simply put, we do not have any other surviving examples of communally or collaboratively authored religious dialogues from early modern England. The fact that most of the participants involved in these dialogues were women is remarkable, as are the many moments when individual personalities and actual family conflicts are visible in the discussions. Part of the reason for this glossing over of the singular nature of these texts, I believe, has to do with a lack of attention to genre. As dialogue was a popular form and exempla a popular device in Renaissance literature, so perhaps analysis of the Ferrars’ use of them has seemed unnecessary. But an exploration of these genres reveals both the extent of the Ferrars’ textual innovation and highlights key aspects of their project, especially regarding their view of history and its relationship to the search for truth. devotional exercises, and music. In the early emphasis on scripture, spiritual reading, and dialogue among lay people, as well as the figure of St. Philip as an organizer rather than direct leader, there are commonalities with the Ferrars’ project. However, from the first in the Oratory there was an emphasis on speaking extemporaneously when filled with the Spirit; the Ferrars preferred more studious reflection and advanced preparation of their speeches. St. Philip was an evangelist who created a movement that was eventually codified into an order; the Little Academy was, as mentioned above, intended as a private vehicle of discussion. While Nicholas Ferrar traveled extensively in Italy, there is no direct mention of St. Philip or the Oratory; although one of the Ferrars’ favorite historians was Baronius, who was an early participant in the meetings and disciple of St. Philip Neri. See Paul Türks, Philip Neri: The Fire of Joy, trans. by Daniel Utrecht (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), Ch. 8., and Williams, l–lii. As Nicholas translated Juan de Valdés’ The Hundred and Ten Considerations (not approved for publication until 1638, after Nicholas’ death), however, the Spanish reformer, and the conversations he led among his circle of men and women (out of which he wrote the Considerations), may have been a more direct influence on Little Gidding. Valdés’s (c. 1509–1541) circle at Naples included the Italian poet Vittoria Colonna; his work was introduced to England via his disciple Peter Martyr Vermigli. On Valdes’ influence on Nicholas see Williams, liii–lv, and on Valdés and George Herbert, see Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: “Divinitie, and Poesy, Met” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Ch. 4. Francis de Sales’ (1567–1622) Introduction to the Devout Life was bound by the Collett sisters at Little Gidding, and he is quoted in the dialogues. His Spiritual Conferences, which grew out of conversations with the nuns of the Order of the Visitation, of which he was a founder, could have served as a model if the Ferrars knew the text; however the final form of these conversations only refers to the questioners and edits the conversation into a monologue. 322 The flip side of the family’s preoccupation with authoritative narratives and a “usable past” (usable in the sense of applicable as models and patterns for the present) was a deep suspicion of fiction. This culminated in the burning of a trunk of books of romances and tales of chivalry on the site of the future grave of Nicholas Ferrar, an act that is in fact foreshadowed in the Story Books. After exploring George Herbert’s parabolic improvisations, in which he freely incorporated elements of biblical parable with images from the emblem tradition and narratives of his own invention into his lyrics, his friends’ insistence on “just the facts,” to the point of literary holocaust (Spenser! Ariosto!), may come as a surprise. While Herbert was suspicious of “fictions onely and false hair,” he did not condemn romance or chivalrous literature with the Ferrars’ stridency. Both Herbert and the Ferrars told stories with catechetical ends in mind, Herbert catechizing his unseen readers, and the community at Little Gidding, instructing itself. That Herbert was one of the initial readers of the Story Books, and the Ferrars among the initial readers of The Temple, suggests a mutual recognition of sympathy between these two projects, whose primary aim was conversion of life through imitable patterns of devotion. Herbert, as noted in the previous chapter, made use of dialogue within his lyric parables as one strategy of engaging the reader. The Ferrars, in their dialogues, appropriated a genre with ancient roots, which flourished during the early modern period, exploiting its formal hybridity and polyphony to their own unique ends. 323 III. Renaissance Dialogue, Collaborative Authorship, and the “framing & moulding of this storying Busines” K.J. Wilson, in his study Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogues, writes that dialogues have always presented a problem to literary theory from Aristotle on, because they exist in a sort of shadow-land between narrative and drama. For Wilson, the dialogue of the English humanists is “an art of ideas,” “a didactic art,” and above all, “a medial art,” mirroring “the Renaissance humanists’ role as mediators between the ideas of antiquity and their own sensory world.” Their goal was “to create a dialectic between the present and the past,” and dialogue was “a literary form uniquely receptive to this function.”45 Virginia Cox in The Renaissance Dialogue calls it an “awkward hybrid genre,” that “at the same time as presenting a body of information or opinion . . . also represents the process by which that information or opinion is transmitted to a particular audience, at a particular place and time.”46 Jon R. Snyder describes “the protean nature of dialogue, which allows for a limited number of different formal configurations and a seemingly infinite number of possible themes,” noting that in the sixteenth century “everything from rhetorical handbooks to medical treatises to travel narratives to manuals on dueling to erotic fiction to utopias can be found in dialogue form.”47 The popularity of this form cannot be fully accounted for by the prestige of its roots in ancient Greece and Rome; Snyder argues that dialogue allows prose writers to 45 K.J. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogues (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), ix, xv, 9, 127, 177, 2. 46 Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) xi, 4. 47 Jon R. Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 7–8. 324 pursue a topic laterally: This lateral direction of dialogical conversation—as opposed to the vertical logical steps required in a demonstration—provides for a far more flexible and open arrangement of a sequence of topics, narrative loci, and other elements than that found in the various kinds of nonfictional prose treatises.48 In addition to this flexibility of form, Virginia Cox argues that the popularity of dialogue in certain cultures (such as sixteenth century Italy or eighteenth century France) reflects a larger societal crisis of communication: [W]hen any age adopts on a wide scale a form which so explicitly ‘stages’ the act of communication, it is because that act has, for some reason, come to be perceived as problematic . . . Certainly, whatever they are, these causes will be complex, and any generalizations must be cautious ones. But it seems safe to suggest that the use of the dialogue form may be seen as a symptom of an unease with the conventions which govern the transmission of knowledge within a society, and a desire to reform them by returning to a study of the roots of persuasion.49 This desire to reform a decadent and irreligious society through example and right reason are evidenced throughout the Story Books; as the Affectionate says, “If our stories be right, the practize of the world is very wrong.”50 The term “dialogue” in sixteenth-century England encompassed a number of fluid and overlapping connotations, and was used interchangeably with “discourse,” “disputation,” “conference,” “debate,” or “conversation.” Dialogues could be poetic, as in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, or a means of religious instruction, as in the catechisms and colloquies of Erasmus, Cordier, Valdés and others, or a method of formal and public 48 Snyder, 8. 49 Cox, 7. 50 Sharland, 243. 325 disputation and debate as a component of university training. Joseph Puterbaugh contrasts English and Continental Renaissance dialogues, noting that while most of the hundreds of nondramatic prose dialogues published in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were “closed-off exercises in propaganda dressed up as dialogue,” that “[i]n European models of the questione d’amore, conversazione, or trattato d’amore, dialogue is conceived as an exercise of wit, suggesting delight in the ‘play’ of conversation.”51 Two of the most famous and influential early sixteenth-century dialogues, Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (set in 1507 and published in 1528 after circulating in manuscript) and Erasmus’ Colloquies (first published in 1518 and expanded several times), as Janet L. Smarr notes, “present their dialogues in relation to the concept of play”: For Castiglione, the conversation is explicitly a game intended to pass the evenings at court in mixed company. For Erasmus, dialogues are part of a pedagogical theory that emphasizes learning through play, so that the student encounters learning as something enjoyable.52 Erasmus, in response to critics who suggested that his methods of teaching were childish, replied, “I’m not sure that anything is learned better than what is learned as a game.”53 Tasso, too, noted the delight involved in dialogue, which he described as the “pleasantest and least irksome” of didactic genres, “because the writer of a dialogue does not teach you the truth with the authority of a master, but joins companionably with you in the 51 Joseph Puterbaugh, “‘Truth Hath the Victory’: Dialogue and Disputation in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments,” in Dorothea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée, eds., Printed Voices: The Renaissance Culture of Dialogue (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 138–139. For a recent study in early modern English religious polemical dialogue, see Antoinina B. Zlatar, Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 52 Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 5. 53 Erasmus, “De utilitate colloquiorum,” (3.742.26–27), cited in Smarr, 5. 326 search for the truth.”54 The Ferrars were earnest and dogged in their discussion of truth and virtue, and several of the conversations did set the course for the community’s ascetic practice, especially around temperance.55 However, delight in the play of conversation was an equally important part of these exercises, as evidenced by the description of storying as taking the place of Christmas recreations, the beginning of each session with a musical performance, as well as the many performative aspects of the actors delivering their stories that are captured in their transcription. Dialogue as a genre was more popular in the sixteenth than in the seventeenth century, and it waned rapidly after the Renaissance; in 1710, the Earl of Shaftesbury, in his “Advice to an Author,” remarked that “dialogue is at an end.”56 Until recently, it received very little critical attention. Dorthea Heitsch and Jean-François Vallée attribute this to literary critics’ inheritance of nineteenth-century genre categories, which has perhaps blinded scholars to dialogue, which tends to blur, and bridge, the modern distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, orality and literacy, or poetry, prose, and drama. A fundamentally hybrid genre, dialogue spans not only what modernity has described as “literature” and “philosophy,” but also rhetoric, ethics, social history, and pedagogy.57 Perhaps this genre-blindness explains why, with over twenty-five years of critical attention to the recovery of early modern texts by women, and a significant rise in interest in religious texts, only a handful of essays have been written on the Little Academy, 54 Cited in Cox, 81 and 153 n. 67. 55 See Ransome, Web, 137–140. 56 Quoted in Snyder, viii. 57 Heitsch and Vallée, x–xi. 327 despite the Ferrars’ connection to two major metaphysical poets, Herbert and Richard Crashaw. Another issue in examining the Story Books of Little Gidding is the question of authorship: who “wrote” these dialogues, and what was the process of composition? This question about authorship and the Little Academy is related to, and complicated by, the authorial slights of hand in the genre of dialogue itself. In a dialogue with a sole author, the “authorial” role may be splintered between a number of different speakers, or the role-division between “author” and “readers” may be entirely broken down. The precise function of the fictional exchange will vary according to whether it is dramatized or narrated, and, crucially, to whether it is presented as fiction or historical record.58 However, the dialogues of the Little Academy were communally or collaboratively authored, so the “authorial role” is splintered, or dispersed, from the beginning. Cox describes the breaking down of the “role-division” between author and readers, but in the Story Books, this division hardly existed in the first place, since the authors and the intended audience was essentially one and the same. The Ferrars’ dialogues were recorded and preserved primarily so that the community could continue the “selfcatechizing” that had begun with their performance, by reflecting on them regularly. The Story Books were not intended for publication, and are known only to have circulated to Susanna Collett Mapletoft and George Herbert (before they were passed to other family members through inheritance). Cox also assumes in her description that, whether or not the dialogue is “presented” as fictional or historical, that it is in actuality fiction. (This is certainly a valid 58 Cox, 5. 328 assumption, as the overwhelming majority of Renaissance dialogues are fictional.) Cox uses the term “documentary dialogue” to describe fictional dialogues where known historical persons are the speakers. The Ferrars’ dialogues, however, were “documentary” in the sense of recording actual conversations which took place on specified dates (even if these conversations were later heavily edited). Virginia Cox notes that only in Renaissance Italy did a strong tradition of documentary dialogue develop.59 As Nicholas Ferrar traveled extensively in Italy and read and translated from Italian, he may have been familiar with some of these, though there is no evidence. The Ferrars were familiar with at least one example of religious writing which had its basis in actual conversation, as the Hundred and Ten Considerations of Juan de Valdés were purported to have begun with Sunday gatherings of Valdés’ disciples, who would discuss theological topics and then hear Valdés discourse on them (see note, above). Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life was highly esteemed at Little Gidding; perhaps the community was also familiar with de Sales’ Spiritual Conferences, derived from his discourses to the Nuns of the Visitation, and used by that Order as a complement to their Rule to be read out regularly.60 However, though both of these works had their origin in conversation, the end result was a treatise by a spiritual master; a monologue. The members of the Little Academy were companions in search of truth rather than disciples of a teacher, and their exchanges of stories and discussions were the heart of the exercises and not a lead-in to them. This is not to say that Nicholas was not a highly influential and charismatic 59 60 Cox, 10. See St. Francis de Sales, The Spiritual Conferences of St. Francis de Sales, Benedict Mackey, Francis Gasquet, and Nicholas Wisemen, trans. and eds. (Westminster, MD: Newman Bookshop, 1943). 329 spiritual leader for the community; but he seemed to prefer to be a kind of stage manager or director rather than the pedagogic focus. He catechized his own family but did not preach, and refused to catechize the children of the neighboring villages, saying that was the responsibility of their parents. He served as spiritual director to a number of family members and friends, but individually and not publicly. He shunned theological debate and left no spiritual treatise of his own. Heather Hirschfeld, in her article “Early Modern Theories of Authorship,” provides a useful summary of recent scholarly attention to collaboration in the Renaissance, defined as “the efforts of multiple contributors to the writing or publication of a given text.” The terms collaboration and collaborative authorship 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.”61 Hirschfeld describes studies of collaboration in three areas: extraliterary texts (including scientific, historical, and religious works), manuscript and print culture, and drama. She notes that “it is incumbent on scholars who wish to reclaim lost or forgotten female voices to move beyond the dominant Romantic definition of the individual author and to recognize, in the diversified processes of textual production, alternative formulations or experiences of authorship.”62 However, in the studies she surveys, there is very little discussion of specifically religious works, and the number of collaborators on individual texts is relatively small, usually two or three (with the exception of compilers of 61 Heather Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship,” PMLA 116, no. 3 (May 2001): 610. 62 Hirschfeld, 615. 