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

JEMCS 2.1 (Spring/Summer 2002) Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk, and its "Pauline" Rerighting Patricia Parker The Turks are preposterously zealous in praying for the conversion, or perversion rather, of Christians to their irreligious Religion. . . . ? Alexander Ross, Alcoran Ifye spell Roma backwarde ... it is preposterus amor, a love out of order or a love agaynst kynde. ?John Bale, Englysh Votary es In the opening chapter of Shakespeare from the Margins, I attempted to outline a cultural semantics of the "preposterous," as both the "unnatural" and the "reversed" or "turned." In what follows, I propose to extend this exploration to early modern rep resentations of the "Turk" and "turning Turk."1 As a keyword for inversions in family, state, and "minde,"2 the term "preposterous" pervades English writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies, in texts such as Massinger's The Unnatural Combat (1624), in which a father proclaims it "preposterous in nature" that he should "give account/ Of [his] actions to [his] sonne."3 The con cept involved not simply a vertical overturning, however, but the "sinister" conversion (or perversion) of progression from left to right. The idea is also associated with turning "backwards" from male to female (or to "imperfect" male), with "Hebrew" and other graphic forms of spelling backwards, and with sodomy under stood as "preposterous amor."4 "Preposterous amor" itselfwas frequently conflated with other early modern paradigms of inversion. What Drayton termed the 2 The Journal for Early Modern Cultured Studies "preposterous end" of Edward II, relating it to "that preposterous sinne wherein he did offend," was inseparable, for example, from that king's elevation of "base" favorites to high estate. ("Never did Princes more preposterate/ Their private lives, and public regi ment.")5 The original of such inversion was the "preposterous pride" of Lucifer; the Fall was understood as an act of arsy-versy overturning in which a secondary female put herself "first," spelling backwards the orthodox order of the genders. Eve was thus not only the first insubordinate woman but the firstwitch, the enchantress of Southwell's palindrome on her re-righting: "Spell Eva backe and Ave shall you finde,/ The first began, the last reverst our harmes,/ An Angels witching wordes did Eva blinde,/ An Angels Ave disinchants the charmes." Witchcraft (as Stuart Clark observes in Thinking with Demons) involved "prepos terous" as well as "sinister" inversion.6 In the familiar New Testament figure of the "perfection" toward which the scriptures progressed (moving from left to right, or darkness to light), relight ing the backward spell of Eve meant reading the Hebrew scrip tures in the "right" direction. The preposterous was thus a key term in Protestant polemics that condemned both papist Rome and Turks for reversing or "preposterating" the biblical testaments. In discourses that linked the witchcraft of such preposteration with sodomy or "preposter ous amor" two central "Pauline" epistles were particularly influ ential: Galatians on Christians "betwitched" into turning "back wards" to Jewish circumcision, and Romans 1 on turning back from truth to lies, in verses that coupled the "uncleanness" of idol atry with a sexual "turning" from "natural vse" to "that which is against nature."7 Galatians 1.7 refers to those who "pervert the Gospel of Christ" (a "pervert" that corresponds to the convertere of the Vulgate text), providing one of the sources for early modern descriptions of "turning Turk" (or "returning Jew") as a reverse conversion. (Alexander Ross claims, for example, that "The Turks are preposterously zealous in praying for the conversion, or per version rather, of Christians to their irreligious Religion.") Galatians as a whole provided an important authority for the con trast between teleological progression "forward" and its "back ward" perversion. The Geneva gloss on Galatians 3.3 describes the forbidden mixing of Christian faith with the abrogated Jewish "Lawe" as moving "backward" rather than "forward": "If the Lawe be to be ioyned with faith, this were not to goe forward, but back ward." Galatians explicitly associates this backward conversion with being "bewitcht" into turning from the "Spirit" to fleshly "cir cumcision." Regressing to the Hebrew testament is here identified Parker 3 with "Agar,* glossed both as Abraham's bondwoman and as Sinai, a "mountaine in...

pdf

Share