Domestic disputations at the dung heap: A reception history of Job and his wife in Christianity of the West

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DOMESTIC DISPUTATIONS AT THE DUNG HEAP: A RECEPTION HISTORY OF JOB AND HIS WIFE IN CHRISTIANITY OF THE WEST by Katherine Low

Bachelor of Arts, 1996 Doane College Crete, NE

Master of Divinity, 2004 Brite Divinity School Fort Worth, TX

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of Brite Divinity School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Biblical Interpretation Fort Worth, TX December 2010

UMI Number: 3443324

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©Katherine Low 2010

To my daughter Lila Belle, my beautiful night who illuminates my days.

Table of Contents List of Ilustrations .......................................................................................................... i List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................... v Acknowledgments........................................................................................................ vi INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER ONE: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR BIBLICAL RECEPTION STUDY, CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDER, AND JOB ..................... 7 Methodological Considerations ................................................................................ 8 Reception History and Literary Paradigms: German Reception History............ 16 Reception History and Cultural Paradigms: Communication Studies ................ 19 A Circulated Image of Job: Highlighting Issues and Themes ................................ 25 Gender and the Gendered Body: A Wider Lens ..................................................... 29 The Gendered Body ............................................................................................ 34 The Book of Job: A “Received” Prologue/Epilogue .............................................. 40 “Curse God and Die” .......................................................................................... 48 The Emasculation of Exile: Job and Gender........................................................... 55 Job in Pain ........................................................................................................... 59 In the Guise of War ............................................................................................. 62 Early Receptions of Job .......................................................................................... 69 CHAPTER TWO: JOB AND HIS WIFE IN EARLY CHRISTIAN ART ................ 81 Christian Artistic Receptions of Familiar Greco-Roman Forms ............................ 83 An Early Christian Artistic Standard for Job and His Wife: Christian Adaptations of Roman Marriage Ideals ...................................................................................... 89 The Figure of Job in Early Christian Art ............................................................ 98 Job as Citizen and Manly Athlete ................................................................. 100 Job’s Sella Curulis ........................................................................................ 107 Job’s Wife in Early Christian Art ..................................................................... 110 Satan and the Wife’s Bread........................................................................... 111 A Modest Mourning Wife ............................................................................. 123 Summary ............................................................................................................... 132

CHAPTER THREE: EDEN’S DUNGHILL: JOB AND HIS WIFE IN MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY AND IN THE MIRROR OF HUMAN SALVATION [SPECULUM HUMANÆ SALVATIONIS] ...................................................................................... 134 Medieval Preaching and the Background of Speculum Humanae Salvationis ..... 142 Adam and Eve Compared to Job and his Wife: A Latin Tradition Passed Down Through the Middle Ages ..................................................................................... 159 Medieval Gendered Deviant Speech ..................................................................... 191 Summary ............................................................................................................... 200 CHAPTER FOUR: “MORE SHAMELESS THAN THE DEVIL”: EARLY MODERN FORMS OF THE DEVIL AT THE DUNG HEAP AND DEBATES ON MARRIAGE ............................................................................................................. 202 Medieval Bodies ................................................................................................... 207 Changing Views of Roles at the Dung Heap ........................................................ 218 Paintings of Job and his Wife from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries . 231 “More Shameless Than the Devil”: How Job and His Wife Figure in Early Modern Marital Literature .................................................................................................. 246 Summary ............................................................................................................... 273 CHAPTER FIVE: FROM COMPLACENCY TO CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION: JOB AND HIS WIFE IN WILLIAM BLAKE’S ENGRAVINGS........................... 276 Introduction: Romantic Sublimity and Job ........................................................... 276 William Blake’s Exceptional Take of Job’s Wife ................................................ 286 Blake’s Theological Outlooks............................................................................... 290 Blake’s Book of Job .............................................................................................. 297 Job Meets Jesus Christ: Blake’s Overall Meaning for Job ............................... 301 Job, Humanity, God, and Satan .................................................................... 308 Job and His Wife in Blake’s Job Series ................................................................ 336 Job’s Wife as Job’s Emanation ......................................................................... 344 Summary ............................................................................................................... 356 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... 359 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................... 363

List of Ilustrations Figures 1.1. Historiated Initial, Latin Bible (Jerome, Prologue to Job). Paris, Almagest Atelier, c. 1120-30. MS 317. Photo courtesy of University of Colorado at Boulder, Special Collections. 2.1. Wall painting of Job from the catacombs of St. Calixtus, Rome. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society. 2.2. Wall painting of Job from the Cemetery of Apronianus, Rome, in the catacombs of St. Marcellino and Pietro. Fourth century. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society. 2.3. Job and wife wall painting in the Via Latina Catacomb. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society. 2.4. Drawing of Job and wife of a damaged sarcophagus Church of St. Sebastiano, Rome. Picture from J. Wilpert, Sarcofagi Cristiani Antichi II (1932), p. 266. Photo: Christian Art Index, Princeton University. 2.5. Sarcophagus in Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Cristiano, Lateran 164. Photo: Christian Art Index, Princeton University. 2.6. Job and his Wife on the Sarcophagus Junius Bassus from 359 C.E. in the Treasury Museum of St. Peter’s, Rome. Photo: ARTstor. 2.7. Sarcophagus Junius Bassus from 359 C.E. in the Treasury Museum of St. Peter’s, Rome. Photo: ARTstor. 2.8. Sacrophagus of C. Junius Euhodus and Metilia Acte. Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican, Rome. 2nd cent. C.E.. Photo: Ann Raia, www.vroma.org. 2.9. Adoration of the Magi, Sarcophagus of Flavius Julius Catervius, Tolentino Cathedral. 4th century C.E.. Photo: ARTstor. 2.10. Wall painting of a dining scene from the catacombs of St. Marcellino and Pietro, Rome. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society. 2.11. The Sarcophagus of Mourning Women. Archaeological Museum, Istanbul. Photo: ARTstor. i

2.12. Rabbula Gospel folio 13r. Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana in Florence. Photo: ARTstor. 3.1. Job, His Friends, and His Wife. Bas-relief on central portal of the western façade, Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, 11-12th century. Photo: Katherine Low. 3.2. Speculum Humanae Salvationis, MS. Douce 204, fol. 020v. Catalonia, Roussillon, c. 1430-1450. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photo: ARTstor. 3.3. GKS 79, fol. 50. Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Germany, c. 1430. Photo used with permission from The Royal Library, Copenhagen, accessed from http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/218/eng/50+recto/?var 3.4. Mirror of Human Salvation. France, 15th C.E.. Ms.139, fol.22 recto, 15th century. René-Gabriel Ojéda at Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. 3.5. A German Woodcut out of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1476 from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 81. Photo: ARTstor. 3.6. A German Woodcut out of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, c. 1481 from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 83, fol. 94v, col. 1. Photo: ARTstor. 3.7. GKS 80.2. Speculum Humanae Salvationis, fol. 42v. 1400-50. Photo used with permission from the Royal Library, Cophenhagen. 4.1. Miroir de l’humaine salvation. MS Hunter 60, fol. 29v. Bruges, 1455. Glasgow University Library. Photo courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department. 4.2. Anonymous artist, “Job on the Dungheap,” in Ulrich Pinder, Speculum Patientie, Nurenburg, 1509. Photo: Bayersiche StaatsBibliothek. 4.3. Anonymous artist, “Job on the Dungheap,” in Hans von Gersdorff, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney, Ausburg, c. 1532. Photo: Bayersiche StaatsBibliothek. 4.4 Martin van Heemskerck, “Triumph of Job,” 1559. Photo used with permission from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1981. 4.5. Jan Mandyn (1500-1560). “Les épreuves de Job,” Le Musée de la Chartreuse de Douai. Photo courtesy of Photothèque—Musée de Douai. ii

4.6. Job in His Misery, Jan Lievens, 1631. The National Gallery of Canada. Photo: Courtesy of National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_zoom_e.jsp?mkey=96 86 4.7. Gioacchio Asserto, “Hiob im Elend,” Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 1635. Drawn to scale from the painting by Teresa Ann Ellis. Photo used with permission from the artist. 4.8. Gaspard de Crayer, “Job’s Adversity,” 1619. Toulouse, Musée des Augustins. Photo: Daniel Martin. Courtesy of Toulouse, Musee des Augustins. 4.9. Gerard Seghers (1591-1651), “The Patience of Job,” date unknown. National Gallery, Prague. Photo: Wikipedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seghersjob.jpg 4.10. Rubens (after), Job Tormented by Demons, Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 4.11a. Matthaeus Merian, c. 1630, “Job on the dungheap,” in Icones Biblicae. Photo: Katherine Low. 4.11b. Matthaeus Merian, c. 1630, “Job on the dungheap,” in Icones Biblicae as published in a German bible history by Raspischen Handlung, c. 1765. Photo: Katherine Low. 4.12. Bernard Picart “Job 2:9,” late seventeenth century. As reproduced in an English family Bible printed by Henry Galbraith between 1763 and 1764. Photo: Katherine Low. 4.13. Caspar Luyken, “Job II,” as published in Historia Celebriores Veteris Testamenti by Christopher Weigel, 1712. Photo: Katherine Low. 5.1. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 3 (Bentley 421.2), "Job and His Family." All William Blake's engraved illustrations of The Book of Job come from the Collection of Robert N. Essick. Copyright (c) 2009 the William Blake Archive. This project is supported in part by a William Blake Archive Reproduction Grant for Graduate Students. 5.2. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 4 (Bentley 421.3), "Satan Before the Throne of God." iii

5.3. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 23 (Bentley 421.22), "Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity." 5.4. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 5 (Bentley 421.4) "Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan." 5.5. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 13 (Bentley 421.12) "Job's Evil Dreams." 5.6. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 15 (Bentley 421.14) "The Lord Answering Job out of the Whirlwind,” image. 5.7. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 16 (Bentley 421.15) "When the Morning Stars Sang Together." 5.8. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 17 (Bentley 421.16) "Behemoth and Leviathan," image. 5.9. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 18 (Bentley 421.17) "The Fall of Satan." 5.10. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 19 (Bentley 421.18) "The Vision of Christ." 5.11. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 22 (Bentley 421.21) "Job and His Daughters." 5.12. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 9 (Bentley 421.8) "Job's Comforters." 5.13. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 8 (Bentley 421.7) "Satan Smiting Job with Boils," image. 5.14. William Blake, “The Angel of the Divine Presence Covering Adam and Eve.” Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, c. 1803. Image from and reproduction by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 5.15. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 12 (Bentley 421.11) "Job Rebuked by His Friends," image. 5.16. Herbert Granville Fell, “Job Reproveth His Wife,” in The Book of Job With Designs by Herbert Granville Fell and an Introduction by Joseph Jacobs (London, J. M. Dent; New York, Dodd/Mead, 1896). Photo: Katherine Low. iv

List of Abbreviations AJSL

The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures

BDB

Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew Lexicon

CBQ

Catholic Biblical Quarterly

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

CSEL

Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

E

David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake

J

Jerusalem by William Blake

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JSOT

Journal of the Study of Old Testament

M

Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake

MT

Masoretic Text

NRSV

New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

OTL

Old Testament Literature

PL

Patrologia Latina

SBL

Society of Biblical Literature

SHS

Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation)

SIE

Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake

T.Job

Testament of Job

VT

Vetus Testamentum

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Acknowledgments Great satisfaction comes from my working among faculty, staff, and colleagues at Brite Divinity School. They include Dr. Leo Perdue, Dr. Toni Craven, Dr. Stephen Sprinkle, Dr. Jeffrey Williams, Sandy Brandon, and Reina Rodriguez. The academic backgrounds and insights of my dissertation committee, Dr. Leo Perdue (director), Dr. David Gunn, and Dr. Namsoon Kang, enriched my work. Furthermore, I owe gratitude to those at the TCU William L. Adams Center for Writing, especially Dr. Dave Kuhne, who read drafts of this dissertation. The Interlibrary Loan department at TCU Mary Couts Burnett library was able to supply me with many sources in a timely manner and I appreciate their willingness to do so. While writing this dissertation, it has been my honor to become a mother and be reminded daily of reasons why a project such as this matters. Thank you to my daughter, Lila, in whom I find delight and daily surprise. Above all, my spouse’s support is the reason why I was able to see this work through to its completion: Thank you, Andy, for everything, including doing my share of the housework everyday! My parents might not ever read this study but they stay close to me in the writing of every word. Mom and Dad, you always remind me with your gentle spirits and your lavish love from where I have come and where I want to go. My entire family rests at the heart of this work.

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INTRODUCTION This study traces Christian interpretations in the West of Job and his wife from early Christianity into the modern era with the thesis that artists and authors focus on Job and his wife in order to make claims about their own ideal constructs of gender within their broader historical socio-religious situations as Christians. Job’s wife appears very briefly in the book of Job. She speaks one line to her husband. The text only mentions her in passing beyond the second chapter of the book. She is a silenced and unnamed figure in the biblical account. Why does Job’s wife figure so prominently in art and literature of Christianity in the West when her biblical status is that of a minor character in a book which primarily centers on a male hero and exchanges between men? Through reception history of the Bible, I argue for complex reasons for why this is so, maintaining a focus on Christian negotiations of gender, primarily within a marital ideal. I engage a cultural tradition in this dissertation that is sexist in nature. The silencing of women remains a historical reality. Idealized feminine representation in the visual arts and literature exists alongside the privleding of masculine experience and perspective. As a female Christian minister from North America, I revisit my cultural tradition with sensitivity to such a reality, while at the same time, noting a richness and variety through which people have related to Job and his wife. This richness and variety does not diminish the historical reality of sexism towards Job’s wife, but it does allow for conversations on the wider issues gender studies brings to interpretations of Job and his wife. Both Job and his wife face expectations of gender 1

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that interpreters carry from their social contexts. In studying those interpretations, biblical scholars can become aware of how they impose their own socially constructed perspectives of gender onto biblical texts through their exegetical methods. My perspective remains unique in terms of my use of gender theory to engage a reception history of Job and his wife. Numerous studies on the reception history of Job exist. A three volume study by Stephen Vicchio tracks images of Job in early, medieval, and modern Christianity and contains a wealth of resources with which to begin to study the reception history of Job.1 One single volume work by Mishael Caspi tracks the textual afterlives of Job in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.2 Individuals have contributed to the ways in which Christians have understood Job, especially Samuel Terrien’s volume on Job’s iconographical traditions.3 Terrien provides important information about how artists have interpreted Job. Due to interest in feminist studies and feminist theology in biblical studies, various articles and essays have also surfaced in recent years concerning Job’s wife. I highlight and discuss these in the section “Curse God and Die” in chapter one. All previous studies on the reception history of Job either focus primarily on Job, center on literary sources only, or lack the unique perspective that gender studies 1

Stephen Vicchio, The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, 3 vols. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006). See also, Stephen Vicchio and Lucinda Dukes Edinberg, The Sweet Uses of Adversity: Images of the Biblical Job (Baltimore, MD: IPP Press, 2002). 2 Mishael Caspi and Sara Milstein, Why Hidest Thy Face: Job in Traditions and Literature, Bibal Monograph Series (North Richland Hills: BIBAL Press, 2004). 3 Samuel Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

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brings to interpretations of Job and his wife. The fact that Job remains at the center of the book, and at the center of expanded traditions about the book of Job, gives all the more reason why the perspective of gender is valuable. I pay attention to what male authors and artists mean to convey about Job’s masculinity, and, in turn, his wife’s femininity. The guiding principle in this reception history study of Job and his wife contributes both to biblical studies and gender studies because I highlight gender specific uses of the book of Job. In other words, I emphasize material about the book of Job that represents cultural points-of-view on gender. When it comes to this dissertation, those in cultural and gender studies will find the sources valuable to their work and those in biblical studies will have an opportunity to examine exegetical perspectives on the book of Job. Even with a focus on gender, the amount of material available on Job and his wife is staggering. Therefore, I have placed another limit on this study, that of geography and religion. A rich interpretive history exists for Job’s wife in Judaism and Islam, but I only highlight Christian sources to keep to a limited scope. Furthermore, the sources emerge from viewpoints from the West and I hope that a future study beyond the so-called “Western classics” can further enhance the findings presented here. The method of reception history of the Bible requires an interdisciplinary scope, one that comes with unique challenges for biblical interpretation. I alert the reader to three issues that account for my limited perspective and interpretive

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dilemmas. First, the insights gleaned from historians about gestures require a high level of conjecture given the culturally sensitive nature of the use of gestures. I depend on numerous art historians and cultural theorists to explain certain gestures at work in art and visual culture of Job and his wife, although such a complex field requires more explanation than allowed for in this study. Second, the study of art brings with it untold or unknown contexts about who created it and for what purpose. Therefore, many assumptions brought forth about visual sources come from educated guesses as well as educated scholars. Third, I do not attempt to measure just what kind of impact any given interpretation of Job has made to its readers because to do so requires more length than allowed for here. Despite this study’s limitations, the materials set forth in it highlight significant ways that Job and his wife figure in interpretive discourse in Christianity of the West. Reception history of the Bible allows a biblical interpreter to enter into various streams of cultural tradition in order to examine the significant features of a biblical story that have made an impact in societies throughout the world. The first half of chapter one introduces reception history as a method of interpretation as it relates to cultural studies. Then, I expand on how gender theory and issues of the gendered body are the criteria for the kinds of material highlighted in this dissertation. The second half of the chapter briefly examines the book of Job in its ancient near eastern setting while focusing on what reception history brings to the book of Job even in its earliest forms. The emasculation of exile in terms of masculine negotiations in Job remains an underlying issue, and that which interpreters

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grapple with in terms of early receptions of Job. Also, gender issues serve to introduce significant gaps in the text that have made it possible for interpreters to engage Job’s wife in a variety of ways. Finally, the earliest receptions of Job and his wife are introduced, including elements from the Septuagint and the Testament of Job. All of this serves as a background to receptions of Job and his wife from Christians in the West, which the rest of the chapters cover. Chapter two of this study engages early Christian art featuring Job and his wife in order to demonstrate an emerging early Christian ideal of marriage. As Christianity solidifies into institutional power structures, it develops a form of gender socialization for proper Christian marriage. Job and his wife become part of that marital ideal. The art engages traditional Roman iconography to communicate elements of that marital ideal. Job’s wife as a proper wife of an important patriarch and a modestly grieving mother serves to provide Christians with models for proper marital behavior. Chapter three traces a medieval thread of interpretation of Job and his wife that explains their marriage in terms of Eden and a verbal interaction between Adam and Eve. This common medieval tradition to recall Adam and Eve is examined within a broader cultural phenomenon, that of gendered deviant speech and the continued establishment of Church dogma. Images of Job and his wife in which Job’s wife visually aligns with Satan, especially in The Mirror of Human Salvation (Speculum Humanae Salvationis), a popular and standard work of Christian theology which

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circulated throughout Europe during the late Middle Ages, provide evidence of an underlying theme to relate Job’s wife to a woman of deviant speech. Chapter four begins with a discussion of medieval concerns for Satan’s role in the Job story in order to assess changes that take place in early modern art of Job. When changing notions of Satan enter artistic traditions, representations of Job’s wife receive more sinister characteristics. As a result, particularly in Baroque art, Job’s wife serves not to side with Satan, or to engage in a theologically challenging and deviant speech, as much as she serves as a model for a bad wife. Her image of the shrew in Renaissance art relates to a literary trend in early modern Europe that speaks of Job and his wife in terms of proper Christian marriage in domestic conduct literature. Chapter five focuses on one artist, William Blake, because he deviates from traditional iconographical standards for Job and his wife and because his illustrations of Job continue to inspire contemporary audiences. Romantic inclinations toward sublimity and beauty inform an overall interpretation of Blake’s Job, notwithstanding Blake’s dissent of established forms of Christianity. Blake’s system of gender, as part of his ideological move toward imaginative freedom, “brotherhood,” and political deviance, remains central to why Blake depicts Job’s wife in non-traditional ways.

CHAPTER ONE: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR BIBLICAL RECEPTION STUDY, CONSTRUCTIONS OF GENDER, AND JOB The book of Job shows minimal concern for women, or, at least it keeps women on the periphery of the text, but artists throughout history ignore such a fact. Their visual representations of Job and his wife centralize their relationship, recalling a big gap in the biblical text. Job’s wife disappears after speaking one line in the biblical text, but she reappears time and again throughout history in the imaginations of poets, theologians, and especially artists. Such appearances call to mind questions of relationships between text and image. J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu note the rich complexities that emerge from an analysis of the relationships between the Bible and canvas: Staging a meaningful dialogue between the text and the canvas is often a matter of identifying an interpretive crux—a conundrum, gap, ambiguity or difficulty in the text, a stumbling block for interpretation or question that crops up repeatedly in artistic representations of it—and following its thread as it knits the text and painting together in complex and often unexpected ways.4 Exum and Nutu describe the overall trajectory of this study—to follow the artistic threads of the interpretive crux of Job and his wife. To do so, I rely on the method of reception history; yet, reception history alone will not suffice. Reception history of the Bible is a form of biblical interpretation that accesses and organizes how the Bible has impacted people through the analysis of peoples’ uses of the Bible, from

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J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu, Between the Text and the Canvas: The Bible and Art in Dialogue (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007), 2.

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commentaries, literature, and art, to music and film. Biblical interpreters who engage reception history begin first with their knowledge of the biblical text and the interpretive gaps, questions, and insights that have motivated people to interpret the biblical text in their own social and political contexts. The amount of material that demonstrates how people use the Bible throughout history remains immense. Therefore, in numerous studies on biblical reception history, especially from the Blackwell Bible Commentaries, scholars use a guiding principle, or a specific criterion through which to disseminate, organize, and analyze a vast amount of material. It is left up to the authors to emphasize the material that they find particularly impactful or historically significant.5 Methodological Considerations The methods I employ in this study to analyze receptions of Job and his wife come out of the realm of cultural studies, a term designating a large gamut of interdisciplinary academic disciplines concentrating on cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies has some distinguishable characteristics. First, it engages a broad critical landscape, from established disciplines to new movements, with a goal to examine the relationships between cultural practices and power. Power, in this case, rests within the structures of society, constantly negotiated. As Gunn and Fewell attest, any description of power will fall short because “there is always a multiplicity

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See the editorial preface in David M. Gunn, Judges, ed. John Sawyer, Christopher Rowland, and Judith Kovacs, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

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of elements (or subjects or interests) involved in power relations.”6 The concept of “hegemony” plays a key role for many cultural analyses, as hegemony connotes “struggle and confrontation between opposed ways of life.”7 Cultural critique analyzes “all parts of culture to expose their operations of power in the production of identity and in the maintenance of hegemony.”8 Second, culture is both the setting of analysis and the object of analysis.9 The term culture refers to the sum of the inter-relatedness of all social practices. Therefore, the study of culture relates to analyzing the ways humans organize into complex relationships within societies.10 When it comes to biblical studies and cultural studies, Alice Bach notes, “cultural studies allows one to legitimize the concept of being in two places at one time, that is, I can have my head in a biblical cloud and my feet planted firmly on Midwestern soil.”11 Third, cultural studies assumes cultural subjectivity of knowledge, approaching relationships between observers and the object in terms of their constant interaction. Thus, an object of study is never far from its place in politics, religion, economics, or gender. As a result, any social practice is open to consideration in cultural studies, as even cultural products of everyday life produce some form of

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Danna Nolan Fewell and David M. Gunn, Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 15. 7 Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 61. 8 A. West, "Cultural Studies," in Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, ed. John H. Hayes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), 236. 9 Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon, Introducing Cultural Studies (Cambridge: Icon Books/Totem Books, 1998), 9. 10 Hall, "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," 60. 11 Alice Bach, "On the Road between Birmingham and Jerusalem," Semeia 82 (1998): 297.

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cultural knowledge. Traditional understandings of high/popular culture dichotomies, or classical canons, become decentered in favor of what Antony Easthope calls “escheweing a foundational matrix” of knowledge, making a subject’s position problematic in light of such things as cultural institutions, ideologies, and gender.12 When it comes to the assumption that cultural studies maintains connections with new movements, such as political and activist movements, the American adaptation of cultural studies seems lacking. What began at the University of Birmingham as the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in 1964 grew out of the “New Left” philosophy, maintaining a philosophical ground in Marxism.13 One of the lead thinkers in the CCCS, Stuart Hall, notes that cultural studies, as a practice of interpretation, did not catch on in America until the 1980s, and, even then, it did so mostly in areas of communication studies. Mass communications in the 1970s in America assumed a quantitative and scientific foundation that many proponents of cultural studies attempted to subvert through the study of popular culture, cultural practices, and the politics of mass media.14 Cultural studies in America has its own emerging forms, unique from, yet connected to, the CCCS. Those forms still lack overall definition, for which many

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Antony Easthope, Literary into Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1991), 171. Easthope argues that a paradigm shift is occurring for the study of texts in British and North American institutions of higher learning, from literary studies to cultural studies, which blurs lines between canonical and popular literature. 13 Stephen D. Moore, "Between Birmingham and Jerusalem: Cultural Studies and Biblical Studies," Semeia 82 (1998). 14 Lawrence Grossberg, "Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies," in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (New York: Routledge, 1996), 136-39.

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scholars are thankful.15 Cultural studies proponents boast of the field’s ability to cross over disciplines and engage the complexity of competing discourses. However, American adaptations of cultural studies are not without their critics. The study of popular culture in America, for instance, seems to many as an act of scholars paying homage to the cult of celebrity while avoiding serious intellectual exercise. This skepticism of the study of popular culture has found its way into biblical studies, because as Roland Boer notes, “in western capitalism the Bible has by and large been claimed as a major item of ‘serious’ culture, a constitutive document of the canon of high literature.”16 Understanding popular culture as working-class culture, a class that produces cultural produces for consumption by or for working class people, Boer advocates that cultural studies serves best when addressing the living of lives amongst “vast socio-economic systems.”17 Largely dismissed from its British political roots, American cultural studies draws its main concepts from literary theory. Some of the most important critics of American cultural studies scrutinize the field for recreating another form of textual analysis, or ad-hoc and trite theorization.18 A helpful distinction in biblical studies between literary studies and cultural studies comes from a collection of essays by Fernando Segovia. He begins with three 15

Steven Jay Sherwood, Philip Smith, and Jeffrey C. Alexander, "The British Are Coming ...Again! The Hidden Agenda Of "Cultural Studies"," Contemporary Sociology 22, no. 3 (1993). 16 Roland Boer, Knockin' on Heaven's Door: The Bible and Popular Culture, Biblical Limits (New York: Routledge, 1999), 10. 17 Ibid., 6. 18 Sardar and Loon, Introducing Cultural Studies, 56-59. Post-modernism in America lends to a dismissal of Marxism as another Enlightenment “grand narrative” or one of Eurocentric determinism. See also Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, "On the Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies: 'British' Cultural Studies in an 'International' Frame," in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Routledge, 1996).

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paradigms, or “umbrella models of interpretation,” that have recently functioned in biblical studies—historical criticism, literary criticism, and cultural criticism.19 He then compares those three paradigms with his preferred emerging paradigm, which he calls “cultural studies.” For Segovia, cultural studies, as an umbrella model, can hold underneath of it a wide variety of theoretical frameworks but pivots on an important hermeneutical key, which he calls the ideological. The ideological mode of discourse within the paradigm of cultural studies focuses “on contextualization and perspective, social location and agenda, and hence on the political character of all composition and texts as well as reading and interpretation.”20 In other words, what seems consistent for many biblical scholars who engage cultural studies is their focus on perspective and power dynamics. Segovia then places himself as a postcolonial critic within the ideological mode of discourse. Segovia’s distinction as an ideological critic calls upon issues of suppression, resistance, race, class, representation, and difference. For biblical studies, as well as other kinds of area studies in American academics, “dominant paradigms have suffered from an overemphasis on what has been articulated from within the profession, and a consequent underemphasis on the voices, power struggles, and ideological conflicts outside it.”21 The study of culture reminds the reader that texts, as cultural products, are intrinsically wrapped up in societal processes. Texts, and 19

Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000). 20 Ibid., 41. 21 George Lipsitz, "Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies," American Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1990): 616.

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their interpretations, do not stand separate from contextual experiences.22 It is no wonder that Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert centralize minority voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Reading from This Place; Segovia’s focus on the ideological stems from the importance of the study of power dynamics in cultural studies.23 Segovia articulates an important overall assumption shared by many cultural studies scholars, the belief that “meaning and significance of literary texts depend on the models, codes, and values of readers.”24 Reception history, as engaged by biblical scholars, demonstrates a level of concern for this assumption, for reception history of the Bible at its very broadest means to evaluate how people have imputed biblical sources in their cultural contexts, how they depict, learn, interpret, engage, and make sense of the Bible. Due to its analysis of how culture, values, social movements, power practices, economics, technology, impact biblical interpretation, this broad definition places reception history under a rubric of cultural studies. Also, at the center of this method stand the readers who interact with biblical texts in a variety of social formations. David Gunn situates reception history under cultural criticism and reader-response under literary theory. The distinction is helpful, as Gunn notes, “it is

22

For an application of such principles to biblical study, see Robert M. Fowler, Edith Blumhofer, and Fernando F. Segovia, eds., New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millennium (New York: T & T Clark International, 2004). 23 For an exceptional essay in this work, see Gale A. Yee, "The Author/Text/Reader and Power: Suggestions for a Critical Framework for Biblical Studies," in Reading from This Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). 24 James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein, eds., Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), 75.

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an axiom of cultural studies that texts and their readers or users are in a reciprocal relationship.”25 In other words, culture impacts the Bible and the Bible impacts culture. The designation of reception history of the Bible under a cultural studies umbrella is not easily discernable in the use of reception history by biblical scholars. For instance, a recent book on reception history and biblical interpretation by a New Testament scholar, David Paul Parris, focuses entirely on the German school of reception history and the work of Hans Robert Jauss, in particular.26 Although an important aspect of reception history and biblical studies, the hermeneutics of Hans Robert Jauss represents just one of the many directions biblical scholars can take in adopting reception history for biblical interpretation. At its basic level for biblical interpretation, reception study tracks the changing intelligibility of any given work or group of works through the analysis of cultural assumptions audiences throughout the centuries bring to the work in question. The presence of the word history in reception history does not indicate an objective cataloging of data from past events. Rather, the history in reception history signals the ongoing manifestations of interpretations that remain situated in culture. Thus, cultural analysis informs reception history, because, in the words of Mieke Bal,

25

David M. Gunn, "Cultural Criticism: Viewing the Sacrifice of Jephthah's Daughter," in Judges & Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, ed. Gale A. Yee (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 204. 26 David Paul Parris, Reception Theory and Biblical Hermeneutics, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009).