330 anthologies or histories). The Story Books of Little Gidding were certainly collaboratively authored, but they were also communally authored, as the collaborators were not independent agents but members of a household devoted to a common purpose. The practicalities of how such idiosyncratic texts as the Story Books came to be written down should be considered. De Sales’ Spiritual Conferences were preserved through the remarkable (or perhaps trained) memory of one Mother Claude-Agnés Joly de la Roche, who, as St. Jane-Frances de Chantal wrote, had been endowed by God “with so happy a memory that she repeated word for word what our good Prelate had preached, several days after she had heard it.”63 Though Nicholas himself was known for his powers of memory and the Collett sisters’ memorization of the Psalms and the New Testament is mentioned at the opening of the Story Books, the Ferrars did not need to rely on recollection alone to set down their discussions. Nicholas had served as Deputy Treasurer of the Virginia Company and was responsible for preparing the minutes of the meetings; he was adept at shorthand. In fact, shorthand, or “characterie,” was an invention of the late sixteenth century; a number of books describing various methods followed Timothy Bright’s Characterie. An Arte of Shorte Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character, published in 1588. One of the primary uses of this new art was for listeners to take down sermons, to the astonishment and sometimes consternation of preachers.64 63 64 de Sales, xxiii. Anthony Tyrell in the preface to a sermon of his published in 1589 noted that “my words were no sooner out of my mouth but a young youth had penned my sermon verbatim in characterie, an art newly invented, so that it could be published, but he first sought my permission . . .” However, the quality of note-takers’ versions varied. Thomas Playfere felt compelled to publish his own edition of a sermon he had preached in 1596 after two pirated editions appeared, noting to his dedicatee, Lady Elizabeth Cary, “I had rather have 331 Though women were avid note-takers of sermons, it is not clear that many of them did so in shorthand. Teaching shorthand to women, as with all aspects of women’s education, was controversial. Ralph Verney advised William Denton, Let not your girl learn Latin nor shorthand. The difficulty of the first may keep her from that vice, for so I must esteem it in a woman; but the easiness of the other may be a prejudice to her, for the pride of taking sermon notes hath made multitudes of women most unfortunate.65 Though it is not known if any of the Collett sisters knew Latin, at least one of them probably did know shorthand, as Nicholas was often away during the meetings of the Little Academy. The Collett sisters were taught bookbinding and served as scribes; “characterie” would have been another literary craft for them to add to their repertoire. A major question around the authorship of the Story Books is the extent of Nicholas’ involvement in them: how much did he control the proceedings and the finished text? The manuscript volumes are purportedly in his hand.66 The introductory material in the first volume is likely by him, but is not signed. In the same way that Nicholas avoided public theological debate, he avoided signing his writing; the “Printer’s Preface to the Reader,” in The Temple, which scholars agree is authored by him, is also unsigned. However, writing was very important to him, and he seems to have had a desire to shape or even control the writing of others. Many surviving letters in the Ferrar Papers are actually to and from family members living at Little Gidding, as Nicholas felt it to be my head broken than to have my sermon so mangled.” Quoted in Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion, and Education in Early Modern England, 164, 165. 65 66 Quoted in Charlton, 165–166. Maycock, 265. Though Williams notes that he thinks one of them is in Mary Collet’s hand (I need to find this reference). 332 important that family members work out their differences in writing. He was eager to get the participants in both incarnations of the Little Academy to set down their commitment to the exercises in writing, and was frustrated when this did not happen immediately. He was also known to have kept a spiritual diary, which has not survived.67 In the introductory material to “The Winding Sheet,” it is presumably Nicholas who warns the reader not to try to decipher the true identity of each of the virtue-named actors; in this way his desire for anonymity extends to the others.68 As Cox notes, this displacement of the authorial role is a characteristic of documentary dialogue (though Cox is referring to fictitious scenarios): “In choosing the dialogue form, the writer is renouncing an authorial role, and becoming, like the reader, an admiring eavesdropper on the conversation of others.”69 For someone like Nicholas, who preferred literary stage-managing to direct authorship (as a translator, and as Herbert’s literary executor), it is easy to see why dialogue held a certain appeal. Even the likely pseudonyms for Nicholas in the two incarnations of the Little Academy, the Visitour and the Register, imply a certain distance from the proceedings: as someone who is not a full-fledged member but in and out, or who is merely a scribe. And yet, knowing from the Ferrar Papers that Nicholas had a penchant for writing certain family members’ letters for them or with them (when they were educated and certainly capable of writing on their own), and that this occasionally 67 On family quarrels over Nicholas’ drafting of letters for others, see Ransome, Web, 147–149. 68 Blackstone, 111. However, in the introduction to the first series of dialogues, Mary Collett is named, since the text notes that “shee that was elected Chiefe” bore the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Sharland, 2). 69 Cox, 43. 333 led to conflict, we must consider the possibility that Nicholas was more active, less a Visitour or Register than he appeared. The one reference within the Story Books themselves to the way in which they were composed is in the last recorded dialogue, “The Winding Sheet,” performed in 1634, after the deaths of George Herbert and Mary Ferrar in (reference is made to each of their recent deaths). “The Winding Sheet” opens with a long introduction describing the difficulties in reconvening the Little Academy after a furlough of two years. The participants resolve to continue the dialogues, only to face new challenges “[u]pon a review & muster of their forces & provisions.” The Compositor for so we shall henceforth terme him, on whom the framing & moulding of this storying Busines was imposed, thought it good to take the Rise of the whole ensuing Action from this point & making an Entrance upon this occasion to goe on according as the first project was to a particular Examination day by day of those truths, which were most disordered amongst themselues.70 No sooner is this resolved, however, than Mary Ferrar’s death and “the Dispersion of some of the Actors” force those who wish to continue to reconstitute themselves as a new group, and not a mere continuation of the old. This “Compositor” does not speak in the dialogue that follows, nor is he referred to again, but it seems very likely that Nicholas is the author of this preface and is referring to himself here as the “framer and moulder” of the dialogues; he also takes the name of “Register” in “The Winding Sheet.” This passage points to the Story Books as truly a collective effort, with Nicholas as organizer and editor. If he were instead writing a “documentary dialogue” with his family members as 70 Blackstone, 106. 334 characters, scripting their actions entirely, their agreement or “dispersion” would be of little consequence to him; as it stands, the family has some vaguely-defined but divisive “issues” to work through before a reduced number recommit themselves to the project, which they do by signing a solemn resolution to practice what they preach.71 Therefore there is no reason to doubt, as Francis Turner and other earlier biographers did, that the Collett sisters had only memorized dialogues written by Nicholas.72 Nicholas, as “Compositor,” likely had a role in selecting the stories or sometimes translating them out of sources such as de Thou. As mentioned above, there is no evidence that any of the sisters knew Latin. However, the banter and discussion between stories, while occasionally prolix, does not seem scripted; the actors wander “laterally” in the way of conversation, disagree and debate, and return to their theme. Some endings to the day’s proceedings are tied up neatly while others are abrupt. Individual personality, even in these masked circumstances, shines through. Maycock states that “Initially it appears that the material for each day’s discussion was provided by Nicholas himself,” but that as the meetings went on, “[t]he sisters ceased to rely on the set discourses drawn up by Nicholas and, from the stores of their own wide reading, were able to provide their own narratives and their own vigorously stated homilies.”73 This seems to me a reasonable assertion. The project was certainly viewed as collaborative by Arthur Woodnoth, who asks on behalf of George Herbert, “And if to it Each of my 71 Blackstone, 110–111. 72 See Muir and White, 17–18. 73 Maycock, 263–264. 335 Cosens wold be pleased to add one of theire Storyes I conceau it wold be receaud with very great acceptation . . .”74 Nevertheless, the final version of the Story Books was certainly shaped by Nicholas. Whatever the specifics of Nicholas’ role as “Compositer,” the Little Academy throughout the dialogues claimed Mary Ferrar as its Founder, and she was the exemplar spurring on the “Mayden Sisters” to intermingle “the Practize of Devotion,” with “the study of wisedome, searching and enquiring diligently into the knowledge of those things which appertaine to their Condition and Sex.”75 Though the interlocutors are a mixedgender group, the young women’s search for pious wisdom is the group’s raison d’être. Virginia Cox notes that “[t]he inclusion of women speakers is one of the great innovations of the vernacular humanist dialogue of the sixteenth century,” though the inclusion remained controversial, especially when women were given leading roles. Cox quotes Pietro Bembo’s Boccaccian dialogue Asolani (1505): “I imagine that there will be many people who will criticize me for having called in women to participate in these investigations [into the nature of love], on the grounds that it is more fitting for women to devote themselves to their womanly tasks, than to interest themselves in these things. But I care nothing for these critics.”76 At Little Gidding, however, there was no such conflict between “womanly tasks” and investigations into the nature of virtue, if not into the nature of romantic love. In fact, at one point the Guardian suggests that housewifery is a 74 Printed in Blackstone, 268–269. 75 Sharland, 2. 76 Cox, 122–123 n. 33. 336 waste of time and a distraction from the higher purpose of contemplation.77 Despite the double appeal of dialogue as both learned and erudite, but also accessible as a form of casual conversation, very few of the hundreds of extant Renaissance and early modern dialogues included women as speakers. And when they did, as Janet Lavarie Smarr notes in Joining the Conversation, female speakers often did not participate on equal footing with males. For example, though women are featured as speakers in one of the most influential dialogues of the early sixteenth century, Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (published 1528), this text “remain[s] somewhat ambivalent about the roles of women.” Even when the discussion in Castiglione’s Urbino is directly about the role of women, the women present do not offer their own speeches, but only occasionally disrupt those of the men.78 A number of Renaissance women, however, did try their hand at the form. Dialogues by women tended to be more diphonic than polyphonic, as a conversation between two friends or relatives frequently seemed more plausible than either a gathering of women or a mixed gathering that would allow participation by female voices.79 In this polyphony of female voices, the Little Academy is an interesting exception. Because of the Ferrars’ unusual domestic situation of a large number of daughters living with extended family in one house, the multi-voiced dialogue form is natural to them, as is mixed-gender participation on equal footing, since the male participants are also family 77 Sharland, 133, from the Christmastide 1631 dialogue on Patience. This passage will be discussed in the concluding chapter on theological aesthetics as a way of life. 78 Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 6. 79 Smarr, 2. 337 members with whom it is appropriate to converse openly. In the two polyphonic Renaissance dialogues by women that Smarr discusses, Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron (published 1559) and Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne (published 1600), each must create a special space for a group of women to participate in a dialogue.80 In the Heptameron, a mixed-gender group returning from a trip to curative baths is waylaid by a flood and other troubles and seeks shelter in a monastery; in Il merito delle donne, a group of seven women from all stages of life gathers at the home of a widow. Retreats of various kinds are often used as settings for dialogue (e.g. Boccaccio’s Decameron, Castiglione’s Il cortegiano, Erasmus’ The Godly Feast); withdrawal from the cares and constraints of the world, however temporary, opens up the space and leisure for the kind of speculative philosophizing on which dialogue thrives. For a group of women, however, this retreat-like space is not just an encouragement to discourse, but a necessity for plausibility; in the everyday world, “womanly tasks” preclude this kind of entertainment, or social norms deem it inappropriate.81 Again, the Little Academy is an exception; the Ferrars’ retreat is permanent, as they have “retired” from gentle society and city life to devote themselves to spiritual pursuits, and their daily routine is one designed around periods of prayer and contemplation. Nor was Little Gidding a narrative frame, but rather a historical place: it is as if the Ferrars realized that they were living in the ideal setting for dialogue (wholesome and bucolic with a good library, but perhaps a little boring), and so decided 80 See Smarr, Ch. 6, “Many Voices.” 81 Smarr, 195. 338 to stage these exercises in pious imagination. The Story Books may be a case of life imitating art. IV. Literary Models for the Story Books: Erasmus, Boccaccio, Marguerite de Navarre When it comes to dialogic sources, the Ferrars were surely familiar with a large number of Erasmus’ works. His editions of patristic writers, so important to Nicholas, were indispensable in this period.82 Erasmus supported the education of women, as part of a belief that every person could in some way participate in the life of the Gospel; in his colloquy “The Abbot and the Learned Lady,” among other texts, he satirizes the commonplace prejudice against women studying, including learning Latin. Erasmus broadly argued, as Patrick Collinson puts it, “that Christian truth was more persuasive mirrored in the particularizes of human existence than argued in dogmatic abstractions . . .”83 In the Paraclesis, he describes what makes a true theologian: In this kind of philosophy, located as it is more truly in the disposition of mind than in syllogism, life means more than debate, inspiration is preferable to erudition, transformation is more important than intellectual comprehension. Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and—I shall boldly add—all can be theologians.84 The Mother (Mary Collett) puts forward a similar argument in the dialogue “On the 82 Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, Volume 39, trans. and annotated by Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), xvii. Nicholas Sr. and Mary Ferrar named one of their older sons Erasmus. 83 Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 501. 84 From Desiderius Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings, ed. John C. Olin; quoted in Collinson, 499. 339 Austere Life.” Though preaching properly belongs to the ministry (though the sisters, it must be noted, do a fair amount of sermonizing in the dialogues), preaching through actions is common to all Christians: “Wee may tread out the way to heaven and wee may lead on by good works, though wee cannot teach by wordes. And perhaps that Real kind of Instruction hath in all Ages beene the most forcible, is in this the most Necessarie.”85 The Ferrars adopted both the humanistic emphasis on letters and learning, and the insistence that the aim of this learning is self-cultivation and not mere disputation. In the seriousness with which they pursue the religious life, the community at Little Gidding is reminiscent of the diners in Erasmus’ well-known colloquy The Godly Feast (Convivium Religiosum, written c.1521). In it, Eusebius, the owner of a country estate that doubles as an ideal religious retreat, invites eight friends to join him for lunch and a tour of his gardens and home. Eusebius tells his friends that the food he serves is simple and entirely from the gardens; they are to bring their own “seasoning,” an appetite whetted by a light meal the day before and a vigorous walk.86 When the guests arrive, they notice the scriptural mottoes painted everywhere, as well as a variety of wall paintings with moral messages in a variety of languages. Over lunch, the guests, all laymen, hear a reading from Scripture and join together in interpreting it. Despite the focus on scripture, there is a place for appropriate compatible pagan learning as well: “And so, when I read such things of such men, I can hardly help exclaiming, “St. Socrates, pray for us!”87 Eusebius’ 85 Williams, 171–172. 