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The Champions without more words disrobing themseues from their Pilgrims attyre, euerie one selected foorth an armor fitting to their portely bodyes, and in steed of their Ebone staues tipt with siluer, they welded in their hands the steeled blades, and their feete that had wont to indure a paineful pilgrimage vpon the bare ground, were now redy prest to mount the golden stirrup.1 In the extract above taken from The Seven Champions of Christendom (1596), Richard Johnson’s champions transform from holy pilgrim to knight, exchanging “Ebone staues” for “steeled blades,” shedding holy robes for steely armor. The quick “redy prest” easy transformation of pilgrims to champions provides a useful departure point for understanding the troubling fungibility between hagiography and romance in early modern England. Catering to an eager readership , Johnson exploits rather than condemns such a conjuncture of genre. He dubs Saint George the English hero (from Coventry), leader to an international band of Christian saints, the titular “champions of Christendom” who “mount the golden stirrup” and perform knightly deeds.2 Thus, while the Protestant divine Edward Dering viewed the conflation of Catholic saints’ lives— which “so defiled” the festivals and “high holydaies”—and the tales of romance as part of a popish plot to “bewitch” English believers into “superstition,” polemicists were not alone in making use of the analogy.3 This chapter takes as its focus texts that confront the hybrid aspects of “Catholic” romance inspired by the lives of saints. Dering’s verb choice “bewitched,” with its feminine connotation , raises a second related thread in this chapter’s focus: women as proxy for the “superstitious” and Catholic dimensions of romance.4 chapter t wo Saint or Martyr? Reforming the Romance Heroine in the New Arcadia and Pericles s a i n t o r m a r t y r ? 61 The stories I consider in the following pages are ostensibly romances, but their texts repeatedly crisscross saintly and knightly motifs. In chapter 1, I show how the cloistered heritage—and its consequent adjectival relationship of the “fabulous” or the supernatural marvelous—was a source of tension for romance authors after the Reformation. I demonstrate in what follows how that same vexed history could also be mined for a new spiritual benefit. Structuring my investigation will be the ambiguity between women, as dangerously efficacious carriers of the Catholic past manifested in their sorcerous, frequently fraudulent power to perform marvelous feats, and the powerfully redemptive figure of the female saint, who was also marked by supernaturally miraculous motifs. Although Johnson’s saintly champions seem untroubled by their dual identities , Edmund Spenser’s Duessa vividly personifies the problem of the reciprocity of the feminine, the false church, and romance women bruited about after the Reformation.5 “The author,” the transmogrified Fradubio of Spenser’s Faerie Queene moans, “of all my smarts,/Is one Duessa a false sorceresse,/That many errant knights hath broght to wretchednesse” (1.2.34).6 As a “false sorceresse ,” she doubles as the Whore of Babylon, who for Protestants symbolized Catholicism. She seduces the Redcrosse Knight away from Una, the true reformed church, and takes him far into the forest of romance, Error’s woods. The struggle between these two female characters emblematizes a larger pattern of early modern romance, in which male authors sought to reform the romance of its Catholic taint by reforming its women, in this case by transforming Duessa into Una. Especially attentive to their female heroines, Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia and the play Pericles reveal how the persistence of hagiography (specifically that of the virgin saint), as troublesome kin to romance, offers these writers a charged template for a literary and gendered recuperation. The princesses’ trials , especially in the most thoroughly overhauled third book of the Arcadia, elevate women to paragons of virtue, nearly eclipsing masculine heroics. Their martyr-like suffering throws into stark relief Sidney’s reformulation elsewhere of supernatural marvels along the lines of Protestant belief. Like Sidney’s Arcadia , Pericles stages a daughter as the crucial agent of a narrative—and generic— redemption; Marina works rather than prays her way out of the brothel, redirecting the miraculous (and hagiographic) motifs of romance toward a less supernatural wonder grounded in a very human constancy. She, like Pamela and Philoclea, labors with words and relies on a rhetorical dexterity for preservation rather than any Egyptian-like healer, miraculous lightning bolt, or other [3.144.252.140] Project...

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