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cultural analysis “problematizes history’s silent assumptions,” not isolating or enshrining a certain past, but understanding the cultural situatedness of everything.27 Many biblical scholars place reception history with reader-oriented approaches, such as reader response.28 Hayes’ Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, includes “reader-reception criticism” under the wider category of reader-response criticism.29 The term, reception history, as John Sawyer points out, did not make it into either of the two Dictionaries of Biblical Interpretation, the SCM one by Richard Coggins and Lesley Houlden published at the beginning of the Nineties, or the two-volume one of John Hayes published by Abingdon at the end of the Nineties. Nor did it make it into the Post-Modern Bible (1995) or The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (1998), but I suggest that it is now perhaps gaining ground and has become the most accurate and convenient way to describe an approach to the text which takes account of its impact on society and its many AFTERLIVES and CONTEXTUALIZATIONS—two other usefully transparent terms incidentally that are now widely used.30 Sawyer points out that biblical texts impact society. Therefore, one paradigm for reception history comes from the literary theory of the German school. On the other hand, Jauss has little to no impact in the use of reception history as a method in media studies, mass communication, and audience analysis.31 After providing an 27

Mieke Bal, "Introduction," in The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, ed. Mieke Bal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 1. 28 See, for example, K. M. Newton, ed., Twentieth-Century Literary Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 187-99. 29 E. V. McKnight, "Reader-Response Criticism," in Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, ed. John H. Hayes (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), 372. 30 John F. A. Sawyer, "The Place of Reception-History in a Post-Modern Bible Commentary" (paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature, Art of Hebrew Bible Commentary Consultation, Nashville, 2000). Available online at http://www.bbibcomm.net/news/sawyer.html. 31 For instance, see Susan R. Suleiman, "Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism," in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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overview of both approaches to reception history—literary and cultural—I establish my own typology for the kind of reception history of the Bible that I use in this dissertation. Reception History and Literary Paradigms: German Reception History Working out of an atmosphere of rethinking the literary-academic environment of German universities in the late sixties, Hans Robert Jauss applied Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm shift to literary scholarship. His 1969 “Paradigm Change in Literary Scholarship” argued that the old “formalist” paradigm no longer applied to literary study.32 Jauss refereed between two extremes of his day. Formalism lacked historical depth, according to Jauss, and Marxist literary criticism focused solely on the text as historical artifact. In both cases, a historical-positivistic literary approach assumes that a text’s meaning resides within the text and an interpreter uses the appropriate tools (historical, grammatical, and philological tools) to unlock that meaning. For Jauss, the text holds a social function and an aesthetic dimension: “a literary work is not an object that stands by itself . . . . It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers.”33 A text, however, carries specific characteristics of literary category (genre) that guide reading. 32

Hans Robert Jauss, "Paradigmawechsel in Der Literaturwissenschaft," Linguistische Berichte 3 (1969). See a discussion of this in its context in Robert C. Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 8-11. 33 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

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Influenced by Hans Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics of the fusion of horizons, Jauss applies a “horizon of expectations” to a work. Authors inscribe in a text their understandings of their place in the past and the expectations they have for their reading public. Jauss assumes a time-gap between text and reader: the task of interpreting the tension between text and present as a process in which the dialogue between author, reader, and new author deals with the temporal distance in the back-and-forth of question and answer, of original answer, present question, and new solution.34 Jauss expresses a dialogical hermeneutic between text and reader. The reader negotiates “the hidden nexus between past and future.”35 Jauss believed in the reality of historical distance between texts and readers. The concept of “horizon” (Erwartungshorizont) serves to fuse the gap, but not to overcome it. Whereas something “foreign” or “distant” distances a text from a reader, horizons come together through conversation. Taking the term horizon of expectations from an art historian, Jauss thought of “horizon” as an entire set of mental expectations a reader brings to a text in the same way a viewer would bring a set of expectations to interpret a work of art.36 For example, a reader brings a different set of expectations to reading a novel as opposed to an encyclopedic reference because of the nature of differences in genre.

34

Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xxxvi. 35 Ibid., 67. 36 Parris, Reception Theory and Biblical Hermeneutics, 151. As for the art historian of particular influence to Jauss, see E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Millennium ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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In the UK, the terms Rezeptionsgeschichte (“reception history”) and Wirkungsgeschichte (“history of influence”) are used interchangeably to communicate how reading remains situated in history.37 Gadamer coined the latter term in Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method). Robert Holub calls Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy a “precursor” to the development of reception history as a method by Jauss because Gadamer focuses primarily on philosophical ideas of history and being-in-the-world whereas Jauss adapts such ideas for relationships between literature and history.38 Reception history made little to no impact in America until the 1980s when Robert Holub published the first overview of reception history in English in 1984.39 The kind of reception history to which Holub refers remains centered in the German school. For Holub, the most basic meaning of reception theory reflects a move from focusing on author of the text to the reader of the text.40 Several shortcomings from the reception history of the German school include the limitedness of a singular reader “horizon.” Jauss’ concept of horizon kept an individual reader in private quarters, in private conversation with a literary work. Many reception theorists following Jauss advocate for a multiplication of horizons of expectations based not only on the individuality of a reader but also from social 37

Rachel Nicholls, "Is Wirkungsgeschichte (or Reception History) a Kind of Intellectual Parkour (or Freerunning)?," in Use and Influence of the New Testament Seminar Group at the British New Testament Conference (2005). 38 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). See the discussion of Gadamer in Robert C. Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1984), 36-45, 53. 39 Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. 40 Ibid., xii.

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contexts and historical movements of the reader(s).41 Moreover, the concept of fusion of horizons philosophically addresses the concept of reading, which is why many works include reception history under discussions of reader-reception, but this direction limits itself to literary history. For the purposes of this study, it is not enough for reception history to shift the subject from author(s) to reader(s). Reception History and Cultural Paradigms: Communication Studies One major assumption of reception history is that “meaning” cannot exist as an objective entity within a text without the influence of the culture of those of who read the text. Or, as Parris puts it, “possible meaning” comes from “the fusion of horizons: from meaning as a static concept to a dynamic one.”42 On the extreme end of this meaning spectrum, Stanley Fish denies any objective independence of a text; no text contains inherent meaning beyond what a community of readers ascribes to it.43 His arguments communicate the importance of contextual interpretation. In order to deal with consequential relativism of his reader-orientated ideas, Fish calls into question a dichotomy of text as object and reader as subject. Rather than suggesting that a text holds specific intended meaning, reading consists of “a succession of decisions made by readers about an author’s intention.”44 In other words, a readerly interpretation creates the author’s intentions. An interpreter chooses an interpretation 41

William M. Schniedewind, Society and the Promise to David: The Reception History of 2 Samuel 7:1-17 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6-7. 42 Parris, Reception Theory and Biblical Hermeneutics, 150. 43 Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). 44 Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting the 'Variorum'," Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (1976): 476.

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based on certain communal norms of reading, or “interpretive strategies,” that come from what Fish calls “interpretive communities.” These strategies preexist before reading, and, therefore, dictate the form of reading and create the outcomes of meaning.45 A biblical scholar, L. William Countryman, attempting to bring “discrete methods (literary, social scientific, historical, etc.) into conversation,” in light of “increasing fragmentation of method,” argues against too narrow of a focus in one’s own method of interpretation.46 Interpreters today, “standing at the conclusion of the modern era and the beginning of something else that has not yet become clear,” will best serve biblical studies by situating themselves in broader communities.47 As a result, Countryman proposes an interpretive triad between text, interpreter, and interpretive communities. Ascribing to some textual self-sufficiency, Countryman states, “to say that there is an author or, at any rate, some human presence shaping the text is to reaffirm that the text is indeed the product of a particular place and time.”48 A.K.M. Adam draws upon Stanley Fish’s work to deny any readerly claims to objectivity in interpretation. But, he concedes to some kind of “objective existence of

45

Ibid., 483-484. For a discussion of Stanley Fish and others who work out of literary studies and inform reception study, see Philip Goldstein, Communities of Cultural Value (New York: Lexington Books, 2001), 1-51. 46 L. William Countryman, Interpreting the Truth: Changing the Paradigm of Biblical Studies (New York: Trinity Press International, 2003), 1-13. 47 Ibid., 16. 48 Countryman, Interpreting the Truth: Changing the Paradigm of Biblical Studies, 27.

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the text while denying it any functional efficacy.”49 In other words, a text can stand alone but means nothing without human interpretation. The concept of text remains central to the discussions of the scholars above, as many, especially biblical scholars, assume a text exists in the form of written word. After all, texts are clear artifacts of any society, but not the only artifacts. The previous section focused on reception history in terms of literary studies, which, for biblical scholars, remains a central area of inquiry. But, under the growing impact of cultural studies and its attention to all cultural forms of media, reception history has informed television/film, audience study, and communication studies as a whole. Constant realignments are taking place among multiple disciplines, especially those that engage in qualitative and quantitative research, even as the distinctions between “qualitative” and “quantitative” blur. 50 For instance, Klaus Bruhn Jensen demonstrates the potential for humanities scholarship of theoretical application to engage quantitative research in mass communication because media is both a social and discursive phenomenon. He suggests that social semiotics exists as a common ground.51 The study of the impact of the Bible, whether in textual manifestations or even in oral transmissions in media messages, demonstrates that the audiences’ activity in 49

A. K. M. Adam, Faithful Interpretation: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 127. 50 James Hays, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella, "Introduction," in The Audience and Its Landscape, ed. James Hays, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 51 Klaus Bruhn Jensen, "After Convergence: Constituents of a Social Semiotics of Mass Media Reception," in The Audience and Its Landscape, ed. James Hays, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

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receiving those messages is part of reception history. One of the areas of most development in terms of audiences and viewers engaging biblical interpretations and the impact on those interpretations on society has been film studies.52 Incorporating the influential film theory of Laura Mulvey, “the male gaze,”53 into the study of religious visual culture, David Morgan creates the phrase “the sacred gaze.” Visual culture, as a mode of analysis, studies images, the practices surrounding the use of those images, and convergences of cultural meanings adapted for various contexts. Morgan defines the sacred gaze as a cultural term designating the range of seeing spiritually significant imagery in a variety of mediums. He suggests that any visual culture contains around it a “field of vision,” a whole complex gamut of how images connect with viewers, audiences, subjects, and cultural conventions. The literary influences behind any image remain just one of the many influences of an image. 54 Morgan notes a modern practice of grounding textuality in reading texts in print. But, at its very basic, textuality “is about message-sending and about the correct decoding of the message.”55 Furthermore, Mieke Bal advocates that one can “read” art. From a semiotics perspective, reading images is similar to reading printed text; a reader or viewer attributes meaning to a visual work through encoded signs and thus engages in an interpretive process. The meanings of signs come from one’s socio52

For an effective example, see David M. Gunn, "Bathsheba Goes Bathing in Hollywood: Words, Images, and Social Locations," in Semeia 74: Biblical Glamour and Hollywood Glitz, ed. Alice Bach (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996). 53 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 54 David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 55 Ibid., 89.

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historical context. In other words, a reader or viewer frames an interpretation in a socio-historical cultural context.56 Reading visual culture, or, as Louis Marin deems “pictorial texts,” involves a level of complexity in terms of encoded messages within a work’s iconographical landscape.57 The very idea of “representation” means that a pictorial sign stands for something else, to re-present an element in its own unique form. A biblical painting, for instance, fixes one point of a story onto space; viewers are not privy to the “before and after” when they see the pictorial text itself. An artist projects a point of time onto a fixed space, engaging conventions from his/her/their visual repertoire. The visual vocabulary of symbols—colors, gestures, clothing, lighting, landscape—come from an artist’s cultural backgrounds—his or her education, historical context, religious background, etc. The importance of reception, whether in literary or visual contexts, in a cultural studies orientation, rests in how “semiotic practices, social forms, and ideological frames operating within specific cultural contexts and historical moments configure human subjectivity.”58 From her perspective as an art historian, Elizabeth Sears calls attention to two main currents in “reading” images. First, a scholar can proceed with an iconographical analysis of an image, tracing artistic conventions usually in reference 56

Mieke Bal, "Reading Art?," in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (New York: Routledge, 1996), 25-42. 57 Louis Marin, "Toward a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's the Arcadian Shepherds," in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 58 From the introduction to “Reception Study, Cultural Studies, and Mass Communication,” in Machor and Goldstein, eds., Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, 203.

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to written works. As Sears notes, “part of this process involves constructing prior histories of visual motifs and charting the ways that given figures and concepts were represented over time.”59 Another way to “read” images comes not from content analysis but from visual culture, in other words, the various threads that interact with the image, such as the patron, the financial arrangements, gender, class, ethnicity, and other socio-cultural contexts. An effective analysis of art will pay attention to both content and culture, illuminating “broader currents in the field.”60 In his model of encoding/decoding, Stuart Hall applies semiotics to audience reception, especially in television. His model has its limits for biblical studies and reception history, but some concepts provide fruitful substance for the topic at hand. For instance, visual discourse, as Hall puts it, cannot completely mediate an entire concept. Bal’s definition of disources fits this situation: “Discourse implies a set of semiotic and epistemological habits that enables and prescribes ways of communicating and thinking that others who participate in the discrouse can use;” it implies some “unexamined assumptions.”61 A visual representation is a discursive message about something, even if those messages have been naturalized to seem real in that they align perfectly with that which is being represented. A visual sign of a biblical story is not the whole biblical story itself but represents a partial picture of a biblical story. Such visual signs almost become natural or real when they are widely 59

Elizabeth Sears, "'Reading' Images," in Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. Elizabeth Sears and Thema K. Thomas (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 2. 60 Ibid., 3. 61 Bal, "Introduction," 7.

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distributed.62 To illustrate Hall’s main points and to provide a touchstone visual example that will carry through the rest of the discussion on theoretical considerations for this chapter, I introduce a standard image of Job from medieval times. A Circulated Image of Job: Highlighting Issues and Themes The conflation of the characters in Job, including Job, his wife, the Devil, and Job’s friends together in one scene, remains one of the most significant naturalized visual signs that mark the story of Job. Take, for instance, a historiated initial in figure 1.1, decorating the letter ‘U’ in a Latin Bible from Paris. Figure 1.1 is a visual representation of Job that means to communicate the entire story of Job in one illustration. It is a quintessential medieval image of Job, one of many of similar form that circulated around Europe during the Middle Ages. The image is meant to be distributed among audiences. Elaborate historiated initials of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries marked the beginnings of chapters and books. Since such an initial functioned as a “visual aid to remembering,” so that the one could use the illustration as “a guide to lead one through the vast text,” a “device to help a reader use a manuscript,” as noted by Christopher De Hamel,63 then the image also puts lasting impressions on the memory of the reader. Furthermore, medieval artists worked “according to a specific formula, and this most often meant using designs and

62

Stuart Hall, "Encoding, Decoding," in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 95-96. 63 Christopher De Hamel, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 101.

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compositions with a familiar precedent.”64 Medieval artists adhered to artistic tradition, visually retelling the story in the established way, in a visual sign familiar to an audience with its own set of social expectations. Stuart Hall speaks of message exchange in terms of “production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction.”65 The meaning of a circulated and distributed image or representation comes when people “receive” the image and frame the understanding of that image in social practice or ideology. In terms of the continuation of a dominant image, Hall states, “there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’; and these both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized.”66 When examining an image of Job through a reception history model, Hall provides a guiding principle: the ideology and the institutional mechanisms at work in certain visual patterns. In other words, what does the Church, as an institutional power, gain by keeping certain images of Job in circulation? Using gender theory to help illuminate cultural schema at work, this study focuses on specific patterns for Job and his wife as they function for Christians. With Hall’s focus on the institutionalization of images in mind, a brief discussion of the underlying assumptions at work in figure 1.1 will set the stage for what to expect in terms of the use of reception history in this dissertation. Figure 1.1 accompanies a biblical translation approved by the Church, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, 64

Ibid., 195. Hall, "Encoding, Decoding," 91. 66 Ibid., 98. 65

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which Pope Damasus 1 commissioned in 382. By the seventh century, Jerome’s Latin version became the standard translation for the Church, especially with an endorsement by Augustine. Even though Jerome paid close attention to Hebrew, Jerome relied heavily on Septuagint versions of Job. For instance, the Vulgate keeps Job on a dung heap (sterquilinio); the Greek text changed the Hebrew term in 2:8 from an ash-pile (rpah) to a dung-pile outside the city (th/j kopri,aj e;xw th/j po,lewj). For main concepts and literary sources, this dissertation is indebted to Stephen Vicchio’s three volumes on the history of the biblical Job. Vicchio coins the phrase “Saint Job,” a common motif in Christianity that concentrates on Job’s patient suffering most evident in the prose section of Job, over and against an iconoclastic Job found in the poetic sections.67 The image of figure 1.1 is no exception because it conflates characters from the prologue of Job with the three friends of Job, who are primary actors in the poetic sections. Also, the image presents Satan in traditional Christian understanding, with animal-like qualities, even though “the adversary” (‫ ;השׂטן‬hā sātan) in the book of Job appears before God’s throne as one of the members of the heavenly council. The institutional motivations to include Satan in the image of Job stem from issues of salvation, impressing upon the viewer a sense of Satan’s snares and the need for repentance. Chapters three and four of this dissertation will further discus Satan’s role in traditional Christianity as it affects Job.

67

Stephen J. Vicchio, Job in the Medieval World, 3 vols., vol. 2, The Image of the Biblical Job: A History (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 7.

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Fig. 1.1. Historiated Initial, Latin Bible (Jerome, Prologue to Job). Paris, Almagest Atelier, c. 112030. MS 317. Photo courtesy of University of Colorado at Boulder, Special Collections.

In figure 1.1, Job’s wife shrouds her left hand while holding it up to her mouth while she points with her right hand. Chapter two will examine her gesture more closely in early Christian art, and chapter three will address her role in medieval art. In terms of the circulation of this standard “snapshot” of the book of Job, a question remains why the artist even includes Job’s wife, especially when Job spends most of his time in the biblical book conversing with his friends, and Job’s wife disappears after the second chapter of the book. A broad answer comes from theologians from early Christianity through the early modern period and their focus more on Job as a

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Christian saint, battling Satan. The more trials artists can compound on Job the more saintly he appears. Therefore, Job’s wife comes to represent a whole package of assumptions about marriage, female vulnerability to Satan, and religious expectations of gendered behavior. At this point, I now turn to gender theory, which provides the necessary criteria with which to focus on material about Job and his wife in this dissertation. Gender and the Gendered Body: A Wider Lens Hardly any female biblical scholars commentate on Job. So Victor Sasson indicates in a footnote in his brief article on Job’s wife.68 Since the late 1990s, only a handful of women have written full commentaries on the book of Job.69 My answer for Victor Sasson in regard to a lack of female commentators on Job comes from the historical development of feminism in biblical studies. The political and social women’s movements of the 1960s and 70s, deemed Second Wave Feminism, faced challenges of sexual discrimination and inequality. Feminists of all kinds engaged institutions that held women at an ideological subordination—an assumption of the natural inferiority of women. The burgeoning challenges to male hegemonic control

68

See n. 2 in Victor Sasson, "The Literary and Theological Function of Job's Wife in the Book of Job," Biblica 79 (1998). 69 Including Katharine J. Dell, The Book of Job as Sceptical Literature, ed. Otto Kaiser, Beihefte Zur Zeitschrift Für Die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991); F. Rachel Magdalene, On the Scales of Righteousness: Neo-Babylonian Trial Law and the Book of Job, Brown Judaic Studies ; No. 348 (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2007); Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); E. J. van Wolde, Mr and Mrs Job (London: SCM Press, 1997).

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of Western society and woman as “other” ranged from radical, reformed, literary, psychoanalytical, to egalitarian theorists.70 In the 1980s, feminist biblical scholarship slowly emerged as an “acceptable” category in the mainstream field of biblical interpretation.71 During the 1980s, one of the major goals of feminist scholarship was “to uncover positive portrayals of women in the Bible.”72 Traditionally, a feminist interpreter centralizes women’s voices and experiences.73 The editorial preface to Women in Scripture summarizes a feminist perspective: it “seeks to understand a text specifically for the way it functions as a representation of women’s lives and experiences and also to evaluate whether sexism is encoded in the text. . .”74 Generally, feminists acknowledge that biblical literature comes from patriarchal contexts. Patriarchy (rule of the father) as the main structure of home, state, church, education, and workplace serves as the central ideological challenge to feminist theory.75 Therefore, a form of a feminist canon has emerged in which feminist biblical scholars can engage their agendas to centralize women in light of a history of patriarchal subordination. Deborah Sawyer lists texts in a “feminist canon,” including those in which women are central characters, victims of patriarchal 70

Ginette Castro, American Feminism: A Contemporary History, trans. Elizabeth LoverdeBagwell (New York: New York University Press, 1990). 71 Phyllis Trible, "The Effects of Women's Studies on Biblical Studies: An Introduction," JSOT 22 (1982). 72 Cheryl Exum, "Second Thoughts About Secondary Characters: Women in Exodus 1.82.10," in A Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy, ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 76. 73 Ruth Robbins, "Introduction: Will the Real Feminist Theory Please Stand Up?," in Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide, ed. Julian Wolfreys (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 74 Carol L. Meyers, Toni Craven, and Ross Shepard Kraemer, Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), x. 75 Robbins, “Introduction,” 50.

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structures, and active participants for their own destiny.76 Most likely due to the scant presence of women in the book, the book of Job is not in the list. One major consequence of feminisms is the correlation between the construction of female behavior and the construction of masculine behavior. Feminisms drew attention to the many ways women’s experiences have been naturalized; the idea of men as gendered beings was largely left uninvestigated. By the time a prominent scholar of gender, Judith Butler, begins writing her now influential Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published in 1990, one of the wider known by-products of feminism began to cause concern.77 In 1985, Eve Sedgwick called attention to homosocial bonds that maintain heterosexual patriarchal power; men learn about masculinity, since the seventeenth century anyway, through their relationships with other men in culturally sanctioned ways.78 Sedgwick’s account of heterosexuality is situated in a structuralist position, Levi-Strauss’s theory of the exchange of women, because she accounts for implicit homosocial bonds that are formed through a man desiring a woman. Women, essentially, come “between men” in that they act as material rewards for male relationships. An overall goal of Judith Butler’s work is to challenge the culturally

76

Deborah F. Sawyer, "Gender Criticism: A New Discipline in Biblical Studies or Feminism in Disguise?," in A Question of Sex? Gender and Difference in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, ed. Deborah W. Rooke (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2007). 77 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). One of the most succinct discussions I’ve found on this topic is Toby L. Ditz, "The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History," Gender & History 16, no. 1 (2004). 78 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

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fixed constructions of gender present in a Levi-Straussian model picked up by Jacques Lacan that turns sexuality into a symbolic reality that essentially locks males and females into rigid categories. In a reaction to the impact of Sedgwick’s work, Butler notes that “the Lacanian feminist insistence on the primacy of the phallus” maintains sexual difference in an inescapable heterosexual position, but Sedgwick’s Between Men has had lasting implications for queer theory because it complicates desire and calls into question how desire affects identity.79 Butler’s work emerges out of feminism, but widens its lenses and challenges established lines of interpretation within feminism.80 This “wider lens”81 does not exclude previous feminist analyses but positions the ideas of “man” and “woman” in an unfixed and complicated process of relations. Gender is an unfixed cultural process. Gender is what any given culture constructs as “man” and “woman” based on social assumptions of masculine and feminine behavior and performance. Cultures encode the concepts of “man” and

79

Judith Butler, "Capacity," in Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (New York: Routledge, 2002), 113. See also Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Wellek Library Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Judith Butler, "Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?," in Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere, ed. Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). For Sedgwick’s work in queer theory, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Sedgwick’s later works have complicated notions of performance. See, for instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 80 I have also struggled with inescapable sexual identifications and Butler’s advocacy to rid feminism of the primacy of the phallus in my area of biblical interpretation: Katherine Low, "The Sexual Abuse of Lot's Daughters: Reconceptualizing Kinship for the Sake of Our Daughters," The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26, no. 2 (2010). 81 To borrow the phrase from Sawyer, "Gender Criticism: A New Discipline in Biblical Studies or Feminism in Disguise?," 5.

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“woman” with specific meanings. The foundational work of Judith Butler rejects symmetry between the concepts of “man” and “woman;” the terms do not represent split limitations and boundaries, instead they represent negotiated terms in a fluid cultural process. Gender remains performative, but Butler warns “performative is not simply to insist on a right to produce a pleasurable and subversive spectacle but to allegorize the spectacular and consequential ways in which reality is both reproduced and contested.”82 In other words, performances of gender create the reality of gender. One point of unease from Butler’s work on gender is her heavy-handed theoretical and philosophical position that tends to ignore some realities of biology, which puts many in danger of polarizing biology/culture. Butler’s concept of gender performance allows for the possibility of queer dissections and gender crossings because she highlights that gender formation is mediated through culture and resists any account that frames “gendered characteristics in either biological or psychic structures.”83 Therefore, Butler removes links between biological processes such as menstruation, childbirth, or the production of semen to conceptualizations of masculinity and femininity as performances. Butler means to “unfix” references between biological sex and the uniformity that structures of power impose upon the body in order to regulate sexuality. The next section introduces the importance of body in terms of gender, power, and regulatory impositions of cultural institutions. 82

Butler, Undoing Gender, 30. Rachel Alsop, Annette Fitzsimons, and Kathleen Lennon, Theorizing Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 166. This is a valuable discussion and organization of gender theory. 83

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The Gendered Body Theorists are now starting to take note of the importance of body in terms of how gender plays out in society. In her book on Tobias Smollett, Aileen Douglas poignantly points out that “If you prick a socially constructed body, it still bleeds.”84 The body remains critically attached to culturally perceived “natural” boundaries of gender. Paul Goring points out, “cultural representations gain power by their association with the body precisely because the flesh can bestow authority through the persuasive rhetoric of ‘nature.’”85 To take the representation of Job in figure 1.1 as an example, the illustration depicts Job’s nude, marked body lying on a dung pile while his tormentors stand over him. Rather than displaying Job’s bodily restoration that takes place at the end of the book, the medieval artist focuses on Job’s nudity, and his suffering. Why do medieval artists make the choice to perpetuate images of Job’s broken body? In commenting on Job’s ubiquitous, barely covered body on a dunghill, Marina Warner notes that his temporary nudity, or nuditas temporalis, symbolizes the rejection of earthly goods and wealth. But, this rejection coincides with Job’s natural nudity, or nuditas virtualis, that reminds the viewer of the resurrection of flesh. An artistic focus on Job’s temporary nudity only reinforces the Church’s spiritual ambitions for the viewers, that one day nakedness will culminate in

84

Aileen Douglas, Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xxii. 85 Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19.

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heavenly nudity rather than symbolize the short-comings of the flesh.86 Job’s body helps to reinforce such a theology prevalent in the church during the Middle Ages. Michel Foucault notes that discourses on sex during the Middle Ages were “organized around the theme of the flesh and the practice of penance,” which Job in figure 1.1 emulates.87 The body, as it is represented, exhibits a society’s view of gendered constructions. As noted about Butler’s work, gender comes in the form of performativity, the sense that cultures produce expectations of gender through repeated sets of acts that appear to provide the substance of gender.88 People “do” gender, in that they “see” gender played out in their societies and they themselves “play out” gender in their corporal existence. Performativity relates to an entire gamut of cultural expectations for “proper” masculine behavior and “proper” feminine behavior. In this sense, polar genders (male and female) are cultural fictions, created to keep the body regulated in its behaviors. Butler moves gender as far away from essence as possible. In other words, gender remains a set of unfixed attributes given or assigned to one’s sex based on culture, not based on natural categories of biological sex.89 Butler relates a binary system of conceptualizing gender—man and woman— to power relations. Such gender categories depend on the stabilization of behavior in 86

Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 304. 87 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 33. 88 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 44. 89 Ibid., 179.

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society; a destabilization of gender, then, includes acknowledging that there “are the myriad ‘bodies’ that constitute the domain of gendered subjects.”90 The body does not engage in one single cultural drama but rather takes part in numerous social spaces and in numerous societal regulatory grids. The challenge becomes, for Butler, how to speak of “the body,” not as a passive entity, but as a location of multiple cultural exchanges “in which identity itself is ever shifting, indeed, where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated, and recirculated only within the context of a dynamic field of cultural relations.”91 Butler’s concept of a “dynamic field of cultural relations” engenders this study. To engage Butler with embodiment, or, to mediate between a gap between the body as a biological mechanism that dictates gendered experience and social impositions upon the body that inscribe behavior (sex/gender distinction), many authors, including Butler, have turned to Michel Foucault, who has imparted a legacy of the “social body” and its relation to power structures. Foucault has challenged a mind/body dualism and has maintained the view that the body is both a site of political struggle and an area of subjectivity. The complexity of Foucault’s claims come from the idea of power and its oscillating forms because the body becomes a site of both societal inscriptions of gendered norms and a material subject that resists and destabilizes those norms.92

90

Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 13. Ibid., 161-162. 92 See Chapter 4, “Foucault and the Body: A Feminist Reappraisal,” in Margaret A. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), 81-116. 91

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Any social system imparts prescriptions for particular behavior onto the body and uses the body to “regulate and shape society.”93 The body is involved in a dynamic process of biological and social practices. For instance, eighteenth century European and American scientists associated smaller facial measurements of the human skull to women, criminals, idiots, and “lower races.” Caucasian women seemed to biologists as more “apelike” than white men. Scientists engaged such analogies to maintain and naturalize white male hegemonic and hierarchal society.94 Smaller facial measurements may have existed, but social norms of race and gender clearly affected the scientific conclusions. A dynamic relationship exists, as “social representations and classifications of the body both shape, and are shaped by, the organic body.”95 Bryan Turner’s The Body and Society highlights how the body, as conceptualized in culture, conflates with notions of sexuality and social power.96 The body pertains not only to the nature of a human (biological), but also to the human’s situatedness in culture. The body’s physical nature contains internal structures and pre-set biological determinations, but the outer surface of the body remains 93

Lisa Isherwood, "Sex and Body Politics: Issues for Feminist Theology," in The Good News of the Body: Sexual Theology and Feminism, ed. Lisa Isherwood (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 20. 94 Nancy Leys Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 95 Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 104. 96 Although Turner builds on Foucault, he also challenges some of Foucault’s premises. For instance, Turner disagrees with Foucault when it comes to the relation between discourse and socialization. Foucault assumes that discourses have social effects, but Turner argues that a plurality of discourses about the body make it impossible to present a uniformed picture of the body in society. This critique comes mainly from Foucault’s philosophical treatments of the body in prison. See Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory, 3rd ed., Theory, Culture & Society (London; Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008).