86 Erasmus, Collected Works Vol 39, 176. 87 Erasmus, Collected Works, 194. 340 frugality enables him to be more generous towards the poor.88 “Dessert” is a treasured codex of the Gospels. At the meal’s end, Eusebius distributes a number of small symbolic party favors: a book of Solomon’s proverbs, two more of Matthew’s gospels and Paul’s epistles, a book, and oil lamp, a pen, and a small codex of Plutarch’s Moralia.89 In the end, though, it is the host that bids farewell while the guests remain to enjoy more hospitality. Eusebius must leave on business, his version of aristocratic “hunting”: he must go provide comfort to an ill friend, and intervene in a quarrel to reconcile the two parties.90 Erasmus uses this dialogue to model a way of life rather than to engage in debate. In his retreat, Eusebius is an exemplar of the virtues of temperance, simplicity, charity, and hospitality. The very architecture and ornamentation of his house promotes wisdom. His guests discuss scripture in the manner of those “theologians” Erasmus describes in the Paraclesis—not specialists but humble practitioners asking sincere questions. Indeed, the reading and explication of scripture is a prominent part of the “feast.” The Ferrars emphasize, especially around the Christmas season, that their dialogues are taking the place of delicacies; they serve as more suitable nourishment. Biblical interpretation is woven throughout the stories, in the kind of multi-voiced preaching of the guests at Eusebius’ feast. They also, as mentioned previously, engaged in mealtime reading, and 88 Ibid., 200. 89 Ibid., 204. 90 Ibid.,206–207. 341 were partial to wall mottoes.91 When Mary Collett is promoted from Chiefe to Mother, she is given a number of symbolic gifts suitable to her office, including a Bible, a bell, a candle, and seven “children” (her sibling, to whom she is now to be a spiritual mother).92 The seriousness of inquiry we find in The Godly Feast, combined with an emphasis on the enjoyment of simple pleasures, resonates with the project of the Little Academy (though the Ferrars’ prose is far more convoluted than Erasmus’ straightforward Latin). Erasmus presents a vision of self-sufficient rural retirement where learning and contemplative discourse is central, but where Christian imperatives to offer hospitality, feed the poor, visit the sick, and reconcile the quarrelsome are still met. From Erasmus’ pious lunch, it seems very strange to move to the unstable and far less temperate world of Boccaccio’s Decameron, and yet this late medieval work holds out an intriguing possibility of influence on the chaste Ferrars’ dialogue sessions. This is especially true when considered alongside Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. This possibility was rejected by A.M. Williams, who argues in his introduction to a selection of the Ferrars’ dialogues that On occasions when ‘storying’ became partly intended for amusement as well as for edification, a comparison (and, one might add, a contrast) with the pleasures of other isolated groups—Boccaccio’s plague-driven refugees and Chaucer’s road-weary pilgrims—is tempting but to be avoided. . . To suggest that the little Academy was also in the tradition of 91 See previous chapter, “Liturgy at Little Gidding.” 92 Sharland, 178–184. 342 the Courts of Love and that Mary Collett is an Eleanor of Aquitaine turned anchorite would be open to question.93 However, Williams notes the publisher’s preface to Valdés’ One Hundred Ten Considerations, which Nicholas would later translate, which appeals to you that waste all your time idly in reading of Boccace his hundred Novelties, and the like, lay them a while aside, and read these considerations of Valdesso, which are indeed true Novelties . . . Here you shall find the true and holy Enamourments of God and of Christ with mankind.94 The hundred Considerations are presented as a pious alternative to the hundred tales of the Decameron; the preface emphasizes the holy delight and pleasure that is to be found there, as opposed to the earthly delights of Boccaccio. This appeal, as we know, did resonate with Nicholas, who was both seeking after spiritual wisdom, but also had, as he later confessed to his great distress, some difficulty in laying aside chivalrous and romantic literature. Williams feels stronger influences are to be found in Socratic dialogue, and agrees with Bernard Blackstone that the form of the Little Academy can be traced to Elizabethan court tradition, baptised and purged of vanity, yet recognizably part of the pastoral convention. Nicholas surrounded by the Sisters, in serious converse in the Great Chamber, is but a variation on the shepherd with his swains and nymphs; the names of Phyllis, Corydon and Chloe are exchanged for those of Learner, Patient and Humble; the quaint conceits, the elaborate compliments and courtly euphuisms are the same, though they adorn a theme higher and more solemn than was ever discovered in Arcadian valleys.95 93 Williams, xx. 94 Cited in Williams, lv. 95 Blackstone, xiv. 343 However, a pastoral or even Sidneyan precedent for the Little Academy seems about as likely as Mary Collett as Eleanor of Aquitaine. What a wholly philosophical model for the Story Books leaves out is the centrality of the stories themselves to the Ferrars’ project. The members of the Little Academy, unlike the guests in The Godly Feast, do not simply converse or debate on godly themes—they tell stories, one after another. Part of Williams’ reaction to Boccaccio or Chaucer as a model is a recollection of the kinds of stories told in those collections, most of which are anything but pious: but, as Boccaccio himself notes, stories themselves are neutral, and told for a variety of purposes. In his Epilogue to the Decameron, Boccaccio addresses those who would argue that his tales were unseemly for a virtuous female audience. He notes that his stories were not told in a church or any place requiring a certain level of chastity of mind, but in gardens, in a place designed for pleasure, among people who, though young in years, were nonetheless fully mature and not to be led astray by stories, even at a time [during the plague] when respectable people saw nothing unseemly in wearing their breeches over their heads if they thought their lives might be preserved. Like all things in this world, stories, whatever their nature, may be harmful or useful, depending upon the listener.96 The listener or reader is all-important to Boccaccio, as what is suited for one will be illsuited for another. The lady who is forever saying her prayers, or baking pies and cakes for her father confessor, may leave my stories alone: they will not run after anyone demanding to be read, albeit they are no more improper than some 96 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. by G. H. McWilliam (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 830. 344 of the trifles that self-righteous ladies recite, or even engage in, if the occasion arises.97 By this description it is clear that the Collett sisters are far from Boccaccio’s intended audience. However, they would likely only have had access to a very expurgated version of the Decameron, in which the raciest episodes had been removed. The first apparently complete if altered English translation of the Decameron appeared anonymously in 1620.98 A number of women in the Ferrar household confess to having enjoyed reading romances. And, of course, there is the locked trunk of romances and chivalrous works that Nicholas had sent back from his Continental travels (see below). Quite possibly, the Decameron was among them. However, it is not the nouvelles themselves, expurgated or not, that may have influenced the Ferrars, but the structure of the Decameron, which may very well have been recreated in some way at Little Gidding. Boccaccio opens the work in 1348, with a description of plague-ravaged Florence. Seven young women sit in church, each “a friend, 97 98 Ibid., 831. This translation is based on a combination of Le Maçon’s French translation of 1545 and Salviati’s edition (published 1582), which sought to make the work palatable to the authorities of the CounterReformation, revising anything “that might have been construed as blasphemous, profane, critical of the Church and is institutions, or offensive to Christian morality.” Many of Salviati’s revisions were retained by the anonymous English Protestant translator in 1620, who also followed Le Maçon in affixing a moral to the end of each of the stories (see Boccaccio, 34–36, 40). Herbert G. Wright notes that the 1620 translation encountered some difficulty in the licensing process, for after it had been sanctioned by the bishop of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury (George Abbot) withdrew his approval, though it was eventually obtained. The work was reissued in 1625, 1634, 1657 and 1684 and contained woodcuts from the Le Maçon edition; see Herbert G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1957), 191. In this edition the famous story of the naïve Alibech and the hermit Rustico (III, x) has been replaced by a much tamer account of the wooing of a Danish princess (Boccaccio, 31). The translator also writes out the same-sex attractions of the husband who discovers his wife and young lover beneath a chicken coop (the story of Pietro di Vinciolo in V, x), which significantly alters the ending of the tale and the variety of “mutuall joy and Household contentment” it describes (Boccaccio, 40). 345 a neighbor, a relative of the other six, none . . . older than twenty-seven or younger than eighteen,” all “intelligent, gently bred, fair to look upon, graceful in bearing, and charmingly unaffected.”99 They decide to leave the desperate, infected city together and seek refuge in a country estate, bringing with them three young men whose guidance they deem necessary. Temperance and orderliness is part of their project, as many of those left in the city have descended into debauchery.100 As a way to pass the hotter part of the afternoon, they spend ten days telling entertaining stories, one story each, with occasional musical interludes. On the first day they elect a queen, who in turn chooses the next day’s king or queen. Each of the characters, Boccaccio notes, is known by a pseudonym: I could tell you their actual names, but refrain from doing so for a good reason, namely that I would not want any of them to feel embarrassed, at any time in the future, on account of the ensuing stories, all of which they either listened to or narrated themselves . . . therefore . . . I propose to refer to them by names which are either wholly or partially appropriate to the qualities of each.101 Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron was intended to be a French Decameron, as is stated in its introduction, but the manuscript was left unfinished after eight days of stories.102 Though the work as a whole is attributed to Marguerite, the stories themselves 99 Boccaccio, 58. 100 Ibid., 61, 66. 101 Ibid., 58. 102 Marguerite (1492–1549), Queen of Navarre, was the sister of François I and grandmother of Henry IV by her daughter Jeanne. She was a patron of Rabelais and possibly of John Calvin, and a protector of church reformers. She wrote plays and religious poetry that exhibited an intense mysticism. The first edition of the Heptameron appeared posthumously in 1558, and the following year another edition appeared, which ascribed the work to Marguerite. Her first work to appear in English was the long poem Le Miroir de l’ame pécheresse (“The Mirror of the Sinful Soul”) first published in 1531. It appeared under the title A Godly Meditation of the Christian Soul in 1548, translated by eleven-year-old Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII and future head of the English Church. She may have received the manuscript 346 seem to have been contributed by a number of men and women in Marguerite’s entourage.103 The Prologue describes how Marguerite and her friend the Dauphine (Catherine de Médicis), along with others in her court, began collaborating on a French Decameron. However, unlike Boccaccio’s tales, they would include only true stories. This project was interrupted by pressing affairs of state, and left unfinished; this provides an opening for the fictional (or semi-fictional characters, whose names are inversions and puns on the names of members of Marguerite’s court) to complete the task.104 These characters plan to then present the finished manuscript of the conversations to Marguerite and her court, therefore closing the circle, as Marguerite is now portrayed as the recipient of the text rather than its author.105 Marguerite’s storytellers are five men and five women, whose pleasant sojourn to a spa for its healing waters is interrupted by a terrible flood, which instigates a series of unfortunate events. Trying to make their way home, they are forced by treacherous conditions to seek refuge in a monastery, where they have ten days to wait until a new through her mother, Anne Boleyn, who had served as a lady in waiting at the court of Queen Claude, Marguerite’s sister-in-law. In 1597, a selection of tales from the Heptameron was published under the title The Queen of Navarre’s Tales Containing Verie pleasant Discourses of fortunate lovers. The discussion linking the stories was omitted. The complete Heptameron was not published in England until Robert Codrington’s edition of 1654. However, there is proof that tales from it formed “the favorite reading of English ladies in the first decades of Elizabeth’s reign.” See Marguerite de Navarre, The Heptameron, trans. by P.A. Chilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 7, 22; and Hugh M. Richmond, Puritans and Libertines: Anglo-French Literary Relations in the Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 10, 11. Marguerite possessed several qualities that would have appealed to the Ferrars: like Valdés and Savonarola, she was a Roman Catholic who supported reform; her mystical religiosity was described as ambiguous, located between Protestant and Catholic; and her charity was legendary. 103 de Navarre, 10. 104 Ibid., 11. 105 Smarr, 210. 347 bridge is constructed. However, while Boccaccio warns off from his stories women devoted to prayer, religion plays an important part in the Heptameron. Looking for some form of entertainment, the displaced spa-goers ask Oisille, an older widow, what they should do for entertainment. She replies, [W]hen you ask me to show you a pastime that is capable of delivering you from your boredom and your sorrow, you are asking me to do something that I find very difficult. All my life I have searched for a remedy, and I have found only one—the reading of holy Scripture, in which one may find true and perfect spiritual joy, from which proceed health and bodily repose.106 They agree with Oisille on the value of Bible reading, but acknowledge that they still need more recreation than sola scriptura. Therefore it is decided that in the mornings, Oisille will read and interpret the Bible to them and they will attend Mass, and in the afternoons they will tell stories to each other around a given theme. The stories, then, take place in the context of what is called Oisille’s “spiritual nourishment”: “So well did she deliver the reading that the Holy Spirit, full of sweetness and love, seemed to be speaking through her mouth.”107 The place of women in general and specifically within the Church is a primary concern in the Heptameron. For example in tale 67, a woman abandoned on an island with her husband serves as his priest and confessor at his death, which provokes discussion on whether this is appropriate, and why it is that women cannot serve as confessors: because they are incapable of concealing anything, or because they oppose vice more strongly than men and would grant harsher penances?108 Though infidelity, 106 de Navarre, 66. 107 Ibid., 535. 108 See Smarr, 205–206. 348 rape, and deception abound in the stories told, these are still interpreted as a kind of exempla. After yet another story of lustful and wicked friars and the promise of a further story to top it, Oisille comments, ‘We have all sworn to tell the truth . . . and we have sworn also to listen. Therefore you may speak freely, for when we recount the evil doings of the men and women in our stories, we are not doing it in order to bring shame upon the individuals, but in order to remove the esteem [and] trust placed in the mere creatures of God, by means of displaying the sorrows to which those creatures are subject, to the end that our hope may come to rest upon Him who alone is perfect and without whom all men are but imperfection.’ ‘Well then,’ replied Hircan, ‘I shan’t be afraid to tell you my story.’109 The storytellers in the Heptameron contextualize their stories within a moral framework and vigorously debate proper conduct, even while enjoying the salacious aspects of their tales. The Ferrars would not have encountered a complete translation of the Heptameron in English, but it is conceivable that it was among the foreign romances that Nicholas sent home from his travels. The 1597 selection of tales might have been available to them, though this did not contain the discussion between stories. However, they might have known William Painter’s popular anthology The Palace of Pleasure (Volume I published 1566 and Volume II in 1567), which contained ten stories from the Heptameron in the first volume and five in the second, as well as sixteen stories from the Decameron in Volume I, “carefully selected, and judiciously doctored, to present Bocaccio as a rigid moralist,” or another such volume containing these widely translated 109 de Navarre, 416. 