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1. Fabulous Romance and Abortive Reform in Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
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This chapter begins with a “ruined” book, a lavishly bound collection of the foundational works of the English church published in 1616. This particular volume includes the Psalter, a genealogy of figures from sacred scripture drawn by John Speed, a brightly illustrated edition of the King James Bible by the printer Robert Barker, and the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalms in English meter. Yet despite the orthodoxy of its contents, its binding bears traces of the confessional anxiety that repeatedly convulsed early modern England.1 Opulent, rich, red velvet, embossed with figures in gold and silver thread, the embroidered binding counters in small evidence for the thoroughness of an iconoclastic Protestantism, which had fitfully whitewashed illustrations from texts of religious devotion even as it had redecorated its church interiors. Indeed , this book and its binding show rather the contiguity of Christian confessional allegiance. For, although now faded and nearly illegible, embroidered Latin phrases frame both the front and rear cover images. This tattered Latin, “Nova Facta Sunt Omnia” (all this was made), “Exista: Per Mosem Data” (as given by Moses) recalls the Vulgate, and for Protestant England the Catholic Holy Scripture that the Protestant English Bibles superseded, as it encloses an Old Testament tableaux. On the front, an embroidered Moses and Aaron hold between them the tablets of stone containing the Ten Commandments superimposed over a cross threaded by a golden snake. The central images remain remarkably well preserved. The embroidered scene with its Old Testament heroes surrounded by a Latin frame suggests a coexistence of competing orthodoxies , of Latin and vernacular, of image and word, of Catholic and Protestant. chapter one Fabulous Romance and Abortive Reform in Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser 30 fa b u l o u s t e x t s But when the volume is turned over, there is a striking reminder that readers were preoccupied still with Christian confessional boundaries despite the emerging ideal of an Anglican via media. For the rear binding, which illustrates the two Marys worshipping at either side of the crucified Christ, has had its central image, the crucifix, carefully excised, leaving the two women to mourn the outline of the familiar, but now absent, icon.2 The suspicion toward the Catholic marked through this act of erasure tells a Embroidered binding on the back of a 1616 Bible (New Testament). The Holy Bible. (Imprinted at London, by Robert Barker, 1616), HEH438000:070, STC (2nd ed.), 2245. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. [3.237.178.126] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:09 GMT) fa b u l o u s r o m a n c e a n d a b o r t i v e r e f o r m 31 story that maps in a very material way the varied confessional allegiances of England’s Christian readers. It vividly illustrates a central claim of this chapter : that in seeking to come to terms with the instability of the period’s religious culture, readers as well as writers struggled to reconcile past and present forms of belief in ways that were sometimes violent, frequently contradictory, and often characterized by small painstaking gestures with disproportionately large symbolic resonance.The crucifix’s effacement from this volume of orthodox Anglican devotional books offers a material testament of other more subtle acts of erasure that happened between the covers of narratives almost as familiar as those of Moses, Aaron, the Marys, and Christ over the period of England ’s long reformation. Nearly three decades earlier, a remarkable excision of story sets apart two English vernacular romances, Sir Philip Sidney’s revised Arcadia and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, marking them with the conflicts of faith. In Sidney ’s case, the omnipresent de rigueur motif of the duel between knight and supernatural foe remains only as an ellipsis. Spenser does not shun dragons nor other supernatural antagonists, but he too calls attention to the outline of a familiar but altered icon. In his explanatory letter to Ralegh, Spenser writes that his subject will be “the historye of king Arthure.”3 But he then proceeds to neglect, almost entirely, many of its most famous episodes, including the quest for the Sangreal. These two seemingly insignificant textual elisions emblematize a larger pattern within both works that reckon with what for Protestants had become a troubling dimension of the romance: its invocation of the supernatural marvelous with its powerful memorial...