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

NOTES

NOTES Notes to Introduction 1. François de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, ed. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: Vintage, 2002), 6. 2. I allude here to early modern emblem traditions, which represent the penitent heart as an alembic that distills sins into praise. One of the biblical sources for this view of devotion is John 16:20, “ye shall be sorrowful , but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.” See Holy Bible, King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984). George Herbert, George Herbert, ed. Louis L. Martz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), expresses this view of devotion in the conclusion to “Man’s Medley” when he declares: “Happy is he, whose heart / Hath found the art / To turn his double pains to double praise” (34–36). The Catholic convert William Alabaster, The Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. G. M. Story and Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), however, offers one of the most explicit metapoetic statements on the transformative, or, as he puts it, “transelemental,” goals of devotional poetry when, in sonnet 15 of his Penitential Sonnets he concludes: “And these conceits, digest by thoughts’ retire, / Are turned into april showers of tears” (13–14). 3. I use the term “metaphysical” here in the philosophical sense of the science of first principles, the a priori assumptions regarding, in the case of pre- and early modern cosmology, the particular structures underlying the relationship between time and eternity, particular and universal. The most important structure informing the articulation of the self in the sacramental contexts considered in this book is found in metaphysical doctrines proclaiming the identity of microcosm and macrocosm. Furthermore, my analysis of devotional rhetoric as a form of symbolic action designed to work at psychological, metaphysical and confessional levels is inspired, in part, from the various studies of Kenneth Burke. See The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970) and Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, 247 248 Notes to Pages 2–5 Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966). 4. Nicholas Caussin, “On Sacred and Profane Eloquence,” in Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, edited and translated by Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 283, 279. 5. Wayne Rebhorn, Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 4. 6. “BATTER my heart, three person’d God; for, you / As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; / That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’ and bend / Your force, to breake, blowe, burn make me new” (1–4). John Donne, John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964). I provide a detailed reading of this poem in the conclusion. 7. Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 4:74. References to Traherne’s Centuries will hereafter be cited in the text by century number followed by the number of the meditation. 8. See C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Carols Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 9. Marshall Grossman traces the distinctly formal aspects of this transition in the context of poetic narratives of the self in The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 10. Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), offers seven general propositions regarding the shift from premodern to modern universes, the first three of which underwrite the argument presented in this book: 1. The private recesses of the individual anima replace the medieval church as the primary point of contact between God and persons. 2. This internalization of presence secularizes the sociopolitical, emptying it of ultimate meaning and thus enabling a “realistic” appraisal of such things as institutional behavior, hierarchy, power, coercion, and so forth. 3. This split between the sociopolitical and the divine is simultaneously inscribed and erased. That is, secularization and cosmology coexist within the dominant culture, the latter reinventing the divinity of the king and the supernatural ground of the social order. (12) Perhaps most important in the context of my argument is Shuger’s noting that the shift from the premodern to the modern universe consists...