349 and very popular tales with a suggestion of the narrative frame.110 They also would have had five years to indulge in the 1620 English translation of the Decameron, before abandoning such literature for more spiritual fare in their move to Little Gidding.111 The Decameron and the Heptameron suggest possible literary precedents for the organization of the Little Academy, such as is not found in any surviving English dialogue. As in the Decameron, the Little Academy is dominated by young women (the stated ages of Boccaccio’s interlocutors ranged from seventeen to twenty-eight; the Collett sisters in 1631 ranged from sixteen to thirty) with several male participants in a guardian role (John Ferrar is called the Guardian). Both Boccaccio and Marguerite present their works as collaborative efforts, and in the case of the Heptameron, this was likely more than a conceit. Interlocutors were known by pseudonyms; Boccaccio says these names point to qualities possessed by each woman, while in the Heptameron they are descriptive but also punning; the Collett sisters in the first configuration were named aspirationally, in terms of a quality they lacked. The Little Academy chooses, instead of a diurnal king or queen as in the Decameron or Heptameron, to install Mary Collett first as Chiefe and then Mother, preserving hierarchy without the rotation. As in the Heptameron, the Ferrars are concerned with the truth of the stories they tell (though they are not concerned that the story be from the experience of the storyteller or someone known to 110 111 See Richmond, 11 and de Navarre, 42. Castiglione’s Il cortegiano was also influential on the Heptameron and was likely familiar to the Ferrars; however this mixed-gender dialogue is based not around trading stories but discussing the ideal courtier’s way of life. As a courtesy handbook, Il cortegiano is viewed as an influence on Herbert’s The Country Parson; see Kristine A. Wolberg, “All Possible Art”: George Herbert’s Country Parson (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008). 350 the storyteller; their truth has a broad sense of history, as discussed below). The Ferrars’ stories are told as entertainment, with the requirement that each participant be ready to tell a story each day, as in the two works; there is often a musical offering as well, as in the Decameron. As in the Heptameron, each day has a theme, and the stories are told in the context of scripture reading and devotional practice. In a rhetorical flourish, the finished stories of the Heptameron are offered back to Marguerite’s court and the author becomes the recipient; so too are the Story Books primarily intended for the collaborators that devised them (though at Mary Ferrar’s suggestion, they send the first volume to their married sister Susanna Mapletoft). As Marguerite’s court decided to stage their own French Decameron, the Ferrars may have also appropriated the narrative frame of both works for more explicitly edifying ends. Like Boccaccio’s and Marguerite’s storytellers, they consider themselves fortunate escapees from the perils of the world; however, their retreat is permanent, not temporary, and the Little Academy’s quest for truth is stronger than that found in these other works. It is this sense of the Ferrar community as primarily seeking after wisdom and virtue that makes Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navare’s sorts of stories entirely unsuitable for the purposes of the Little Academy; titillating, addictive nouvelles are beyond redemption for the Ferrars’ project. Instead they turn to one of the genres or devices that, along with fabliaux and lais, formed a medieval predecessor to the nouvelles: exempla, or moral tales. The Ferrars’ use of exempla go beyond the need to find suitably pious material, demonstrating their view of history and constituting a cornerstone of their rule of life: imitation of holy patterns. 351 V. “What example will you give us?” Exemplarity and Historical Truth A conversation recorded by John Ferrar in his life of Nicholas, between Nicholas and his tutor Augustine Lindsell (later bishop of Peterborough and Hereford), illustrates the importance of exemplary stories to Little Gidding’s founder: His tutor, when he last saw him [Nicholas], towards the last seven years of his life, betake himself to so temperate a diet and sparing, to that fasting and watching, would pleasantly say to him: ‘Nick, whither will you go? What example will you give us?’ He would pleasantly reply: ‘Nay, tutor, you are to answer to God for this. Why did you commend unto me and made me (being so young at college as I was) to read the lives of all the holy men of old time and saints of God, the good fathers of the church, and of those good men in our later times, even in the Church of England, the saints and holy martyrs? Was it that I might only know the good things that they did? And what was that to me if you intended not, or that I should not endeavour, to fit and frame my life in all I could, by the assistance of Almighty God’s good grace and spirit, to do and to live as they did, as much as was in my poor power to do?’112 After the death of his mother in 1634, Nicholas increased his ascetic practices to the point of concern of family and friends. John’s biography emphasizes throughout that Lindsell admired him greatly (saying that he was “both a better scholar and an abler divine than he himself was,”); still his “pleasant” question—“Nick, whither will you go? What example will you give us?”—expresses doubts about the course his former star pupil is charting. But Nicholas turns his question back on him: Lindsell himself is responsible for Nicholas’ “example,” because it was he who encouraged an impressionable student to read the Vitae Patrum, martyrologies, and accounts of desert monasticism. Even before he went to Cambridge, Nicholas had memorized parts of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments. As he retorts to Lindsell, these examples exist not merely to be “known,” but imitated. 112 Muir and White, 100. 352 The Ferrars, as Reid Barbour has written, “abdicated from Stuart society,” but in their retreat, they attempted to reformulate the best of the church across the centuries on their plot of Stuart England.113 The great Christian exemplars of the past were only removed from the Christian present by a lack of those willing to follow in their footsteps. The Ferrars’ stories are drawn from a wide range of material: classical heroes (Trajan and Alexander each make an appearance) and authors (Socrates and Aristophanes), the Doctors of the Church (Augustine, Basil, and Jerome), the desert fathers and early Greek Christian sources (the Vitae Patrum, Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow), the Venerable Bede, stories from the lives of early Popes, Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, spiritual writers (St. Francis de Sales, Pico della Mirandola), in addition to other more contemporary historical sources such as the Speed’s History of Great Britain, the Annals of Baronius and the Historia sui temporis of de Thou. In the course of the dialogues, the Actors quote from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Sidney’s sonnets, Erasmus’ “De Praeparatione ad mortem,” Aesop’s fables, and a poem attributed to Francis Quarles, among other sources.114 They shared with their friend George Herbert a fondness for proverbs. Kate Riley comments that the “presence of tales such as ‘The Lady of the Lights’ suggests that the sisters occasionally dipped into the annals of 113 114 Barbour, 35. See Pamela Tudor-Craig, “Charles I and Little Gidding” in Richard Ollard and Pamela Tudor-Craig, eds., For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London: Collins, 1986), and Williams, lxxii and lxxv. The Chiefe quotes the poem “Like the Damask Rose” (minus the first stanza, which is attributed to Francis Quarles (“Hos ego versiculos”) or Simon Wastell (1560–1635) (“The flesh profiteth nothing”). See Sharland, 92-94 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_to_the_Damask_Rose, accessed December 10, 2012. Many of the literary quotations are from the Guardian (John Ferrar), who, stepping out from behind his younger brother’s shadow in the dialogues, relishes playing the Devil’s Advocate, and balances sincere piety with good humor. 353 romance.”115 Pamela Tudor-Craig notes that the stories told about relatively recent European history “are drawn exclusively from the non-Reformed countries of France, Italy and Spain,” with the longest story on the retirement of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.116 References to Protestant reformers are “relatively scanty;” As Tudor-Craig notes, The overall impression to be gained from the Story Books is that Nicholas’s interpretation of what he called ‘the good old way’ would have veered more towards Catholicism than towards Puritanism.117 It is worth noting, however, that some of the Ferrars’ favorite Roman sources were reform-minded (Valdés, de Thou, Baronius, Savonarola). The Ferrars’ vision was “catholic” rather than “Catholic”; despite expected prejudices (especially about Islam), many of their stories speak to the importance of ecumenical and even inter-religious reconciliation where it is possible, or at least an acknowledgment of goodness wherever it exists. In the dialogue on Holy Innocents Day, 1631, about the impossibility of worldly happiness, the Chiefe defends the use of stories from Roman Catholic countries since they give further evidence of the truth of their theme: That Difference of religion may not derogate from this truth, God makes the greatest Opposites in this Age to agree therein, that there may bee no place for Cavill, where there is no liberty of appeale or controule of what part soever a man bee, Papist or Protestant, hee hath an over-ruling example.118 115 Riley, 198–199. Romance and chivalrous texts will be discussed below. 116 Discussed in Barbour, Ch. 1. 117 Tudor-Craig, 183. 118 Sharland, 69. 354 The Ferrars’ reading was wide, and they scoured their library for a certain kind of story, which falls under the genre or device of exemplum, “a brief narrative presented as true and aimed at being inserted into a discourse (in general a sermon) to convince an audience by a salutary lesson.”119 Joseph Mosher, in an early study of exempla in England, notes that an exemplum has a more restricted sense than an example, “as a distinct species of illustration based upon actual or supposedly actual happenings.”120 The emphasis on the truth of the tale is important, because the exemplum is a call to action or imitation. As Elizabeth Allen notes, “When a text claims exemplary status, it makes a twofold assertion: as a particular instance, the narrative bears a relation to a concept; and by signaling a concept, the narrative is ‘applicable’ to other instances, principally the lived experience of readers.”121 Mosher lists six purposes of exempla: (1) to furnish a concrete illustration of the result of obeying or disobeying some religious or moral law; (2) to give proof or confirmation of the truth of an assertion; (3) to arouse fear in the sinful or to stimulate the zeal of the godly; (4) to make clear the meaning of some abstruse statement; (5) to revive languid listeners, evoke interest or laughter; (6) to eke out a scant sermon by “farsing” it with tales.122 This list points to the history of exempla as used in sermons, and the last two items suggest the use made of exempla by medieval friars. Dante complains about this sort of exempla in the Paradiso: “Christ did not say to His first fellowship, ‘Go and preach idle 119 Brémond, Le Goff and Schmidt, quoted in Elizabeth Allen, False Fables and Exemplary Truths in Later Middle English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4. 120 Joseph Albert Mosher, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 6. 121 Allen, 3. 122 Mosher, 8. 355 tales to the world.’”123 The Ferrars do not make use of these sorts of exempla, such as animal fables or stories of cuckholding. Long before the friars put use of this device into somewhat ill-repute, Gregory the Great promoted it in his Dialogues and Gospel Homilies: “examples often rouse the hearts of one’s hearers to love of God and neighbor better than words.”124 “Words” (verba) could also be translated as “doctrine,” implying “not only that narratives might indirectly influence audiences more forcefully than moral precepts, but also that they actually activate the minds of audience members.”125 Exempla, to borrow Herbert’s phrasing from “The Windows,” ring in the conscience rather than the ear alone, and cause the listener to act. The applicability of exempla is tied to their paradoxical nature as both particular and general. John D. Lyons notes that exemplum is etymologically akin to the Latin verb eximere, “to take out, to remove, to take away, to free, to make an exception of.” An exemplum is a part, a detail, cut out and removed from a whole and held up.126 An exemplum is something “cut out” of one source, and held up for what it demonstrates; it can then be grafted on to another situation by imitation. Perhaps this etymology partially 123 Paradiso, XXIX, lines 103–120; John D. Sinclair, trans., The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, III: Paradiso (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 420–423. 124 Pope Gregory I, Forty Gospel Harmonies, trans. by David Hurst (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 366. “[A]d amorem dei et proximi plerumque corda audientium plus exempla quam verba excitant,” quoted in Allen, 165 n.49. 125 126 Allen, 15. John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 9. Lyons notes that the word “detail” has a similar etymological meaning: dé + tailler in French and de + tagliare in Italian. 356 explains the appeal of exempla to the Ferrars, who in the preparation of their Gospel Harmonies cut up and reassembled biblical text and illustrations, recombining them into a new whole. As they cut out Continental religious prints or the illustrations from Foxe’s Actes and Monuments with scissors, storing them until they could be applied to an apt biblical text, so too they pilfered their library for stories which could be excerpted and applied to the day’s theme and then, when the situation arose, to their lives. However, this universal applicability of the exemplum is contingent on a certain view of history, one in which individual events bear meaning in themselves, apart from a historical continuum. Karl-Heinz Stierle quotes Cicero’s maxim, “historia magistra vitae” as an example of this historical outlook: This maxim draws attention to the connection, extending beyond the scope of any single lesson, between history and moral philosophy . . . History itself is shaped from a moral-philosophical standpoint and appears separated from the historical continuum, bearing its own meaning within itself. History is a macroexemplum. The criteria by which events may be translated into history are those of moral philosophy, which find their expression in the context of a “story.”127 “History is philosophy teaching by example,” was the commonplace expression of this view; indeed, without it, the idea of the Renaissance, as the rebirth of ancient learning, is not possible. Humanist thought throve on example. Example is textual, in keeping with the humanist emphasis on philology. Example is historical and thus suited to those who wanted to recover the wisdom of antiquity. Example could 127 Karl-Heinz Stierle, “Story as Exemplum—Exemplum as Story: On the Pragmatics and Poetics of Narrative Texts,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, trans. by David Henry Wilson et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 400. 357 be conceived of as a tool of practical social change, as a guide to action, in keeping with the strong moral purpose of many early humanists.128 However, even as Humanists venerated ancient exemplars, “the development of humanist philology helped to sharpen awareness of the gulf between ancient culture and modernity and of the contingency that defines life in time. Humanism needs and promotes exemplarity even as it subverts it.”129 In the modern view of history, no single event can be removed or “cut out” from the chain of events on which it is contingent; indeed, history is now bound by contingency and events are inextricable from their whole: R. Koselleck connects the disappearance of the exemplum since the late eighteenth century with a changed conception of history, the underlying experience of which could no longer be that of the “magistra vitae.” The adherence to the continuum of events, which is integral to this new conception of history, can be termed “syntagmatic.” As history frees itself from the clutches of the moral-philosophic system, it goes out of the paradigmatic and into the syntagmatic sphere of endless interconnections which continually overlap but can never be conclusively defined.130 Lindsell, in his conversation with Nicholas, questions the old exemplarity: “Nick, whither will you go? What example will you give us?” Are you really going to become a Desert Father, in Huntingdonshire? Lindsell gave the boy Nicholas the Vitae Patrum to read to inspire him in his own seventeenth-century faith, and not necessarily so that he would become an ascetic himself. Nicholas’ response, “Was it that I might only know the good things that they did?” can be answered in the affirmative in a world where the heroic asceticism of desert monks is viewed as a response to a particular set of challenges facing 128 Lyons, 12. 129 Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), 9, 16. 130 Stierle, 401. 