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interpreted, represented, and situated in society. Therefore, any theoretical discussion of the body includes issues of social control.97 In one of his main premises, Turner argues that “the body lies at the centre of political struggles.”98 By “political,” Turner means the interactions of various cultural relationships. “Gender identity,” Turner states, is “inserted into physiology by socialization into specific roles and identities.”99 Turner’s statement about the insertion of gender identity into physiology leaves open the question of who does the inserting. R. W. Connell has provided an answer, one that presupposes dependency of regional, economic, racial, and religious factors on gender, but an answer, none the less, that has impacted gender studies, that of “hegemonic masculinity.” While recognizing the existence of multiple masculinities in Western gender orders, Connell’s study on masculinities builds upon Antonio Gramsci’s work on class relations and the concept of hegemony as a sustainment of power in society by a dominant group. Connell states, “Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.”100 The greatest maintainers of hegemonic masculine power are the established institutions of society, those which gain from maintaining a rigid 97

Ibid.,41-42. Turner’s primary concern when it comes to social control is to discuss how patriarchal systems in society have regulated and controlled women’s bodies. See Shilling’s assessment of Turner’s work in Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, 102-05. 98 Bryan Turner, The Body and Society, 40. 99 Ibid. 100 R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 77.

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form of gender in order to impose power over the subordinates, in this case, women. Connell emphasizes, however, that hegemonic masculinity is in constant negotiation because groups consistently challenge the dominance of rigid gendered constructions in society.101 Furthermore, one of the side-effects of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, with its focus on Christian pastoral, confession, and the denial of flesh, is the calling into question established forms of Christianity that function as major agencies of power, sequester the body into limited categories, and, as a result, maintain the subordination of women.102 Through a reception history account of Job and his wife, as well as the interplays or negotiations of gender in society, this dissertation remains centered on the institutional structures of Christianity. Due to a vast coverage of material from a variety of time periods and regions, this study relies on the ability to reference experts and further background material in the footnotes, as well as to assume that the select material covered in the dissertation represents only a small part of the book of Job, that of the marriage of Job. The friends of Job hardly receive any attention, nor do issues of theodicy, the function of wisdom in Job, the whirlwind speeches, or receptions of behemoth or leviathan, all of which could constitute great volumes of work. The next section only points out a few of the main points about the biblical text of Job, as a background to the examinations of receptions of Job and his wife that follow. As the next section notes, the book of

101

See, for instance, R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, "Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept," Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005). 102 Jeremy R. Carrette, "Prologue to a Confession of the Flesh," in Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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Job itself holds enough ambiguities to fuel ongoing debates about Job throughout the centuries of its reception. The Book of Job: A “Received” Prologue/Epilogue The book of Job consists of a variety of literary styles with possible scribal additions. It opens and closes with a prose folktale (chs. 1-2; 47:7-17) which contains different themes than the poetic sections (chs. 3-27). Also, the book contains a hymn on the inaccessibility of wisdom (ch. 28) and an addition of Elihu speeches (chs. 3237), both of which date to later in the Persian period.103 The following units, proposed by Leo Perdue, identify Job’s literary structure: The Prologue (chs. 1-2) The Dialogues (chs. 3-27) The Poem on the Inaccessibility of Wisdom (ch. 28) The Oath of Innocence (chs. 29-31) The Elihu Speeches (chs. 32-37) The Speeches from the Whirlwind (38:1-42:6) The Epilogue (42:7-17)104 The chronological literary progression of Job builds upon the prologue/epilogue prose tale that presents a patient, pious, sufferer and then incorporates a large portion of poetic dialogue in which Job assumes the role of a tragic hero, wailing about a divine and powerful tyrant who cares nothing for his subjects. When God (YHWH) answers Job’s accusations of misrule of sovereignty in the form of a whirlwind, the speech

103

There are those that argue for the place of Elihu’s speeches in the original text of Job and not as a later addition. See, for instance, Norman C. Habel, "The Role of Elihu in the Design of the Book of Job," in In the Shelter of Elyon: Essays on Ancient Palestinian Life and Literature in Honor of G. W. Ahlström, ed. W. Boyd Barrick and John R. Spencer (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984). 104 Leo G. Perdue, The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008), 123-24.

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addresses Job with a metaphor of battle.105 Thus, God and Job are opponents in the midst of a debate about God’s justice, a debate that never fully resolves, especially since God provides no specific apology or warrant for unjust actions and because Job either acquiesces out of humility or futility or subversively protests God’s divine rule.106 The didactic tale of the epilogue (42:7-17) restores the protagonist and condemns the friends for their defense of retribution because it is ultimately God’s responsibility to set things right.107 Implicitly, then, the epilogue suggests that Job’s questioning of divine authority in terms of just rule was considered a catalyst of redemption for both Job and God.108 From its conception, the book of Job relates to reception history, with its focus on how people have imputed meanings into their theological, political, and social 105

Through a form of linguistic assault, Yahweh appears to Job like the divine warrior or the storm god to restructure order. Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom in Revolt: Metaphorical Theology in the Book of Job (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1991), 210-40. 106 The lack of resolution is confounded by Job’s supposed repentance, which many have argued did not take place. If Job admits no guilt, then God’s display of power is rendered useless to answer Job’s dilemma of suffering. For essays arguing against Job’s repentance, see Thomas Krüger, "Did Job Repent?," in Das Buch Hiob Und Seine Interpretationen, ed. T. Krüger, et al. (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2007); Leo Perdue, "Creation in the Dialogues between Job and His Opponents," in Das Buch Hiob Und Seine Interpretationen, ed. T. Krüger, et al. (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2007). A claim contrary to this comes from Habel who argues that the sage author of Job means to subtly replace a warrior God with a God who is a wise sage, asking rhetorical questions about an amoral cosmic order in favor of unanswered questions rather than about giving answers : Norman C. Habel, "In Defense of God the Sage," in The Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, ed. Leo G. Perdue and W. Clark Gilpin (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992). Furthermore, some have argued for the book of Job in terms of a court case in which Job, the plaintiff, takes God, the defendant, to court in a legal process. See Rafael Chodos, "Reading the Book of Job as a Multicultural Case Report," in Probing the Frontiers of Biblical Studies, ed. J. Harold Ellens and John T. Greene (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2009); Magdalene, On the Scales of Righteousness: Neo-Babylonian Trial Law and the Book of Job. 107 Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 126-28. 108 Marvin Pope notes that the vindication of the hero is an inescapable feature of the folktale, making it hard to imagine how else the story could end. The lack of charge of Job’s guilt also suggests Job’s vindication: Marvin H. Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, vol. 15, The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1982), lxxx-lxxxi.

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developments because the book of Job is a scribal compilation of traditions that stem back to the use of an ancient folktale. By referring to the prose tale as a folktale, most scholars mean to reference the stylistic elements within it, such as dialogue between only two characters at one time, repetition of elements, numbers, and sequences, a “far away” setting, and a happy ending.109 The folktale itself has parallels in many ancient Near Eastern sources, including the Babylonian Theodicy, that highlight the suffering of an apparently righteous man.110 The fact that a previous Job narrative of some sort existed also comes from the early sixth century B.C.E. reference to the righteousness of Job in Ezekiel (14:14-20).111 Utilizing this folktale, the sage “received” an earlier didactic narrative about simple justice, the maintenance of patience and pious virtues in the midst of suffering, and retributive justice, and added a substantial poetical dialogue. The poetic sections respond and address a major event in the socio-political climate at the time, the

109

Carole Fontaine, "Folktale Structure in the Book of Job," in Directions in Biblical Hebrew Poetry, ed. Elaine R. Follis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987). For an argument that the prose/poetic contrast is deliberate, that the “folktale” means to present a picture of Job’s exaggerated piety, an overall strategy of the author, see Athalya Brenner, "Job the Pious? The Characterization of Job in the Narrative Framework of the Book," JSOT 43 (1998). 110 W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 15-94. See also M. Weinfeld, "Job and Its Mesopotamian Parallels--a Typological Analysis," in Text and Context, ed. W. Claassen (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988). Pope’s commentary also includes a section on textual difficulties of Job and the hapax legomena which occur in the book and looks to ancient Near Eastern parallels: Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, xlvii-lxxiii. 111 Ezekiel also refers to Noah and Dan’el from Ugaritic literature: Shalom Spiegel, "Noah, Danel, and Job: Touching on Canaanite Relics in the Legends of the Jews," in Louis Ginsberg Jubilee Volume 1 (English Section) (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945). See also H.M. Wahl, "Noah, Daniel Und Hiob in Ezechiel Xiv 1-20 (2-3): Anmerkungen Zum Traditionsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund," Vestus Testamentum 42 (1992). For an interesting study on the three referents in art, see Berthold Kress, "Noah, Daniel and Job: The Three Righteous Men of Ezekiel 14.14 in Medieval Art," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 67 (2004).

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Babylonian Exile, and to call into question the justice and mercy of God.112 In adapting a well known tale in Judah, possibly one that existed prior to crisis brought on by Assyrian, Egyptian, and Babylonian conquests, the poet complicates its simplicity in light of political developments and makes Job’s sufferings not just the property of one single man, but also makes his sufferings representative of the suffering of an entire body politic in the midst of a spiritual crisis warranting explanation. When the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., they deported a section of the population, especially the elite, to Babylon.113 Before then, Egyptian political dominance over Palestine began to wane, followed by the rise of the NeoAssyrian power. When Tiglath-Pileser III (745-727 B.C.E.) began his reign, he centralized the bureaucracy and began to break-up governmental units. Biblical passages demonstrate a constant negotiation of the powers of empire. For instance, Hoshea paid tribute to King Shalmaneser of Assyria but appealed to Egypt for

112

Perdue, The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires, 11751. For discussion of an alternative argument for dating Job in the second half of the sixth century, and that it was written by a Jew in Arabia, see F. Foster, "Is the Book of Job a Translation from an Arabic Original?," AJSL 49 (1932); A. Guillaume, "The Arabic Background of the Book of Job," in Promise and Fulfilment, ed. F. F. Bruce (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1963). 113 There is a debate within biblical studies about the use of the term “exile” as ideological rhetoric or as historical fact. Some, like Barstad, believe the exile never took place, that biblical authors constructed the event as part of their identity-building, or as part of Persian propoganda. These arguments are covered in Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003). For another coverage of the debate with multiple perspectives, see Lester L. Grabbe, ed., Leading Captivity Captive: 'the Exile' as History and Ideology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998). The debate also affects how biblical scholars understand the restoration in the Persian period. Another compilation dealing with this topic is Gary N. Knoppers, Lester L. Grabbe, and Deirdre Fulton, eds., Exile and Restoration Revisited: Essays on the Babylonian and Persian Periods in Memory of Peter R. Ackroyd (New York: T&T Clark, 2009).

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assistance against Assyria, and, according to the text, the appeal led to a capture of Samaria and the army “carried the Israelites away to Assyria” (2 Kgs 17:4; NRSV).114 After years of domination, the Assyrians destroyed Israel’s capital, Samaria, in 722 B.C.E., the upheaval forced a wave of refugees of the northern territories to enter the southern Kingdom of Judah.115 Being in the midst of the negotiations of empires complicated the society of ancient Israel. During the emergence of the Neo-Babylonian empire, Judah’s previous hold on its own statehood became precarious. This especially holds true when Assyria weakened and Egypt saw an opportunity to control Judah, creating a buffer territory in between Egypt and the rising Neo-Babylonian Empire. But, the Babylonians defeated Egyptian and Assyrian armies in the battle at Carchemish in 605. Judah was caught in between a power-struggle of empires; Jehoakim, king of Judah (609-598 B.C.E.) attempted to withhold tribute to Babylonian rulers in hopes that Egypt would come to his aid. Nebuchadnezzar was a Babylonian prince who took control of the army and wanted to invade Egypt. He invaded Judah in 597 and a preliminary wave of forced deportation of Judah’s leaders took place.116

114

All biblical quotes in English come from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise stated. 115 D. L. Smith-Christopher, "Reassessing the Historical and Sociological Impact of the Babylonian Exile (597/587-539 Bce)," in Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions, ed. James M. Scott (New York: Brill, 1997), 11-13. See also Paula M. McNutt, Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 146-48. 116 Smith-Christopher, "Reassessing the Historical and Sociological Impact of the Babylonian Exile (597/587-539 Bce)," 13-14. See also D. J. Wiseman, Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon (London: British Museum, 1983).

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Forced with the choice of aligning with Egypt or continuing to pay tribute to Babylon, Zedekiah (598-586 B.C.E.) chose the former; the Babylonian army sacked Jerusalem in 586. The members of the royal families, high-ranking officials, priests, and administrators not executed were seized and deported to Babylonia. No complete picture of the events exists, and an exilic period in Judah seems evident based on limited material culture and biblical references.117 Biblical literature offers pieces and fragments of the peoples’ responses to the break in their continuity, to the fragmentation of their culture and traditions. The book of Lamentations vividly describes the destruction of Jerusalem, while Psalm 137 certainly marks a kind of passionate response that comes with anger from the hardships of captivity. Leo Perdue also notes that “it is not coincidental that the language of imprisonment and metaphors of slavery are numerous in biblical texts dating from the period of the exile.”118 It seems surprising that some responses build-up faith in God, but as Samuel Terrien puts it, “Deprived of Holy Space, they preserved Holy Times.”119 The book of Job offers an alternative angle to piety; those who saw their children slaughtered, those who were ripped away from their homes, or those who lost their entire fortunes, like Job, had little in the way of comfort when “belief in divine justice

117

A discussion of which can be found in Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History, 79-82. For discussion of material culture, see Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, Vol. 2: The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Periods (New York: Doubleday, 2001). Furthermore, see Rainer Albertz, Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B.C.E., trans. David Green, Studies in Biblical Literature (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). 118 Perdue, The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires, 122. 119 Samuel Terrien, "Job as a Sage," in The Sage in Israel and the Ancient near East, ed. John G. Gammie and Leo G. Perdue (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 240.

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threatened to collapse because of the burdens placed on it by historical events:” their harps were “tuned for a dirge.”120 From 586-539 B.C.E., a population of Jewish sages existed in Babylonia, out of which the sage who created the poetic dialogues in Job could have emerged, especially with knowledge of forms of Babylonian wisdom.121 These sages could have interacted with the Babylonian intellectuals; therefore, as Perdue notes, “the poet thus shapes his own theological response to the captivity by including views from the Babylonian tradition, and his own unique perspectives on the suffering of the innocent and the issue of theodicy.”122 The chronological development of Job, its growth over centuries, helps to explain why Job’s wife and the satan123 disappear after the first two chapters; the sage utilized the didactic tale to present Job as a protagonist and therefore Job’s wife and the satan functioned as antagonists to further Job’s image as a pious sufferer. Then, in chapter 3, Job’s anger complicates a position that God rewards the good and punishes the evil, and divinely inspired suffering requires no investigation. In this light, Loren Fisher has parsed Job into two parts, in order to delineate its various time periods and forms. Fisher suggests that the compiler of Job buried the Rebel Job (Job II) within 120

As stated in James L. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction, Revised and Enlarged ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 103. 121 Perdue, The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires, 14048. 122 Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History, 85. 123 I use the lower-cased, definite article of “the satan” (!jFh) here when I refer to the role in the biblical book of Job because it is best translated as “the adversary,” a position or an office of the heavenly council (Zech 3:1-2) rather than the postexilic personal name. Peggy L. Day, An Adversary in Heaven: Śāṭān in the Hebrew Bible, Harvard Semitic Monographs (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988).

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the text of the traditional folktale (Job I) with some insinuations of scribal unorthodox deviance.124 On the other hand, many scholars read Job as a literary whole, which is to say that it need not matter how the book came into existence but that readers are faced with making cohesive sense of the book as a total of its parts.125 It is not necessary to dwell on this modern debate about reading Job in its parts or in its canonical form in this study because it is not a primary concern for reception history to make claims about literary analysis, but, rather, to observe how the various ideas associated with Job’s story have made their way into the lives of readers and into the institutions of which they are a part. A background of some of the difficulties of Job, however, highlights one of the most interesting conclusions from many of those who have worked with Job in reception history of the Bible. For centuries, especially before Enlightenment historical-critical analysis, Christians have largely ignored the moral ruptures and incongruencies in Job. David Clines sums up the traditional Christian view of Job: “Job has been read typically as prefiguring the sufferings of Christ, or the tribulations of the church. And in medieval exegesis and iconography in particular the figure of Job was essentially a symbol of the Christian virtue of patience.”126 It is quite

124

Loren R. Fisher, The Many Voices of Job (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009), xv-xx. Carol Newsom takes Job as a whole, except for Elihu’s speeches, in Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, 16-17. Also, David Clines argues that one author wrote the entire book, even if the story of Job pre-existed in some form, though not written down: David Clines, The Book of Job 1-20, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco: Word, 1989), lviii. In his OTL commentary, Habel argues for a unifying, underlying plot that connects the book of Job as a whole: N. C. Habel, The Book of Job: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 25-35. 126 Clines, The Book of Job 1-20, liv-lv. Jewish reception study of Job is beyond the scope of this work, but it is interesting to note that rabbinic interpreters predominantly considered Job as a 125

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stunning that the first five centuries of Christianity focus on the image of the saintly Job, largely ignoring his angry speeches.127 Thus, any painful exilic setting of Job remains lost on Christian interpreters, who, like in the epistle James, only receive Job in terms of his patience and righteousness in light of his typological connection with Christ (James 5:11). Chapter two will elaborate further on early Christian receptions of Job, but it behooves me to mention here how a concern for the relationship between the prose and the poetic sections of Job becomes a historical-critical problem that remains outside the boundaries of what is dealt with in the chapters of this dissertation. Situating the author of Job in exilic society, however, has certain implications for the biblical presentation of Job and his wife, which is the subject of the next section of this chapter. Since the rest of the chapters in this study reference receptions of Job and his wife, the conversation as it appears in the biblical book, then, warrants a closer look. After a discussion of the textual elements of the conversation between Job and his wife (2:9-10), I then offer my own brief interpretation of gender in Job in light of an exilic setting. “Curse God and Die” Two twenty-first century examples of the use of Job 2:9 in fictitious contexts of suffering and misery, one in a comedic fashion and one in a post-apocalyptic righteous gentile according to Judith R. Baskin, Pharaoh's Counsellors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition, Brown Judaic Studies (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983). 127 Stephen J. Vicchio, Job in the Ancient World. The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, vol. 1 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 140.

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novel, attest to the enduring power of the words of Job’s wife. Stephen Colbert, a comedian and political satirist, co-wrote a television series and film called Strangers with Candy, which takes place in an average American high school.128 Colbert plays a science teacher who fails to guide his students on their science fair projects. When Colbert’s character, Mr. Noblet, hears a student suggesting some hope, he dramatically suggests before laying his head on his desk that, “Hope? You fool. Don’t you know death when you see it? I’m being punished. You have no idea the terrible things I’ve done. Curse God and die!” 129Colbert’s character humorously applies serious and tragic divine rhetoric to a seemingly minor situation, but in his character’s mind, all hope is lost for his students to enter the science fair. A desperate situation also leads to the use of “Curse God and die!” in a Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. After a cataclysmic event occurs on earth, a man and his son are left migrating on foot from a cold climate to a warmer one, hopelessly trying to avoid cannibalistic gangs and starvation. When the father contemplates shooting his own son in the head rather than allowing his capture by cannibals, the father’s inner thoughts ask, “Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.”130

128

Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, and Amy Sedaris, Strangers with Candy (New York: THINKFilm, 2005). 129 Chapter 14, “Hope,” Strangers with Candy, DVD, directed by Paul Dinello (THINKFilm, 2005). 130 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 114.

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Feelings of hopelessness and despair surround both contemporary uses of Job’s wife’s phrase, stemming from an overwhelming assumption that Job’s wife suggests that Job commit suicide by cursing God. In the biblical book, Job’s wife asks Job: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die” (2:9; NRSV). Her statement might assume a cause and effect, that if Job curses God, he will die. The causal notion comes from an implicit assumption that God would retaliate if Job cursed him to his face, as the satan suggests earlier (2:5). Terrien calls the suggestion a “theological method of euthanasia.”131 To curse God is to defy God, to self-destruct and thus violate God’s creation. Leviticus 24 describes an instance in which someone blasphemes YHWH, an offense that evokes the punishment of stoning. Cursing God insinuates death, but only as part of a community willing to enforce the law (cf. 1 Kgs 21:1-14).132 Furthermore, Job ends up violating God’s creation in chapter 3, the next time Job speaks, in what Perdue describes as an “assault on creation,” Job cursing the day of his birth and all of God’s creation, calling for a reversal of creation.133 In this light, some authors have noted the function of Job’s wife’s words in terms of their impetus for Job to start questioning his unquestionable piety, moving him from a passive faith to an assertive one.134 If this is the case, though, the text no longer needs

131 132

Samuel Terrien, Job: Poet of Existence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 42. See also D. J. O'Connor, Job, His Wife, His Friends and His God (Dublin: Columba Press,

1995), 34.

133

Leo G. Perdue, "Job's Assault on Creation," Hebrew Annual Review 10 (1987). See also Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History, 98-102. For more on Job 3, see Valerie Forstman Pettys, "Let There Be Darkness: Continuity and Discontinuity in the 'Curse' of Job 3," JSOT 98 (2002). 134 Ellen Van Wolde, "The Development of Job: Mrs Job as Catalyst," in A Feminist Companion to Wisdom, ed. Athalya Brenner, The Feminist Companion to the Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995). In addressing the issue of the seemingly sharp differences in the

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her to provoke response in Job because she totally disappears except for passing references.135 Job’s wife exemplifies yet another case of “the disappearing woman,” especially when Job’s children “were born to him” (1:2; see also 42:13). The wife of Job is only referenced in a few sections (19:17; 31:10), and by implication of the birth of children (1:2 and 42:13).136 Job’s wife does theology when she speaks. Carol Newsom’s feminist perspective praises Job’s wife for “religious radicalism.”137 Phyllis Trible describes Job’s wife’s breaking “the bounds of orthodoxy,” because she questions Job’s fixed

prologue and the poetic sections, Pardes suggests that Job’s wife provides a link between the tensions between patience/impatience and cursing/blessing of the prologue and the poetry, anticipating that which is spoken in the poetic sections: Ilana Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 144-55. See also J. William Whedbee, The Bible and the Comic Vision (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 229. Similarly, McGinnis suggests that Job’s wife presents blasphemy as an option, knowing that Job would not take the option. Job’s wife thus steps in at a time when Job walks the line between blessing and cursing God: Claire M. McGinnis, "Playing the Devil's Advocate in Job: On Job's Wife," in Whirlwind: Essays on Job, Hermeneutics and Theology in Memory of Jane Morse, ed. et. al. Jane Morse (New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). Interestingly, Elie Wiesel approaches her in a similar way but from a different angle, suggesting that she really meant for Job to bless God so that Job avoid saying anything bad against God: “Maybe she really meant to say, ‘My dear husband, I am afraid that maybe you will be so taken by suffering, you will be so corrupt, so perverted and so poisoned by suffering that you will die against God. At least now, bless God and die’” in Elie Wiesel, "The Eternal Question of Suffering and Evil," Proceedings of the Center for Jewish-Christian Learning 3 (1988): 16. 135 Those references include Job lamenting that his situation is so bad that even his wife, the one closest to him, rejects him because of the stench of his breath (19:17). Also, Job maintains his integrity so much so that he vows that if he has “been enticed by a woman,” then “let my wife grind for another” (31:10). Brenner takes the inherent sexism in this text to task, noting the assumption at work that Job is able to sexually pass her off to another man: Athalya Brenner and Fokkelien van Dijk Hemmes, On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Brill, 1993), 143-46. 136 For Klein, she only provides “a background for the all-male enclave”: Lillian R. Klein, From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 76. Contrary, when comparing Kafka’s The Trial with Job, Halvorson-Taylor suggests that the loss of Job’s wife signifies Job’s misinterpretation of the events that surround him: Martien A. HalvorsonTaylor, "The Strange Case of the Disappearing Woman: Biblical Resonances in Kafka's Fräulein Bürstner," in From the Margins I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009). 137 Carol A. Newsom, "Job," in Women's Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 140.

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categories. If Job’s wife does adhere to retributive theology, in that Job’s cursing God and doing “bad” will lead to bad things, such as his death, she challenges the theology just by suggesting it.138 Yet, an ambiguity remains concerning the use of the Hebrew word %rB (barek, “to bless”) in Job 2:9. The Hebrew word barek literally means “bless:” scribes engage in a technique to offer a euphemism in the place of “curse” (Job 1:5, 11; 2:5, 9). The word inextricably links the satan with Job’s wife. Both the satan and Job’s wife assume a causal relationship between piety and prosperity because both relate Job’s cursing God to the removal of God’s favor (2:5, 9). In other words, both the satan and Job’s wife function as adversaries against Job’s supposed integrity. This is not such a problem if one assumes the satan’s role in a non-Christian light, but even Norman Habel assumes a more negative role for the satan in terms of Christian temptation when he states that “the narrator has Job’s wife serve as the earthly mouthpiece for the hidden Satan.”139 Tod Linafelt complicates clear uses of the euphemism in Job, suggesting that the book means to set-up constant negotiations between blessing and cursing.140 Whereas Trible associates this relation with the satan as Job’s wife calling forth a challenge to the status-quo, others circumvent the problem of associating Job’s 138

Phyllis Trible, "Biblical Theology as Women's Work," Religion in Life 44, no. 1 (1975): 910. In another way, West advocates that by speaking, Job’s wife shows assertiveness, the kind of voice of faith that feminists should advocate for, as argued in Gerald West, "Hearing Job's Wife: Towards a Feminist Reading of Job," Old Testament Essays 4 (1991). 139 Habel, The Book of Job: A Commentary, 96. 140 Tod Linafelt, "The Undecidability of Brk in the Prologue to Job and Beyond," Biblical Interpretation 4, no. 2 (1996). Linafelt ultimately argues that the euphemism seems less likely for Job’s wife, who means to say “Still you hold fast to your integrity; continue to bless God [for all the good it has done you] and you will die” (p. 167).

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wife with the satan, and all the negative assumptions therein, by arguing that Job’s wife actually means for Job to bless God, after which Job can die in peace knowing that he did all he could to maintain his integrity.141 If such is the case, Job’s response seems a bit more heated than necessary if Job’s wife implied a blessing (2:10). The response Job has to his wife is unmistakably negative, but commentators disagree on the level of anger in Job’s rebuke.142 Job calls her “one of the foolish women” (2:10). When Job engages the substantive lbn (nābāl/nebālā), calling her one of the foolish women, he implies her social deviance (2Sam 3:33; Prov 17:7), bordering on denying her a place in the community.143 Unlike how the fool functions in Psalm 14:1, as someone who denies the existence of God, Job’s wife keeps God in the center of their debate. Both Job and his wife agree that what has befallen Job has come from God. Job maintains acceptance of God’s dealings, whether good or bad: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (2:10a). Job uses the communal “we,” thereby including her in his system of thought. The verse ends with an important note that “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (v. 10b). If 141

The most extensive argument for such is found in Donal O'Connor, ""Bless God and Die" (Job 2:9): Euphemism or Irony?," in Proceedings of the Irish Biblical Association, ed. Martin McNamara (Dublin: The Irish Biblical Association, 1996); O'Connor, Job, His Wife, His Friends and His God, 21-38. 142 Job is “aggressively vehement” in Athalya Brenner, "On Female Figurations in Biblical Wisdom Literature," in Of Prophets' Visions and the Wisdom of Sages: Essays in Honour of R. Norman Whybray on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Heather A. McKay and David J. A. Clines (Sheffield: JSOT, 1993), 198-99. On the other hand, Clines contends that Job’s reply is “remarkably mild” in Clines, The Book of Job 1-20, 53. 143 In a feminist materialistic reading, Erin Runions compares the foolish reference here with Job 30:1-13, suggesting that foolish women imply socio-economic conditions, those expelled from community, noting an internal critique of Job and his wealth: Erin Runions, "Ms Job and the Problem of God: A Feminist, Existentialist, Materialist Reading," in From the Margins I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009).

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Job’s wife serves as a mechanism to move Job from his piety to his questioning God’s justice, the notion that Job did not sin with his lips as opposed to simply did not sin (1:22) offers some commentators with evidence that Job might have been thinking about cursing God.144 In either case, the author chooses to highlight that what comes out of Job’s lips is appropriate for the situation, in contrast to that which comes out of the lips of his wife. One often overlooked component of Job’s response to his wife is his use of a gendered general category, one of the foolish women. By generalization, I mean that Job places his wife’s speech into a category of behavior. Although the function of a “foolish woman” remains ambiguous, the category is derogatory. Job expects a certain kind of behavior from his wife through his use of a generalization. Gendered generalizations become a mechanism of hegemonic masculinity so those in power might utilize them to control multiple operative forms of identity. Any form of rigid classification removes subjectivity. In her discussion on Foucault, Butler is cautious of Foucault’s use of power in terms of an anonymous force constituting humans as objects. Subjectivity comes, according to Butler, in refusing the totality that comes with category, in this case, privileging heterosexuality and regulating homosexuality. Through normalizing heterosexuality, hegemonic masculinity can maintain a hierarchy of gender.145

144

McGinnis, "Playing the Devil's Advocate in Job: On Job's Wife," 137. Judith Butler, "Sexual Inversions," in Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, ed. Susan J. Hekman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 145

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Though many of the observations mentioned above stem from a Western gender order, such ideas resonate with biblical mappings of gender. Virginia Burrus states that “there is by now widespread scholarly agreement that gender in antiquity was mapped not as a binary of two fixed and ‘opposite’ sexes (as is typical of our own modern western culture) but rather as a dynamic spectrum or gradient of relative masculinities.”146 Therefore, social hierarchies of power related to divine over human, man over woman, master over slave, and rational over heretical. When a woman’s feminine nature drifted toward masculine behavior, tensions arise, in biblical texts and in the cultures which produced them.147 In categorizing his wife’s speech as foolish, Job enacts an established social hierarchy of gender. Job engages the same method God does in the whirlwind speeches, rhetorical questioning, in order to silence a subordinate. Job’s wife first uses the rhetorical strategy in her question to her husband. What might a gendered view of Job’s exilic context reveal about the workings of gender in Job? In other words, what does exile do to negotiations of masculinity, embodied gender, and public performance? The Emasculation of Exile: Job and Gender The author of the book of Job has an exilic social location, one that has witnessed atrocities like physical torture from oppressive governments and 146

Virginia Burrus, "Mapping as Metamorphosis: Initial Reflections on Gender and Ancient Religious Discourses," in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, ed. Todd Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 4. See also the discussion of a historical shift from a “one sex” theory to a “two sex” theory in Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 147 Burrus, "Mapping as Metamorphosis: Initial Reflections on Gender and Ancient Religious Discourses," 5.

