Notes
Introduction 1. Rogers, Of the Imitation of Christ, “First Epistle of the Translator.” Throughout this book in quotations of early modern texts, I retain original spelling and punctuation, but I have not reproduced every detail of typography such as eccentric or nonmodern use of capitalization and italics. 2. I. Green, Print and Protestantism, 303. 3. See ibid., Appendix I, for detailed publication information. 4. Quote from Greene, Light in Troy, 1. Greene further describes early modern imitatio as “a precept and activity which . . . embraced not only literature, but pedagogy, grammar, rhetoric, esthetics, the visual arts, music, historiography, politics, and philosophy” and had implications “for the theory of style, the philosophy of history, and for conceptions of the self ” (1–2). Other general treatments of imitation and exemplarity in the early modern period include Lyons, Exemplum; Quint, Origin and Originality; Rigolot, “Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity ”; and Steadman, Lamb and the Elephant. 5. Among the first to treat imitatio Christi as a genuinely Protestant phenomenon was J. Sears McGee, whose landmark comparative study of “Anglican” and “Puritan” pieties devotes considerable attention to the continued importance of this devotional model among conservative English Protestants (McGee, Godly Man, 107–13). However, his organizing binary has the inadvertent effect of privileging “Puritan” as the more innovative end of the Anglican/Puritan devotional 201 spectrum. Anglican imitatio is characterized as “following pre-Reformation tradition ” and is identified with both medieval soteriology and classical morality (107 n. 56), while the Puritan devotional emphasis on human depravity and Christ’s role as mediator is treated as an outgrowth of the new Protestant emphasis on justification by faith (108). This critical framework obscures the dynamism of “traditional” themes like imitatio Christi and their mobility across confessional divides. If McGee’s characterization of “the puritan relationship with Christ” as “often intimate, but seldom imitative” (107) has become something of a truism, his construal of Anglican imitatio as essentially conservative has been equally, if more subtly, influential, rendering some instances of Protestant imitatio invisible and others too readily dismissible. Elizabeth Hudson’s “English Protestants and the Imitatio Christi”—a follow-up to McGee’s “Conversion and the Imitation of Christ”—is the most recent work exclusively devoted to the imitatio Christi theme in early modern England. Hudson complicates McGee’s Anglican/Puritan binary but does not challenge his basic understanding of the imitation of Christ as a static devotional framework inherited from the Middle Ages. Noting “considerable ambiguity, even inconsistency” in the devotional culture of the period, she “nevertheless concludes that conservative Protestants were more likely to recommend Jesus as the model for human behavior than were their puritan contemporaries ,” attributing this difference to “Puritan doubts about human ability to emulate so perfect a model” and “the close identification of the imitatio Christi theme with traditional Catholic piety” (541). The imitation of Christ has thus yet to be fully integrated into our account of English Protestant devotional practice or the broader “secular” culture of imitation with which it no doubt interacted . See Perry, “Imitation of Christ.” 6. Dickens, English Reformation, represents the older view that the English Reformation was a popular reaction against the moral bankruptcy of late medieval Christianity. Perhaps the most influential proponent of the view that it was a reformation from below is Patrick Collinson; see his various essays collected in Godly People, Religion of Protestants, and Birthpangs of Protestant England, as well as his monograph Elizabethan Puritan Movement. This interpretation was challenged by several revisionist historians who characterize the English Reformation as imposed on a reluctant populace from above: Haigh, English Reformations , Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, and Reformation and Resistance; Bossy, Christianity in the West; Scarisbrick, Reformation; and Duffy, Stripping of the Altars . Judith Maltby points out that both “bottom-up” and “top-down” models of the Reformation tend to rely on records of dissent, thereby marginalizing the conformist majority; while acknowledging the greater methodological difficulties inherent in studying conformity, she suggests that its neglect in the histori202 Notes to Page 2 ography of the English Reformation is also due to “the assumption that nonconformists took their faith more ‘seriously’ than men and women who conformed to the lawful worship of the Church of England” (Prayer Book and People, 8). For a recent general history of the Reformation focused on its implications for “ordinary” English men and women, see Jones, English Reformation. For good studies of conformist piety, see Maltby, Prayer Book and People; Targoff, Common Prayer; and Rosendale, Liturgy and...
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