358 the early church, including the loss of the possibility of martyrdom resulting from the Roman Empire’s tolerance and then adoption of Christianity; in other words, in a world of inextricable cause and effect. Nicholas has “cut out” the example of the desert fathers and is applying it to himself; Lindsell is beginning to doubt that that is possible, or a very good idea. But to raise this point is to challenge the whole notion of exemplarity, on which so much of Christian exhortation and practice is predicated, and so he can only shake his head. Even as the Ferrars heartily subscribed to an exemplary view of history, several places in the dialogues of the Little Academy demonstrate anxiety about the veracity of their sources and the reliability of ancient authority; the cracks in this humanist paradigm are beginning to show. Stories that are not fully true cannot be fully applicable to life. This anxiety bespeaks a nascent awareness that the gulf between the primitive Church and the Stuart Church may not be easily surmounted. At the opening of the St. Stephen’s Day 1631 dialogu e, the Chiefe cites the importance of the dayly recompting of some good Histories, whereof wee ought not in truth to bee unfurnished, considering the opportunity that God hath given us to grow rich in these kind of jewels; for Jewells they are indeed, especially when they are well sett by a gracefull delivery and a seasonable application.131 The Ferrars’ library seems to have been well furnished with historical writing. John’s life of Nicholas describes their mealtime reading of “either some chronicles of nations, 131 Sharland, 20. 359 journeys by land, sea voyages, and the like.”132 And by this means it so came to pass that, though they seemed to live privately and had not much commerce with people, yet they were well acquainted with the former and latter passages of the world and what was done in it at home and abroad, and had gained knowledge of many actions of note and passages of consequence, and the manners of other countries and nations, and affairs of their own country.133 Religious retreat was no reason to remain uninformed about the happenings of the world. The Chiefe relied heavily on the work of the French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617), whom they called Thuanus, for his stories on the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.134 But the Ferrars also have a weakness for what in the exempla tradition are known as “monks’ tales,” stories of the desert fathers and early monastics from the Vitae Patrum and other sources; these stories can pose more of a challenge where historical accuracy is concerned. As the Chiefe says later in the St. Stephen’s Day 1631 dialogue, as she introduces the story of the Antiochian priest Sapritius, It is a true story for the substance and maine passages of it. Every circumstance I dare not warrant, neither in this nor in most others perhaps that you shall thereafter heare. Thus he spoke, and in this manner he did, are garnishes which wise Masters doe make supply of when the originals are perished. Things did not passe nakedly, though they be nakedly recorded to us. It hath beene judged, therefore, no diminution of truth of History to make supply of such kind of particulars, which, when they are rightly fitted, serve not onely to pleasure, by representing the matter as it 132 Muir and White, 83. 133 P.S. Allen, ed., Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, Vol. 10, ed. H.M. Allen and M.W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941, 84. 134 As a minister to Henry II and later Henry IV of France, de Thou was in an advantageous position to gather material for his year-by-year account of the period from 1546–1584. A complete edition of his works appeared in Latin in 1620, and was violently opposed by the Roman Catholic Church. The Ferrars also refer to two other historians, “the Prince of Historians” and “the grave Florentine,” who have not been identified (Williams, xlv–xlvii). The Ferrars also mention Speed in their discussion on the Isle of Man in “The Winding Sheet”; Blackstone, 119. 360 were in prospective, but to great benefitt by instructing and preparing the hearers minds how to behave themselves comely in the like occasions.135 After she makes this statement, the Guardian tells her that caveat is unnecessary, and to stop holding up the story and begin. However, the interlocutors still feel that this disclaimer about historical accuracy is necessary. Ancient stories that require rhetorical filling in of details can receive an historical imprimatur by virtue of the authority of their source. Not all edifying stories make it into this category, however; the Ferrars distinguish between a true example, and an invention or illustration. In the Holy Innocents’ Day 1631 dialogue, the Moderatour tells a story about a mother asked by her dying son to procure for him a shirt made by a happy woman; she learns in her quest that there is no such woman in the world, whose life is untouched by sorrow, and so she ceases to grieve for him. It was a witty Invention (sayd the Cheife) if it were not a truth, which you have recompted, most honoured Moderatour, and sensibly leading our Imaginations to the veiw of this worlds wretchedness. In which respects it may very well serve, as statues doe, though not for upholding, yet for ornament of royall Buildings, a gracefull setting of, if not a supporting argument to that Conclusion which this daies stories all of them inferred: That the best and fairest Happiness of this world is begun in vanity, grows up with vexation, and even ends in repentance.136 During another Christmastide dialogue of 1631 on the theme of humility, the Chiefe mentions St. Anthony’s vision, and his practice of asking for blessings from priests and bishops despite his own great holiness, citing Athanasius as her source. The Affectionate follows with her story, “The Devil’s Confession,” about a desert mother whose humble 135 Sharland, 21–22. 136 Sharland, 68–69. 361 prayer rids her of lascivious thoughts once and for all. She prefaces it by saying, “though it adds no Authority, yet it may add perhaps Illustration to that truth which St. Antonies Divine vision taught us.”137 The difference in the status of the two stories does not seem to have much to do with content (since both are about desert ascetics having visions), but about the authority of Athanasius and the reputation of Anthony. As the Moderatour says in the dialogue on patience, “the firmest inventions of Mans heart for good are easily shaken if they bee not stabilished by good Arguments.”138 The authority of the stories the Ferrars tell, piece by piece, solidifies the argument for virtue, that virtuous behavior is always the most reasonable course of action. This argument requires supports, and not decorative “statues,” to stand firm, and so certain stories (those that are deemed historically accurate by known authorities) are weighted more heavily than others of less certain provenance. This kind of authority is especially important to the Ferrars when dealing with otherworldly topics, as in the dialogue of December 29, 1631, which is focused on the reality of the afterlife, “that is, how it can bee that there should bee any sensible apprehension of things when the senses are dissolved with the bodies corruption in the grave.” The Chiefe asks the Patient to begin with a story “which our Visitour lately told us out of St. Augustine.”139 The Patient recites or reads the story in Augustine’s words, as 137 Sharland, 95. 138 Ibid., 107. 139 Ibid., 74. This is Augustine’s Letter 159, to Euodius (415 AD); see Augustine, The Works of Saint Augustine: Letters 156–210, II/3, ed. by Roland Teske and Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004), 47–49. 362 translated by Nicholas. Augustine writes of Gennadius, a devout physician of Carthage, who as a young man doubted whether there was life after death. In a dream, he meets a young man who guides him to a heavenly vision of the Saints singing hymns. The same young man visits him in another dream, and questions him about how it is that he experienced the previous vision and is seeing him now if his physical body is asleep and his eyes are closed. When Gennadius can’t answer, the young man tells him that after death, “there shall yet remaine a Life to thee whereby thou shalt live, and a sence by which thou shalt be sensible,” and tells him to doubt no more.140 The Cheerfull begins the next story with an acknowledgment that she can’t top Augustine’s clout: If the Creditt of my Author were equall to St. Augustines my story would be in no whitt inferior to that which you have heard. I cannot deliver it upon so bold warranty. No. Sophronius, that relates it in his Spirituall Middow, is not so authentick a witnesse. If any refuse it I will not contend. Let him have his opinion, so he will allow me mine. The approbation of many excellent Men hath in my Judgement sett the seale of truth to it. None can deny it in the morall: I believe it is so in the Fact.141 The Cheerfull’s source, the Spiritual Meadow (“Leimon” or Pratum Spirituale) by Johannes Moschus (550-619), is one of the earliest hagiographical works, a collection of 140 Sharland, 75–76. Augustine himself uses this story as evidence of the existence of the afterlife, even as he acknowledges that it is evidence only, but not proof: “Someone might say that by that story we have not resolved but complicated the question about so important an issue. But a person is free to believe these words or not, and everyone has himself into whom he may withdraw for this most profound question . . .I wish I knew how those things are differentiated that are seen at times through the spirit and that are thought to be seen through the body or how the visions of those people are distinguished whom error or impiety deludes when many events are recounted like the visions of pious and holy people! If I had wanted to mention examples, time would run out on me rather than the supply of examples.” Augustine, 49. 141 Sharland, 76. 363 tales gathered from the ascetics of Egypt.142 In the spirit of competitive storying, the Cheerfull argues for her story’s merit even as she acknowledges that it’s author “is not so authentick a witnesse” as the great Bishop of Hippo. Provenance is especially important as the story concerns a message confirming the truth of the gospel from beyond the grave. Enagrius, skeptical of the Christian promises of resurrection and of a hundredfold return on riches given away for Christ’s sake, is at last converted from philosophy after much effort on the part of his friend, the bishop Cinesius. Following his baptism, Enagrius asks for a receipt from his friend for a large donation to the Church; after his death and burial, this document is recovered with new writing, ostensibly from the other world, informing the bishop that he has indeed received his hundredfold interest and is satisfied that what his friend preached to him is true. This is a Story which I the more boldly report unto you, because I have heard it to have been publickly delivered by a famous Divine in a very solemn assembly. But however the Action passed, wee have a sure word concerning the truth of the Doctrine itselfe, even the Testimony of that great Doctor of the Gentiles, That every Man shall receive according to the things which he hath done in his body, whether they be good or bad.143 Since the story’s source is somewhat second-rate, she defends her tale based on the authority of another of its tellers, “a famous Divine in a very solemne Assembly.” And if this esteemed preacher’s use of it fails to convince, ultimately the moral rests on the 142 The Spiritual Meadow was dedicated to Sophronius but written by Moschus. It was first edited by Fronton du Duc in “Auctarium biblioth. partum,” II (Paris, 1624) 1057–1159. “Though the work is devoid of critical discrimination and teems with miracles and ecstatic visions, it gives a clear insight into the practices of Eastern monasticism, contains important data on the religious cult and ceremonies, and acquaints us with the numerous heresies that threatened to disrupt the Church in the East.” Michael Ott, “Johannes Moschus,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_%281913%29/Johannes_Moschus, accessed November 26, 2012. 143 Sharland, 78. 364 Bible’s authority in the testimony of St. Paul. The Affectionate follows up with a story from Gregory of Tours (538-594), which she characterizes as “a story every way admirable as being of most famous Persons, conteining rare passages, and of unquestionable verity,” of Bishop Sidonius of Averene.144 The Chiefe presents the last of the day’s stories, telling a more contemporary story from the Annals of Baronius so that “these elder miracles should be confirmed and sett forth by some further examples of later times.”145 If you doe but believe it true, you cannot esteeme it lesse wonderfull than any you have yet heard. And that you may believe it to bee true, you shall know that it is not onely confidently written in serious works of most famous Men, but hath beene often by very discret and religious Persons delivered in the Pulpits of Italy as an undoubted truth received at first from the relation of those whose Fidelity and wisedome was above all suspicion, either of deceiving others or being deceived themselves.146 The climax of her story speaks directly to the question of truth. Two philosopher friends, Marsilius Ficinius and Michael Mercatus, take a vow that whichever of them should die first will report to the other about his state in the next world. One morning, Michael Mercatus’ philosophizing is interrupted by the sound of a running horse. Looking out his window, he sees his friend all in white on a white steed, crying out to him as he rushes past, “Oh Michael, Michael, those things are true, they are true indeed!” He later learns that his friend has died that same hour. From that day “sending a bill of divorce to all his former studies of Learning, hee applied himselfe onely to learne Christ Jesus 144 Ibid. 145 Sharland, 86. 146 Ibid., 87. 365 crucified.”147 The Ferrars frame these stories of the great beyond with an emphasis on the authority of their learned sources. Three of these stories themselves from the December 29, 1631 dialogue also actively engage learning and skepticism. In Augustine’s story, the doubts of the physician Gennadius are addressed by a heavenly messenger sent not only to give him a glimpse of the communion of saints, but also to lead him through a process of deductive reasoning reflecting on his experience, its relationship to his physical senses, and its consequences for his belief. Enagrius, in the story from the Spiritual Meadow, is a philosopher who doubts not only the possibility of resurrection, but the heavenly economics of storing up treasure in the world to come; his concerns are both scientific and economic, in the sense that charity may be just a holy way of huckstering money out of people. In Baronius’ story of the philosopher friends and their vow, Michael Marcatus receives heavy-handed proof of the afterlife: wisdom literally crying in the streets in the form of his friend on a white steed yelling, “These things are true!” In each of these stories, learning is the source both of skepticism and the desire for certainty; at the end of each story, learning is not discounted or negated but reoriented toward the gospel. Science or philosophy might have led each of the protagonists away from belief, but instead their supernatural experiences redirect their knowledge toward God. The Ferrars argue that even the metaphysical can become reasonable. The later configuration of the Little Academy stretches this assertion to the limit in the dialogue that Blackstone titled “The Winding Sheet,” when they consider several 147 Sharland, 88. 366 medieval stories about trial by ordeal. Speaking of these stories of “Fierie Tryal,” the Repeater (John Ferrar), says, I for my part shall neuer giue way to the discredit of those particular Histories, which sufficient witnesses haue auouched & wise & good men recommended to Posteritie; but accept them by assent, & make vse of them by imitation proportionally as my weaknes giues me Leaue. Not falling down to the suspicion & Diffidence of their truth by reason of the stangenes, yt accompanies them, but rising vp & mounting vpon this very ground to the Admiration & extolling of yt incomprehensible wisedome & power of God, which infinitely exceeds the limits of our Imagination & in different Ages & occasions proceeds after a different manner of operation, I meane in our views & Apprehensions; but always in a Constant vniformite to it self in respect of truth & goodness, & with attainment of absolute perfection in euery work, wch it intends.148 The “strangeness” of these stories, which the Apprentice (Anna Collett) calls “so transcendent to the pitch of our Adge,” testifies to God’s “incomprehensible wisedome & power,” which is always extending beyond the bounds of the human imagination. Though the manner of God’s working proceeds “after a different manner of operation” in different ages, its ends are changeless and perfect. However, the Ferrars always try to apply their stories to their own experience. The Repeater says that he will “make vse of them by imitation proportionally as my weaknes giues me Leaue,” which is a bit vague, but the Apprentice goes further and considers whether God would deliver an accused but innocent person from this kind of ordeal in their own time. It is presumption, it may be, to make choice of vnwarranted meanes in the like occasions; but vndoubtedly it is a spice of infidelitie to think, yt God will doe nothing extraordinarily, when yt Craft & Malice of the Deuill & his instruments haue intercepted the ordinarie and vsual conduit-pipes of Help and remedie. As long as I may I shall carefully & diligently in all exigents make vse of second Causes and instruments, but when they fail I 148 Blackstone, 191-2. 