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5. Vesting Significance and Authority: The Vestiarian Controversy under Cranmer and Its Treatment by Foxe That a particular outfit or a more general style of clothing should make a ‘‘statement’’ is a familiar enough idea in the twenty-first century. It assumes that clothing, like language, participates in a system of signs, and that plain clothing, such as chinos or blue jeans, can be every bit as much a statement as can a dark suit, a pink dress, or a tuxedo. But when we take clothing to be making a ‘‘statement,’’ rhetorically we are using a metaphor, or possibly a metonymy, or both. Only figuratively does clothing speak and whether it speaks metonymically or metaphorically depends on whether its statement is—or more accurately, is perceived to be—a metonymic expression of a societal norm or a deliberate metaphorical deviation from it, and thus on whether it is perceived to answer to a conservative language of codes or to a marked difference from them. Distinguishing between metaphor and metonymy helps to track and to explain the process of historical development, even while history further clarifies the potential for dynamic relationship between these two tropic paradigms. Their relationship is particularly sensitive to the fluid play of dominant and emergent perceptions and, when these are sufficiently distinct , to ideologies. As the Renaissance historiographer Sir Francis Bacon realized both in theory and practice, symbols, like battles, have histories. Symbolic language informs and shapes, rather than simply expresses, history as event and as account and does so in ways that can resist and alter totalizing abstractions, whether these pertain to history or to literary theory.1 Accordingly , my interest in this chapter lies less in drawing fine distinctions between metaphor and metonymy than in the lived play of these figures in historical experience. When we see clothing as a statement, we are likely also assuming the societal function of role-playing or possibly of deliberate role-playing, even masking, which within some contexts is recreation or constructive play and within others is simply hypocrisy—the last a word from Latin hypocrisis, ‘‘imitation, mimicry,’’ and thus historically connected with the theater: 78 Vesting Significance and Authority 79 compare Greek hypocrites, ‘‘actor.’’ If the societal function of clothing is controverted , what Gramsci termed ‘‘the language question,’’ as invoked in my second chapter, figuratively urges its presence as well, which ‘‘in one mode or another . . . signifies that a series of other [ideological] problems are beginning to impose themselves’’ (Steinberg, 206). Gramsci’s ‘‘language question ’’ comes in one mode or another, which might be understood as one representational mode or another, such as clothing or language per se, and not simply in one or another mode still more materially productive. A system of signs, metaphor and metonymy, role-playing, masking, and hypocrisy —the last three common accusations in Reformation polemics—would be hard to beat as modes and points of reference for the vestiarian controversy over the use of traditional ecclesiastical vestments during the TudorStuart period. As M. M. Knappen observed in a ‘‘magisterial’’ study of puritanism some sixty years ago, the vestiarian controversy was ‘‘more than a . . . quibble about a piece of cloth.’’2 John Udall (1560?-92), writing, or at least published , in the early 1590s, would pointedly have agreed that the heart of ‘‘the controuersie is not about goates wooll (as the Prouerbe saith) neither light & trifling matters . . . but about no lesse matter then this, whether Iesus Christ shall be King or no.’’3 This controversy first became urgent in England in 1550, when the Zwinglian reformer John Hooper openly resisted the wearing of traditional ecclesiastical vestments for his consecration as bishop, and it actively persisted through most of Elizabeth’s reign, to reemerge , together with larger issues, under the Stuarts.4 In the broadest sense, the relation of a Protestant church to its Roman Catholic precursor was figuratively (and visually) at issue in Hooper’s resistance and with it the priesthood of every believer, to which an anointed and hierarchical priesthood distinguished by power and symbolic dress is clearly inimical and an egalitarian ministry (Latin minister, ‘‘servant’’) in common dress is congenial. Even more exactly, however, interpretation of the eucharistic celebration as the renewal of Christ’s sacrifice and thus a propitiatory offering for the quick and the dead, as opposed to its interpretation in Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s words, as ‘‘only a commemoration and remembrance of that sacri fice,’’ had over centuries been woven into the...

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