In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1                  Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Reformed Body Visible The parallel careers of Thomas Rogers (ca. 1553–1616) and Philip Sidney (1554–86) offer a useful starting point for exploring the major intersections between devotional and literary models of good imitatio in early modern England. Sidney’s biography is far and away the more familiar. A pious and ambitious aristocrat whose powerful family connections might (with better luck) have landed him within Elizabeth I’s inner circle, he rode out his rustication from the court by composing sophisticated fictions that, after his untimely death following the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, helped secure his lasting fame as a Protestant cultural icon.1 Rogers’s fate was more pedestrian. A prolifically publishing cleric with an eye for popular tastes, he devoted the bulk of his literary output to the translation and (when needed) doctrinal purification of Lutheran, pre-Reformation, and Counter-Reformation devotional works.2 Despite a modest literary fame and close ties to Sir Christopher Hatton, for whom he served as chaplain, and to Richard Bancroft, eventual archbishop of Canterbury, Rogers was never promoted beyond his first living at Horringer in Suffolk. His most enduring work is an exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles first 17 published as The English Creede in 1585 and later republished in substantially revised form as The Faith, Doctrine and Religion Professed and Protected in the Realm of England (1607).3 On the face of it, there is no good reason to cross the disciplinary boundary currently cordoning off these two seemingly unrelated stories : Sidney’s as a shining star in the Elizabethan literary firmament and Rogers’s as a substantial footnote in the history of the late Tudor/early Stuart church. Upon closer examination, however, Sidney’s and Rogers’s worlds touched in a surprising number of intriguing ways. They just missed each other at Christ Church, Oxford, where Sidney was in attendance from 1568 to about 1571 and Rogers from 1571 until he graduated with a Master of Arts in 1576. Relatively early in their careers, both appear to have been influenced (Sidney profoundly so) by the moderate, avowedly humanist strain of Lutheranism promoted by Philip Melancthon and his followers on the Continent. Sidney was the protégé of the prominent Philippist Hubert Languet. Rogers was a translator of the famous Lutheran pedagogue Johannes Rivius, the Melancthon protégé Niels Hemmingsen , and Johann Habermann, whose well-known book of Lutheran prayers Rogers dedicated to Sidney’s future father-in-law, Francis Walsingham , in 1577. Even more interesting is the two men’s roughly analogous position within their respective spheres as defenders of literary arts deemed suspect by their peers. Like Sidney, whose circa 1580 Defence of Poesy was written in part as a personal apology for poetic pursuits perceived by his mentors as dangerously distracting from the duties of a would-be statesman, Rogers felt compelled in 1590, at a particularly difficult moment in his clerical career, to justify his literary activities as an author and translator of popular devotional materials.4 The details of Rogers’s difficulties with the proPresbyterian , classical “brethren” who held sway among the Suffolk clergy throughout his tenure at Horringer are secondary for our purposes to his passionate and career-long dedication to the written word as the equal (or better, depending on which pamphlet you read) of preaching in its capacity to effect personal and political reformation. Like Sidney, Rogers dreamed of a Protestant republic of letters, in which “the promise and purpose of God” would be accomplished in no small part through writing and reading .5 His preface to A General Discourse Against the Damnable Sect of User18 Imitatio Christi ers, his 1578 translation of a work by Philippus Caesar to which Rogers appends a tract of his own culled from the commentaries of the famous Philippist Niels Hemmingsen, epitomizes his high hopes for England’s progressive spiritual literacy: servauntes shalbe instructed, his enemies shalbe tolde their faultes, all shall knowe their dueties towardes God, their Prince, their betters , their equals, their inferiours, themselves, though not by wordes of mouthe, yet by wrighting: that both the godly may be confirmed in the trueth, and the graceles converted in tyme and be saved. And therfore doth God in these daies, more than at any time, and in Englande . . . stir up, and incense the mindes of some to wright, of others to translate : whereby as wee enjoie externall happines more...

Share