367 shall not doubt (I meane I shall endauor without all doubtfulness) to haue recourse to the prime Cause & motor himself, & expect the immediate influence of his supernatural grace & vertue . . .149 In this, the Apprentice shifts the focus from the ordeal as a test for identifying innocence to something from which one must be delivered. A faithful person who believes the promises of scripture cannot discount the possibility of direct divine intervention when all other means of rescue have failed; miracles can’t be ruled out entirely just because the age in which they appeared to occur with more frequency has passed. The dialogue continues with the Register (Nicholas) stressing the importance of avoiding becoming the object of slander, which can quickly lead to dire straits. One can’t help but think that he is speaking from personal experience and also from anxiety about the tenor of the times. In less than ten years Little Gidding would become the object of a polemical tract that sought to encourage Parliamentary forces to destroy the community.150 After the Learner and Apprentice (Mary and Anna Collet) demonstrate knowledge of a story of a particularly corrupt Pope, Nicholas chides them that “I perceiue yu have been busied in others wardrobes as well as yr own & that yu have reaped the teares wth ye wheat.”151 This seems to point to the sisters’ perhaps unauthorized reading of Nicholas’ books. They respond, 149 Blackstone, 194–195. 150 See The Arminian Nunnery; or, a briefe description and relation of the late-erected monasticall place called The Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire . . . (London: Thomas Underhill, 1641). 151 Blackstone, 156. 368 Wee could not avoyde the sight of euill in our search after good. The Examples of vice & vertue are so intermingled as there is no possibilitie of seuering them in our reading.152 The Repeater responds that as long as they keep to the right in practice, this doesn’t matter. In fact, “There may be good vse made of keeping the wrong in your remembrances,” since hearing about the punishment of vice may make virtue more attractive.153 However, virtue and vice can only intermingle in storying if at the story’s end vice is punished, if there is a reckoning between sheep and goats as in each of the Ferrars’ tales. Moral ambiguity, as in many of the tales in Marguerite de Narvarre’s Heptameron, or worse, the celebration of vice, as in romances and chivalrous fiction, can wreak havoc on an unsuspecting or impressionable listener due to the very power of stories and exemplarity. It is for this reason that the Ferrars reserve a particularly harsh judgment for works of fiction. VI. “The lying Patternes of Orlando” and Little Gidding’s Bonfire of the Vanities The Ferrars describe their views on literature at length in two places in the Story Books: in the dialogue “On the Austere Life,” (dated by Williams to Advent 1632) and in the Christmastide 1631 dialogue on patience.154 In “On the Austere Life,” which is primarily concerned with dietary temperance, the discussion of literature unfolds from the question, “Does wine ever increase wisdom?” The Cheerful argues that it never does, 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 No exact date given, but it took place after December 30. Sharland, 103–153. 369 while the Affectionate takes the opposing view for the sake of argument, putting forth two instances where imbibing produces more satisfactory results than abstention, the first being the negotiation of business deals. After discussing German deal-making practices, the Actors conclude that “Excesse of wine helps men in their Bargains & other like affaires not by addition of Wisedome, but by taking away Shame & Conscience,” putting them in a better frame of mind to take advantage of others.155 The Affectionate then argues her second case: AFFECTIONATE. Why you will not I am sure deny but Poetrie & Poets Merrit a chief place amongst the Professours of knowledge and goodness. CHEERFULL. No verily. It being plain, that the First seeds of wisedome & vertue haue been planted by their hands throughout the whole world. AFFECTIONATE. And it is much more plain as well by their own Confession, as by dayly Experience, That Wine taken in good measure serues notably to help them in their Compositions. As on the contrarie it is a common by-word, that, Water-drinkers neuer make good Verses.156 The Cheerful responds that the Psalms are the exception to this, as David “drank more teares then wine, when he composed the most excellent peices of his work,” as well as Virgil, who wrote his poetry “by force of much studie & not of much wine.”157 The Affectionate says that she is excluding sacred compositions, as well as “serious Poems,” and is speaking instead of poems “of singular delight,” whose composers are witty if perhaps not wise: “Ballate-makers, Epigrammatists, & such as write Sonnets of & to their Mistresses, Satirs, Comoedies & the like.” (The two sisters debate whether ballads should 155 Williams, 205. 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid, 205–206. 370 remain on this list, the Affectionate dismissing them while the Cheerful says that “a good Ballet is a peice of better stuff than to match with most of the other.”) They conclude, however, that the wit of these works is at best “pernicious vanit[y]” and at worst akin to blasphemy. The Guardian cites Sir Philip Sidney’s “sonnet of Recantation,” (“Leave me, O Love which reachest but to dust,”) which contains the postscript, “Splendidis longum valedico nugis,” “I bid a longsome Farewell vnto splendid Trifles or Ba[u]bles,” as one of many such palinodes put forth by poets regretful of their oeuvre at the end of their lives.158 The sisters then ask whether these poets of “delightful” verses write better while inebriated than they otherwise would; does wine sharpen their perception of scurrilous topics if not of virtuous ones? They conclude that such poets do not “by well-tipling themselues grow to a better apprehension,” but only are “rather more fitted to make significative expression of their own passion. They vent their amorousness, their spleen & all other such like humours more freely & set them off more liuely & conspicuously, when they are heated with wine then before.”159 This is the true strike against various forms of “witty” poetry for the Ferrars: these genres revel in unbridled passion. “Indeed if passions blind the mind, that which increaseth the passions must needs adde to the blindes,” says the Gaurdian (John Ferrar). However, he then questions whether “Amourousnes” really blinds the intellect, since romantic love has been known to transform “the dullest Capacitie to such a height of Finenes & quicknes as no Art nor 158 Ibid., 207. 159 Ibid. 371 Studie can reach vnto; how much more then when it comes vpon a Rich foundation of Natural Abilities perfected by Learning & Art” will it not elevate the understanding and affections “to the loftiest pitch, that humane Nature can sore vnto.”160 The Mother (Mary Collett, promoted from Chiefe) disagrees vehemently with this defense of love poetry, however, saying that the soaring the Guardian describes is no more than “transcendent boldness, which they vse with God, investing their Mistresses with those diuine Attributes, which wee tremblingly lift vp our eies to look vpon,” and offering up their souls “in Vassalage to filth & Rottennes,” to corruptible flesh, rather than to God.161 Though over two years later in “The Winding Sheet” the Guardian will say that “There may be good vse made of keeping the wrong in your remembrances,” in “On the Austere Life,” the Ferrars reject the excuse that the writers of epigrams, satires and comedies give that the inglorious behavior portrayed in these texts is set down in the interest of correcting vice: “This is that sauce, that hath always made this trash goe for Dainties.” They cite Aristophanes’ mocking of Socrates in The Clouds as one example of this; making fun of virtue is a serious crime at Little Gidding.162 It is concluded by the Actors that an excess of wine obscures wisdom and undermines poets’ skill if not their spleen, “For Vertue is the commodititie, that all Learning trafficks for.”163 160 Ibid., 208. 161 Ibid., 208–209. The Mother’s strong words echo Herbert’s early sonnet of 1609/10: “Open the bones, and you shall nothing find/ In the best face but filth, when, Lord, in thee/ The beauty lies in the discovery.” Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert, 206. 162 Williams, 209. 163 Ibid., 210. 372 From this conversation, it is clear that the Ferrars would not be among the ideal readers for Sidney’s Defence of Poetry or the severall other apologies of poetry that appeared in the 1590s.164 Sidney, Sir John Harington (discussed below), and others use the existence of biblical poetry to justify their art, but the Ferrars make a distinction between religious verse and “serious Poems,” and other genres that they deem inferior because they are fueled by wit rather than wisdom. Self-discipline and humility were paramount virtues for the community, so poetic forms that revel in passion and swagger become anathema. Still, there are moments in this section of dialogue that suggest that the Ferrars didn’t always abide by their present prescriptions. The Cheerfull admits to enjoying a good ballad now and again, and the Guardian makes a spirited defense of love poetry that does not seem to be entirely for the sake of argument.165 The second instance of sustained discussion on literature in the Story Books relates more directly to stories as exempla and their positive and negative influence, and takes place during the long dialogue on Patience during Christmastide of 1631 (a year prior to “On the Austere Life”). The Cheerfull, arguing for Patience as one of the chief 164 See Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004) for a collection of these treatises. 165 In “The Winding Sheet,” the Apprentice somewhat surprisingly alludes to a certain ballad referencing the Duke of Buckinham’s disastrous expedition against the Island of Ré in 1627 as an example of “debauched Humor.” The line for the quote is left blank in the manuscript; Blackstone quotes the first two stanzas: “I sing the praise of a worthy Wight, Whose Father ( — —) that never wou’d fight, For his Face, but more for his A—made a Knight, With a fa la la la la la. The Knight soon after a Duke became, And got at the Island of Rhee such a fame, That all true English Cur’d B— With a, etc.” 373 virtues, cites it as “one of those Attributes which the Scripture gives to the Divine Majesty.”166 The Moderatour (Susanna Ferrar Collett) compares this to the pagan characterization of the gods, . . . full of all Manner of Impatiency, of which Temper even our Christian Poets in these Times faine the blessed Saints and Angels of Heaven to bee, when in their Compositions they bring them on the Stage of this world. Such an unanswerable Contradiction is there in Mans apprehension between Meaknes and greatnes, Long-suffering and power, Patience and Happines.167 The Guardian responds sarcastically to his sister, “Your skill in these studies makes you an absolute judge,” to which she replies, My many precious houres wasted in these vanities (replied the Moderatour) have given mee too much and too certain a knowledge of this malignous Error in Poets which, had not my Affections and Opinions complied with, I could never with such delight and approbation have continued in the reading of them.168 Susanna Collett was not alone among educated women in lamenting the lure of romances. Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, acknowledged that until she was married in 1641, she spent her “precious time in nothing else but reading romances, and in reading and seeing plays” (though perhaps she can be forgiven this indulgence, since she married at fifteen), while Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, complained about women readers: . . . the truth is, the chief study of our sex is romances, wherein reading they fall in love with the feigned heroes and carpet-knights, with whom 166 Sharland, 113. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid., 113–114. 374 their thoughts secretly commit adultery, and in their conversation and manner, or forms of phrases of speech, the imitate the romancy-ladies.169 Cavendish names the seductive influence of these books, while Susanna describes her “Affections and Opinions” complying with the error of the poets, as her will is shaped to theirs. Citing the example of Christ, the Cheerfull declares that “Patience and Christianity are such Relatives as they cannot, in the worlds esteeme, be separated, neither in the being nor in their growth.” This witness of Christ and the saints speaks to Patience “as the proper Armes of Christian Religion . . . Hee that refuseth to beare Patience for his Coat must passed over into some other Family. Hee may bee a Gallant, a marital Man, a great Man of this world; a Saynt of Heaven, a good Christian hee cannot bee.”170 The Guardian responds that now I see the reason why not onely Virgill and Homere, but Ariosto and Spencer and all other bookes of Chevalry, bring in their frayed worthies so defective in Patience. . . Hee must be a Christian in earnest and not in appearance that weares this piece of Armour, which, because these famous Devises want, however compleat in the height of all other virtues they bee made, I cannot allow them to passe for good examples of vertue amongst Christians.171 The Ferrars have an expansive view of patience, as endurance of affliction, forbearance under persecution, and perseverance, as well as waiting on the Lord (as in their Night Watches). Patience is not only an individual virtue, but a communal and societal one, and 169 Quoted in Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1999),178. 170 Sharland, 118. 171 Ibid., 119. 375 it leads the members of Little Gidding to something close to pacifism. The Chiefe agrees with the Guardian and quotes an unnamed source (possibly Nicholas?) who says that Orlando and the rest of those renowned Palladines through the recompting of their worthy Action have beene made the destroyers of more Christian soules than ever they killed pagane Bodies, and yet he doubts not (as he sayeth) of that Battle wherein above three hundred thousand Moores are, by good and authenticall Historians, reported to have beene slaine by Orlando in one day. The full proof of this Charge I shall leave to bee made at the Light of that Bone-fire which is resolved, as soone as Conveniency permits, to be made of all these kinds of Bookes by our Visitour.172 Chivalrous verse is in a category considered far more dangerous than the sonnets, epigrams, satires and comedies described in the dialogue “On the Austere Life.” Whereas the latter poems encourage vanity and pride, the former does this as well but is also souldestroying. (The suggested bonfire will be discussed below.) These exemplas are corrosive rather than restorative. Undoubtedly, from the lying Patternes of Orlando and Rogero, from the counterfeit approbation of Carloman and Gotgride touching these practizes, there lies the springhead of these poisonous [Histories], and thence are those wretched opinions first taken, which afterwards, by fond reason and ungodly examples of eminent Personages, take eternall rooting in carnall Minds.173 The Chiefe is referring to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, which appeared in a wildly popular English translation by Sir John Harington in 1591.174 Harington affixed a preface in defense of poetry in general and his version of Orlando in particular, which apparently 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid., 120. 174 On Harington’s translation, see Townsend Rich, Harington and Aristo: A Study in Elizabethan Verse Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940). Harington, strangely enough, was also the inventor of the water closet. 376 did not convince the Ferrars. In it he compares Ariosto with Virgil, but also says that “some things that Virgill could not haue, for the ignoraunce of the age he liued in, you finde in my author, sprinckled ouer all his worke,” mentioning “The deuout and Christen demeanor of Charlemayne,” “the conuersion of Rogero to the Christen Religion,” and “infinit places full of Christen exhortation, doctrine, & example.”175 However, Harington does anticipate some of the Ferrars’ objections: But now it may be & is by some obiected that although he write Christianly in some places, yet in other some he is too lasciuious, as in that of the baudy Frier, in Alcina and Rogeros copulation, in Anselmus his Giptian, in Richardetto his metamorphosis, in mine hosts tale of Astolfo, & some few places beside. Alas, if this be a fault, pardon him this one fault, though . . . yea, me thinks, I see some of you searching already for these places of the booke, and you are halfe offended that I haue not made some direction that you might finde out and read them immediately.176 Indeed, Townsend Rich comments that Harington “made his translation more wanton than Ludovico Ariosto ever intended, and he added attacks on women whenever possible.”177 Still, Harington, recalling John Ferrar’s worlds to his nieces in “The Winding Sheet,” claims that there is a moral advantage in leaving the tares with the wheat, saying that these scurrilous passages should be read as my author ment them, to breed detestation and not delectation. Remember, when you read of the old lecherous Frier, that a fornicator is one of the things that God hateth; when you read of Alcina, thinke how 175 John Harington, “A Preface, or rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetrie, prefixed to the translation of Orlando Furioso, 1591,” in G. C. Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, vol. 2 (1904; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 212–213. 176 Ibid., 214. 177 Rich, 28–29. 