Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England

Introduction

            In the introductory epistle to his 1580 translation and Protestantization of Thomas à Kempis’s devotional treatise Imitatio Christi, Thomas Rogers makes a case for the continued relevance of this Continental, latemedieval text to his English Protestant audience: “A shame were it therefore for us to imitate so painfulie as manie do in eloquence Cicero; in philosophie Aristotle; in law Justinian; in Physick Galen for worldlie wisdome ; yet to imitate, as most do, the French in vanitie, the Dutch in luxerie , in braverie the Spanish, the Papists in idolatrie, in impietie and al impuritie of life the Atheists, and not to folowe our Savior Christ in heavenlie wisdome and in al Godlines of manners.”1 Rogers could have saved himself the trouble. As it turned out, Elizabethan readers needed little persuading to appreciate the enduring appeal of Thomas à Kempis. Rogers’s translation of the Imitation of Christ—just one of thirteen English translations and three paraphrases of the text undertaken between 1500 and 1700— was one of the steadiest devotional sellers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was printed seventeen times between 1580 and 1640 and nearly every other year between 1580 and 1609.2 The popularity of the Imitation of Christ, not to mention the wide popularity of other religious how-to manuals like Arthur Dent’s Plaine 1 Man’s Path-way to Heaven (printed at least twenty-seven times between 1601 and 1682) and Edmund Bunny’s Protestantization of the first part of Robert Persons’s First booke of the Christian exercise (which sold at least thirty editions between 1582 and 1640), is a powerful testament to the religious significance attached to the imitation of models in the period.3 However, while the imitative mode has long been recognized as a “central and pervasive” feature of early modern English literary and intellectual culture, imitatio Christi, the traditional devotional practice of imitating Christ in his person and Passion, has received comparatively little attention in scholarly accounts of post-Reformation English devotional culture .4 This disjunction in the critical histories of literary imitatio and imitatio Christi is at least partly attributable to a tendency among an earlier generation of scholars to organize treatments of early modern English piety along rigidly drawn confessional lines, privileging Protestant over Catholic, and “Puritan” over “Anglican,” as representative of what is most distinctive about the period and therefore most worthy of close critical attention.5 In more recent years, revisionist and postrevisionist historiographical approaches have yielded a more nuanced picture of English lay religiosity that—among other things—invites fresh attention to traditional devotional practices like the imitation of Christ.6 Even the most cursory examination of the period’s devotional print culture affirms the cross-confessional appeal of Christian imitatio. Ian Green’s critical survey of the period’s best and steadiest devotional sellers includes a significant number of sermons and devotional works that emphasize meditating on or modeling oneself after the person of Christ, among them works by “godly” authors like William Perkins (A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified, 1596), John Preston (The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love, 1630), Daniel Dyke (the second of his Two Treatises, 1616), Edward Reynolds (the third of his Three Treatises , 1631), James Ussher (Immanuel, 1638), and Richard Sibbes (The Bruised Reede, and Smoaking Flax, 1630).7 The very existence of these works should put to rest the old Anglican/Puritan binary, suggesting that any “dichotomy between a puritan focus on Christ’s atoning work and an Anglican one on his moral example is far from clear cut.”8 Their circulation alongside “Anglican” and Catholic steady sellers that focused on 2 Imitatio Christi Christ’s life and passion—such as Lancelot Andrewes’s Passion and Nativity sermons, Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (first printed legally in England in 1592), and Robert Southwell’s Marie Magdalen’s Funeral Teares (l591)—suggests something of the scope of recovery remaining to be done on the meaning or range of meanings attached to the imitation of Christ in post-Reformation England. Rogers’s decision, in the passage quoted above, to contextualize Protestant anxieties about the propriety of patterning oneself after Christ within humanist debates about the positive and negative potential of imitation suggests why and how scholars of English literature should participate in this project of recovery. The ease with which Rogers moves here between categories of imitation we would tend to separate out as “sacred” and “secular” is a reminder...