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enslavement to societal systems different than in Judah. Job’s sage had prior knowledge of Babylonian literature and culture. Exile brought with it deportation, alienation, and a collapse of social structure. Masculinity, then, as part of an established social order, fluxuates. In a roundtable discussion on nationalism and religion, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza calls attention to how any process of colonization or subjugation brings on a process of emasculinization in which the colonized men reconstruct their masculinity through religious nationalism, to legitimize war and control sexuality. I leave the application of such a process to a contemporary American scheme of economic globalization to Fiorenza and others, but, the implications remain in terms of gender order and political upheaval.148 In discussing how gender is volatile during times of war, John Tosh states that “one of the characteristic features of national crisis is that it may bring about drastic change in the socially acceptable ways of being a man.”149 Furthermore, “military values have often been promoted as a response to perceived threats to male dominance;” threatened hegemonic masculinity often suppresses women and maintains the dominance of traditional masculine values, such as strength and courage.150 Two themes remain important for Job’s context. First, when in times of political upheaval or societal unrest (unemployment, illness, or war), forms of hyper148

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, "Feminist Studies in Religion and Theology in-between Nationalism and Globalization," The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 1 (2005). 149 John Tosh, "Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender," in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 48. 150 Ibid., 55.

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masculinity and hyper-femininity take effect, requiring those in society to appeal to clearly delineated gender performativities. Hyper-masculinity means an excessive display or expectation of traditional masculine performance, usually marked by rigid heterosexual and patriarchal societal standards, those which hegemonic power structures support. By traditional masculine performance, most gender critics mean the kind of masculinity that privileges men. Second, in times of depleted status, such as in socioeconomic loss, a common hegemonic masculine response is fighting, or at least offering threats of violence. A confrontation usually takes place, in which one asserts a masculine hierarchy through social competition.151 Reflective of what is happening in an exilic context for the author of Job, God consistently tests, and attempts to control, Job’s masculinity. As Job attempted to control his wife’s gender, pushing her behavior out of a masculine realm and back into a feminine realm, so too does God take part in asserting a gendered order over Job. God does this through two things; first, God allows for the infliction of physical pain on Job. Second, God appears to Job in the guise of a warrior, evoking images of masculine violence. The author of Job is reflecting what happens in exilic society; the negotiation of masculinities remains one of the effects of the Babylonian exile. The author is not representing social reality as much as he is negotiating that social reality in light of what Perdue calls “not only the reshaping of group identity, but also the desire to achieve a position of power in relationship to others outside their social and 151

See chapter 4, "Masculinities and the Notion of Crisis," in John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture, Issues in Cultural and Media Studies (Buckingham; Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2002), 75-97.

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epistemological boundaries.”152 Negotiating masculinity remains one way in which to position power. In other words, the author reflects not so much a social reality as an ideological motivation to construct masculine identities during a time of exilic emasculinization. Cheryl Anderson calls attention to elite male redactors who are ideologically motivated to manipulate law to present an authorization of women’s economic dependence on men, labeling the social construction of gender as normative for society.153 Carole Fontaine calls attention to representations of the captive body in ideologies of war; public art for great empires shames male victims, thus undercutting the ability of the mens’ deity to champion them in war against the deity’s competitors.154 In his work on gender, war, and memory, Ovidiu Creangă situates Joshua’s warrior leadership in terms of war/violence and gendered space, doing so within the cultural and ideological framework of exile. What is important in this context is that Joshua the warrior is “manned” because men remember (represent) their heroic past, commemorating their forms of violence in a time when violence was put upon them.155 Creangă argues that in relation to YHWH and the covenant, Joshua is seen as a “woman,” while in relation to other men, he is seen as a fellow warrior.156

152

Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History, 134. Cheryl B. Anderson, Women, Ideology, and Violence (New York: T & T Clark, 2004). 154 Carole R. Fontaine, With Eyes of Flesh: The Bible, Gender and Human Rights (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008). See, especially, chapter 2, “Gendering the Captive: Representations of the Abuse of Human Dignity,” 31-77. 155 This based on Harold C. Washington, "Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: A New Historicist Approach," Biblical Interpretation 5, no. 4 (1997). 156 Ovidiu Creangă, "The Silenced Songs of Victory: Power, Gender and Memory in the Conquest Narrative of Joshua (Joshua 1-12)," in A Question of Sex? Gender and Difference in the 153

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Similarly, Mark Hamilton makes note of a code of kingship for biblical authors who pose the warrior king like the deity, YHWH mentoring the warrior. Thus, how the king “displays and manipulates his body” associates itself with the deity himself; the body of the state, reflected in the king, is sustained by YHWH through covenant.157 All the observations of the biblical scholars above intersect war, violence, and gender, assuming also that in times of upheaval of group identity, as such in the exilic period, gradients of masculinities expose themselves. Job in Pain It is quite obvious that Job is in pain, mentally and physically, as reflected in the poetic sections. Here are just a few examples: the terrors of God come up against Job (6:4); Job experiences nights of miseries with his flesh covered in worms and dirt (7:2-5); Job chooses death over staying in his body (7:15); Job images God like a flesh-ravaging warrior (16:9-17); God terrifies Job (23:16); and pain gnaws at Job (30:17). F. Rachel Magdalene relates Job’s treatment of his wife in terms of the torture he experiences at the hand of the deity. The “verbal lashing of his wife” is “the

Hebrew Bible and Beyond, ed. Deborah W. Rooke (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007). More of the ideas presented here come from Ovidiu Creangă, "'Have I Not Commanded You? Be a Man, Not a Woman. . .' Joshua, the Warrior, and His Feminine Side: Revisiting the War on (Male) Gender in the Conquest Narrative (Josh. 1-12)" (paper presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, 2008). 157 Mark W. Hamilton, The Body Royal: The Social Poetics of Kingship in Ancient Israel, Biblical Interpretation Series (Boston: Brill, 2005), 115.

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direct result of the torture he is undergoing.”158 In other words, Job redirects his anger towards God onto his wife. In her study on how Job reflects a trial based on Neo-Babylonian law, Magdalene suggests that God tortures Job to test his faith, as a result of the prosecuting role of the satan bringing a charge against Job’s piety.159 Job’s body remains important here, for after God allows for his physical infliction, Job begins to lament his situation, and his friends enter to elicit a confession for some unknown sin. The physical torture of Job means to bring him to confession so that the powers-thatbe can maintain their control.160 The body in pain affects the mind. Basing her observation on Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Magdalene observes that “if one controls the body through pain, one can control the mind. If one controls the mind, one can construct a new world.”161 She also suggests that “God is not an agent of mercy in the minds of these people; rather, he is an abuse perpetrator. Mrs. Job is actually exhorting Job to provoke his abuser to the point of death.”162 To insinuate that God is a torturer is to also relate God to war-like situations. In Scarry’s The Body in Pain, pain functions as the ultimate reality. Scarry calls pain an “interior state” that takes no object. Pain is pain, and trying to describe it often 158

F. Rachel Magdalene, "Job's Wife as Hero: A Feminist-Forensic Reading of the Book of Job," Biblical Interpretation 14, no. 3 (2006): 228. 159 For another argument that the satan targets not just Job’s piety, but “Job’s skin” in terms of Job’s wife, see David Shepherd, "'Strike His Bone and His Flesh': Reading Job from the Beginning," JSOT 33 (2008). 160 In this way, argues Magdalene, Job’s friends act as God’s witnesses in the trial. See Magdalene, On the Scales of Righteousness: Neo-Babylonian Trial Law and the Book of Job, 199-223. 161 Magdalene, "Job's Wife as Hero: A Feminist-Forensic Reading of the Book of Job," n. 80, p. 229. 162 Ibid., 213.

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shatters language. The inexpressibility of pain makes it a prime weapon in war because the institution of pain empties “the body of cultural content.”163 In torture, for instance, the torturer collapses a person’s world-consciousness through continual contraction of the body’s inner state and can thus reinsert his or her own world-view. This is why words of confession often come after torture; the tortured expresses the confession that the torturer wants to hear only so that he or she might end the pain. Carol Fontaine applies this notion to Job, in which God acts as the Divine Warrior and Job his captive: through the torture of his body, Job is “being deconstructed by God just as the bodies of victims are taken apart by the warrior in order to inscribe new boundaries under his own complete control.”164 In her discussion of biblical texts, Scarry describes humans as permanently wounded creatures of a divine creator, a creator that consistently engages in the act of wounding because inflicting pain brings the human into divine reality. The difference in power is in that God has no body while humans have bodies.165 God remains outside of the ability to feel pain. Therefore, as Fontaine has noted about Scarry’s point of view, “the ability to inflict pain [on the body] becomes a structural sign of power.”166 In this light, Fontaine has also argued for an ideology at work in representations of the captured in the ancient Near East, an ideology that feminizes 163

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 118. For more contextual applications of pain, see David Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 164 Fontaine, With Eyes of Flesh: The Bible, Gender and Human Rights, 106. 165 Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 209. Scarry mostly focuses on Genesis and Christian scriptures here and doesn’t mention Job. 166 Fontaine, With Eyes of Flesh: The Bible, Gender and Human Rights, 39.

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the captives. The association of warfare with masculinity, “feminizing the enemy serves to both shame the foe and hearten one’s own troops.”167 Rather than see an ideological form of feminizing, the real point of struggle for Job, however, comes in the gradients of masculinities. The breaking of Job’s body symbolizes the breaking-down of Israelite society as a whole.168 In the whirlwind speeches, when God appears in the guise of war, God comes to defend his honor with clear allusions to masculine performance. The poet of Job engages such performance in light of what happens in times of war—the men come to arms and face one another to negotiate masculinity among the company of and opposition to other men. In the Guise of War At the beginning of each speech from the whirlwind, God entreats Job: “gird your loins like a man” (38:3; 40:7). God initiates war-talk by calling upon Job in masculine warrior terms. Job must gird his loins like a rbG (geber), which refers to both a man, as distinctive from a woman, and relates to the root that is “commonly associated with warfare and has to do with the strength and vitality of the successful warrior.”169 A mighty man, for instance, is called a rwBG (gibbôr).

167

Ibid., 56. See the discussion of the principle of Israelite bodily wholeness, liminality, and religiosocial participation in society in Alec Basson, "Just Skin and Bones: The Longing for Wholeness of the Body in the Book of Job," VT 58, no. 3 (2008). 169 Entry 310. R. Laird Harris, Jr. Gleason L. Archer, and Bruce K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980). 168

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Traditionally, scholarly agreement defines the girding of the loins as a phrase indicating “preparation for any strenuous or difficult undertaking.”170 In the most basic sense, the use of the girding of the loins phrase (referred to as loingirding) represents the expectation of a coming activity.171 The loin muscles also symbolically represent strength and virility, hence, the word takes on another connotation for reproductive parts.172 This association with reproductive parts, however, plays a very small role in the girding of the loins. Only a few passages refer to children coming from the loins (Abraham in Gen 35:11 and David in 1 Kgs 8:19 and 2 Chr 6:9). Some connection exists between a male’s virility and his strength.173 The same could be said for women as well, for a woman’s strength to bear children comes from her loins (see Jer 30:6). Whereas both humans and animals have loins, the girding of loins culturally signifies readiness for vigorous physical activity. The act of girding (rgx or

rza) involves both the masculine and feminine body, whether putting on some kind of clothing, belt, or in a more abstract sense, strength.174 A strong woman in Proverbs, for instance, girds her loins with strength (31:17). 170

Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, 291. In an unpublished essay, Clines suggests that loingirding is a masculine activity. David J. A. Clines, "Play the Man! The Masculine Imperative in the Bible," (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 2008). 172 Victor P. Hamilton, "Motnayim, Loins," in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed. R. Laird Harris (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), 536-37. 173 As noted by Athalya Brenner in an essay about the subversive way bodily humor about foreign rulers feminize and weaken their characters, as evident from the case of Daniel 5. For Brenner, a biblical male leader’s political power intertwines with his ability to sire an heir. Athalya Brenner, "Who's Afraid of Feminist Criticism? Who's Afraid of Biblical Humour? The Case of the Obtuse Foreign Ruler in the Hebrew Bible," in Prophets and Daniel: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series), ed. Athalya Brenner (Sheffield: Continuum, 2001), 238-41. 174 Herbert Wolf, "’Āzar, to Gird," in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, ed. R. Laird Harris (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980). 171

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The entire idea of loingirding marks power dynamics on the gendered body. For instance, Jeremiah wears a loincloth for God. In Jeremiah 13 the prophet’s individual bodily actions become reflective of the entire body politic. Jeremiah 13 begins with a prophetic sign-act in which God commands Jeremiah to buy a linen “loincloth/waistcloth” (rAza)e to put upon his loins. Verses 8-10 engage the metaphor in terms of the pride of Judah and Jerusalem which God will ruin, just as the loincloth is ruined. Verse 11 allows for another metaphor—God as the loins of Israel.175 Just as a loincloth “clings to one’s loins,” so too, God makes the “whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah cling” to God. The metaphor implies that Israel’s corporeality remains intertwined with God’s. God-as-loins-of-Judah metaphor keeps with the notion of loins as the location of the body’s strength. Physical power rests within the loins for they were the assumed seat of strength.176 Job 9:4 lauds God for his mighty strength. God asks Job, “Have you an arm like God?” (40:9). The text recalls a “sumptuous spectacle” of “hegemonic hypermasculinity, preeminently an awe-inspiring physique.”177 God in Job entreats the audience to marvel at the strength of Behemoth’s loins and the sinew of his thigh (40:16-17). An alternative translation of “thigh” (Adxp) is “penis,”178

175

John M. Bracke, Jeremiah 1-29, ed. Patrick Miller and David L. Bartlett, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 119-20. Bracke does not go so far to suggest such an implication of the metaphor utilized in Jeremiah 13. Rather, he focuses on the word “cling” in terms of God seeking loyalty and obedience. 176 BDB, 608. 177 Moore, God’s Gym, 99, 106. 178 David J. A. Clines and John Elwolde, The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield, Eng.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), Vol. 6, 675.

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which has led some to suggest that vv. 16 and 17 function to parallel Behemoth’s loins with his penis. David Wolfers suggests that God points to Behemoth’s “pudenda” as a metaphor for the potential carnal beastliness of “man,” hearkening a colloquial vulgar phrase, “His brains are in his balls.”179 God, in essence, speaks a moral message to man’s sexual nature. Seeking a moral message, Wolfers provides one way of understanding the role of Leviathan and Behemoth in Job 38, that God offers them as a symbol for Job himself, to teach Job that he cannot contend to control such powers.180 Another version of this understanding comes from Samuel Balentine who argues that God points to Behemoth as “an object lesson in what it means to stand before one’s maker with exceptional strength.”181 This stream of thought provides an example of Sherwood’s assessment: “On the assumption that moral goodness is linked with aesthetic goodness, and vice versa, and that God, when he speaks, can be expected to articulate himself in high style and civilised prose, the Bible becomes a repository of stylistic as well as religious value.”182 Whirlwind theology, however, complicates religious moral value in the face of such uncivilized exchange and chaotic forces.

179

David Wolfers, "The Lord's Second Speech in the Book of Job," VT 40, no. 4 (1990): 47982. Because the root phd can mean both fear and thigh, Wolfers suggests that the translation of penis is inaccurate, but that the connection to fear comes when the tendons connecting the testicles with the thighs are paralyzed with fear. Thus, the word connotes paralysis of fear. 180 Another way of putting this is “Behemoth and Leviathan plainly represent the sanctified tyranny of nature over men . . . . Yahweh is proud of them, and his pride taunts Job and the reader:” Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004), 15. 181 Samuel E. Balentine, ""What Are Human Beings, That You Make So Much of Them?" Divine Disclosure from the Whirlwind: "Look at Behemoth"," in God in the Fray: A Tribute to Walter Brueggemann, ed. Tod Linafelt and Timothy K. Beal (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 270-71. 182 Sherwood, “Prophetic Scatology,” 190-191.

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Loingirding marks power dynamics at work; the use of such a phrase in Job represents what Deborah Sawyer claims as a “biblical concept of divine/human hierarchy” in Job.183 The phrase could mock Job for his lack of strength. Or, God simply requires that Job prepare for the interchange with God in all his strength.184 Either way, biblical masculinity functions within a hierarchal structure because a mighty God attempts to shrink Job’s manhood. The whirlwind itself functions as a cultural symbol of “the storm god coming to do battle with chaos.”185 Jeremiah’s description of Yahweh as a “strong warrior” places God in contexts of warfare (20:11). An image of a god who participates in warfare also realizes the ultimate form of masculinity. As a result, warfare becomes legitimized masculine activity.186 God comes in the form of a Divine Warrior in the whirlwind speeches in order to, like the Canaanite mythology of Prince Yamm and Mot or Baal and Anat, restore control through military-like conviction.187 However, Behemoth and Leviathan represent the notion that the powers of chaos continue to threaten ordered

183

Deborah F. Sawyer, God, Gender and the Bible, ed. David Gunn and Gary A. Phillips, Biblical Limits (London: Routledge, 2002), 39. 184 J. Gerald Janzen, Job, Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 232. 185 Perdue, Wisdom in Revolt: Metaphorical Theology in the Book of Job, 203. 186 Cynthia R. Chapman, The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter, ed. Peter Machinist, Harvard Semitic Monographs (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004). 187 For a discussion of the Ancient Near Eastern parallels, alongside implications of the divine warrior for modern society, see Leonard Greenspoon, "The Warrior God, or God, the Divine Warrior," in Religion and Politics in the Modern World, ed. Peter H. Merkl and Ninian Smart (New York: New York University Press, 1983). See also, Roland E. Murphy, "Gbr and Gbwrh in the Qumran Writings," in Lex Tua Veritas, ed. Heinrich Gross and Franz Mussner (Trier: Paulinus-Verlag, 1961).

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existence.188 God may encapsulate the top form of the masculine warrior-type, over and against human males, but even God cannot guarantee success. God engages in a continual battle with the forces; therefore, complete control over chaos is never realized. God still requires weapons to battle the forces of chaos—a sword for Behemoth (40:19) and a fishhook for Leviathan (41:1). If Job contends with God’s ruling powers, then Job must battle the forces representing chaos. In light of the social context of Job, the Babylonian exile and communities living in Babylonian captivity, such a theological response to crisis makes sense. In the midst of chaotic changes in communal life of Israel, the author of Job reflects that masculinity remains one of the aspects of male identity in flux, in contention, and under negotiation. When the whirlwind God challenges Job “like a man” (rbgk), it reinforces a cultural cue that God seeks to display a magnificant masculinity as a challenge to Job’s threats, which reflects a broader cultural concern for turning to hyper-masculine expectations of behavior in times of crisis. To continue with Sawyer, who analyzes gender in light of a biblical assumption of divine ultimate power, “in the face of God male power is emasculated.”189 Job uses geber in terms of battle: man does not live again, all the days of his warfare he waits for release to come (14:14). David Clines touches on masculinity in the Bible as far as David goes, for the text describes him as a “mighty man of valour”

188

Leo G. Perdue, Wisdom & Creation: The Theology of Wisdom Literature (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 180. 189 Sawyer, God, Gender and the Bible, 57.

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(hayil gibbôr) and a central characteristic of the gibbôr is his capabilities at war.190 Physical strength remains important for men, as Clines notes, “Hebrew has no words for courage or bravery distinct from strength.”191 David describes a man of war in terms of the blood of war on the girdle around his loins, and in this respect, a belt girded around the loins represents soldierly behavior (1 Kings 2:5). A warrior, in the David narratives, offers the ultimate type of masculinity—strength (hayil).192 Walter Klein suggests that a “gibbôr (’îsh) hayil had social standing or the personal worth that entitled him to it, and the term in addition connoted property and physical, especially military, strength. The gibbôr hayil was, in short, a gentleman.”193 Klein’s assumption of the link between that which is gentlemanly behavior to military strength only reinforces how challenging one’s strength implies a challenge to one’s masculinity. Gender in Job reflects the poet’s societal struggle of being in a setting of captivity, being emasculated in some sense by the captors. The complexity of the poet’s presentation rests in the fact that God asserts his masculinity over Job, in both a necessary and oppressive way because Fontaine points out that “a deity with no ‘warrior portfolio’ simply wasn’t of much use in a dangerous world of competing powers.”194 The display of the divine masculine warrior asserts the Israelite God’s power in the midst of competing Babylonian deities, yet the display 190

BDB, 150. See chapter 10, "David the Man: The Construction of Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible," in David J. A. Clines, Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 212-43. 192 Clines, Interested Parties, 217. 193 Walter C. Klein, "The Model of a Hebrew Man: The Standards of Manhood in Hebrew Culture," Biblical Research 4 (1960): 2. 194 Fontaine, With Eyes of Flesh: The Bible, Gender and Human Rights, 32. 191

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also tortures Job in the process, reflecting a kind of emasculation present in times of exile, leaving the questions about God’s justice and necessary masculine strength open for debate. Early Receptions of Job With attention to gender issues, especially in light of Job’s exilic setting, the poet of Job reveals conflicts of masculinity in terms of an oppressive gender hierarchy of divine over human. These notions also implicitly emerge for early commentators. Alongside a motif of the Saintly Job exists the Job as Warrior/Athlete motif, according to Vicchio, which stemmed from Hellenistic times and continued on through several centuries of Christianity.195 The idea that Job wrestles with adversity might provide a way of speaking about Job’s blatant attempts to question God’s justice, but early Christian commentators kept more focus on the Christian concept of the Devil and his place in Job. In other words, early allegorists and commentators avoid facing the issue of God’s actions by directing Job’s anger toward Satan’s inflictions, finding no contradiction with God’s permission for Satan to strike Job.196 At any rate, early Christian interpreters and their masculine negotiations between Job as a patient sufferer and Job as an athlete reflect an inherent struggle of masculinities present within the text itself. The next chapter will discuss how early Christian interpretations of Job’s character reflect these masculine tensions between Job as a patient sufferer and Job as an athlete or warrior. 195 196

Vicchio, Job in the Ancient World. The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, 4, 218-19. Vicchio, Job in the Medieval World, 33, 41.

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In spite of the lack of female presence in Job, since feminism entered mainstream biblical interpretation, more attention has been given to shed a positive light on the role of Job’s wife. However, early attempts at providing her with a name and an expanded role suggest that even earlier interpreters felt impelled to elaborate on Job’s wife and their marriage as a whole. The work of Choon-Leong Seow, which has enlightened and contributed to the reception history of Job in meaningful ways, provides an example of attempts to recover positive meanings for Job’s wife. In considering two pieces of art that he argues portrays Job’s wife in a positive light, Seow means to recover alternative representations because “her place in the history of interpretation and reception” has been skewed in a harsh misogynistic and negative tradition.197 Similarly, Seow gives Job’s wife “due respect” by offering positive, sympathetic readings of Job’s wife alongside antifeminist, “extremely negative perceptions.”198 Seow speaks of reception history in terms of consequences, meaning “what comes after” and “impact and effects” of “all types of engagements of and encounters with the Bible.”199 Seow poignantly reveals the tensions involved in a variety of viewpoints on Job’s wife. And, such a variety continues to challenge readers: “The minority position can challenge the exegesis of the majority, thereby pointing to the 197

C. L. Seow, "Job's Wife," in Engaging the Bible in a Gendered World: An Introduction to Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, ed. Linda Day and Carolyn Pressler (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). 198 Choon-Leong Seow, "Job's Wife, with Due Respect," in Das Buch Hiob Und Seine Interpretationen, ed. T. Krüger, et al. (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2007). 199 C. L. Seow, "Reflections on the History of Consequences: The Case of Job," in Method Matters: Essays on the Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Honor of David L. Peterson, ed. Joel M. LeMon and Ken Harold Richards (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 563.

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ambiguity of the text to which the reader is invited to return.”200 Thus, Seow brings a reception history of Job’s wife full circle into a textual reading of Job’s wife as she functions in the text, suggesting that “the interpreter may realize that the role of Job’s wife in her single contribution in the book is to give voice on earth to Job of divine confidence as well as divine doubt.”201 In a response to the proliferation of positive positions on Job’s wife, Victor Sasson warns biased “politically-correct” critics not to take lightly the harmful blasphemy Job’s wife insinuates; she deserves the verbal reprimand that follows. She remains a minor character, no matter whether one wishes to see her negatively or positively.202 While this textual point may ring true, it is in the reception history of Job’s wife, in which Seow notes, that Job’s wife remains more than a simple minor character. Sasson’s concern for unwarranted positivity relates to a by-product of feminist interpretation, that of dichotomies. In an attempt to cast Job’s wife in an either/or, negative/positive light, commentators tend to polarize themselves against one another, taking oppositional stances. If one takes a wider approach, a “wider lens” of gender, then the dichotomies of hero/villain become more complex. Even postcolonial feminists note how a Western Christian “emphasis on innocent victim and oppositional relationship between good and evil,” cannot completely address

200

Ibid., 574. Ibid. 202 Sasson, "The Literary and Theological Function of Job's Wife in the Book of Job." See also Mayer Gruber, "The Rhetoric of Familiarity and Contempt in Job 2:9-10," Scriptura 87 (2004). 201

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complexity of both “positive” and “negative” components of women’s lives.203 For instance, an “Asian way of problem solving has esthetic direction rather than ethical direction,” meaning that differentiating between “good and evil” is less important than seeking restoration through balance and harmony.204 Furthermore, representations of women in terms of ideological splits between victim or heroine, between positive or negative, create contradictory categorizations.205 This aside is to say that, given the complexity of her situation, and the rich dynamics involved in the reception of Job and his wife, I will avoid labeling any interpretation as “positive” or “negative.” Rather, through gender theory, I attempt to capture the gender dynamics of ongoing negotiations of peoples’ interpretations for Job and his wife in marital contexts. For instance, it is in the ambiguities of Job’s wife that the Greek text interpolates and expands her message to Job. The Greek Septuagint (LXX) adds extra sentences to the MT to give Job’s wife expression to her loss (Job 2:9). The added words read as follows from Rahlf’s LXX (author’s translation follows): [1Ð ivdou. avname,nw cro,non e;ti mikro.n prosdeco,menoj th.n evlpi,da th/j swthri,aj mou Î2Ð ivdou. ga.r hvfa,nistai, sou to. mnhmo,sunon avpo. th/j 203

Asian feminists in particular have brought up this problem. See Chung Hyun Kyung, "Your Comfort Vs. My Death," in Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life, ed. Mary John Mananzan, et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996), 138. 204 Ibid. Kyung references the keynote address by Rita Nakashima Brock here. For more on Asian biblical hermeneutics, see Kwok Pui-lan, Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (Maryknowll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995). For a consideration of “dialogical imagination,” as a method of biblical interpretation, see Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination & Feminist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). 205 This has also been pointed out by an Asian feminist in terms of the ways antithetical images of women help support hierarchal claims of national identity in Wai-Ching Angela Wong, "The Poor Woman:" A Critical Analysis of Asian Theology and Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Women (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 44.

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gh/j ui`oi. kai. qugate,rej evmh/j koili,aj wvdi/nej kai. po,noi ou]j eivj to. keno.n evkopi,asa meta. mo,cqwn Î3Ð su, te auvto.j evn sapri,a| skwlh,kwn ka,qhsai dianuktereu,wn ai;qrioj Î4Ð kavgw. planh/tij kai. la,trij to,pon evk to,pou periercome,nh kai. oivki,an evx oivki,aj prosdecome,nh to.n h[lion po,te du,setai i[na avnapau,swmai tw/n mo,cqwn kai. tw/n ovdunw/n ai[ me nu/n sune,cousin Î5Ð avlla. eivpo,n ti r`h/ma eivj ku,rion kai. teleu,ta [1] Look! I wait yet a little while for the hope of receiving my salvation? [2] Look! Your memorial is destroyed from the earth, even my sons and daughters, the pangs and pains of my womb which I labored in vain with toil. [3] You, you, sit and spend the whole night in the open air among the rottenness of worms. [4] And from place to place I go about from house to house as a wanderer and a maidservant, waiting for the setting of the sun. When can I take rest from the hardships and the sorrows which now oppress me? [5] Except, speak one word against the Lord and die! The translators here show real concern for her role as mother and her role as provider for her husband, digging deeper into what kind of relationship Job had with his wife.206 Through her husband’s misfortunes, Job’s wife is forced to lower her own status to that of a domestic worker. Early Christians adopted the Septuagint translation as a major source for interpreting Job, even with it being only 75% of the word count of the Masoretic texts.207 Though translators cut short some of the Hebrew and mute Job’s angry speeches, the long edition for Job’s wife suggests a priority to insert more social expectations of gender in their marriage. Job’s wife’s sufferings reflect her husband’s status, along with her loss as role of mother. Chapter two will examine these social expectations of gender further.

206

In this way, many have found affinities to the book of Tobit and the wife of Tobias, Anna, who was reduced to a domestic worker as well. See Vicchio, Job in the Ancient World. The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, 119-22. 207 Vicchio and Edinberg, The Sweet Uses of Adversity: Images of the Biblical Job, 12-14. For more on the Greek translators and their desire to present a righteous Job over and against his angry speeches, see Donald Gard, The Exegetical Method of the Greek Translator of the Book of Job (Philadelphia, PA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1952).