377 Jospeh fled from his intising mister; when you light on Anselmus tale, learne to loth bestly couetousnes . . .178 Harington anticipates that his more puritanical readers would object to the sexual content of his story; however, that is not the primary target of the Ferrars’ invective. The main crime of these “Histories of Chivalry,” and the reason they are condemned at Little Gidding, is what the Chiefe describes as “the making of that Match betweene Christianity and revenge.”179 Orlando’s bloodlust on the battlefield and in his madness brought on by a failed love affair is, to the Ferrars, the worst kind of “ungodly example.” This literature forms “lying Patternes” by the seductive nature of fiction and poetry but also because of the seductiveness of revenge itself, which is, after all, a human usurping of what belongs to God alone.180 There is nothing, questionlesse, more pleasing to Mans corrupt Nature than Revenge . . . Champions in the Fayth are produced compleat in all manner of Vertues, Patience excepted. That which is left out in the example is that which is chiefly intended for Imitation. All the rest is but a Flourish, and serves onely to make this deformity the more lovely . . . Who dare truly say that either Temperance, Justice, Charity, or any other Vertue ever tooke rise or heat in his mind or desires from Orlando his Examples, or any of the rest of those Chimeras? And who can truely deny but that, on the contrary . . . the Impatiency of Offences, the requital of Injuries, the shedding of Bloud, as if it were but shedding of water, have beene bred and nourished in his heart as Dispositions necessary and comely in worldly respects tolerable enough with Christian religion?181 In the glorification of violence, even violence against infidels, in “the shedding of Bloud, 178 Harington, 214. 179 Sharland, 120. 180 cf. Hebrews 10:30, “For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people.” 181 Sharland, 120–121. 378 as if it were but shedding of water,” Christianity ceases to be itself and becomes counterfeit. The Crusaders are “chimeras” in both senses of the word, as false or imaginary examples instead of true ones, but also as grotesque, composite, fire-breathing monsters: wrathful, and without integrity of substance. Wrath, one of the medieval Seven Deadly Sins, has its corresponding conquering virtue in Patience. The corrupted human desire for revenge and susceptibility to wrath is why, in their last dialogue, “The Winding Sheet,” the Ferrars argue that there is no such thing as a holy war. Human endeavors, even ones with righteous ends, are too easily perverted away from the gospel by desire for gain or bloodlust.182 This is likely the reason the Guardian includes Spenser alongside Ariosto for censure; as Achsah Guibbory notes, “The sense that Catholicism must be exterminated” underlies the first book of The Faerie Queene, “in which the battle of good and evil is located in the conflict between the true Protestant church and the false Catholic one, whose allegorical representatives in the poem must be bound or killed.”183 The Chiefe also argues that the influence of stories, for good or ill, is so powerful that it extends beyond the author’s original intentions: The plausible entertainment of these Opinions in the world is that which chiefly is intended in these bookes; if not in the Authors designes, yet certainly in the Devills application . . . Let no man be deceived by the faire, goodly pourtraitures of the vertue which appeareth engraven to the life in them. They are but like the matrone Dresses and modest behaviour wherewith wicked strumpets enflame evill Affections.184 182 For the Ferrars on war, see Blackstone, 148, 152, 160–161, 164. 183 Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 35–36. 184 Sharland, 120–121. 379 As the Holy Spirit can work through the “pious designs” of an author using an attested, truthful and righteous example (which is likely to include the protagonist straying from the path and finding his or her way back through the mercy of God), so too can the Devil work through wicked or vain examples, preying on the reader’s weakness and desire for entertainment. There is no “neutral” reading or passive entertainment; reading plants images in the mind that “take root” and are shown forth in the actions of the reader; all stories are exemplary either for good or ill. Because of the inseparability of literature from exemplarity at Little Gidding, it would be interesting to know if the Ferrars were familiar with the autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, who had perhaps the most literary conversion after Augustine.185 Ignatius describes himself as “given up to the vanities of the world” until the age of twenty-six, when he was wounded in the leg at the Battle of Pamplona in May of 1521. He was carried back to Spain where he recovered from both the wound and the re-fracturing of his leg to set it properly. However, he was left with an unsightly protrusion of bone on the leg. He writes that “he could not bear this (for he was set on following the world and he considered this would disfigure him),” so he requested another (excruciating) operation to shave the bone down. It is while recovering from this dangerous instance of Renaissance cosmetic surgery that he had his famous encounter 185 John’s Life of Nicholas notes that “Their next neighbour was a Roman Catholic gentleman that kept a priest in his house.” This neighbor and his wife visited Little Gidding often, but the Ferrars did not return their visits. This neighbor once brought over “three learned priests habited like gallants,” likely Jesuits, who “argued all the points in difference between us and them with singular temper and acuteness.” One of the priests commented after their debate that “if [Nicholas] should live to make himself known to the world, he would, he was afraid, give their church her hands full to answer him and trouble them in another manner than Luther had done.” Muir and White, 90. 380 with holy reading. Requesting chivalrous tales, he was instead given the only books available at his respite house: Ludolf of Saxony’s Life of Christ, and the Golden Legend. After repeated reading of these books, his fantasies of service to a certain foreign lady were supplanted by the examples of the saints: he would “stop to think, reasoning with himself: ‘How would it be, if I did this which St Francis did, and this which St Dominic did?’” He resolved that upon recovery he would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.186 Ignatius’ conversion is brought about by the kind of equivalency of exemplarity that the Ferrars claim for pious and impious reading: fill your head with romance and chivalrous tales, and you may find yourself risking your life to show a neat leg. Exchange those tales for saints’ lives, and you could soon be on your way to Jerusalem barefoot. Stories are powerful agents of influence, and not to be underestimated. As the Chiefe says in the dialogue on Patience, [P]ray observe, that both God and the Devill worke their Miracles in the same Manner. The proposal of true Examples in the Scripture is that whereby God leades his Saints on to Patience, and the proposal of lying examples in Bookes of Chivalry is that whereby the Devill chiefly seduceth carnall and worldly Minds then to the Love and practize of Impatiency in the highest kind and degree.187 The Ferrars, as discussed previously included religious images in their devotional life, both in the Gospel Harmonies as well as in their home, and were not sympathetic to puritan iconoclasm.188 However, the vehemence with which they reject romance and 186 Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings, ed. and trans. by Jospeh A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (London: Penguin, 1996), 14–15. 187 Sharland, 122. 188 In the chapter “Liturgy at Little Gidding: ‘The Word Continually’” 381 chivalrous literature (concurring with puritan criticism of this literature) suggests that their sense of idolatry was textual rather than pictorial. In a community centered on the near-constant recitation of scripture, and whose devotional and educational exercises consisted of retelling stories with a catechetical and exhortatory purpose, it is the seductions of secular texts, which lure people away from the truth, that are the true idols. Which brings us to the Chiefe’s reference in the Christmastide 1631 dialogue to “that Bone-fire which is resolved, as soone as Conveniency permits, to be made of all these kinds of Bookes by our Visitour.”189 Like his sister Susanna, Nicholas himself had wide experience of romantic and chivalrous literature, as did several family members present in the discussion, of whom the Guardian says, some of whom, it may bee, through an habituated delight in these vanities from their Cradle almost, have need of all the Antidotes that can bee ministered to keepe them from relapse into a tolerable Opinion, at least of that which they have so clearely loved and prized.190 The Ferrars kept two libraries in their religious retreat: the first, whose known contents have been described above, was the source of the stories told in the Story Books, the “short moral histories” recited by the boys, and their mealtime reading aloud, as well as devotional reading. But the second library, the collection of secular literature compiled by Nicholas before retiring to Little Gidding, was kept locked away. In John’s biography of his brother, he describes how three days before his death, Nicholas told John to go to the west end of the church, by the entrance, to measure out the place for his grave. When he has done this, 189 Sharland, 119. 190 Ibid. 382 “. . . then go ye and take out of my study those three great hampers full of books that stand there locked up these many years.” (For so he had done at his first coming to Gidding, that nobody should make use of those books, or see them. They were not many scores, but many hundreds, in several languages, which he had in all places gotten with great search and some cost. They were comedies, tragedies, love hymns, heroical poems, and such like things.) “Carry the hampers to the place of my grave and upon it see you burn them all.” And this he spake with some vehemency and passion of indignation: “Go, let it be done, let it be done! And then come again all of you to me.”191 That this contraband collection contains many foreign books is significant. Nicholas spent much of his time in Europe in Italy and translated works out of Italian; as Townsend Rich notes, “Italy was regarded as the source of Renaissance degeneracy, Papist propaganda, and licentious reading.”192 Roger Ascham, tutor to Princess Elizabeth and author of the dialogue Toxophilius, condemned Italian books in The Schoolmaster in 1570: “These be the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italie, to marre mens maners in England; much by example of ill life, but more by precepts of fond bookes.” When the “open Papistes abroad” could not convert the English through their illicitly imported religious writings, “the subtle and secret Papistes at home procured bawdie bookes to be translated out of the Italian tonge, whereby ouer many young willes and wittes allured to wantonness do now boldly contemne all seuere bookes that sound to honestie and godliness.”193 Unlike Ignatius of Loyola, however, Nicholas had been pious from early childhood, and so had apparently been reading both godly and “wanton” works simultaneously (along with several others in his family). His five years abroad 191 Muir and White, 110. 192 Rich, 41. 193 Smith quoted in Rich, 41–42. 383 gave him ample opportunity for book-buying. John Ferrar notes that as a child Nicholas would “hide himself and would lose his meals rather than not finish his story,” but which kind of story was he reading?194 When the family left London for their life in the country, Nicholas decided to bring the books with him. They were locked up in his study, and presumably he held the key. Nicholas had openly discussed his plans to burn the books, since the Chiefe notes in 1631 that this bonfire is to take place “as soon as Conveniency permits” (though there is no mention of where it is to occur). But six years later (and twelve years after the family’s arrival at Little Gidding) it still hadn’t happened. Why the delay? Did Nicholas still occasionally find something of merit in certain of these books, even though their content may not have been suitable for other, less spiritually advanced, members of the family, who could not peruse with “detestation” rather than “delectation”? Or did those volumes remain closed and locked away even to him, yet present in the place of his private devotions, as he was unable to act on his resolve to destroy them? Whatever the significance of the locked hampers, Nicholas held that he must get rid of them before he died. “So it was performed, and a great smoke and bonfire and flame they made,” large enough to cause some neighbors to run to the house, supposing that it was on fire.195 On being told it was accomplished, Nicholas asked for pen, ink and paper and wrote out the following testament: November 28th 1637 IHS In the name of God. Amen. 194 Muir and White, 43. 195 Muir and White, 110. 384 Inasmuch as all the comedies, tragedies, pastorals, etc., and all those that they call heroical poems, none excepted, and likewise all the books of tales which they call novels, and all feigned histories written in prose, all love hymns, and all the like books, are full of idolatry and essentially tend to the overthrow of Christian religion, undermining the very foundations thereof, and corrupt and pollute the minds of the readers with filthy lusts as, woe is me, I have proved in this regard, therefore, to show my detestation of them to the world, and that all other men may take warning, I have burned all of them. And most humbly have and do beseech God to forgive me all my mis-spent time in them . . . And I profess to be of Velliegus his opinion, that the having of an Orlando in the house is sufficient ground to have it burned down over their heads. I beseech all that truly fear God, that love Jesus Christ, to consider these things well. Amen. Amen. Amen.196 The imaginative genres that Nicholas exhaustively catalogues were deemed to be as powerful incitements to sin as were the stories of the desert fathers to holiness. Though he proclaims his “detestation of them to the world,” there was clearly enough residual, private delectation in them to delay the destruction he had vowed to carry out declared years earlier. After the bonfire, John Ferrar notes that a “rumor spread all the country over at market towns that Mr. Nicholas Ferrar lay a-dying, but could not die till he had burned all his conjuring books.”197 It is an interesting admission in a biography that sought to portray the Ferrars as held in high esteem by their neighbors, rich and poor 196 Muir and White, 111. Certain other manuscripts of the Life list “Galliatus” rather than “Velliegus”; see Blackstone, 63. Alfonso de Villegas (1533–1605 or 1615) compiled the Flos Sanctorum, a collection of saints’ lives that enjoyed a wide circulation in the late 16th century in Spain. Mayor's Two Lives of Nicholas Ferrar gives as a probable identification for Galliatus one Galeazzo Caraccioli. William Crashaw, father of Richard and friend of the Ferrars via the Virginia Company, translated a life of Caraccioli into English in 1608 (though the biography does not mention Orlando). Caraccioli was a Neapolitan and the heir to the marquisate of Vico who was converted to Protestantism through the preaching of Peter Martyr Vermigli, a member of the persecuted Valdés circle in Naples. Upon his conversion, he abandoned his family and his position in Naples and fled across the Alps to Switzerland, as had Vermigli, where he lived in poverty for forty years. Many thanks to Joyce Ransome for assistance with this reference. 197 Muir and White, 110. 385 alike.198 Whatever the community’s reputation among the villagers, the hampers of books were seized upon by the Ferrars as harboring a dangerous force that was incompatible not only with their lives of religious retirement, but with Christianity itself. Storying at Little Gidding wove a distinct expression of English Christianity out of the examples of the distant and recent past. However, it was also a means of overwriting the patterns imbibed from the romantic and chivalrous literature the family, before their move to Little Gidding, had previously found so appealing. Yet this is easier said than done. Ultimately, as Mary and Anna Collet observed, “the Examples of vice & vertue are so intermingled as there is no possibilitie of seuering them.”199 198 Ibid. 199 Blackstone, 156. 386 CONCLUSION: “THEN ORDER PLAIES THE SOUL”: THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS AS A WAY OF LIFE In George Herbert’s poem “The Familie,” the poet imagines “the noise of thoughts within my heart,” as if his preoccupations were the members of an unruly internal family, airing their “loud complaints and puling fears,/ As if there were no rule or eares[.]” Herbert prays that since “the house and familie are thine,” that God will “Turn out these wranglers, which defile thy seat:/ For where thou dwellest all is neat.” He then provides a vision of what his soul would look like, if all his emotions were under control of the virtues rather than the passions: First Peace and Silence all disputes controll, Then Order plaies the soul; And giving all things their set forms and houres, Makes of wilde woods sweet walks and bowres. Humble Obedience neare the doore doth stand, Expecting a command: Then whom in waiting nothing seems more slow, Nothing more quick when she doth go. Joyes oft are there, and griefs as oft as joys; But griefs without a noise: Yet speak they louder than distemper’d fears. What is so shrill as silent tears? This is thy house, with these it doth abound: And where these are not found, Perhaps thou com’st sometimes, and for a day; But not to make a constant stay.1 To live “as if there were no rule or eares” is to live without order and decorum, and also to live without obedience (as in the Latin root of the word, ob + audire, to listen toward; 1 F.E. Hutchison, ed., The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 136–137, hereafter cited as Hutchinson. 