Robert E. Stillman - Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England

Christian Identity, Piety,
and Politics in Early Modern England

ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern

Series Editors:

David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson

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CHRISTIAN IDENTITY,
PIETY, AND POLITICS
IN EARLY
MODERN ENGLAND

ROBERT E. STILLMAN

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

Copyright 2021 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941549

ISBN: 978-0-268-20041-1 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20040-4 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20043-5 (Epub)

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For Sam and Alex and Denise

I do love nothing in the world so much as you

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some books spring up like mushrooms in the night, and some cycle toward eventual completion like the long quests of Spenserian romance. Humphrey Tonkin first taught me to read Philip Sidney as an international poet, and Roger Kuin to read him against the background of those cosmopolitan humanists who supplied his education in politics and piety, and who taught him how to read and to write books. Learning to understand Philip Sidney among the Philippists excited my curiosity about wider networks of irenically minded Christians seeking the peace of Christendom. In the course of exploring those networks and their potential for illuminating Englands post-Reformation culture, I have been supported mightily by some attentive guides and friends.

Roger Kuin commented on a rough draft of this manuscript, and his probing comments enabled me to understand what this book could become. I have had regular advice from two of my brilliant younger colleagues, Nandra Perry and Timothy Crowley, who gave up time from book projects of their own to help mine. I am grateful for their time and for their unfailingly fine insights. Anne Lake Prescott has helped me to learn how grace presses through the seams of even the most seemingly secular poetry of the early modern era. I have benefited at different stages of composition from the sharp editorial skills and intellectual agility and kindness of Mary Ellen Lamb, as well as from conversations about Renaissance rhetoric with Gavin Alexander; about the Renaissance Aristotle with Micah Lazarus; about scholarly narratives with Christian Gerard; about energeia with Daniel Lochman; about Sidney and Scotland with Arthur Williamson; about Catholic women with Susannah Monta; and about religious identity and the Psalms with Hannibal Hamlin. I am grateful too for the support of David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson, the editors of the University of Notre Dame Presss series ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern, and for the Presss anonymous readers, who inspired a better book than I first sent them. Last, I want to express my appreciation of the Humanities Center at the University of Tennessee for awarding me a fellowship to pursue my research and writing, and the good conversation it enabled with colleagues like Misty Anderson and Anthony Welch.

Part of Chapter 5 appeared previously as I Am Not I: Philip Sidney and the Energy of Fiction, Sidney Journal 30, no. 1 (2012): 126. I am grateful to the Journal for permission to reprint this material. My manuscript preserves the idiosyncrasies of early modern English print except when they threaten clarity. I have silently transposed u to v, and i to j, and the long () to the lower case s in book titles and citations when comprehension is at stake.

Prologue

THE TORN VESTURE OF SALVATION: CONFESSING WITHOUT NAMES

The Reformation fragmented the once-whole and holy body of Christendom, a locus of spiritual and political unity whose loss was universally lamented, even if that unity had never been fully complete or fully holy.

This is a book about Christians in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England who espoused forms of piety, who engaged in politics, and who wrote bodies of fiction informed by a wholly different understanding about repairing Christendom and remediating conflict among the divided confessions. These figures were educators, jurists, poets, men of business and courtiers, diplomats and divines, women of consequence and women aspiring to consequence. My book studies their identity as Christians without names and their agency as cultural actors in order to recover their consequence for early modern religious, political, and poetic history. All expressed horror at confessional namesrefusing any name but Christianand puzzled thereby every category that might explain or explain them away. From the vantage of these early moderns, the division among the churches seemed neither irreparable nor self-evidently permanent. It seemed like something altogether more startling.

Division was itself a term that provoked divided responses. Thomas Nashe knew whom to blame for shredding the church (that vesture of salvation) into so many pieces, thereby soiling its partsthe Anabaptists and adulterous Familists and Martinists with a hood with two faces, to hide their hypocrisy; and the barrowists and greenwoodians a garment full of the plague, which is not to be worne before it be new washed. Your If is your only peacemaker, says Shakespeares Touchstone. Ecumenism had its politics, ecclesiastical and otherwise, and the rhetoric of division was regularly co-opted for institutional ends.