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The lack of a name for Job’s wife is another gap to fill. Many women lack names in the biblical text and many feminists have noted how the unnamedness of women serves as a form of sexism by omission.208 In the Masoretic text, it is possible that Job’s wife’s mysterious appearance and disappearance subverts “any definitive naming of her,” but that has not stopped early interpreters in providing her with a name.209 The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i, for instance, along with other Arabic sources, give Job’s wife the name of Rahmah, in tradition of her compassion that she demonstrates in caring for Job.210 Rabbinic traditions suggest that Job married Dinah, thus allowing an Israelite wife for Job, a place among the patriarchs, and also offering an explanation as to what happened to Dinah after the sons of Jacob slaughtered all the sons of Shechem (Gen 34).211 The Targum of Job, as well as Pseudo-Philo, name Dinah as Job’s wife.212 The first century B.C.E. apocryphal text The Testament of

208

One of the most helpful analyses regarding the issue of unnamed women and sexist biblical texts remains Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Scm Classics (London: SCM, 2002). 209 Holly Henry suggests that “her silence subverts any definitive naming of her”: Holly Henry, "Job's Wife's Name," College Literature 18, no. 1 (1991): 35. 210 Demonstrating influence from T. Job as well in that she sells her hair. The Swahili text Utendi Wa Ayubu names her as Lady Rehema and continues her role in a similar fashion. See Caspi and Milstein, Why Hidest Thy Face: Job in Traditions and Literature, 82-198. 211 Michael C. Legaspi, "Job's Wives in the Testament of Job: A Note on the Synthesis of Two Traditions," JBL 127, no. 1 (2008). 212 C. Mangan, "Some Observations on the Dating of Targum Job," in Back to the Sources: Biblical and near Eastern Studies in Honour of Dermot Ryan, ed. K. J. Cathcart and J. F. Healey (Dublin: Glendale Press, 1989); Celine Mangan, "The Targum of Job," in The Aramaic Bible: The Targums, ed. et. al. Kevin Carthcart, The Aramaic Bible (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991); David M. Stec, The Text of the Targum of Job: An Introduction and Critical Edition (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994).The extant pieces of Targum of Job from Qumran omit this information: B. Jongeling, C. J. Labuschagne, and A. S. Van Der Woude, Aramaic Texts from Qumran (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976). For extensive coverage of the Aramaic version of Job found at Qumran, consult David Shepherd, Targum and Translation: A Reconsideration of the Qumran Aramaic Version of Job (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004). See also, Celine Mangan, "The Attitude to Women in the Prologue of Targum

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Job, which is abbreviated as “T. Job,” converges such traditions by giving Job two subsequent wives. The story begins with Job calling his seven sons and three daughters to him while Job rests on his deathbed. He tells the tale of his life with his first wife Sitidos, before he married his second wife Dinah.213 Due to the fact that T. Job brings in a Jewish Dinah tradition, the text more than likely stems from a Jewish origin. Yet, the author relies heavily on the LXX and evidences a kind of Hellenistic Judaism that had major influence on the New Testament.214 The concept of a Testament is a Hellenistic development, one that means to leave a spiritual legacy from a patriarch. Since Hellenistic culture attests to the use of legal wills and to the composition of testaments for Greek philosophers, Jewish communities utilized similar conventions for their heritage. T. Job, unlike other Greek testaments, focuses more on story than on apocalyptic elements, making it more like a novel.215 Written in Greek, T. Job’s overall themes are that of a spiritual nature, over and against an emphasis on material goods and wealth. The “Testament” as a literary category presents a revered figure’s last-will-and-testament: a patriarch calls his

Job," in Targumic and Cognate Studies, ed. Kevin J. Cathcart and Michael Maher (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). 213 The Job as Jobab tradition evident in LXX but not in rabbinic sources merges in T. Job. See Legaspi, "Job's Wives in the Testament of Job: A Note on the Synthesis of Two Traditions," 7476. 214 Michael A. Knibb and Pieter W. van der Horst, ed., Studies on the Testament of Job, Society for New Testament Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 215 Lawrence M. Wills, ed., Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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children to his deathbed to recount his life story in which he places emphasis on certain virtues. The testament ends with details on the patriarch’s death and burial.216 Robert Kugler conjectures that Roman domination of the Jews in Alexandria lends to T. Job’s sharp divergence from the biblical counterpart in terms of the origins of Job’s sufferings. The text, dating somewhere between the first century B.C.E. and the first century C.E., dismisses earthly possessions and material wealth and could coincide around the time of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E..217 T. Job opens with Job calling together his family and reminding them of a time when he was ruler over all Egypt (28:7).218 When he lived near a popular temple, Job doubted its origins from were God, and an angel confirmed his suspicions, telling him in a dream that it originated from the Devil. After Job destroyed Satan’s temple, Satan begins to attack Job. Job’s friends, the three kings, come to see Job twenty years after the onset of his illness. Job’s wife, Sitidos, living a life of destitution and servanthood in order to care for Job, pleads with the kings to properly bury her children. But when Job provides them with a vision of her children in heaven, Sitidos retreats and dies peacefully of exhaustion (ch. 40). T. Job thus consists of the following sections: Prologue (ch. 1) 216

George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 231-34. See also John J. Collins, "The Testament of Job," in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael Stone, Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum Ad Novum Testamentum (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). 217 Robert A. Kugler, "Testaments," in Justification and Variegated Nomism, ed. D. A. Carson, Peter T. O'Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 202-04. Kugler builds upon Collins here. 218 All references and citations of T. Job come from Robert A. Kraft, ed., The Testament of Job: According to the Sv Text, Texts and Translations: Pseudepigrapha Series (Missoula, Montana: Scholars' Press, 1974).

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Main Body (chs. 2-50) Job Speaks with Angel (chs. 2-5) Job Struggles with Satan (chs. 6-27) Three Kings and Elihu (chs. 28-45) Three Daughters and Spiritual Inheritance (chs. 46-50) Epilogue: Death, Heavenly Ascent, and Burial (chs. 51-53) The women characters in T. Job have received much attention from scholars because their roles, for better or for worse, are greatly expanded compared to the biblical version. First, when Satan first attacks Job, he disguises himself as a beggar who comes to Job’s door. Job knows the beggar is Satan but Job’s maidservant does not; she gives Satan a fresh loaf of bread instead of the burnt loaf Job instructed her to give him (ch. 7). When Job left the city after Satan struck him with disease, Job sat on a dung heap for 48 years, his skin infested with worms and his eyes humbled watching his wife work as a maidservant (vv.19-20). The situation gets so bad that Sitidos begs for bread in the market place, and Satan, disguised as a bread-seller, requires Sitidos to cut her hair in public for a loaf (v.22). Satan figures prominently in the first section of T. Job, interacting mostly with two principle characters, with a woman or with Job.219 Both Sitidos and the household maidservant cannot recognize Satan in disguise, a fact that leads Kugler and Rohrbaugh to suggest that the women symbolize the uselessness of earthly honor in contrast to the kind of honor Job

219

Satan nearly disappears when the Kings enter the story, nor is Satan mentioned in the final section of T. Job. This is discussed in Bradford A. Kirkegaard, "Satan in the Testament of Job: A Literary Analysis," in Of Scribes and Sages: Early Jewish Interpretation and Transmission of Scripture, ed. Craig A. Evans (New York: T&T Clark, 2004). For more on Satan’s role, see H. C. Kee, "Satan, Magic, and Salvation in the Testament of Job," in Society of Biblical Literature 1974 Seminar Papers, ed. George MacRae (Atlanta: SBL, 1974).

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receives from God.220 Others note the contrasts between knowing and not knowing, enduring and not enduring, and that Job’s wife, though a faithful wife, cannot transcend “the state of deception,” a testament to the weak nature of female insight.221 An underlying ideology of femininity as an earth-bound performance exists in T. Job. Or, as Susan Garrett notes, in giving Job’s daughters a spiritual inheritance, the text affirms female corporeal nature, the kind that Job’s daughters give-up, or transcend through an expression of masculine ideals.222 When it comes to expression of masculine virtues, though, Nancy Klancher has most recently argued that Job’s daughters mean to mirror Job in his acceptance of monotheistic inheritance, that they characterize a right relationship with the Hebrew God.223 At the end of Job’s life, he grants his three daughters, the ones born to him through Dinah, with three golden boxes with golden bands/girdles inside, the same that Job received from the Lord. The amulets cured Job’s body and will protect the daughters from the enemy as well (47). When the daughters put on the girdles they

220

Robert A. Kugler and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, "On Women and Honor in the Testament of Job," Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 14, no. 1 (2004). 221 John J. Collins, "Testaments," in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period. Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus, ed. Michael E. Stone (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984), 352. 222 Susan R. Garrett, "The 'Weaker Sex' in the Testament of Job," JBL 112 (1993). 223 Nancy Klancher, "The Male Soul in Drag: Women-as-Job in the Testament of Job," Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 19, no. 3 (2010). When it comes to the inheritance of Job’s daughters in the MT text (42:14-15) and in T. Job, see Zafrira. Ben-Barak, "Inheritance by Daughters in the Ancient near East," Journal of Semitic Studies 25 (1980); Zafrira Ben-Barak, "The Daughters of Job," Eretz-Israel 24, Avraham Malamat (1993); Rebecca Lesses, "The Daughters of Job," in Searching the Scriptures, ed. Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1994); William S. Morrow, "Toxic Religion and the Daughters of Job," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 27, no. 3 (1998); Heike Omerzu, "Women, Magic and Angels: On the Emancipation of Job's Daughters in the Apocryphal Testament of Job," in Bodies in Question: Gender, Religion, Text, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Darlene Bird (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005).

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experience a change of heart, and begin to speak in the language of the angels (48), in the tradition of Christian glossolalia (see 1 Cor 13:1; 14:14-17; 2 Cor 12:4; Rom 8:26). Three days later, Job gives each daughter an instrument to play, and the daughters sing while Job ascends to heaven and his body goes into a tomb (53). Whether or not wearing the girdles and embodying spiritual gifts constitutes a masculine performance, a denial of female embodiment, or a signal of concern for heavenly riches over and against earthly riches remain debated. When it comes to the women in T. Job, the words of Maier and Schroer, in their feminist leanings, reveal what reception history can enlighten, especially in the midst of the gaps of the text: For a feminist reading of the book of Job the wife is a challenge in various respects. Through her, the patriarchal character of the book becomes dramatically apparent. Although she is inflicted by the same disasters as Job, apart from the disease, her suffering is not recognized; in fact, she herself is hardly mentioned. Contrary to all biblical roleconventions her advice is not accepted by Job: she is called foolish and dishonorable, and is removed from the story that follows. At the same time, however, the later narrative traditions show that this important gap had a stimulating effect on readers’ imagination and called for more details. It is no coincidence that the Testament of Job devotes so much attention to this wife and to Job’s daughters. A Job as devoid of relationships as the one in the Hebrew tradition was not acceptable.224 It is in the realm of relationship that this dissertation begins, expanding on what Maier and Schroer observe, that the marital relationship between Job and his wife

224

Christl Maier and Silvia Schroer, "What About Job? Questioning the Book of 'the Righteous Sufferer'," in Wisdom and Psalms: A Feminist Companion to the Bible, Second Series, ed. Athalya Brenner and Carole F. Fontaine (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 196-97.

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cannot remain for readers as unexamined as it is in the biblical text. The impact of Job and his wife on readers’ imaginations in Christian societies is what follows.

CHAPTER TWO: JOB AND HIS WIFE IN EARLY CHRISTIAN ART The previous chapter analyzed how the author of Job, an Israelite sage in Babylonia, received an early Israelite folktale (Job 1-2; 42:7-10) and adapted it in light of social and cultural circumstances, book-ending the prose around poetic sections. The exilic setting of the book offers a prime context for masculinity in crisis; in the concepts of Job in pain and God’s response from the whirlwind, aspects of gender hiearchial negotiations take place. Job’s body signifies body politics, both in terms of the inflictions upon Job in light of torture and pain and in terms of God’s call for him to gird his loins and to perform a specific act of masculinity in a power struggle. The body reveals social apparatuses at work. The gendered body is one that performs based on social ideals of what masculinity and femininity should look like. This chapter moves away from the text and into the world of art and visual culture as a starting point. In chapter one, I introduced David Morgan’s concept of “the sacred gaze.” Visual culture signifies an analysis of not only the messages of an object, but the social apparatuses that produce and engage any object, whether text or image.225 The examination of visual culture takes place “when either a visual scholar asks socially or culturally minded questions or when a social or cultural analyst investigates visual artifacts or ways of seeing.”226 Such culturally minded questions

225 226

Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice, 31-33. Ibid., 31.

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include Stuart Hall’s concept of the institutionalization of representation discussed in the previous chapter. The historiated initial, figure 1.1, introduced in the previous chapter is an example of a reproduced image that represents the whole of the book of Job. The quintessential medieval image of Job places his nude body on a dung heap surrounded by his wife and the devil. The Christian ideal of patient suffering, unquestioning faith and piety, serves to perpetuate orthodox teachings of the Church. From a cultural studies perspective, then, artistic intentionality emerges from social and cultural contexts. Therefore, this chapter asks what kinds of social and cultural meanings of gender are encoded in the art of Job and his wife in early Christianity. For instance, Job and his wife dominate the artistic iconography of the early Christian world. Why did artists choose to portray them together? The cultural aspect of Job’s “field of vision” in early Christianity includes social understandings of gender, or, how Job and his wife’s relationship meets or falls short of an early Christian understanding of marriage in a Roman context. I analyze the visual culture of Job and his wife in light of Roman imperial contexts, in the midst of intersections of gender, empire, and early Christian identities.227

227

For an example of this kind of analysis of Roman art in light of biblical texts, see Davina C. Lopez, "Before Your Very Eyes: Roman Imperial Ideology, Gender Constructs and Paul's InterNationalism," in Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses, ed. Todd Penner and Caroline Vander Stichele (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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Christian Artistic Receptions of Familiar Greco-Roman Forms Early Christian art adopted specific Greco-Roman styles because those images carried cultural significance for a Roman context.228 Those contexts overlap and intersect. As Hans Belting states, “Holy images were never the affair of religion alone, but also always of society, which expressed itself in and through religion.”229 The origins of Christian art in the first four centuries of the Common Era, then, must be considered in relation to the broader culture and society.230 Mary Charles-Murray phrases it this way: “Christian art must therefore be considered as a continuous branch of the art of the ancient world.”231 The Bible served as a source of depiction, but artists reinterpreted “the vast repertoire of familiar pagan images seen all around them.”232 Christian artists did so because, as Christianity became more and more acceptable in the wealthier classes and in the empire itself during the fourth and fifth centuries, artists capitalized on forms and images already in place in Greco-Roman society while establishing and maintaining authorial images of the Church and state.

228

Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). See also Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 159-64. 229 Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, 3. 230 John Lowden, Early Christian & Byzantine Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1997). This is also André Grabar’s main thesis in his Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). 231 Mary Charles-Murray, "The Emergence of Christian Art," in Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (New Haven; Fort Worth: Yale University Press: In association with the Kimbell Art Museum, 2007), 51. 232 Jeffrey Spier, "The Earliest Christian Art: From Personal Salvation to Imperial Power," in Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (New Haven; Fort Worth: Yale University Press: In association with the Kimbell Art Museum, 2007), 1.

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The allegorical connections between Old and New Testament stories remain key for early Christian art and exegesis. Christian artists used Greco-Roman imagery to revision the relationships. For instance, representations of Jonah include a ketos, a Greco-Roman sea monster, the term used in the LXX. The style belongs to GrecoRoman culture, but the uniquely Christian version of the representation comes from types or prefigurations of Jesus Christ’s ministry, death, and resurrection. Jonah, then, as a type of Jesus, prefigured Jesus’ resurrection by living three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish (Matt 12:40).233 The catacomb frescoes of Christians, beginning from around 200 C.E., represent some of the earliest distinctive Christian artistic forms. Around the latter part of the third century, wealthy Christian families also began to commission marble sarcophagi. The catacombs of the third and fourth centuries served as pilgrimage sites and areas of venerating martyrs and saints.234 Economically speaking, then, Christian art developed on a scale consistent with the political stability of Christianity and the financial resources of its advocates, which could allow for spaces to express the religion and culture of Christianity itself.235 When it comes to the relationship between early Christian images and textual sources, such as biblical and ecclesiastical, most Christian images were abridged allusions to elements of biblical stories rather than illustrations of an entire biblical

233

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 7. 235 Charles-Murray, "The Emergence of Christian Art," 56-57. 234

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book.236 Those scholars who begin their integrative work between text and image at different points—beginning with the text or with the image—will produce different conclusions. Some scholars regard Christian art as another form of scriptural exposition. Other scholars consider Christian art as part of the iconographical forms of late classical art and therefore pull from themes from late classical literature for their interpretations as well. An early Christian image generates its meanings from biblical texts. However, any given image reveals not only elements of textual exposition but also the “field of vision” surrounding its conception, including what Robin Jensen calls “the incorporation of symbolic” thinking into religious practice.237 In this sense, gender, as a symbolic construction of both social and religious practice, can play an important role in the interpretation of artistic images of Job. Colleen M. Conway establishes a basis for the importance of gender in understanding early Christian texts in Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity.238 Her study applies an ideal Roman hegemonic masculinity to biblical representations of Jesus. Just because a baby was born with male reproductive organs did not make him a man in Roman society; a man makes himself a man based on his actions. His manliness is based on comparison with other men. Roman men were expected to seek opportunities to display their courage and other celebrated masculine virtues, such as self-control and piety. When it comes to Jesus’ particular dislocation 236

Robin M. Jensen, "Early Christian Images and Exegesis," in Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (New Haven; Fort Worth: Yale University Press: In association with the Kimbell Art Museum, 2007), 68. 237 Ibid., 70. 238 Colleen M. Conway, Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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from constructions of the family and household, Conway argues that Jesus in the Gospels represents a “mix of masculinities,” as one who “at times resists hegemonic masculine ideology, even while the narrative presents him in decidedly imperial masculine terms.”239 The ideal imperial masculinity of the empire that Jesus reaches, as Conway puts it, is the freedom to make active choices for one’s life, a self-mastery that elevates one to the transcendent realm. When it comes to imperial understandings of gender hierarchies, masculine heroes ascend closer to the gods than other men.240 God, therefore, might not be biologically male, but necessarily manly in perfection, autonomy, order, and completeness; God is a perfect example of masculinity. Jesus’ death on a cross, a shameful form of punishment in Roman culture, calls his masculinity into question. But, Conway suggests that early Christians (like in the Philippians hymn) couched his death in pious humility that ultimately demonstrates self-control in the face of death and thus restores failed masculinity. Jesus “offers the kind of manly self-control so prized in the hierarchal Roman world.”241 Since the household structure remained integral to Roman imperial culture, Jesus challenges its central structure with ultimate hypermasculinity, which is defined as an emphasis on masculinity to serve the ideals of the surrounding culture. As Paul notes, a celibate lifestyle takes a masculine sense of self-control and mastery not reserved for the weak (1 Cor 7:1-9). What does this sense of hypermasculinity lend to 239

Ibid., 125. Ibid., 36-39. 241 Ibid., 142. 240

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images of Job and his wife? Why is Job often portrayed with his wife? In early Christian exegesis, Job’s masculinity clearly mirrors that of Jesus Christ’s, as Job is expected to prefigure Jesus’ bodily suffering and ultimate triumph over spiritual attack. A feminine counterpart to Job’s masculinity, as found in the artistic construction of Job’s wife, might also reveal how wives were supposed to act in such situations. Some catacomb depictions of Job in Calixtus and Domitilla feature a lone, seated, Job. Job sits on a pile of rocks (see figs. 2.1 and 2.2).242 He is a dignified figure, accepting his suffering in a stoic way as a moral example. The cemetaries of Apronianus and Domitilla in Rome from the 4th century also includes Job seated alone.243 Furthermore, the same motif exists in the Chapel of the Exodus in the Necropolis of El-Bagawat in the Kharga Oasis in Egypt. The chapel is one of the earliest of the necropolis, dating to the late third century.244 The images of Job in the Chapel of Exodus are poorly preserved but it that appears Job sits on a chair, talking to someone in front of him.245

242

For discussion of the dates of the Roman catacombs, see F. van der Meer, Early Christian Art, trans. Peter and Friedl Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). 243 Choon Leong Seow, "Christian Consequences of Job" (paper presented at the Ministers Week, The McFadin Lectures, Brite Divinity School, Fort Worth, Texas, 2009). 244 Ahmed Fakhry, The Necropolis of El-Bagawat in Kharga Oasis (Cairo: Government Press, 1951). 245 Ibid., 61.

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Figure 2.1. Wall painting of Job from the catacombs of St. Calixtus, Rome. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society.

Figure 2.2. Wall painting of Job from the Cemetery of Apronianus, Rome, in the catacombs of St. Marcellino and Pietro. Fourth century. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society.

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Catacombs elicited a kind of spectatorship different from the elaborate sarcophagi of the elite for public viewing. In a sacred funerary context, Job’s trial represents human suffering and a prefiguration of Christ’s suffering.246 As Christian art expands into the empire, and into more public arenas, Job’s wife becomes more central in portrayals. The more common appearance of Job and his wife together is partly due to a Christian adaptation of the Roman standard to centralize the conjugal relationship in epitaphs and tomb structures, to make a public manifestation of the institution of marriage.247

An Early Christian Artistic Standard for Job and His Wife: Christian Adaptations of Roman Marriage Ideals Few extant images of Job and his wife from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries C.E. exist. The similarities between the representations demonstrate the existence of a prevailing early Christian artistic tradition for Job and his wife. The costumes and gestures of the type-scene indicate Roman social influence. Despite several literary interpretations of Job’s wife that cast her in a verbally bold light,248 the artistic message suppresses any strong resistance or questioning from Job’s wife in favor of

246

Jaś Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity, Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 271, 74. 247 The marital relationship exists as one relationship among a network of kinship structures in Roman society, as pointed out by Beryl Rawson, "The Roman Family in Recent Research: State of the Question," Biblical Interpretation 11, no. 2 (2003): 121. 248 Those verbal textual traditions will be discussed in this chapter, including Job’s wife in the LXX and in T. Job.

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Christian wifely fidelity advocated by Roman ideals (1 Tim 2:11-15).249 The same holds true for early Christian artistic messages of Susanna; those messages, in the words of K. Smith, “invent marital chastity,” despite any implications of sexual lust in her story. A common Roman icon of the praying person, the orant, most often applies to Susanna in early Christian art so that artists combine virtues of religious piety with marital chastity.250 The sustainment of marital fidelity remains an important early Christian strategy in Christian art as Christianity became institutionalized and assimilated into Roman culture.251 Artists make Job and his wife fit an ideal, despite various forms of everyday marital relations. As Elsa Tamez notes concerning biblical authors in their social contexts, “in the Roman empire the patriarchal household only remained as an ideal of the male and governing elite, filled with nostalgia and discontent in the face of contrary conduct, especially wealthy women.”252 A coherent Christian common visual theme relegates Job and his wife to husbandly honor and wifely respect. In early Christian depictions of Job with his

249

I am indebted to Dr. Carolyn Osiek for clarifying this idea for me after reading a very early draft of this chapter. 250 Kathryn A. Smith, "Inventing Marital Chastity: The Iconography of Susanna and the Elders in Early Christian Art," Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993). 251 As evident in another study on marriage themes in early Christian art by Beverly Berg, "Alcestis and Hercules in the Catacomb of Via Latina," Vigiliae Christianae 48, no. 3 (1994). 252 Elsa Tamez, Struggles for Power in Early Christianity, trans. Gloria Kinsler (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2007), 33.

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wife, Job remains seated whereas Job’s wife stands, holding a stick in one hand.253 Bread sits at the end of the stick. Most often, she also raises one hand to her face. In the New Catacomb, Via Latina, Rome, a wall painting depicts Job sitting on a rock while his wife stands behind him (fig. 2.3). Job’s wife’s placement behind Job is unique; another wall painting preserved in less quality in the New Catacomb represents the more common position of Job’s wife, standing off to Job’s side. 254 In nearly every surviving image of Job and his wife in early Christian catacombs and sarcophagi, their positions are identical; Job sits and his wife stands to his side, offering him something on the end of a stick. The following surviving works solidify the existence of an early Christian visual motif of Job and his wife: one of the earliest depictions, the mid third century, of Job and his wife in a fresco from the hypogeum, underground grave, of the Viale Manzoni, Rome; a fresco near the basilica of the cemetery of Petrus and Marcellinus from 320-340 C.E.; a bas-relief from Arles, now lost, contested dating from the eighth century; another lost piece with Job and his wife comes from the 4th century Reims sarcophagus, destroyed during the French Revolution, but an illustration survives; an illustration of a damaged sarcophagus in the Church of St. Sebastiano, Rome (fig. 2.4); a sarcophagus (Lateran 164) in the 253

Five examples include two paintings from the New Catacomb, Via Latina, Rome, and a bas-relief from Arles (now lost), and two sarcophagi representations on the Junius Bassus sarcophagus in the Treasury Museum, St. Peter’s, Rome and a sarcophagus from the cemetery of Domitilla, Lateran 171, Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican. 254 The painting is less preserved and quite faded. For more information, see Antonio Ferrua, The Unknown Catacomb: A Unique Discovery of Early Christian Art, trans. Iain Inglis (New Lanark, Scotland: Geddes & Grosset, 1990); William Tronzo and College Art Association of America, The Via Latina Catacomb: Imitation and Discontinuity in Fourth-Century Roman Painting, Monographs on the Fine Arts (University Park, PA: Published for the College Art Association of America by the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986).

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Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican, Rome (fig. 2.5); and the sarcophagus Junius Bassus, a prefect of Rome, from 359 C.E. in the Treasury Museum of St. Peter’s, Rome (fig. 2.6). The visual motif of Job and his wife, more preserved in the West and present but scant in the East, continues throughout the eighth century. The date of the Arles sarcophagus is contested but it demonstrates, along with the Reims sarcophagus of the fourth century, how a motif of Job and his wife was carried at least into Gaul, modern-day France.255

Figure 2.3. Job and wife wall painting in the Via Latina Catacomb. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society. 255

See Edmond Le Blant, "D'une Representation Inedite De Job Sur Un Sarcophage D'arles," Revue Archeologique 2 (1860).

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Figure 2.4. Drawing D of Jobb and wife of a damaged sarcoophagus Churcch of St. Sebasttiano, Rome. Picture from J. Wilpert, Sarrcofagi Cristiaani Antichi II (11932), p. 266. Photo: P Christiaan Art Index, Prinnceton Universsity.

M Vaticanii, Museo Pio Cristiano, C Laterran 164. Photo:: Christian Art Figure 2.5. Saarcophagus in Musei Index, Princeton Univversity.

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Figure 2.6. Job and his Wife on the Sarcophagus Junius Bassus from 359 C.E. in the Treasury Museum of St. Peter’s, Rome. Photo: ARTstor.

For early Christians, biblical marital models solidified the institution of marriage and their spiritual integrity in what Mary D’Angelo calls “the interchange of Roman ‘family values’ propaganda and early Jewish and Christian apology.”256 Such a display of marital peace between Job and his wife, despite any textual elements to the contrary, sets-up Christian “family values” based on Roman ideals. The marriage laws of Augustus from the early first century C.E., for instance, established an imperial and an ideal conventional claim over marriage. The propaganda based on his

256

Mary R. D'Angelo, "Ευσέβεια: Roman Imperial Family Values and the Sexual Politics of 4 Maccabees and the Pastorals," Biblical Interpretation 11, no. 2 (2003): 139.

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laws (Lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, Lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis) included a concern for ordering society based on past virtues.257 Job and his wife’s marital relationship as subject exists as one example of broader cultural currents that marriage should reflect the state. “Family” (οίκος and οικία in Greek and domus in Latin) means not only the physical dwelling of kinship groups, but also the whole of the household and family lineage, kin living under one roof and kin living elsewhere.258 The term paterfamilias, Latin for “father of the family,” refers to the male in a Roman household with the most authority. Roman law concerning his authority applied to all Roman citizens. The husband’s authority existed strongly in legal configurations, especially in terms of property ownership, but high-class women held more freedoms to own property and even ran households that lacked male authority.259 Post-Pauline domestic ethics demonstrate social concern for well-established authority between husband and wife. The so-called “household codes” (Col 3:18-4:1; Eph 5:21-6:9; 1 Peter 2:18-3:7) reflect an assimilation to Roman ideals of marital behavior. The household codes communicate the subordination of wives, children, and slaves to the paterfamilias—husband, father, master.260 Aristotle argues for similar stratification of the home in Politics because, for Aristotle, the authority257

Ibid., 141-42. See also Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 21-24. 258 Carolyn Osiek, "The Family in Early Christianity: 'Family Values' Revisted," CBQ 58, no. 1 (1996): 10. 259 Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch, Families in the New Testament World, ed. Don S. Browning and Ian S. Evison, The Family, Religion, and Culture (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), 58-59. 260 Ibid., 117-18.

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structure of the home undergirds the stability of the state. The household codes remain indicative of a Roman development of Aristotle’s idea that the clearly delineated authority in the political order begins with the home.261 The household codes attempt to manage and maintain proper behavior reflective of Roman cultural values.262 In other words, “theologically and ethically the deutero-Pauline church joined the Augustan moral revolution.”263 One deutero-Pauline text pertinent to Job and his wife is 1 Timothy 2:8-15. Verses 8-9 call men to exhibit spiritual piety and women to “emulate societal ideas of feminine modesty and virtue.”264 It reads: “I determine then that in all places men should pray, lifting pious hands without anger or dispute; likewise women should adorn themselves in respectable clothing with modesty and self-control.”265 The epistle of Timothy delineates a Roman code of dress for women, for their dress marks their social identity; their modesty also counteracts the expectation that men can express their prayerful actions in public. Modest clothing for women remained of social importance in Roman contexts because clothing outwardly reflected a woman’s self-control (swfrosu,nhj), or in

261

Trevor J. Burke, Family Matters: A Socio-Historical Study of Kinship Metaphors in 1 Thessalonians (New York: T&T Clark International 2003), 61-65. 262 Margaret Y. MacDonald, "Rereading Paul: Early Interpreters of Paul on Women and Gender," in Women and Christian Origins, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D'Angelo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 246. 263 Osiek and Balch, Families in the New Testament World, 121. 264 MacDonald, "Rereading Paul: Early Interpreters of Paul on Women and Gender." 265 I Timothy 2:8-9, author’s translation: Bou,lomai ou=n proseu,cesqai tou.j a;ndraj evn panti. to,pw| evpai,rontaj o`si,ouj cei/raj cwri.j ovrgh/j kai. dialogismou/Å ~Wsau,twj Îkai.Ð gunai/kaj evn katastolh/| kosmi,w| meta. aivdou/j kai. swfrosu,nhj kosmei/n e`auta,j

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Latin, prudentia.266 The term for “modesty” (aivdw,j), and the Latin pudor, relates to the female body and social expectations of dress.267 Like the women in 1 Tim 2:9 who should wear respectable clothing in modesty (aivdou/j), so Epictetus argues that young women should understand “that they are honored for nothing else but appearing decent and modest (evp’ouvde,ni a;llw| timw/ntai h] tw|/ ko,smiai fai,nesqai kai. aivdh,monej).”268 In his “Advice to the Bride and Groom,” Plutarch argues that a wife’s modesty (aivdw|/|) will directly relate to the modesty of great love that a husband and wife will share in mutual relations.269 The artistic standard for Job and his wife reflects the social expectations of gendered behavior discussed above. Christian artists downplay Job’s physical suffering and his theological uncertainty for his proper piety and husbandly authority. They also downplay Job’s wife’s verbally rebellious side for a proper depiction of respectful servitude. The following sections treat Job and his wife separately in order to discuss the gendered implications and societal expectations placed upon Job and his wife in early Christian art.