387 to incline to listen to). Herbert, as frequently is his custom, employs a variety of musical metaphors. When “order plaies the soul,” harmony reigns and the noisy wranglers are turned out. Order has a civilizing effect, “making of wilde woods sweet walks and bowers.” This reformed household has Obedience as a doorkeeper and sentinel; Joy is a frequent visitor. Though “griefs” dwell under this roof also, they are “griefs without a noise,” under control, perhaps as spiritual practices of mortification, which Herbert, according to Turner’s summary of his letters, recommended to Nicholas Ferrar. To attend to ye great Christian duty of Mortification & reall, true, humble contempt of ye world: not to be frighted wth ye suspitions, slanders & scornes wch worldly persons would throw uppo[n] Them.2 These disciplined griefs have a silent power that speaks louder than “distemper’d fears.” This manner of household reorganization is necessary if the Lord is to visit it regularly; otherwise, the Holy Spirit may drop by occasionally, merely a divine day-tripper, “but not to make a constant stay.” This poem would have appealed to the Ferrars for a number of reasons. At Little Gidding, all things certainly “had their set forms and hours.” As Joyce Ransome notes, time at Little Gidding was “highly structured and well filled,” and each room in the house contained a timepiece; a clock with a bell summoned the different companies to their hourly prayer gatherings in rotation. Nicholas also placed sundials on three sides of the church tower, each with a motto.3 The Ferrars had transformed the “wildness” of their 2 Quoted in Joyce Ransome, “George Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar, and the ‘Pious Works’ of Little Gidding,” George Herbert Journal 31, no. 1 (2007): 2. 3 Joyce Ransome, The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2011), 65–66. Lynette R. Muir and John A. White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar: A Reconstruction of John Ferrar’s Account of His Brother’s Life Based on All the Surviving Copies (Leeds: 388 estate into pleasant gardens; Edward Lenton comments on the “fine grove and sweet walks, latticed and gardened on both sides,” that he passed through on his approach to the house.4 Herbert’s focus on the virtues recalls the names of the interlocutors of the Little Academy. “Silence and Peace” were observed at Little Gidding in the form of a version of the monastic “greater silence” each night after the family’s gathering for prayer and to receive Mary Ferrar’s blessing.5 The image of Humble Obedience waiting by the door, and then springing into action when finally receiving a command, recalls the Ferrars’ night watches, long stretches of praying the Psalms and singing hymns, contrasted with their near-ceaseless activity during the day. The goal of this disciplined and synchronized family piety was to invite the divine to make a “constant stay” at Little Gidding, or, in Eliot’s words, to “redeem the time.”6 Rigorous spiritual discipline was the only escape from the noisy, distempered world, as the Submisse sings in a hymn to spiritual retirement at the opening of a Christmastide 1631 dialogue: O happy you, that have subdued The force o th worlds desire! And into th fort of solitude For safety do retire. You fled from freedome so supposed, In straintes freedome find, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996), 83. Hereafter cited as Muir and White. The specific mottoes on the sundials are not known. 4 Muir and White, 412. 5 Ibid., 74. 6 T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 90. 389 Because true freedome is inclosed I th circuit of the mind.7 This emphasis on freedom enclosed within the “circuit of the mind” was evident in many practices at Little Gidding, from Nicholas’ translations, to the construction of the Gospel Harmonies, to the dialogues of the Little Academy, which sought to examine the reasonableness of faith, and uncover the false claims of the world’s “freedoms.” Richard Crashaw’s “Description of a Religious House and Condition of Life” (first published 1648), which praises “A long & dayly-dying life, which breaths / A respiration of reuiuing deaths,” is often said to allude to Little Gidding, which Crashaw visited frequently (Ferrar Collett was sent to study under him in Cambridge at Peterhouse). As both a poetic disciple of Herbert and a close friend of the Ferrars, Crashaw is in an ideal position to comment on their shared spirituality. The poem also seems to recall Herbert’s “The Familie,” with its ordered household of virtues: But reuerent discipline, & religious fear, And soft obedience, find sweet biding here; Silence, & sacred rest; peace, and pure ioyes; Kind loues keep house, ly close, and make no noise. The poem’s conclusion seems to allude to the visit of Charles I, while also reminiscent of the ending of Herbert’s “The Starre,” as the soul through meditation makes its way back to the source of enlightenment. And room enough for Monarchs, while none swells Beyond the kingdoms of contentfull Cells. The self-remembering SOVL sweetly recouers 7 E. Cruwys Sharland, ed., The Story Books of Little Gidding, Being the Religious Dialogues Recited in the Great Room 1631–2, from the Original Manuscript of Nicholas Ferrar (London: Seeley, 1899), 72. I have not yet found an attribution for this hymn. Several of the other hymns in the Story Books are from George Wither’s Hymns and Songs of the Church (1623). 390 Her kindred with the stars: not basely houers Below: But meditates her immortall way Home to the originall sourse of LIGHT & intellectuall Day.8 The “Monarchs” could be literal monarchs like King Charles I or the Ferrars’ favorite Monarch-turned-monastic, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, or could refer to each resident in the house who, within the “contentfull Cell,” enjoys a kind of wide and royal freedom. Herbert himself was a lover of rules and order, and freedom within constraints, not just in his metrically-sophisticated poetry, but in his devotional life. Walton recounts an episode from his institution as rector at Bemerton: When at his Induction he was shut into Bemerton Church, being left there alone to Toll the Bell, (as the Law requires him:) he staid so much longer than an ordinary time, before he return’d to those Friends that staid expecting him at the Church-door, that his Friend, Mr. Woodnot, look’d in at the Church-window, and saw him lie prostrate on the ground before the Altar: at which time and place (as he after told Mr. Woodnot) he set some Rules to himself, for the future manage of his life: and then and there made a vow, to labour to keep them.9 In The Church Porch, Herbert describes Man as “a shop of rules,” and urges his reader not to despise living “by rote.” Slight those who say amidst their sickly healths, Thou liv’st by rule. What doth not so, but man? Houses are built by rule, and common-wealths. Entice the trusty sunne, if that thou can, From his Ecliptick line: becken the skie. Who lives by rule then, keeps good companie.10 8 Richard Crashaw, The Poems of Richard Crashaw, Second ed., edited by L.C. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 338–339. 9 Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson, intro. by George Saintsbury (1927. Reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 289. 10 Hutchinson, 12. 391 Rule and order is the way to true, rather than “sickly,” health. In the comparison with the house, the image of spiritual “edification” is again present; spiritual discipline becomes the soul’s own “Eliptick line,” mirroring the perfect and unchanging movement of the heavens. The Country Parson has his own pastoral orbit, which Herbert describes in the chapter “The Parson in Circuit.” Herbert’s intention for the title of his clergy conduct manual is unclear: it bore a double title when finally printed in 1652, “A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life.”11 With Amy Charles, I feel that “The Country Parson” is a likelier candidate for what Herbert intended.12 It is notable that he uses the phrase “Rule of Holy Life.” The Country Parson has recently been read as a Renaissance courtesy manual or character book, and contextualized among many texts of this type for various professions.13 However, this subtitle (which could have been Herbert’s own) recalls a much older work, the Regula Pastoralis of Gregory the Great, which instructed bishops on how to manage their cure of souls, and on how to move back and forth between the states of action and contemplation required for pastoral work.14 Herbert himself describes his own work as “a Mark to aim at,” and shares his hope that others will add to it “untill the Book grow to a compleat 11 Original title page reproduced in Hutchinson, 222. 12 Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert, 187. 13 See Kristine A. Wolberg, “All Possible Art”: George Herbert’s “The Country Parson” (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008) and Ronald W. Cooley, “Full of All Knowledg”: George Herbert’s Country Parson and Early Modern Social Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 14 See St. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care, translated by Henry Davis; Ancient Christian Writers 11 (Mahwah, NJ: Newman Press, 1978). 392 Pastorall.”15 His desire for collaboration in the spiritual life, for someone else to “thrust his heart/ Into these lines,” as he says in “Obedience,” was richly met in his friendship with the community at Little Gidding, as they in turn “thrust” his lines out into the world. The “pious designs” of George Herbert and the Ferrar family were never meant as theoretical abstractions, but as helps and guides to their devotional lives. The “framing” of their theological aesthetics took many forms: the intricately-structured volume of The Temple, the learned, devout and spirited performances of the Little Academy, the care in the renovation of St. John’s and St. Mary’s churches, which sought to balance liturgical elements increasingly in conflict in their age. After Herbert and Nicholas’ early deaths, the disestablishment of the Church of England, and the suppression of the Book of Common Prayer, Walton, Oley and others would look back at the friendship between Bemerton and Little Gidding as relics of a Golden Age, a simpler, holier time. However, these “pious designs,” preserved in print, in manuscript, in biblical collage, and in brick and mortar, witness to Herbert and the Ferrars’ struggle, in an increasingly polarized and conflicted age, for true simplicity, purity of heart, and communal harmony. 15 Hutchinson, 224. 393 APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Title Page, The Arminian nunnery: or, A briefe description and relation of the late erected monasticall place, called the Arminian nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntington-shire. . . . (London, 1641). Folger Digital Image Collection, Folger Shakespeare Library. (http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGERCM1~6~6 ~143390~108832:The-Arminian-nunnery-or,-A-briefe-, accessed December 29, 2012. Copyright © Folger Shakespeare Library. Used by permission: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.) 394 Figure 2. The Church of St. John at Little Gidding. The Ferrars restored the church during Nicholas’s lifetime, but the façade was added in 1714. Photograph © 2008 Christopher L. Walton. Used with permission: Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial Generic 2.0 License. 395 Figures 3–4. The chancel and choir of the Church of St. John at Little Gidding (above, left). The Flemish brass eagle lectern at front left in the chancel dates back to the Ferrars’ time; a brass font bowl from the same period is now kept next door at the Ferrar House. Nicholas Ferrar’s tomb stands outside the church (above, right); other members of the family are buried beneath the paving stones. Photograph (left) © 2002 Seth Roby. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tallama/2547843975/, accessed December 29, 2012. Used with permission: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Generic 2.0 License.) Photograph (right) © 2008 Geoff Jones. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoffjones/2337203909/, accessed December 29, 2012. Used with permission: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Generic 2.0 License.) 396 Figure 5. The Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Leighton-Bromswold. © 2005 ChurchCrawler. (http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/68974, accessed December 29, 2012. Used with permission: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.) 397 Figures 6–7. Interior of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Leighton-Bromswold (left). The undifferentiated pews, twin pulpit and lectern (symbolizing the equality of prayer and preaching), and the half-height screen are original to the refurbishing of the church by Nicholas and John Ferrar and George Herbert. Photograph (left) © JevStar Ltd. (http://www.leighton-bromswold.org.uk/album/ detail.asp?GetAPicID=1489, accessed December 29, 2012. “Use for Educational purposes is explicitly granted”: http://www.leighton-bromswold.org.uk/site/legal.asp.) Photograph (right) © 2003 John Salmon. (http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/380831, accessed December 29, 2012. Used with permission: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.) 398 BIBLIOGRAPHY Addleshaw, G.W.O. The High Church Tradition. London: Faber and Faber, 1941. ——— and Frederick Etchells. The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship. London: Faber and Faber, 1956. Alexander, Gavin, ed. 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Edited by R. N. Swanson, 211–221. Woodbridge, UK: Ecclesiastical Historical Society; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2002. Yates, Nigel. Buildings, Faith and Worship: The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Young, R.V. Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. Studies in Renaissance Literature 2. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2000. 417 CURRICULUM VITAE REGINA LABA WALTON Boston University Division of Religious and Theological Studies 145 Bay State Road Boston MA 02215 rlw@bu.edu Degrees Ph.D., Religion and Literature, Boston University, May 2013 “Pious Designs”: Theological Aesthetics in the Writings of George Herbert and the Ferrars of Little Gidding First Reader: Peter S. Hawkins (Division of Religious and Theological Studies/Yale Divinity School) Second Reader: Christopher Martin (English Department) Third Reader: Karen Westerfield Tucker (School of Theology) M.Div., Harvard University, 2003 Thesis: Contemplative Negotiations: Walter Hilton and the Relationship Between Exterior State and Interior Life B.A., English Literature and Religion, Hampshire College, 2000 Fellowships and Awards Boston University Women’s Guild Award, 2011 The Alice M. Brennan Humanities Award and Clairmont Mansfield Award, 2010 from the Boston University Humanities Foundation Doctoral Fellow, The Episcopal Church Foundation, 2005 Boston University Luce Program Scholarship, 2005 Conference Presentations “Herbert and the ‘Garment of Style’: Confused Clothing, Ruined Finery, and the Mixed Aesthetics of The Temple.” George Herbert Society Regional 418 Conference: “‘Is there in truth no beauty?’ George Herbert, the Beauty of Truth, and Christian Aesthetics.” April 5, 2013, Grove City College, Grove City, PA. “George Herbert and the ‘Dangerous’ Art of Preaching.” Second Annual New England Anglican Studies Conference: “Preaching and the Theological Imagination.” Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 2021, 2012. “Sighs, Groans, and the Mystical Paradox of Wordless Speech in the Poetry of George Herbert.” Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Francisco, California, November 19-22, 2011 “‘Storying’ in The Temple and at Little Gidding.” Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Montreal, Québec, March 24-26, 2011 “‘Contrary Reports’: The Beauty of Holiness and Contemptus Mundi at Little Gidding.” Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Atlanta, Georgia, October 30–November 2, 2010 “‘Sighs will convey/Anything to me’: Sighs, Groans, and the Mystery of Wordless Speech in George Herbert’s Poetry.” Northeast Conference on Christianity and Literature: “Christianity and Detective Fiction,” Pace University, New York City, March 6, 2010 “‘Religion Stands on Tip-toe in our Land’: George Herbert, the Ferrars of Little Gidding, and the Dissolution of the Virginia Company.” Seventh Annual Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Graduate Student Conference, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, October 24, 2009 “The Impact of the Dissolution of the Virginia Company on George Herbert and the Ferrars of Little Gidding.” Seventh Biennial Symbiosis [Journal] Conference: “Boston and the New Atlantic World.” Suffolk University, Boston, Mass., June 27, 2009. Finalist for Graduate Student Paper Prize. “People of the Book: Book Production as Spiritual Practice at Little Gidding.” Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Boston, Mass., February 27, 2009 “The Deaths of Macrina and Monica in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina and Augustine’s Confessions.” Third Annual Pappas Patristics Conference, “Evil and Suffering in the Patristic Period,” Holy Cross School of Theology, Brookline, Mass., October 13, 2006 419 Publications Book Review: Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding by Joyce Ransome. Anglican Theological Review 93:4 (Fall 2011): 739–42. Academic Interests Religion and Literature Early Modern Religious Writing Liturgy and Worship Poetry of the English Renaissance Anglican Studies History of Protestant Monastic Communities Christian Contemplative Traditions Asceticism English and American Poetry The Bible as Literature