Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England

ONE. Southwell's Plaint: Subjection and the Representation of the Recusant Soul

ONE Southwell’s Plaint SUBJECTION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE RECUSANT SOUL “The stories of saints are the most ambiguous literature in existence.” — Nietzsche Following the wave of antirecusant proclamations that Queen Elizabeth issued in 1571, 1581 and 1585 in order to consolidate the 1559 “Act of Uniformity,” which required church attendance, and the 1563 “Act for the Assurance of the Queen’s Majesty’s Royal Power” that made refusing the Oath of Supremacy a treasonable offense, English Catholics found themselves in an awkward Catch-22 position where open fidelity to Rome necessarily entailed an act of political treason.1 At the same time that Elizabeth narrowed the social space in which recusants could move, the papacy sharpened the definition of what it meant to be a Roman Catholic in England after 1580 by no longer permitting allegiance to Elizabeth’s political authority.2 Such changes in the churches’ positions both clarified and intensified religio-political conflict in England, placing English Catholics in a highly fraught position where national and religious allegiances were at cross-purposes with one another. 37 38 Divine Subjection This situation not only meant that Catholic services became underground affairs, it also led to an internalization of the old faith, to a deepening, of the meditative, private aspects of religious experience.3 This intensification of the meditative aspects of Catholic discipline is particularly evident in the devotional and pastoral literature of the Jesuit priest and poet Robert Southwell. Southwell’s work reveals the extent to which Elizabethan recusants were encouraged to sustain their Catholicism not only by participating in clandestine services, but also by cultivating forms of interiority in which they would imagine and reimagine the act of submission to divine, rather than Protestant, authority. Drawing on the Ignatian tradition’s meditative regime, along with a host of literary and rhetorical conventions, Southwell’s texts offer a means of resisting religio-political oppression by enacting one’s submission to divine authority. In Southwell’s poems, homiletic works, and pastoral literature, recusants are given a devotional framework through which they can symbolically mitigate the lived experience of social and religious exile. Through the representation of interpellative scenes — or scenarios of divine subjection — Southwell provides recusants with a medium through which to access distinctly Catholic forms of desire and identity. Although Southwell is always cognizant of a Protestant readership , so much so that his work became highly popular among nonCatholics during the seventeenth century, his primary audience is the Elizabethan Catholic community for which he prepared to do pastoral work from the point of entering the Jesuit order in 1580, and for which he was martyred in 1595.4 As John and Lorraine Roberts have most recently observed, Southwell turned to poetry as a particularly inspiring means of maintaining the integrity of the English Catholic community by relating matters of Catholic faith and doctrine, particularly those resolved by the Council of Trent.5 Taking into account that Southwell’s literary efforts are part of a larger “apostolate of letters” designed to embolden the faith of English Catholics living under an increasingly oppressive Protestant rule, this chapter examines how the rhetorical structure of Southwell’s texts inscribe and symbolically mitigate the sense of exile and self-division that he and his fellow missionaries describe as characteristic of recusant experience. I examine, in other words, how the symbolic action of Southwell’s literary texts dramatizes in order to transform the sense of exile and psycho-spiritual paralysis experienced by Elizabethan Catholics divided between national and religious loyalties. The body of this chapter is divided into four sections. Making reference to Southwell’s personal letters and to general Jesuit protocols , the first section provides an overview of the counterintuitive structure of the ideal recusant subject as Southwell predicates it. Section 2 further explains the predication of this ideal subject by examining how Southwell registers religio-political exile as a form of self-alienation. Given this internalization of political conflict, religious meditation, devotional lyric and pastoral epistle all play significant roles in constituting oneself as a subject within and against hostile social circumstances. This fashioning of the ideally devout recusant subject takes one of its most illuminating and complicated forms in Southwell’s Mary Magdalene’s Funeral Tears.6 In my reading of Magdalene’s Funeral Tears as a response to the persecution of Catholics, I argue essentially two things. First, I demonstrate...