266

Bruce Winter, Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans 2003), 101-02. 267 Ibid. Winter provides the bibliographic references of Epictetus and Plutarch that follow. 268 Epictetus, The Enchiridion, trans. Thomas W. Higginson, The Library of Liberal Arts (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1955), XL. 269 Plutarch, Advice, 139C. See Sarah B. Pomeroy, ed., Plutarch's Advice to the Bride and Groom and a Consolation to His Wife (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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The Figure of Job in Early Christian Art Job, as a Patriarch, embodies early Christian virtues of spiritual endurance, heroism, and the promise of life after death. The second century C.E. Apocalypse of Paul promotes Job as a saint, one who experiences survival after death. In the text (ch. 27), Paul meets Job, Noah, and Lot before the resurrection as representing those patriarchs whose immortal souls remained in heaven after their bodily deaths.270 Clement of Rome includes Job as a prototype of Jesus, one who accepts humility and endures suffering for the sake of righteousness and redemption.271 Although, Job rarely obtains humility in his lament of having been born (Job 3), his tirades against God’s unjust treatment (chs. 6-7), or in his speeches that defend his honor (ch.31). Indeed, Job does more complaining in anguish than demonstrating patient suffering. Although the Hebrew Bible account of Job may not emphasize his patience, Christian traditions preserve his piety and patient suffering. As mentioned earlier, Stephen Vicchio establishes one central way early Christians understood Job in commentaries: a patient sufferer who mirrors Jesus Christ’s patience that through suffering one will reach vindication through resurrection. But, also, “Job the Warrior”

270

Theodore Silverstein and Anthony Hilhorst, Apocalypse of Paul: A New Critical Edition of Three Long Latin Versions (Genève: P. Cramer, 1997). For English text of the Apocalypse of Paul, see Willis Barnstone, ed., The Other Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 538-50. 271 First Clement 17; for critical Greek text, see J. B. Lightfoot, ed., Clement, Part One. The Apostolic Fathers: Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp, vol. 2 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1989). For an English translation, see Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Apostolic Fathers in English, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2006). See also Caspi and Milstein, Why Hidest Thy Face: Job in Traditions and Literature, 212-17.

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is another way early Christians depicted Job.272 T. Job offers a glimpse into Hellenistic Jewish thought and holds great influence over early Christian understandings of Job as well. In the text, as discussed previously, Job destroys a pagan temple devoted to the worship of Satan, and as a result, Job engages in active battle or war (po,lemoj) with Satan (3:4). As in the biblical text, Job’s possessions get taken away from him. Then, Satan petitions God for the authority to inflict Job’s body (ch. 19). Job spent 48 years on a dung heap (kopri,aj) outside the city, his body infested with worms and disease. God finally appears, but the whirlwind speeches remain absent in T. Job. Rather, God condemns Job’s friends for questioning Job’s piety (ch. 42). For Job, “patience is superior to everything” (krei,sswn evsti.n pa,ntwn hv makroqumi,a; 27:7). A strong literary tradition concerning Job and the nature of his suffering, alongside developing views in early Christianity concerning life after death, casts Job in a saintly light. Artistic representations of Job, however, cast him in a more subtle and vague light. Not one image from early Christianity places Job upon a dung heap, a unique interpolation of the Greek, as both the LXX and T. Job use the exact term (kopri,aj).273 Two visual aspects—Job’s clothes and his seating arrangements—signal a conventional visual emphasis on Job’s role as proper Roman paterfamilias which

272

Vicchio, Job in the Ancient World. The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, 139. Rahlfs’ LXX, Job 2:8 and T. Job 19:8. The dung heap is a later interpolation of the place outside the city where people put their garbage. The MT specifies Job’s placement among the ashes (rp,ae(h) as indicative of ancient Israelite mourning practices. 273

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would, for an early Christian audience, encapsulate an ideal of his ability to run his household in controlled Christian piety. Job as Citizen and Manly Athlete By the first century B.C.E., the toga dominated Roman dress for Roman adult male citizens. In Roman grave reliefs at this time, a toga indicated a male’s status, for foreigners and exiles did not dawn the toga.274 For Roman male citizens, the toga was worn over the tunic. Indeed, the toga functions this way with male representations on the Junius Bassus sarcophagus (fig. 2.7). Junius Bassus, after all, signifies how the fourth century in Christian art brought with it more imperial and state sponsorships, especially since the reign of Constantine.275 It is fitting, then, that the central characters in both upper and lower register scenes, including Abraham, Jesus, and Peter, all wear the toga. The predominant scholarly consensus for Job’s New Testament correspondent on Junius Bassus relates to Paul’s arrest, depicted on the extreme bottom right. Job, as typus Christi patientis, a type of Christ’s patience, becomes exemplified in Paul’s ministry and death.276 The similar pointed roof structures over Job’s and Paul’s scenes, as opposed to the curved roof on the Eve and Adam scene immediately to the

274

Shelley Stone, "The Toga: From National to Ceremonial Costume," in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 13-17. 275 Charles-Murray, "The Emergence of Christian Art," 53. 276 Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1964), 41. This is also the argument of Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, The Iconography of the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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right, also functions as a connective sign.277 Scholars agree that Job’s image on Junius Bassus means to communicate a Christian theological message of patience.

Figure 2.7. Sarcophagus Junius Bassus from 359 C.E. in the Treasury Museum of St. Peter’s, Rome. Photo: ARTstor.

Job wears a tunic, a loose-fitting sleeveless garment worn to knee-length; he bares one shoulder in most artistic cases. The sleeveless, loose tunic provides for the viewing of Job’s muscular chest or arms (see figs. 2.5 and 2.6). Greek heroic statuary, 277

It has been argued that since both Eve and Job’s wife speak with Satan in early Christian literary traditions and allegedly fall victim to Satan’s temptation to lead their husbands to sin, that Job’s wife and Eve share a visual connection in the minds of the viewers. Cynthia Chapman, "Woman, Satan and the Curse: Job's Wife in Text and Image," in Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: 2005). Although the theme resonates on Junius Bassus, this idea develops later in the history of art of Job and his wife and comes to fruition in medieval art.

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athletes and warriors especially, displayed the muscular male body with hardly any clothing.278 Roman adaptations of the Greek heroic nude emphasize a Roman concern for nudity in public while at the same time engaging heroic nudity as a way to honor important Roman men in terms of heroes of old.279 Hallett argues that the difference between a Greek hero in art and a Roman hero in art comes from the depiction of a male’s head. Roman artists continued the ideals of a Greek heroic body but the head of a Roman statue preserved the man’s character and individuality.280 An example of the Greek ideal body with a distinctive face comes from the sarcophagus of C. Junius Euhodus and Metilia Acte in the Vatican, Museo Chiaramonti (fig. 2.8).

Figure 2.8. Sacrophagus of C. Junius Euhodus and Metilia Acte. Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican, Rome. 2nd cent. C.E.. Photo: Ann Raia, www.vroma.org.

278

Jan Bremmer, "Walking, Standing, and Sitting in Ancient Greek Culture," in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 279 Christopher H. Hallett, The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 B.C.-A.D. 300, Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Rather than use the term “heroic nudity,” Hallett prefers “heroic costume” to emphasize that nudity, with the accompaniment of certain drapery or weaponry functioned as a costume to present certain social conventions concerning male nudity. 280 Ibid., 289-295.

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The scene places Euhodus and Metilia, priestess of Magna Mater (Ostia), in the guise of Alcestis and Admetus. In the mythic tale, Admetus is fated to die at a specific time unless he finds another to die in his place. Alcestis agrees to die in his place. Heracles, however, intercepts her from Death and restores their marriage. Marriage exists as an underlying theme here as a real-life couple chooses to present their marriage in a mythological story. Junius Euhodus exhibits a form of heroic nudity, first as a hunter to the left, as Admetus watching his wife Alcestis die in the middle, and finally shaking Herakles’ hand as he delivers Alcestis back to Admetus. She remains fully clothed, exuding a modest demeanor with her right hand to her chin. Concerning the use of the myth of Alcestis and Admetus, Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson note that “scenes of marriage and scenes featuring the virtues of women (for example, fertility, fidelity, and beauty) are sometimes combined with those that refer to male virtues like prowess in battle or the hunt, the granting of clemency to vanquished foes, and pious offerings to a beneficent god.”281 The sarcophagus places a Roman man, Junius Euhodus, in the realm of heroes of old; his nudity indicates this placement but his face preserves his distinctive Roman character. Job’s early Christian standard deliberately communicates his status as a hero of old; the visual representation of his athletic body depicts a spiritual lesson from Greco-Roman sport. In studying the difference between Greek and Roman concepts 281

Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson, "Introduction: 'Her Parents Gave Her the Name Claudia'," in I Claudia 2: Women in Roman Art and Society, ed. Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 7. Admetus and Alcestis also appear in the Via Latina catacomb, as images of overcoming death. See the discussion in Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: The Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity, 274-78.

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of manliness, Myles McDonnell suggests that a Greek man could prove his courage in many situations, but for Roman men, the culmination of masculinity related to battle, as “physical prowess or courage, especially as displayed in war, remained the central element of manliness throughout the Republican period and into the Empire.”282 In other words, Roman masculinity depended on a man’s relation to other men rather than simply in relation to other women.283 McDonnell’s argument for a Roman masculine ideal poses problems for Job, whose physical illness threatens his corporal integrity. However, the existence of illness only compromised masculinity if the self-restrained masculine behavior wanes. Job remains in control of his suffering, and that proves his masculinity. For instance, Seneca states, “If I must suffer illness, it will be my wish to do nothing out of control, nothing effeminately.”284 Furthermore, Hellenistic Jews and Christian authors adopted athletic metaphors not only to engage familiar rhetoric of their audiences but also to display the superiority of their metaphorical spiritual wrestling

282

Myles McDonnell, "Romen Men and Greek Virtue," in Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ralph Mark Rosen (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003), 236. McDonnell traces the Latin adaptation of the Greek term avreth, arguing that the corresponding Latin term, virtus, was a broadened term to include ideal Roman male behavior. For another discussion of vir as it relates to war and Roman masculinity, see Richard Alston, "Arms and the Man: Soldiers, Masculinity and Power in Republican and Imperial Rome," in When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon (New York: Routledge, 1998). 283 For a discussion of masculinity in Paul’s letters, depending on this classical measure of masculinity, see Fredrik Ivarsson, "Christian Identity as True Masculinity," in Exploring Early Christian Identity, ed. Bengt Holmberg (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). 284 Seneca, Epist. 67.4: si aegrotandum fuerit, ut nihil intemperanter, nihil effeminate faciam optabo. As translated and cited in Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies in Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 320, n. 51.

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over and against physical endeavors.285 Their spiritual reception of the actual feats of athletes in Greco-Roman culture demonstrates a spiritual form of masculine performance. T. Job contains numerous athletic metaphors when it comes to struggles between Satan and Job. Pope Gregory’s late 6th century commentary fills his exposition on the Book of Job with athletic imagery. To set the mood for the coming of Job’s three friends at the end of the Job 2, Gregory the Great engages battle rhetoric: “And our champion (bellator) encompassed with the rage of the besetting fight, at all points presents his shield of patience, meets the darts coming in on every hand, and on all virtue’s sides wheels round the guarded mind to front the assailing blows.”286 St. John Chrysostom calls Job “God’s athlete.”287 The metaphor of physical battle means to illustrate spiritual strength. In early Christian understandings, bodily pain could lead to spiritual growth.288 As Gillian Clark writes, “For a Christian, the physical suffering of Christ, and of the martyrs, is not finally insignificant: it shows

285

Michael Poliakoff, "Jacob, Job, and Other Wrestlers: Reception of Greek Athletics by Jews and Christians in Antiquity," Journal of Sport History 11, no. 2 (1984). See also David John Williams, Paul's Metaphors: Their Context and Character (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), 26172. 286 Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, Book 3.5: Et bellator noster circumuallantium certaminum feruore deprehensus ubique patientiae suae clipeum opponit; undique uenientibus spiculis obuiat et per cuncta uirtutum latera circumspectam contra irruentia uulnera mentem rotat. Unless otherwise stated, English translations come from Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, vol. 1, A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church (London: John Henry Parker, 1844-1850), 142. 287 St. John Chrysostom, Homily IV, 49. John Chrysostom, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, trans. Paul W. Harkins, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 135. See also Caspi, Why Hidest Thy Face, 230. 288 This remains especially poignant in discussions surrounding sexual abstinence. See Gillian Clark, "The Health of the Spiritual Athlete," in Health in Antiquity, ed. Helen King (New York: Routledge, 2005), 228-29.

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that even the fallen material body may be transformed by a soul united with God.”289 Though Satan smites Job’s body with boils and Job is left in a state of physical ineptness, early Christian authors use athletic imagery to point to spiritual strength. This assumption is not unlike Roman rhetorical writers on gesticulation—a man’s outward signs are meant to persuade and emotionally move the audience.290 Thus, Job’s physical body in early Christian art exudes a muscular overtone, for his outward appearance represents a spiritual example; Job spiritually battled the forces of evil and won. Job’s body and costume, lacking the toga but wearing the tunic, may communicate some kind of athletic spiritual strength, but he remains seated. Around 600 B.C.E. in the later Archaic age, a shift from statues of standing gods to sitting gods took place. Before this, the hero stood as if to demonstrate full physical power. Aristocrats also began to recline at meals and reclining became the posture of sitting at the symposium. Yet, in cases of reclining, proper men took proper seats; sitting on the ground was the position for the beggar.291 The clear social expectation of status shows through in the early Christian motif because Job does not sit on the ground in any depiction. Roman social conventions remained similar to their Greek predecessors in regards to sitting. Job’s seated posture relates to his authority and to his centrality in 289

Clark, "The Health of the Spiritual Athlete," 229. For more information on Roman rhetorics of gesture, see Fritz Graf, "Gestures and Conventions: The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators," in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 36-58. 291 Bremmer, "Walking, Standing, and Sitting in Ancient Greek Culture." 25. 290

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the image. Job does not sit on the dung heap (kopri,aj), the location LXX places Job in physical misery (Job 2:8). This is an example of a departure from the literary text to contextual standards of Hellenistic heroes in art for it would be insulting to deny Job, a spiritual hero, a proper seat in artistic renderings of the Joban story. Job’s Sella Curulis In many representations on sarcophagi, Job sits upon an X-shaped folding stool (sella curulis). Heads of families often received guests upon the seat, as a symbol of authority.292 In the Roman period, this stool was popular among senators and magistrates.293 When a Roman magistrate retired, he kept the chair as personal property in the family home; “At family funerals these chairs were then brought out and displayed as prestigious status symbols.”294 The fold-stool provided mobility and prestige to its owner; it was reserved only for important men.295 For instance, in the upper right register of the Junius Bassus sarcophagus, Pilate sits on an X-stool to make his judgment. In another example, a sarcophagus for a young girl in Rome from the second century, now in the British Museum, London, depicts a mourning scene.296 The process of commemoration in Roman practice mainly consisted of three stages: the prothesis, or lying in state, the ekphora, the procession to the grave, and the deposition, the 292

Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblentz, Furniture, ed. Brenda Gilchrist, vol. 1, The Smithsonian Illustrated Library of Antiques (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1979), 22-25. 293 Barbara F. McManus, "Roman Coins: Republic and Principate," vroma.org (2008), http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/oct_caesarsella.jpg. 294 Hallett, The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 B.C.-A.D. 300, 167. 295 Eric Mercer, Furniture, 700-1700 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 33. 296 See Plate 11, Coblentz, Furniture, 25.

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placement of the body in the grave.297 The sarcophagus shows the father of the family sitting at the head of the body on a folding stool with X-shaped legs. Both sitting individuals raise their hands to their heads in a traditional gesture of mourning. Some families hired musicians or professional mourners who were primarily women and they made public appearances during the ekphora.298 The women standing off to the right of the sarcophagus might be family of the deceased young woman or hired mourners and musicians. Christian artists adapted the significance of the stool for Mary and Jesus, as evident on a sarcophagus of Flavius Julius Catervius from the 4th century C.E. (fig. 2.9). The scene depicts the adoration of the magi. On many other sarcophagi, Mary sits on a pile of rocks nearly identical to that of Job’s seat in the early Christian artistic standard.299 The scene in fig. 2.9 moves Mary into the public arena, out of private quarters into public devotion. Mary carries the demeanor of a noblewoman, sitting on a crossed-stool and resting her feet on a footstool. Thomas Mathews offers a compelling reason for why the Adoration of the Magi became the most popular depiction of the infancy narrative in early Christian art. In the catacombs of Priscilla,

297

John H. Oakley, Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi, ed. H. A. Shapiro, Cambridge Studies in Classical Art and Iconography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. For a detailed account of Roman funerals, see Hugh Lindsay, "DeathPollution and Funerals in the City of Rome," in Death and Disease in the Ancient City, ed. Valerie M. Hope and Eireann Marshall (New York: Routledge, 2000). 298 "Funus," in Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith (London: James Walton, 1870). 299 Stilicho/Ambrose sarcophagus. Vatican inv. 31664 in Museo della civiltà romana a Roma, c. 385 C.E.. Another sarcophagus contains a similar design: Adoration of the Magi. Panel from a Roman sarcophagus, 4th century C.E.. From the cemetary of St. Agnes in Rome in the Museo Pio Christiano.

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Sts. Mark and Marcellian, and in many sarcophagi, Mary wears the garb of Roman noble women and sits on various chairs common to Roman households. The ordinary child on her lap adored by magicians not only links Jesus to imperial importance, the scene claims a Christian assumption of Jesus as a super-magician, whose divine powers render the magic of the Magi impotent. Roman secular imperial power clashes with Christ’s divine power.300

Figure 2.9 Adoration of the Magi, Sarcophagus of Flavius Julius Catervius, Tolentino Cathedral. 4th century C.E.. Photo: ARTstor.

300

Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 82-87.

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Since artists place Job on a sella curulis, they mean to communicate Job’s authority and position in the family. A seated figure in Roman art means to “underline the high status of the protagonist in relation to those around him.”301 Artists engaged this symbol rather than following the LXX text that Job sits upon a dung heap in order to portray Job’s triumph and social status. Earlier in the second century C.E., Tertullian upholds Job’s triumph, calling Job a “hero who brought about a victory for his God” by fighting temptation and wearing the “breastplate and shield of patience.”302 Clearly, Job’s depiction in early Christian art highlights some early Christian attitudes about Job. When it comes to his wife, however, the picture becomes more convoluted. Her imagery, though, should be considered alongside her husband’s. If Job is a spiritual hero, then Job’s wife should compliment her husband with modesty and respect, according to the cultural conventions of the marital ideal in Roman culture. Job’s Wife in Early Christian Art Job’s wife stands, holding a stick with bread at the end in one hand and covering her face with the other. Her repulsion and distance are common interpretations of her representation in early Christian art. Stephen Vicchio describes

301

Glenys Davies, "On Being Seated: Gender and Body Language in Hellenistic and Roman Art," in Body Language in the Greek and Roman Worlds, ed. Douglas Cairns (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2005), 219. 302 Patience, ch. 14: Itaque operarius ille uictoriae Dei, retusis omnibus iaculis temptationum lorica clipeoque patientiae, et integritatem mox corporis a Deo recuperauit et quae amiserat conduplicata possedit. English translation from Tertullian, Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959), 219.

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her “pushing” food toward her husband with a stick, clearly repulsed by Job.303 Choon-Leong Seow interprets Junius Bassus in the same way, covering “her nose with a portion of her skirt on account of the repulsive stench that emanates from her husband’s festering sores.”304 The interpretation of repulsion, however, ignores the visual signs present in her artistic renditions. First, dress, as a symbol of status and social behavior in Roman culture, remains important for interpreting Job’s wife. Second, the materials present with her signal her role in the household, as a Roman matron. Third, her gesture of lifting her often shrouded hand to her face relates to cultural depictions of modest mourning women. The early Christian artistic standard for Job and his wife does not capture Job’s wife’s verbal rebellion, rather it opts to present Job and his wife in sound marital relationship, at least for the time being. Satan and the Wife’s Bread Attempting some positive attribution to Job’s wife, Samuel Terrien suggests that early Christians considered “Job’s wife as an acolyte, or a deacon, or possibly even as a priest, who offered bread to the patient not only as food for daily sustenance but also as a sacramental element.”305 He bases this statement on the visual elements of her bread but he offers no examples of Job’s wife as a deacon. In drawings of the Junius Bassus sarcophagus from the 1700s, showing less forms of damage to the sarcophagus, a cruciform marks her bread, which makes Terrien suspect that Job’s 303

Vicchio, Job in the Ancient World. The Image of the Biblical Job: A History, 218. Seow, "Job's Wife, with Due Respect," 352. 305 Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters, 304

21.

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wife’s demonstrates the roles of a church office.306 Seow follows suit, but more cautiously, implicating that the cross on the bread from numerous other artistic examples, though uncertain, “must have evoked ideas of divine intervention in the sustenance of the sufferer, a provision from on high regardless of the character of the agent delivering it.”307 Terrien and Seow put too much stock in a Christian meaning of Job’s wife’s bread. The cross-shaped marking on the bread remains indicative of everyday bread in Roman societies. Bread found in an oven in Pompeii serves as an example; the charred remains still contain a four-line cross-shaped marking and the baker’s stamp.308 Job’s wife’s bread does not signal any special authoritative role, but, rather, emphasizes her domestic role. Bread associates with women on many levels in Roman culture. The main level of associating bread with a woman comes from her role as wife and mother. This is due to the socially constructed role of wife and mother as the one who pulls together the family meals.309 The matrona, the Roman married woman, exercised considerable control in the management of her household,

306

See the examples s in Malbon, The Iconography of the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, figs.

14 and 15.

307

Seow, "Job's Wife, with Due Respect," 358. Charred bread remains from Pompeii can be found at The Museum of Archaeology in Naples, Italy. Similar markings can be found on the bread given to Abraham’s three visitors at Mamre on the lunette mosaic in Ravenna, San Vitale, fig. 169 in André Grabar, Byzantium: From the Death of Theodosius to the Rise of Islam, trans. Stuart Gilbert and James Emmons (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966). 309 A matrona was to organize the duties of the slaves in her household as well. Yet, small agrarian households with no slaves were probably the most common but scholars know less about their economic arrangements. Richard Saller, "Women, Slaves, and the Economy of the Roman Household," in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 186-91. 308

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despite the passivity expected of wives in the New Testament household codes.310 By the imperial period, Roman wives ate alongside their husbands at many public banquets. Whether wives reclined next to their husbands or not, wives still celebrated the ritual of the Eucharist. Weekly meals in early Christian house churches, which women arranged, included sharing of the bread and cup.311 Entire families ran bakery businesses in the cities at which many women would facilitate the purchase of the family’s daily bread.312 In Rome, housing units developed within cells, with interconnected rooms and even connected courtyards. Often, individual houses would lack cooking capabilities but women gathered at communal sites, such as courtyards or cookshops, to engage the household tasks.313 Bread remains an important narrative element in T. Job. Before Satan took away all of Job’s possessions, Job owned fifty bakeries (10:7). Women and bread mark significant struggles with Satan. Satan, disguised as a beggar, first comes to Job’s house and asks for a loaf of bread (a;rtoj). Job knows that the beggar is Satan and instead gives one of his maids a burnt loaf to give to him. The doormaid, however, swaps the burnt loaf for a loaf of her own to give to the beggar, not knowing the identity of the beggar (chap. 7). 310

Carolyn Osiek, Margaret Y. MacDonald, and Janet H. Tulloch, A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006). See chap. 7, "Women Leaders of Households and Christian Assemblies," 144-163. 311 Ibid., 159-161. 312 Ibid., 194-197. See also Naum Jasny, "The Daily Bread of the Ancient Greeks and Romans," Osiris 9 (1950). 313 Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "Domus and Insulae in Rome: Families and Housefuls," in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003). For a wider discussion of domestic architecture in the East and the West, see Part I: Archaeology of Domus and Insulae.

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For eleven years on the dung heap, Job watches his wife bring him bread; when portions are reduced she divides her loaves to share with Job. Satan disguises as a bread-seller and tricks Job’s wife into cutting her hair in the public square in exchange for a loaf of bread. Hellenistic audiences would have understood the level of humiliation reserved for Job and his wife that Job’s wife looses her hair and exposes it before a crowd.314 In her shame and hunger, with Satan “leading her heart astray” (plagia,zwn auvth/j th.n kardi,an; 23:13), she verbally expresses her anguish to Job. She lost all her sons and daughters, and now she is forced to become a wanderer (planh/tij) and a maidservant (la,trij), toiling to bring bread for Job (ch. 24). T. Job incorporates explicit bread references in Sitidos’ speech, for she exclaims that she scarcely receives food for herself due to her laboring to “obtain a loaf of bread to bring to” Job (euvporh,sasa a]rton prosene,gkw soi). Job’s response defends patience as a virtue, accusing Sitidos of deceiving him of his integrity. The whole while Sitidos gives her speech, Satan is standing behind her; Job calls him out and says “Come out and battle with me” (e,xelqw.n pole,mhson met’e,mou/) but Satan relents and departs for three years (ch. 27). The enigmatic male character standing between Job and his wife on sarcophagi anticipates Satan’s presence during her anguished speech to Job, encouraging him to speak ill of the Lord (see figs. 2.5 and 2.6). Augustine states that Job’s wife “brought no help to her husband,” and, as with Eve, “the Devil had not deserted her when he had destroyed her sons, for he had learned with Eve how 314

Garrett, "The 'Weaker Sex' in the Testament of Job," 62-63.

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necessary woman was for the tempter. But, this time he did not find another Adam whom he could entice through a woman.”315 Such interpretations play important roles in medieval art of Job and his wife, when established ecclesiastical teachings about women become solidified. In T. Job, Satan does not completely prevail over Job through Sitidos, but he lingers in texts and artistic traditions.316 For instance, Adam and Eve stand next to Job and his wife on the Junius Bassus sarcophagus (fig. 2.6) and early Christian interpretations placed Satan in Gen 3 as the tempter of Eve.317 To make an argument concerning the modesty of women, 1 Timothy appeals to Genesis 3, in what Tamez observes as “theological reasoning” in order to support the “submission and obedience for women.”318 The passage demonstrates a hierarchical ideology based on a cosmological order:

315

Augustine, “On Patience,” ch. 12, CSEL vol. 41, 673-674.: Non enim eam diabolus, cum etiam filios abstulisset, tamquam nocendi inperitus reliquerat, qui quantum esset necessaria temptatori iam in Eua didicerat, sed modo alterum Adam, quem per mulierem caperet, non inuenerat. Augustine, Treatises on Various Subjects, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Mary Sarah Muldowney, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1952), 245-46. 316 For a discussion on Satan and Job’s wife in T. Job, see Garrett, "The 'Weaker Sex' in the Testament of Job."; David Penchansky, "Job's Wife: The Satan's Handmaid," in Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Do What Is Right? Studies on the Nature of God in Tribute to James L. Crenshaw ed. et. al. David Penchansky (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000). 317 Another interpretation with T. Job and Augustine, especially based on the Junius Bassus sarcophagus, is that Job’s wife, like Eve, succumbs to Satan’s snares to tempt her husband. On Junius Bassus, Adam and Eve rest next to Job and his wife on the lower right register. Chapman argues that their close proximity means to connect Job’s wife with Eve. Chapman, "Woman, Satan and the Curse: Job's Wife in Text and Image." Seow also makes this connection between Job and Adam, Job’s wife and Eve: Seow, "Job's Wife, with Due Respect," 352. For early Christian interpolations of Satan in Gen 3, see Linda S. Schearing, Valarie H. Ziegler, and Kristen E. Kvam, eds., Eve & Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 318 Tamez, Struggles for Power in Early Christianity, 40.

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VAda.m ga.r prw/toj evpla,sqh( ei=ta Eu[aÅ kai. VAda.m ouvk hvpath,qh( h` de. gunh. evxapathqei/sa evn paraba,sei ge,gonen\ For Adam was created first, then Eve; also Adam was not deceived, but the woman was wholly deceived and became a transgressor (1 Tim 2:13-14). Such a sequential order “is conditioned by the values of Greco-Roman society.”319 Tamez suspects that the author of the text reacts to the reality of dominant women leaders in early house churches, reminding men that if they listen to women they forget respectable social order. Job certainly lives up to the expectation of the text, for in T. Job he prevailed against Satan’s “wrestling holds” (palaistrika,) that he applied to Job through his wife as a deceiver (planhsa,ntwn) of her husband (26:6; 27:5). In the early Christian visual motif, Job’s wife does not appear to speak to Job; she only offers him bread. Satan lingers, but Job’s wife maintains her respectable role for the time being. For instance, T. Job looks favorably upon Sitidos’ faithful servitude, but associates Satan with her verbal chastisement of Job. Sitidos’ procurement of bread for her and her husband fits the context of a wife providing sustenance to her husband. Pieter W. van der Horst further suggests that her name derives from the Greek word siti,zw, which means to “give bread.”320 The clear references to bread in T. Job come from the surrounding culture. Food from grains such as rye, corn, millet, and wheat, grown to make bread, was the most consumed

319

Ibid., 41. P. W. van der Horst, "Images of Women in the Testament of Job," in Studies in the Testament of Job, ed. M. A. Knibb and P. W. van der Horst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 320

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food product of the Romans.321 It comes as no surprise that bread would function as a symbol for sustenance. Furthermore, the wives of elite families procured vineyards and fields and managed the agricultural business of the family.322 The list of Job’s possessions in the beginning of the book qualifies him as a wealthy man (Job 1:1-3). Job himself in T. Job admits his wealth, listing all that Satan takes away from him— 130,000 sheep, 80 dogs, 200 dogs guarding the house, 9,000 camels, 140,000 sheasses—all of which he utilized to take care of and distribute things to the poor and needy (9:1-7). According to such literary evidence, the bread in Job’s wife’s possession represents her role as wife in the household. Another association of women and bread in Roman culture comes from ritualistic settings. Examples of first century Roman depictions of vestal virgins engaging in a ritualistic meal include bread.323 Women often made cakes, or loaves of bread, to offer to their gods.324 In his poem on the worship of Adonis, Theocritus in Alexandria, Egypt, depicts the role of women worshipers: “Women knead, by mixing 321

Jasny, "The Daily Bread of the Ancient Greeks and Romans," 229-33. For more information on grains, agrarian communities, and the Roman Empire, see Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1987), 97-103. 322 Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 144-52. Incidentally, the Book of Job contains a reference to Job’s wife in this household context: “then let my wife grind for another, and let other men kneel over her” (31:10). This serves as another example of the wife’s everyday task of grinding grain to bake bread. But, the LXX removes the sexual innuendo of the Hebrew and clearly states, “then let my wife also please another, and let my children be brought low.” 323 For discussion on such art, along with its context, see Natalie Boymel Kampen, "Between Public and Private: Women as Historical Subjects in Roman Art," in Women's History and Ancient History, ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 220-24. 324 See the examples on pages 19, 38, 41, in Ross Shepard Kraemer, ed., Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Eva Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity, trans. Maureen B. Fant (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 22-23, 151-59.

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all manner of colours with white wheat flour; and others of sweet honey and moist oil.”325 Vestal virgins cremated their dead and put out bread, including a lamp, milk, and water, in the burial chambers.326 Though these images of women with bread do not connect with Job’s wife, they do attest to the relationship Hellenistic women had to the ritualistic function of bread. Women served as priestesses in many kinds of religious acts and those acts did not exist in isolation. Early Christian sources also demonstrate that women baked bread for ritualistic functions. In the fourth century C.E., Epiphanius describes certain heresies, including women functioning as priests in the name of the Virgin Mary, making little cakes with four indentations to offer in the name of Mary.327 Female followers of Quintilla and Priscilla, according to Epiphanius, incorporated bread and cheese in their religious rites, when they were acting as bishops and presbyters.328 Anne Jensen makes a point of connectivity between Greco-Roman religions and early Christians; converts must have carried over elements from their previous religious practices.329 One ritual carried over from Greco-Roman religious practices was the funerary meal (refrigerium), celebrated underground in the catacomb burial places.330 After placing the dead in the grave, the entire family held a funerary banquet in honor 325

Theocritus, Idyll 15, 95-149. Ibid., 19. Kraemer, Women’s Religions, 38. 327 Ibid., 86. Epiphanus, Medicine Box, 79. 328 Ibid., Epiphanus, Medicine Box, 49. 329 Anne Jensen, God's Self-Confident Daughters, trans. Jr. O.C. Dean (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), xxii. 330 Lowden, Early Christian & Byzantine Art. For a discussion of this early Christian practice, see Carolyn Osiek and David L. Balch, Families in the New Testament World, ed. Don S. Browning and Ian S. Evison, The Family, Religion, and Culture (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1997), 212-13. 326

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of the deceased.331 As in all family meals, the matrona facilitated the preparation of the meal. In an essay on women and funerary banquets, Janet Tulloch discusses frescoes found in the catacomb SS. Marcellino and Pietro in Rome. Women in banquet frescoes hold wine-cups in their hands. Like Roman families these Christian scenes included visual motifs of food and wine as signs of prosperity and generosity.332 In figure 2.10, a woman raises a cup in a toast; above her head reads “Irene,”, or peace. A fish sits on a platter in front of the table.333 In Roman dining scenes found in funerary art, the presence of wine vessels are a more common occurrence than the detail of food on dining plates.334 The general connotation of food and wine in dining scenes on funerary sculpture serve as symbols of conviviality.335 Thus, bread itself does not serve as a significant visual marker for hospitality or generosity. In the case of the frescoes of Marcellino and Pietro, women participated in these banquet scenes as part of the cultural milieu of commemoration; women engaged in these meals as a way to mourn the loss of family members and celebrate family.336

331

Christina Souyoudzoglou-Haywood, "Burial Practices," in Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition, ed. Graham Speake (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), 257. 332 Chap. 8, "Women Leaders in Family Funerary Banquets" in Osiek, MacDonald, and Tulloch, A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity. 333 For a discussion on these meals and the debate as to whether they are Eucharistic, a funerary meal, or a commemoration of the Gospel stories of the multiplication of the loaves and the fish, see Richard H. Hiers and Charles A. Kennedy, "Bread and Fish Eucharist in the Gospels and Early Christian Art," Perspectives in Religious Studies 3, no. 1 (1976). 334 Matthew B. Roller, Dining Posture in Ancient Rome: Bodies, Values, and Status (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 123-39. 335 Ibid., 126-127. 336 Janet H. Tulloch, "Women Leaders in Family Funerary Banquets," in A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 164-93.

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Figure 2.10. Wall painting of a dining scene from the catacombs of St. Marcellino and Pietro, Rome. Photo: Estelle S. Brettman, International Catacomb Society.

The main visual connection between the scenes of dining women in Marcellino and Pietro and Job’s wife in the catacombs remains the women’s dresses. In figure 2.3, a catacomb painting, Job’s wife wears a similar costume with two stripes (clavi) on the front. These narrow stripes on the tunics were reserved for the senatorial class and symbolize elite status.337 Unmarried, young women did not have clavi on their tunics.338 Thus, Job’s wife’s costume, like the costume of the women in figure 2.10, depicts her as a matrona of an elite household.

337

Stone, "The Toga: From National to Ceremonial Costume," 15. Judith Lynn Sebesta, "Symbolism in the Costume of the Roman Woman," in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 47. 338

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Another connective element between the dining women and Job’s wife emerges from the broader context, that of mourning and family. Job’s wife in T. Job, according to Susan Garrett, negatively represents a “feminine preoccupation with the cycle of birth, life, death, and burial.”339 She remains occupied with nourishing her husband’s body but not his soul. As a result, Sitidos remains tied to an earthly and perishable existence that allows Satan to use her as an agent to deceive Job.340 Her concern for worldly things, even for the burial of her own children (ch. 39), contrasts with Job’s spiritual ascetical ethos emphasized by some first century Christians.341 Job transcends into heavenly realities while his wife belongs to the world, Satan’s realm.342 The textual construction, a male construction, holds a dualistic doublestandard for Job’s wife—a large amount of literary evidence from male authors encourages real-life Roman women to take pride in their roles as dutiful and domestic wives and mothers.343 For instance, Cassius Dio, a Roman historian, praises a wife who is modest (sw,frwn), a house-keeper (oivko,nomoj), a bearer of children, and a tender (qerapeu/sai) of her husband’s sickness.344 Job’s wife fulfills this expectation and this ideal, at least visually.

339

Garrett, "The 'Weaker Sex' in the Testament of Job," 57. Ibid., 59. Garrett’s argument challenges Pieter van der Horst’s positive treatment of women in T. Job: Horst, "Images of Women in the Testament of Job." 341 Wills, ed., Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology, 243. 342 Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 241. 343 Gillian Clark, "Roman Women," Greece & Rome 28, no. 2 (1981). A social system expected women to maintain domestic spheres, caring about the maintenance of the household. 344 Cassius Dio, 56.3.3-4, as referenced by John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard Books, 1994), 28-29. 340

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A sermon on divorce by Asterius of Amasea offers a literary source that also upholds Job’s wife as an ideal wife. Preaching his sermons sometime around 386 as bishop, Asterius shows connection with the Antioch school and an affinity towards the Cappadocian Fathers and a cynical-stoical moral philosophy.345 Warning his audience not to take divorce lightly, Asterius points out a wife’s role as a husband’s healer (a,ndro.j qerapei,aj) who comforts him in his distress and who can manage the household. He turns to Job’s wife as an example. She sat with Job on the dunghill, scraping his sores and pulling worms from his sores. As an inseperable friend (avcw,ristoj fi,loj), Job’s wife falls into the sin of blasphemy only to urge Job to end his misery so that she might not see him continue on in pain. She took no account of her state of widowhood that would follow (Th.n ga.r ivdi,an loipo.n sumfora.n th.n th/j chrei,aj ouvk evlogi,zeto) and therefore, thought not of herself.346 The sermon upholds a wifely ideal. Though the artistic standard of Job and his wife may remind audiences of implications concerning Job’s wife as a verbally rebellious and weak female duped by Satan, that indication does not clearly come until the Middle Ages. In early Christianity, however, Job’s wife’s dress and gestures indicate another artistic motif, that of modesty and mournful respect. Job’s wife’s modesty falls in line with an early Christian adaptation of Roman ideals. Satan remains present but Job’s wife still

345

I appreciate C.L.Seow for giving me this reference. Introduction in C. Datema, ed., Asterius of Amasea: Homilies I-Xiv (Leiden: Brill, 1970), xix-xxxiii. 346 Homily V, On Divorce, in Ibid., 48.

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carried forth with her wifely duties; she dresses modestly in suitable clothing (1 Tim 2:9). A Modest Mourning Wife The strongest element from Roman art to make the case that Job’s wife exudes an image of wifely fidelity in the early Christian artistic standard comes from images of Roman mourning women. Job’s wife lifts her hand to her face with one hand while she holds a stick in the other hand. In his important study on Job in art, Samuel Terrien suggests that Job’s wife covers her nose because of Job’s stench and cites Job 19:17: “My breath is repulsive to my wife.”347 In arguing that the presence of Alcestis and Hercules in the Via Latina catacomb relates to the concern of the patron to commemorate his wife and thus to uphold marital fidelity, Beverly Berg also argues that “Job and his wife may represent loyalty in adversity, but certainly not marital happiness.”348 Furthermore, she interprets Job and his wife as a reflection of Job 19:17: “Job’s wife extends a piece of bread on a spit toward him while turning away her head and holding her nose at the stench of his loathsome disease.”349 Both Terrien and Berg miss the concern for marital fidelity in the LXX and the omission of any concern for Job’s breath. The LXX rendition of Job 19:17 does not follow the MT version, but reads “I sought my wife.”350 Nothing of the stench of his breath 347

26.

348

Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters,

Berg, "Alcestis and Hercules in the Catacomb of Via Latina," 224. Ibid. 350 Rahlf’s LXX reads: kai. i`ke,teuon th.n gunai/ka, mou prosekalou,mhn de. kolakeu,wn ui`ou.j pallaki,dwn mou which roughly translates to “I sought my wife and summoned my sons’ flattered 349

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shows through in the Greek rendition of the Hebrew Bible. Although, in T. Job, the stench of Job’s body was so great that Job’s male friends, accompanied by soldiers, had to fumigate the area surrounding Job with incense for three days in order to approach him (31:1-5).351 Relationships between early Christian textual traditions and visual motifs remain elusive. However, an interpretation of Job’s stench in relation to Job wife’s gesture remains less substantiated based on visual evidence. A more likely interpretation comes from Roman gestures in art and the established Christian understandings of the wife’s role in a marriage. In both the LXX and T. Job, Job’s wife is in a state of mourning. Tertullian carries a tone of disapproval with hints of sympathy for Job’s wife: Job “severely rebuked his wife who, weary by now of misfortunes, was urging him to improper remedies.”352 Having lost seven sons and three daughters, Sitidos in T. Job attempts to procure financial backing for their burial but Job insists that no burial is necessary because his children were in the keeping of the Lord. After Job reveals a vision of his children in heaven, Sitidos dies of exhaustion (chs. 39-40). Due to her relentless role as mother of ten children, Sitidos fulfills 1 Timothy’s criteria that though, like Eve,

concubines.” In this chapter in the LXX, Job argues that he once had control over his household but now even his wife and concubines reject him. 351 I’ve not found any reference to the stench of Job’s body in relation to Job’s wife, although the elaborate perfuming of his body by his friends does indicate the presence of a tradition of Job’s stench. 352 The whole of 14:4 reads: Quale in illo uiro feretrum Deus de diabolo extruxit, quale uexillum de inimico gloriae suae extulit, cum ille homo ad omnem acerbum nuntium nihil ex ore promeret nisi « Deo gratias », cum uxorem iam malis delassatam et ad praua remedia suadentem execraretur! Patience, ch. 14. Tertullian, Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, 218.

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Satan uses a woman to deceive her husband, “she will be saved through childbearing” (1 Tim 2:15). However, the passage gives conditions: VAda.m ga.r prw/toj evpla,sqh( ei=ta Eu[aÅ kai. VAda.m ouvk hvpath,qh( h` de. gunh. evxapathqei/sa evn paraba,sei ge,gonen\ swqh,setai de. dia. th/j teknogoni,aj( eva.n mei,nwsin evn pi,stei kai. avga,ph| kai. a`giasmw/| meta. swfrosu,nhj\ For Adam was created first, then Eve; also Adam was not deceived, but the woman was wholly deceived and became a transgressor. But she will be saved through the bearing of children, if they remain in faith and love and holiness with modesty (Emphasis added; 1 Tim 2:13-15).353 Based on such a condition, the bearing of children remains central for not only a woman’s place in the home but also her spiritual salvation. Marriage, in Roman society, “was undertaken for the express purpose of producing legitimate children, a purpose reflected in public and private media.”354 Early Christian audiences would have understood the implications of the death of all of Job’s wife’s children for familial and social stability. Job’s wife does not display irrational emotions over the loss for her children based on Roman responses to the death of children. It is more likely that Job’s wife expresses a common cultural attitude toward the loss of children, especially the loss of all the children in the family, and especially in terms of acceptable female behavior of mourning.355 A certain expectation of masculine behavior cautioned men from

353

See Tamez’s discussion of this passage in terms of the language implications; Tamez, Struggles for Power in Early Christianity, 42-47. 354 Dixon, The Roman Family, 119. 355 O.M. Bakke, When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity, trans. Brian McNeil (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005), 45. See also pages 15-55. The loss of a child remained a significant possibility due to the infant mortality rate in Roman society: Osiek, MacDonald, and Tulloch, A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, 78-79.

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showing excess grief, a womanish display. Cicero, for example, relates mourning to effeminate behavior.356 The social expectation of grief on behalf of the wife fits with the LXX’s addition to Job 2:9; it allows the expression of grief to come from the wife rather than from Job. For Job to publicly display a sense of mourning in this cultural setting would be unacceptable according to masculine standards. Due to a high infant mortality rate, some scholars suggest that parents did not invest a high level of emotional commitment toward their children in pre-industrial societies. Though childbirth remained risky with a high infant mortality, and Romans engaged in exposure, parents maintained an emotional bond with their children.357 Children, according to Dixon, “were the focus of hope, frustration, and affection in ancient Rome;” children who died in their prime were “mourned most.”358 The women of the family held the role of ritualistic mourners in Roman culture; paintings on Greek vases establish a gendered role of women mourning that continues throughout the Hellenistic world.359 In Roman art, a married woman mourned modestly. The ideas of mourning and modesty converged in social expectations of feminine behavior. Plutarch, for instance, offers consolation to his

356

For instance, Cicero Fin. 2.94: fortitudinis quaedam praecepta sunt ac paene leges quae effeminari virum vetant in dolore. As cited in Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies in Masculinity in Classical Antiquity, 138. 357 Mark Golden, "Did the Ancients Care When Their Children Died?," Greece & Rome 35, no. 2 (1988). 358 Dixon, The Roman Family, 115. 359 Christine Mitchell Havelock, "Mourners on Greek Vases: Remarks on the Social History of Women," in Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982).

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wife while maintaining that she show restraint in the process of mourning.360 The trend of Pudicitia (Modesty), established in 331 B.C.E. and revived by Augustus in 28-27 B.C.E., meant that Roman society held a specific moral standard for women that included chastity, modesty, and restraint.361 The pudicitia (modesty) pose in Roman art is not only a gesture but an entire portrayal of feminine virtue popular in late republican and early imperial funerary sculpture.362 When a gesture solidifies in visual form, the gesture becomes “highly codified,” a naturalized reflection and expectation of action.363 During the end of the fifth century B.C.E., the practice of commemorating burial sites with sculpted marble vessels, lekythoi, emerged. Most of extant lekythoi come from Athens. Classical Greece white lekythoi often depict visits to tombs. A woman on a lekythos by the Inscription Painter from the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. in the National Musuem in Athens bows her head and raises her left arm to her face.364 Her left hand is shrouded and she does not wear a hair-covering.365 The

360

Plutarch, A Consolation To His Wife, as referenced by Osiek, MacDonald, and Tulloch, A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, 78-79. For full text in English, see Pomeroy, ed., Plutarch's Advice to the Bride and Groom and a Consolation to His Wife. 361 Winter, Roman Wives, Roman Widows: The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities, 46-47. 362 Shelley Stone, "The Toga: From National to Ceremonial Costume," in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 16, 48-49. 363 Michael Koortbojian, Myth, Meaning, and Memory on Roman Sarcophagi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 119-20. 364 Woman crying at a grave. White Lekythos by the Inscription Painter, from Eretria, ca. 460450 B.C.E., in Athens, National Museum. See fig. III in Oakley, Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi, 149. 365 Karen Stears, "The Times They Are A'changing: Developments in Fifth-Century Funerary Sculpture," in The Epigraphy of Death: Studies in the History and Society of Greece and Rome, ed. G.J. Oliver (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 33-35.

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woman clearly mourns, which is an act acceptable for women in her society.366 In classical Athens, from the eighth to the fifth century B.C.E., the socially acceptable gendered expression of grief underwent a change. Hans van Wees notes that as social hierarchies became more rigid, a masculine expression of grief became less socially acceptable. He bases his argument on representations of Athenian funerary scenes, which underwent a significant change when it comes to male expression of grief. In essence, by the fifth century B.C.E., men suppressed their grief, thus exerting their social superiority. By the fourth century B.C.E., male mourners disappear from funerary scenes all together.367 Thus, the white lekythoi depicts a lone woman who covers her left hand with her mantle yet she does not cover the back of her head with her cloak. Her right hand holds a sakkos, a cloth receptacle used to hold things such as money or food, worn like a sack by mourners or supplicants.368 Though an early example from Greek culture, the poses of the women on the lekythoi relate to Roman women, as these gestures make a come-back into Roman society. For Roman society, this cloak, a palla or mantle, functioned as a veil for a woman’s head in public for modest and practical reasons.369 A Roman matrona signified her modesty and chastity (pudicitia) with the symbolic dress of the woolen

366

H. A. Shapiro, "The Iconography of Mourning in Athenian Art," American Journal of Archaeology 95, no. 4 (1991). 367 Men begin to reappear in the fifth century, B.C.E., but with less intense displays of grief. Hans van Wees, "A Brief History of Tears: Gender Differentiation in Archaic Greece," in When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity, ed. Lin Foxhall and John Salmon (New York: Routledge, 1998). 368 Oakley, Picturing Death in Classical Athens: The Evidence of the White Lekythoi, 146. 369 Stone, "The Toga: From National to Ceremonial Costume," 16, 48-49.

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palla or mantle that she lifted over her hair in public.370 However, if she did not lift the mantle over her hair, she still gathered her hair in braids at the top her head, as was popular for women during the reign of Hadrian (117-138 C.E.). When the braids wrapped around the head, the hairstyle looked much like a turban. Imperial women varied this hairstyle, but their public images served as models for lower classes of women.371 It is likely that Job’s wife’s hairstyle conforms to this turban-like coiffure of braids (figs. 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6). In other words, hairstyle and dress all encapsulate the pudicitia pose, which carried specific understandings of the respect for the institution of marriage.372 A graceful Greek married woman could express a modest amount of grief and the pudicitia mourning gesture communicated this sense.373 In Roman art, the pudicitia pose functioned as an illusion to chastity and purity in filial piety on behalf of the woman.374 In figure 2.8, Metilia Acte exhibits a modesty pose, as Heracles presents her to her husband. Visual representations of married women in Roman society feature this pose quite regularly, such as in a republican funerary stele of a man and his wife in dignified posture.375 In this kind of

370

Sebesta, "Symbolism in the Costume of the Roman Woman." Klaus Fittschen, "Courtly Portraits of Women in the Era of the Adoptive Emperors (98180) and Their Reception in Roman Society," in I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome, ed. Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1996). 372 Janet Burnett Grossman, Greek Funerary Sculpture: Catalogue of the Collections at the Getty Villa (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001), 71. 373 Grossman, Greek Funerary Sculpture, 71. The closure of the eyes and the mouth along with a bowed head represents a Greek gesture of mourning. 374 Penelope J.E. Davies, Death and the Emperor: Roman Imperial Funerary Monuments from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113-14. 375 From Via Statilia. 2nd quarter of 1st Century B.C.E.. Rome: Museo Montemartini. See Dixon, The Roman Family, 168. 371

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public depiction, a distance between husband and wife is appropriate, much like the distance between Job and his wife in their artistic renditions. Mary Laura Heuser’s dissertation on gestures in early Christian art provides an extensive overview of iconography of the body in Christian art as a continuation of Greco-Roman visual traditions. Heuser points to the pudicitia pose for Roman women (an arm crosses the body and supports the other forearm) and notes that when the hand is lifted to take hold of the veil the gesture can also serve as a sign of grief. Another example can be found on a 4th century sarcophagus of mourning women found in the Necropolis of Aya‘a near Sidon (fig. 2.11). The mourning women on the sarcophagus are modeled after Attic Greek mourning women.376

Figure 2.11. The Sarcophagus of Mourning Women. Archaeological Museum, Istanbul. Photo: ARTstor.

376

For a historical discussion of this sarcophagus, see Robert Fleischer, Der Klagefrauensarkophag Aus Sidon (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth, 1983).

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A veiled hand, too, signifies grief.377 When a figure presents or receives an object with hands covered, it serves as a symbol of respect and veneration.378 Thus, Job’s wife lifts her veiled hand to her face in a symbolic gesture of restrained grief. Her gesture is less consistent in catacomb paintings but clearly a motif for sarcophagi (figs. 2.4, 2.5, 2.6). This particular visual sign also applies to Mary, mother of Jesus, in scenes of Jesus’ crucifixion.379 Dorothy Shorr argues that the gesture of grief re-emerges in the West in the ninth century in depictions of Mary and St. John the Evangelist standing at the foot of the cross.380 One early Eastern example Shorr did not incorporate into her study comes from the Rabbula Gospels, completed in 586 C.E. around the region of Antioch (fig. 2.12). The scenes in the Gospel Book probably reflected the images that decorated church interiors at the time.381 The women in the crucifixion scene, dressed modestly, also lift veiled hands to their faces. If Job acts as a typus Chrisi patientis, a type of Christ’s patience, then it remains that Job’s wife’s appearance in the early Christian standard design serves to support Job’s patience; she exudes wifely fidelity. Visually, she acts as a matrona who lost her children and serves her husband. Whereas no evidence supports claims

377

Mary Laura Heuser, "Gestures and Their Meaning in Early Christian Art" (Harvard University, 1954). See section Type F, page 185. 378 Ibid., 133. 379 Ibid., 194, 231. 380 Dorothy C. Shorr, "The Mourning Virgin and Saint John," The Art Bulletin 22, no. 2 (1940). 381 Lowden, Early Christian & Byzantine Art, 92-93. See also Cyril E. Pocknee, Cross and Crucifix in Christian Worship and Devotion (Westminster: The Canterbury Press, 1962).

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of neither her repulsion nor her deaconess status, the iconographic tradition does support her fulfillment of expected gender roles in Roman society.

Figure 2.12. Rabbula Gospel folio 13r. Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana in Florence. Photo: ARTstor.

Summary An early Christian visual standard for Job and his wife—Job sits and Job’s wife offers him bread at the end of a stick while lifting a hand to her chin— demonstrates numerous intersections of gender, social position, and cultural contexts. The early Christian visual standard upholds some textual conventions from the Septuagint and T. Job, while in other cases it suppresses certain details for emphasis on early Christian marital ideals based on Roman society. Job’s spiritual athleticism, as opposed to the physical state described in the textual sources, emerges through

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Job’s seating arrangements. Job’s wife, though verbally rebellious, exhibits a gesture of a modest mourning wife. If Job and his wife did not conform to ideals of sexuality and marriage, their marriage “reflected poorly on and threatened the empire as a whole.”382 The relationship between ideal Christian marriage and civic success even resonates with Jesus’ preserved “masculine honor” because his churchly bride maintains her purity.383 In the same way, Job’s “masculine honor” stays preserved through his wife’s proper, modest, subservient behavior. Early Christian artists uphold ideal standards for marriage, like those in the household codes and in 1 Tim 2:11-15, in their iconographic message of Job and his wife. Yet, Satan lingers ever so subtly in the early Christian standard. As iconography of Job and his wife expands into later periods, the message of upholding a marital ideal of Roman society dissipates in favor of a stronger Christian theological message of Job’s wife’s susceptibility to Satan and Job’s prefiguration of the patience of Christ. Many medieval artistic traditions, as the next chapter demonstrates, resonate with Augustine’s assessment of Job’s wife’s as “the Devil’s handmaid” (diaboli adiutrix).384

382

David M. Carr and Colleen M. Conway, "The Divine-Human Marriage Matrix and Constructions of Gender and 'Bodies' in the Christian Bible " in Sacred Marriages: The Divine-Human Sexual Metaphor from Sumer to Early Christianity, ed. Martti Nissinen and Risto Uro (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 290. 383 Ibid. 384 De Symbolo, III.10. CCSL 46, 193.

CHAPTER THREE: EDEN’S DUNGHILL: JOB AND HIS WIFE IN MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY AND IN THE MIRROR OF HUMAN SALVATION [SPECULUM HUMANÆ SALVATIONIS] The previous chapter dealt with Job and his wife in early Christian art. Early Christian artists depict Job and his wife on the basis of an ideology for Christian marriage with Job’s wife as the proper matrona and with Job seated honorably in her presence. As Joban traditions expand into the Middle Ages, Satan becomes more of a visual presence, to the detriment of Job’s wife. It befalls Job and his wife that Satan intercedes in their marriage in medieval times in a way not iconographically present in early Christian art. This chapter focuses on one clearly established iconographical case of Job and his wife in the Middle Ages—the threesome of Job, his wife, and the Devil in the “popular” medieval manuscript Speculum humanæ salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation), referred to as SHS.385 The Speculum Humanae Salvationis, or Mirror of Human Salvation (abbreviated as SHS), was written in the early fourteenth century in rhyming Latin verse and survives in over 400 manuscripts in Latin, Middle English, German, French, Dutch, and Czech. The general form consists of forty-five chapters. Each chapter contains one-hundred lines and four pictures, three of which act as the Old Testament types to a New Testament antitype. Some biblical sources integrate with

385

Numerous medieval manuscripts incorporate the word “speculum” in their titles. For a general discussion on the use of the word, see Ritamary Bradley, "Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Mediaeval Literature," Speculum 29, no. 1 (1954).

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non-biblical sources, such as Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, Gesta Romanorum, and Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea.386 After a brief introduction to the SHS, this chapter looks at various literary sources that highlight the visual interpretation of Job and his wife in the SHS. In essence, the Latin fathers and the theological traditions that follow locate Job and his wife in Eden in terms of Job’s wife’s speech to her husband. The purpose of the discussion of various literary sources is to locate Job and his wife within a specific stream of interpretation. That stream of interpretation consists of comparing Adam and Eve to Job and his wife and explaining what happens when Satan uses the wives through their speech to affect their husbands to do something wrong. Various illustrations from SHS provide representative examples of what happens to meanings surrounding Job’s wife when Satan becomes involved in the pictures. Both the theological and literary stream of Job and his wife compared with Adam and Eve in terms of satanic intervention in their marriage lends reason to why the SHS pictures Job book-ended by his wife and Satan. Finally, to illuminate further what interpretations are at work behind such illustrations in the SHS, this chapter covers social and gendered expectations of deviant speech. A comparison of the various nuances of illustrations of Job and his wife in SHS manuscripts, including to which schools, dates, and locales the illustrations 386

Avril Henry, The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun: A Middle English Translation of Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); Albert C. Labriola and John W. Smeltz, eds., The Mirror of Salvation [Speculum Humanae Salvationis]: An Edition of British Library Blockbook G. 11784 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002); Adrian Wilson and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324-1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

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belong, is beyond the scope of this chapter.387 Space limits me from discussing, for instance, the artistic merit of illuminated manuscripts in light of the growth of the block printing processes at the middle of the fifteenth century, or how a comparison of certain manuscripts reveals artists, dates, or locations of the manuscripts. 388 Instead, in this chapter, a few select images from the SHS of Job and his wife act as representatives of the fundamental iconography, form, and composition of the scene, regardless of variances and revisions. In terms of illustrations in SHS, Wilson and Wilson remark, “While the artists of the Speculum created manuscript miniatures that are very different in style from one copy to the other, they are fairly consistent in the iconography and the symbolism suited to the subjects.”389 The common symbolism found in the illustrations of SHS for Job and his wife is the subject of the discussion. That form is the visual alignment of Satan and Job’s wife, both book-ending Job. The image is meant to typologically coincide with the flagellation of Christ. Furthermore,

387

For a complete list of manuscripts, see Edgar Breitenbach, Speculum Humanae Salvationis: Eine Typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Strassburg: J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1930). 388 As carried out in the following: Bert Cardon, Manuscripts of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis in the Southern Netherlands (C. 1410-C. 1470), Corpus of Illuminated Manuscripts (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 1996); Avril Henry, "The Woodcuts of Der Spiegel Menschlicher Behältnis in the Editions Printed by Drach and Richel," Oud Holland 99, no. 1 (1985); Anna C. Hoyt, "The Mirror of Man's Salvation," Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts 54, no. 298 (1956); Herbert L. Kessler, "The Chantily Miroir De L'humaine Salvation and Its Models," in Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss (New York: New York University Press, 1977); W. Morris, "On the Artistic Qualities of the Woodcut Books of Ulm and Augsburg in the Fifteenth Century," Bibliographica 1 (1895); Kathleen L. Scott, "Four Early Fifteenth-Century English Manuscripts of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis and a Fourteenth-Century Exemplar," English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700 10 (2002); Evelyn Silber, "The Reconstructed Toledo Speculum Humanae Salvatonis: The Italian Connection in the Early Fourteenth Century," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980). 389 Wilson and Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324-1500, 29.

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the SHS belongs to a theological tradition, which naturally, and unfortunately, excludes a discussion of Eastern iconography of Job and his wife. In general, however, Byzantium art remains elusively tied to the form of Job and his wife from early Christianity. For instance, a ninth century copy of the sermons from Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth-century Cappadocian, maintains the iconographical standard of Job’s wife holding a stick out to Job with food on the end while covering her mouth with her shrouded left hand.390 Two other similar examples come from Byzantine Bibles found in Patmos (possibly from the ninth century) and Venice (from c.905).391 The Venice Job offers an example of “border-line Byzantine art proper” in terms of the Greek workshops in Italy. The Eastern connection remains clear.392 And, the Leo Bible, another ninth century illustrated Bible named after its commissioner, a grand chamberlain, which is the highest-ranking eunuch of the court, pictures Job’s wife to the right of the image with her standard pose.393 One difference to this is found in Sacra Parallela, a ninth century Byzantine codex, in which Job sits facing front with his knees drawn up, encased by an earthen hill. Often, his wife stands to his side without her usual gesture. The Sacra Parallela functions as a Byzantine sourcebook for ascetical teachings based on Scripture and orthodox

390

Paris gr. 510, fol. 71v. Fig. 13 in Leslie Brubaker, Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium: Images as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 391 Venice, Marciana gr.538, fol. 23r. Fig. 154 in Brubaker, Vision and Meaning in NinthCentury Byzantium, 363. For more information on Byzantine bibles, see Kurt John Weitzmann, Die Byzantinische Buchmalerei Des Ix. Und X. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1935). 392 Vat. MS. Gr. 746, as noted by André Grabar, Byzantium: Byzantine Art in the Middle Ages, trans. Betty Forster (London: Methuen, 1966), 170. 393 The Leo Bible, Vat. Reg. gr. I. fol. 461iv.

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authoritative teachings for the purpose of providing a summary of approved Christian teachings.394 The image of Job’s earthen mound with his wife by his side also appears in the sixteenth century manuscript of the commentary on the book of Job by Olymiodorus, deacon of Alexandria in the early sixth century.395 Two major differences exist between an early Christian standard form for Job’s wife and medieval ones, in general. First, Job’s wife uncovers her mouth; she no longer holds a veiled hand to her mouth. In early Christian art, Job’s wife projects a modest pose with a veiled hand to the face, a symbol of a proper, modest, grieving wife. Moshe Barasch argues that medieval art specifically adopted the motif of grieving from classical art and that “the most frequently represented gestures of sadness are the more restrained movements that late Hellenistic and Roman sculptors inherited from classical Greek art,” such as the raising of the veiled hand to the face. In other words, a woman’s “classical formula for depicting grief and weeping” does not “disappear in the Middle Ages.”396 The gesture, however, disappears for Job’s wife in the Middle Ages and beyond. At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, on the extremities of the central portal of the western façade, known as the portal of the Last Judgment, rest four small bas394

Vat.gr.749, ff. 26r, 27r, 28v, 30r, 119r, 126r, 152r, 153v, 157r, 179v, 190r. For a discussion of the version in Paris, see Kurt John Weitzmann, The Miniatures of the Sacra Parallela, Parisinus Graecus 923 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). 395 The Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Gr. 86, Folio #: p. 067. For a description of this work, see Chapter XIV in Henry Chadwick, Studies on Ancient Christianity, Variorum Collected Studies (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 396 Moshe Barasch, Gestures of Despair in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 11, 23. Anglo-Saxon gestures also adopt Roman stage gestures, and the veiled hand certainly indicates reverence: C.R. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106.

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reliefs, one of which includes Job surrounded by his wife and three friends (fig. 3.1). Purposefully chosen for the buttress flanking the central portal, the four small sculptures were probably arranged there when the portal was modified in 1240 C.E. Though its original placement remains unknown, the small relief of Job and his wife is one of four similar in style and design. They are the earliest surviving sculpture in the cathedral.397 The image of Job and his wife presents a clear example of the medieval departure from early Christian iconography for Job and his wife. In figure 3.1, two of Job’s friends exhibit typical mourning gestures; one friend stands behind Job with a hand on his shoulder and the other hand to the side of his face while the other friend, not his wife, raises one veiled hand to his face. In the sculpture, Job’s wife faces Job and withdraws her right hand away from him towards her chest. She holds her dress with her left hand. To withdraw her right hand, according to medieval gesture, is to reserve her position on a matter. When two individuals shared an oath or expressed faith for one another, they touched or clasped right hands. “Handfasting” or clasping right hands while exchanging vows was a common way for a couple to marry.398 Touching, or body contact, demonstrates friendship. Therefore, one of Job’s friends touches his back. But, his wife exhibits what J. A. Burrow calls “gestures of pride, like those of scorn or anger” since she

397

104-05.

398

Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, Notre-Dame De Paris (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998),

J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11-16; 34-35.

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stands “aloof from any touching of other persons.”399 In Anglo-Saxon gestures, adopted from the Roman stage, the lowering of one’s arm and turning the palm away from the person being addressed also indicates a sign of dissent.400

Figure 3.1. Job, His Friends, and His Wife. Bas-relief on central portal of the western façade, Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, 11-12th century. Photo: Katherine Low. 399 400

Ibid,, 48. Dodwell, Anglo-Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage, 60-61.

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Even more noticeable at Notre Dame is Job’s wife’s open mouth, connoting the act of speech. The sculpture provides an example of the central focus of this chapter—tensions surrounding Job’s wife’s verbalization in medieval imaginations. From her feminist perspective, Katharine Rogers summarizes medieval attitudes towards Job’s wife: The episode in which Job’s wife tells her husband to curse God and die— minor in the original book—has been magnified by later writers into a general indictment of wives. Her speech, intended to show poor Job failed even by the person who should have been closest to him, has been used as evidence that women never miss an opportunity to increase their husband’s misery or to lead them into sin.401 The use of Job’s wife to make a case for the worthlessness of wives certainly existed, but, her speech exemplifies much more in the cultural and theological landscape of medieval society. In the midst of a multitude of what it deemed heretical and “pagan” behaviors, the Church set about delineating its “proper” teachings; issues of gender exist as side-notes to larger concerns for the Latin Church Fathers.402 This chapter will examine anxiety surrounding the speech of Job’s wife that comes from a concern to maintain hegemonic theological and gendered discourse about God and the Church.

401

Katharine M. Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 3. 402 So argued by Tomarsz Klibengajtis, "Hiobs Weib in Der Exegese Der Lateinischen Kirchenväter: Ein Beitrag Zur Patristischen Frauenforschung," Analecta Cracoviensia 38-39 (20062007). Klibengajtis argues that ssues of misogyny remain secondary to the concerns of the Church Fathers and one should be cautious of such a general label for the specific issues that the Church Fathers are addressing, especially when it comes to the the potential blasphemy and anti-Christian behavior they saw in Job’s wife.

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Medieval Preaching and the Background of Speculum Humanae Salvationis Thelma Thomas speaks of several major differences between art in the West and in the East: Attitudes toward sacred images developed along different tracks in the Byzantine East and Latin West. In the West, for example, the emphasis on the instructional role and didactic capacity of religious imagery was stronger and longer lived than in Byzantium. And, decisively important, Byzantium, unlike the West, experienced an Iconoclastic Controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries: the need to mount a defense against those who would destroy all images of God and his saints, on the grounds that they were idolatrous, led to the articulation of an orthodox theology of sacred images.403 The didactic function of art in the West is a key feature in this chapter. The expansion of Christianity into the West from the seventh to the twelfth centuries required appropriate teaching materials for new converts, as well as constant examination of principles in light of distinct vernacular languages. Images, then, with no clear-cut rules about how to go about using them for the spiritual benefit of the laity, led to a myriad of artistic representations of the Bible. The development of exempla, illustrative biblical and cultural material in the form of short didactic tales of good conduct found especially in sermons, meant to bring teachings to the people using the everyday life of the middle ages as example. Although medieval preachers warned against the idolatry involved in images, their suspicion generally subsided over and against the didactic merits of art to instruct. In Italy alone during the thirteenth and

403

Thelma K. Thomas, "Sacred Images," in Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, ed. Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 212.

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fourteenth centuries, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby demonstrates three different ways three separate preachers dealt with the arts in their sermons, noting the complexity and ambivalence some preachers had towards art. On the whole, Debby traces a general growing historical acceptance of art among preachers in its ability to provide visual biblical exempla.404 The idea of preaching in the Middle Ages developed from Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis (590-604 C.E.) and its sense of the importance of clerical preaching. But, as the Middle Ages progressed, a more complex notion of the rhetorical devices for preaching for a popular audience emerged. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, preachers engaged an array of gestures and styles to facilitate the messages of their sermons.405 If preaching, after all, was meant to present religious ideals to the popular masses in order to persuade them to repent, images and stories (exempla) could aid them in that manner. Joan Young Gregg suggests that in growth and expansion of Christianity, especially in the thirteenth

404

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, "The Preacher as Goldsmith: The Italian Preachers' Use of the Visual Arts," in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002). For a collection of Latin exempla, see Thomas Frederick Crane, ed., The Exempla or Illustrative Stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques De Vitry (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967). 405 Phyllis B. Roberts, "The Ars Praedicandi and the Medieval Sermon," in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002). For a discussion of gestures and performances used by preachers, see Beverly Mayne Kienzle, "Medieval Sermons and Their Performance: Theory and Record," in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 2002). For essays on the idolatry of visual images in literature, see Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman, eds., Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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century, “the popular sermon did not so much address social reform directly as focus on personal spiritual conversion as the root of all social improvement.”406 Pictures function in illustrated texts as another level of meaning for spiritual devotion. Pictures were meant to be “read,” to be studied and meditated upon as any written word.407 Medieval hermeneutics were based on what Eric Jager calls “signifying relations held to be created by God and discovered through grace to the human understanding.”408 Scripture functioned in the West as a “polysemous text” full of significations. Reading allegorically and historically at the same time means that an exegete presumes an actual biblical event occurred as recorded and, at the same time, those events, characters, and images foreshadow or prophecy occurrences in the Christian era. Typology is a form of exegesis in which such events, characters, and images act as figures, or “types” for Christian events, characters, and images. Another mode of reading, tropology, is concerned with the moral life of the individual.409 Erich Auerbach’s highly influential essay “Figura” defines typology, as it functions for the Church, as a way to ground history in both type and antitype: “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second 406

Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories, Suny Series in Medieval Studies (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 9. 407 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 191-195. 408 Eric Jager, The Tempter's Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 12. 409 Ibid., 14-15.

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encompasses or fulfills the first.”410 The events or persons are understood as real and concrete historical occurrences, and, history remains spiritually provisional and in constant need of interpretation. Old Testament events, for instance, point to the incarnation and the fulfillment of the gospel, and the events of the New Testament point to the promise of the end, to the “true kingdom of God.”411 Medieval exegesis was far from rigid about typology. The idea of one medieval typological method is an invention of modern scholarship. Instead, Richard Emmerson uses the phrase “traditional yet fluid and practical nature of medieval exegesis.”412 He draws upon the pictures and text of the SHS as an example of how types and antitypes often link to one another in flexible ways. Emmerson suggests that historicity is not a deciding factor in the SHS because not-so historical texts and images (Song of Songs, visions of Ezekiel, and parables) exemplify events in the life of Christ. Rather, the SHS finds “connections between type and antitype” from anything that seems reasonable and convincing.413 Rather than thinking of the SHS as a typological book for its concern for historical events as types and antitypes, Emmerson regards it as a collection of visual and literary exempla. It engages a multiplicity of stories and images to effectively present Christian teaching, to centralize the antitype as a model for a spiritual life, and to allow one to reflect on one’s salvation. 410

Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 53. 411 Ibid., 58. 412 Richard K. Emmerson, "Figura and the Medieval Typological Imagination," in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh T. Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 16. 413 Ibid., 21.

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The SHS emerged out of specific religious contexts and related to a particular group of consumers. The style of SHS follows the Biblia Pauperum, a thirteenth century typological book with a series of pictures.414 Like Biblia Pauperum, SHS was probably written for the general purpose of strengthening faith through text and image, but more specifically for guiding preachers on particular topics.415 Job and his wife hold a space in the SHS as one of the three Old Testament types that prefigure, or fulfill, a moment in Christ’s life—his scourging. In Chapter 20, the SHS explains how Jesus is tied to a column and scourged. Visually, Christ remains in the center of the picture surrounded by two enemies on other side holding weapons with which to lash him. The first of the three Old Testament types that prefigure Christ’s flagellation is the story of Holofernes’s servant who ties Prince Achior to a tree (Judith 5:5-29; 6:7-13); as SHS puts it, “The attendants of Holofernes bind Achior to a tree, and Pilate’s soldiers tie Christ to a column.”416 The prefiguration of the actual whipping of Christ comes in the form of spousal abuse of both Lamech and Job. Figure 3.2 is a page out of the SHS that demonstrates the traditional page design and layout of SHS with two columns of text under two images at the top of the page. In the left illustration of figure 3.2, two

414

Avril Henry, ed., Biblia Pauperum: A Facsimile and Edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Albert C. Labriola and John W. Smeltz, eds., The Bible of the Poor [Biblia Pauperum]: A Facsimile Edition of the British Library Blockbook C.9.D.2 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1990). 415 Tibor Fabiny, The Lion and the Lamb: Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art and Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992). 416 Unless otherwise stated, all English quotes from the Speculum Humanae Salvationis come from the translation from the Latin by Labriola and Smeltz, eds., The Mirror of Salvation [Speculum Humanae Salvationis]: An Edition of British Library Blockbook G. 11784.

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women labeled Sella and Ada hold Lamech between them while Ada raises her left hand in anticipation to strike him. The SHS states clearly that Lamech’s two wives, Sell and Ada, prefigure both the “pagans” who beat Christ with whips and rods and the Jews who lash Christ with their tongue. The main source of the illustration comes from Peter Comestor’s twelfth century biblical paraphrase of Genesis Historia Scholastica; the biblical text does name Lamech’s two wives (Gen 4:18-19). In some rabbinic traditions, Lamech becomes the murderer of Cain, mostly due to his continuing to use a bow after going blind and, therefore, accidentally murdering Cain.417 In medieval Christian commentaries, Lamech’s main reputation is that of a polygamous murderer. The fact that he kills Cain comes in secondary to Comestor in his introduction of Lamech as “the worst,” because he “introduced bigamy, and thus committed adultery against the laws of nature and of God.”418

417

Brian Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2003), 71-72. For examples of the theme of Lamech killing Cain in Dutch art, see Sandra Hindman, "Fifteenth-Century Dutch Bible Illustration and the Historia Scholastica," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974). 418 PL 198, 1078-1080: et pessimus, qui primus bigamiam introduxit, et sic adulterium contra legem naturae et Dei decretum commisit. For more on Comestor’s influences, see James H. Morey, "Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible," Speculum 68, no. 1 (1993).

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Figure 3.2 Speculum Humanae Salvationis, MS. Douce 204, fol. 020v. Catalonia, Roussillon, c. 14301450. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Photo: ARTstor.

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The mistreatment of Lamech by his wives shows up less frequently in medieval vernacular texts, though the SHS concentrates on it exclusively.419 Sella and Ada remain only two of many wives who notoriously nag their husbands.420 The illustration to the right of Lamech and his wives in figure 3.2 shows Job surrounded by his wife and Satan. Satan whips Job with actual whips, whereas her words form a bubble with which she lashes at Job. It offers a prime example of the standard iconographical form in the SHS for Job and his wife. In yet another example from another region, Job’s wife’s words turn into a whip with which to lash Job (fig. 3.3).

Figure 3.3. GKS 79, fol. 50. Speculum Humanae Salvationis, Germany, c. 1430. Used with permission from The Royal Library, Copenhagen. Photo from http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/manus/218/eng/50+recto/?var 419

Murdoch, The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages, 77. Reiss attributes this tradition of scolding wives to popular Middle English mystery plays about Genesis, the York and Towneley Cycles, in which Noah’s wife scolds him for building the ark. The over-arching theme is the perverted pre-flood condition of order that prompts a wife to question her husband’s authority: Edmund Reiss, "The Story of Lamech and Its Place in Medieval Drama," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1972). 420

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An underlying theme for both Lamech and Job is their marital difficulties. The text and illustrations didactically present the perils of marriage. Though most women in medieval society were married, Shulamith Shahar conjectures that the views of marriage based on a monastic life-style made an important cultural impact on medieval society even though the monastic population itself was smaller than the general married population.421 Chastity was a preferred Christian way of life, based on Paul’s concession on marriage in 1 Corinthians (7:9), that marriage is better than living a corruptible life. A second-best option, according to prevailing Church literature, was the mutual practice of celibacy in marriage.422 Given the general attitudes about marriage from medieval Christian clerics, it comes as no surprise that SHS would present similar views. Mary and Joseph, married yet celibate, offer a prime example of the most ideal marital situation. The SHS launches into a series of justifications why Mary decided to marry Joseph when pregnant: to avoid judgment, to benefit from the support of a man, to allude Satan of the Incarnation, to have a witness of her chastity, to establish genealogical lineage, to present the validity of marriage, to demonstrate the legitimacy of a celibate marriage, and to give assurance to those married that not only virgins are among the elect. A medieval concept of order and hierarchy compels the author of the SHS to say that

421

Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (New York: Methuen, 1983), 65. 422 Ibid., 67-71. For an overview of an ecclesiastical view of marriage, consult Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978).

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“The Lord approves every state if one does his or her duty.”423 Clearly, a standard view based on Church teachings of the hierarchal make-up of marriage exists within the SHS, a testament to its ecclesiastical origins. Several theories exist about the source of SHS; the most common explains that around 1286 to 1324, a Dominican friar compiled the traditional teachings and lessons of the mendicant orders in order to provide a manual to take to the streets of medieval Europe.424 Involved in this theory, explains Kimberly Vrudny, whose dissertation offers another theory of authorship, is a development in late medieval Christianity concerning negative ideas about Christ. Historical developments such as the plague, or the Black Death, led to conceptions that Christ embodied divine wrath. Therefore, SHS evidences Mary’s intercessory role. Vrudny suggests that the Dominican Nicola da Milano and his Marian lay confraternity in Imola, Italy, remains responsible for authorship of the SHS. She compares Nicola’s exegetical remarks in his personal notebook with the High Marian content of the SHS.425 Vrudny’s study of the SHS centralizes the peoples’ experiences with death as a context. The SHS offered another “mirror” through which to look besides the mirror of one’s death, namely, “not the mirror of life with its focus on the transience of existence, but the mirror of human salvation with its focus on escape from death’s 423

SHS, ch. 6. Labriola and Smeltz, eds., The Mirror of Salvation [Speculum Humanae Salvationis]: An Edition of British Library Blockbook G. 11784, 28. 424 For more on authorship, see Wilson and Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324-1500, 26-27. 425 Kimberly Vrudny, "Scribes, Corpses, and Friars: Lay Devotion to the Genetrix, Mediatrix, and Redemptrix through Dominican Didactic Use of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis in Late Medieval Europe" (Luther Seminary, 2001).

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grip through the unfolding of redemption history in Christ, and, significantly, the Virgin Mary.”426 The first outbreak of the Black Death occurred in 1346, around the time that the SHS began circulating. The war between the Italians and the Tartars over access to trade routes witnessed the outbreak when the Tartars besieged the Italians in Caffa, one of the port cities of the Black Sea north of Constantinople. When the illness plagued the Tartars, they catapulted the bodies of their dead into the city. Four days later, the disease took hold. Even when people could escape, they carried infested fleas with them throughout Europe.427 From the middle of the thirteenth century, the Italians set up trading posts, which eventually became populated colonies, for the silk trade connecting Europe with China. Since the rat fleas avoided the smell of horses, nomads of central Asia were less vulnerable. Complex social, political, and populated stations of missionaries and merchants were more susceptible to plague infection.428 Such a widespread disease with an unknown cause elicited theological reactions of God’s punishment. Furthermore, the years after the outbreak brought about a change in the quality of the church’s services. “Europe at the time of plague, then, was a society reeling under repeated, powerful shocks;” states David Herlihy, “burdened with huge numbers of dependents; struggling with difficulty to maintain its 426

Ibid., 36. Ibid., 36-40. 428 Biologically, the plague had two types in this case, bubonic and pneumonic. Bubonic, the most common, comes from a flea’s bite which transfers bacilli into the human system that incubates for two to eight days. After the inception of fever, vomiting and pain in the limbs, the lymph glands swell to the size of an egg or larger. Pneumonic plague occurs when the bacilli cause pneumonia which can pass from one human to another. David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 20-23. 427

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occupational cadres.”429 In the face of such disaster, many clerics held on to the church’s core beliefs for stability. Yet, by the fifteenth century, the amount of young men entering the order without a quality of learning and training in previous years increased.430 Therefore, the SHS not only served a theological need to offer hope to its readers, but it also provided a training manual in many different languages for the clerics preaching and teaching among the varied population. In his book From Memory to Written Record, M. T. Clanchy argues that literacy, writing and reading, is as culturally bound in medieval England as it is in the twentieth-century Western world. Medieval readers held personal connections with their manuscripts and expected to read on many levels, including giving attention to the artistic details surrounding the text. Clanchy also calls into question a modern assumption that literacy equates to civilization, or that illiteracy leads to mental confinement. Furthermore, “literacy” in the medieval world meant that one had the ability to comprehend and engage in Latin.431 Beginning in 1066 with the Norman Conquest of England, Norman conquerors suppressed English in favor of French vernacular, although Latin replaced Old English in written language. The written French language developed in England; the common written language in France at that time was actually Latin. In England, monks learned to write English and Latin. Nevertheless, the vast majority of rural

429

Ibid., 46. Ibid. 431 Michael Camille, "Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Art History 8 (1985): 28. 430

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medieval dwellers could not read or write. Clanchy argues that lay literacy grew out of ruling bureaucracy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England, if not throughout medieval Europe.432 Besides monks preserving the Bible and the teachings of the Church Fathers through careful copying, burgeoning liturgical readings, such as illuminated liturgical manuscripts, Books of Psalms, or Gospel Books, underwent a large development over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Silver, gold, and silk adorned liturgical books since these books decorated the altar during formal service: “Every bishop and abbot wanted the shiniest and most advanced model of liturgical book” as a sign of status.433 From the thirteenth century onward, the aristocracy sought personal prayer books. The emergence of the university and the medieval copying centers of the thirteenth century moved the book out of the monastic libraries and into a wider segment of the population.434 Interactive books with large lettering and numerous illustrations allowed one to view the book even if one could not read. Repetition of the liturgy in churches allowed for textual familiarity. This led to the production of Books of Hours in the later Middle Ages, which are portable prayer manuals covering the liturgical hours for the laity which contained elaborate decorations based on the price. A gendered dimension exists in the personal liturgical books, as Clanchy notes, “through Books of Hours, ladies introduced their families and children to prayer. . . . 432

M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1993), 16-19. 433 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 110. 434 For more on secular book reproduction, see Graham Pollard, "The Pecia System in the Medieval Universities," in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N. R. Ker, ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978).

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This domestication of the liturgical book was the foundation on which the growing literacy of the later Middle Ages was built.”435 This kind of private reading remained a luxury since a book’s scarcity and cost meant that most of the time a book was read aloud to a group. The SHS most likely circulated in such a manner, in contexts of private devotion, as early as 1350 around medieval Europe, first in Latin and then, as over three hundred fourteenth and fifteenth century surviving manuscripts attest, in several translations.436 The need for private devotion and consolation increased after the plague. The connection between women and private devotion finds a resonance in the SHS in terms of the mass deaths of children due to the plague. Vrudny suggests that the focus on the Virgin Mary offered an empathetic image for those mourning the loss of a child because Mary herself experienced the loss of her son and would offer consolation of the reunification of loved ones after death.437 Of course, this 435

M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 112; 251-252. For more on women and the Books of Hours as devotional literature, see Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 436 For those manuscripts in which pictures are not included, Kathleen Scott surmises that such copies were used in religious houses that supported private contemplation and solitary reading rather than preaching or meditating on pictures for spiritual application: Scott, "Four Early FifteenthCentury English Manuscripts of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis and a Fourteenth-Century Exemplar," 197-98. 437 Vrudny, "Scribes, Corpses, and Friars: Lay Devotion to the Genetrix, Mediatrix, and Redemptrix through Dominican Didactic Use of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis in Late Medieval Europe", 57. Vrudny notes how the greatest level of popularity comes from the latter part of the fourteenth century, after the hit of the plague. Given the argument for consolation at the loss of children, it is interesting that SHS does not depict, nor mention, the loss of the children of Job and his wife. SHS chapter 25, however, depicts Mary’s sorrow for the loss of her son with Jacob grieving for Joseph, Adam and Eve mourning Abel, and Naomi bewailing the death of her two sons. Shulamith Shahar notes a general ecclesiastical disinterest in children based on both experience and infant mortality rate and concepts of original sin: Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, 103-05. For more on children in medieval societies, see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962).

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consolation was afforded to those who could patronize the creation of such luxuries as a personal devotional book. Wilson and Wilson note that several hundred copies of the SHS from the first part of the fourteenth century and on into the fifteenth century were produced, “nearly all illuminated,” at a time “when the lessons of piety, the allegories, and all of the arts were devoted to instilling in the minds of the people the need for salvation and the dread of eternal damnation.”438 In general, the morbidity of the Middle Ages remains an irrefutable fact.439 A preoccupation with death shaped the very organization of the Church. Liturgical evidence from the various versions of the Office of the Dead, an early Christian liturgy, demonstrates a much more suffering Job, including his words of misery, despair, and loss (Job 7:16-21; 10:1-7; 10:8-12; 13:22-28; 14:1-6; 14:13-16; 17:1-3, 11-16; 19:20-27; 20:18-23). The date of the Office of the Dead is contested, but by the seventh century, Christian communities read it at funeral services for their loved ones.440 The lessons from Job in the Office of the Dead, paraphrased and elaborated upon depending on the context, are called “Pety Jobs,” or “little Jobs.” Job functioned as the primary biblical figure in the Office as it developed throughout the Middle Ages, although the liturgy paraphrases Job’s speeches, not mentioning Job’s name, but keeping the words in first person so that the reader can relate to the “I” of the 438

Wilson and Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324-1500, 10. Chapter 9, “Last Things,” elaborates on the theme of death in the middle ages in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 440 See the chapter on Job in Medieval Christian Liturgy in Vicchio, Job in the Medieval World, 44-66. For a discussion of the context of the Office of the Dead, see Denis Renevey, "Looking for a Context: Rolle, Anchoritic Culture, and the Office of the Dead," in Medieval Texts in Context, ed. Denis Renevey and Graham D. Caie (New York: Routledge, 2008). 439

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text.441 Therefore, many Books of Hours illustrate Job, but, as no standard for Books of Hours existed, some do not include Job, especially since the Office of the Dead holds Job’s anonymity in the liturgy. Job’s individual sufferings used in the Office of the Dead, providing for the context of individual bereavement, omits the debate with the three friends and God’s wager with the Devil.442 It is this context of individual suffering out of which a Spanish rendition of the Job texts in the Office of the Dead find a poetic profane parody by Garci Sánchez Badajoz from around 1516. The poem, Las Leciones de Job, subverts the solemnity and turns it into a context for passionate love; it opens with love wishing that he die: “Pues amore quiere que muera (for love wishes that I die).” His death comes from unrequited amorous passion. The work received a backlash from the Church, which suggested that the poem made a profanity out of sacred scriptures.443 The Church drew lines between acceptable and unacceptable ideas about Job. The SHS presents an acceptable translation of Joban tradition from Latin, clerical culture for a vernacular audience. Preaching manuals of the thirteenth century, according to Claire Waters, “make it clear that the cultural difference between clergy

441

Lawrence L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 57-65; 79-84. 442 James H. Morey, Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature, Illinois Medieval Studies (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 168-69. 443 Víctor Infantes, "Las Lecciones De Job En Caso De Amores, Trobadas Por Garcí Sánchez De Badajoz," in Un Volumen Facticio De Raros Post-Incunables Españoles (Madrid: Antonio Pareja Editor, 1999). Volume 1 of this work includes a facsimile of the poem.

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and laity was one that had to be constructed and carefully maintained.”444 As part of the exempla preaching tradition, the SHS demonstrates both a concern for the learned culture of theological tradition passed down from the Latin fathers and a desire to make a connection to the common culture. Within this connection rests a reason why SHS illustrates Job and his wife in terms of concern for the wife’s verbal abuse of the husband. Two areas of interpretation intersect with Job and his wife in the SHS—the first is the theological tradition of Job and his wife with Adam and Eve in terms of satanic intervention, and the second related notion has to do with a cultural concern for problematic gendered speech. After a discussion of a line of interpretation that links Job and his wife in terms of Adam, Eve, and the problems of Satan and speech within authoritative church and related cultural settings, I then give a broad overview of socio-cultural understandings of deviant speech. Both the Adam/Eve/Job/Wife comparison and deviant speech discourses illuminate how the general form of Job and his wife in the SHS, and even in other settings, encapsulate medieval anxieties about the ability of Job’s wife to speak forthrightly to her husband.

444

Claire M. Waters, "Talking the Talk: Access to the Vernacular in Medieval Preaching," in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 35.

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Adam and Eve Compared to Job and his Wife: A Latin Tradition Passed Down Through the Middle Ages In tracing how the story of Genesis 3, “the Fall,” since Augustine, acted in medieval Christian culture as a central paradigm of human existence, Jager suggests that Christian-Latin authors focused heavily on the myth of the Fall because of its ideas about language and its moral consequences. They carried an anxiety for the proper transmission of scriptural tradition over and against “false teachings.” In The Tempter’s Voice, Jager compellingly argues that the grounding of religious experience in written word, rather than oral speech, remains one consequence of medieval monastic culture. Even when monks read aloud, they did so from the written word, the same word they took great lengths to preserve and reproduce. A clerical distrust of the oral poems from surrounding “pagan” cultures as rival oral traditions also comes into play. And, according to Jager, the Fall acted as the quintessential narrative warning of the dangers of unmediated oral communication and human consumption of false oral tradition.445 To use the Fall as an epistemological framework for engaging Christian classical tradition is to suggest that the first humans were inexperienced users of language. God’s word impinges on human understanding, and, both Adam and Eve corrupt God’s command by eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The convention that the Devil embodies the serpent is a later Christian

445

Jager, The Tempter's Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature.

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interpolation in the biblical text,446 one that suggests that patristic authors, and the medieval exegetes that followed them, viewed the story of Eden as “a calamitous violation of the whole divinely instituted order of Paradise. After the Serpent, Eve was the first to challenge the ‘received text,’ the ‘tradition, or the ‘canon’ as passed down to her.”447 This section builds upon Jager’s analysis while tracing a particular medieval literary and artistic tradition of comparing Job and his wife to Adam and Eve. In the notion of the Fall as a story Christian-Latin medieval authors used to approach their anxieties over the transmission of non-orthodox teachings, Job’s wife emerges as another Eve and Job as another Adam. As discussed in the previous chapter, the surviving early Christian art of Job and his wife reaches well into the 4th and 5th centuries. Just a few years after the creation of the Junius Bassus sarcophagus around 359 C.E. (see fig. 2.6), Jerome was in Rome working on translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Latin, a translation known as the Vulgate. In 384, Jerome moved from Rome to Jerusalem. After Rome was sacked in 410, another important Christian theologian, Augustine of Hippo, was serving as bishop of Hippo and responded by writing his spiritual autobiography, The City of God. Augustine’s leadership in the Imperial Church of the West has lasting implications for Christian thought throughout the Middle Ages. Furthermore, Augustine’s writings served as the basis for Pope Gregory’s commentaries. Gregory

446

For a thorough listing of Christian sources equating the serpent with Satan, see Schearing, Ziegler, and Kvam, eds., Eve & Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender 447 Jager, The Tempter's Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature, 38.

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the Great, who served as pope from 590-604, held Augustine’s conjectures as infallible. In Gregory’s uncertain time, Augustine’s theology provided him with a stable epistemological foundation.448 In Rome in 595, Gregory completed his Moralia on Job. When it comes to the book of Job, no other Christian theologian holds more influence over medieval literary interpretations of Job than Gregory the Great. As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire in the 300s and as hierarchies emerged, public regulations were established, and as Roman cultural and social mores and beliefs absorbed into Christianity, ideas about marriage changed. In the previous chapter, I discussed the prevailing marriage ideal that blended Roman cultural norms and Christian teachings. Such teachings about hierarchal marital relations and proper behaviors for husbands and wives did not change, but, as Pamela Norris notes, Christian authors debated among multiple cultural groups about the “regulation of the mind and the appropriate control of the body’s pressing needs.”449 Asceticism raised new questions about marriage and celibacy, endorsing a role of humanity contrary to its biological drive to mate and procreate, and, in so doing, it put humans into spiritual conflicts that required extreme tests of will and endurance. Through their expositions on Job, Christian authors exemplify him as one who survived countless spiritual tests at the expense of his own marriage.

448

Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity, 2 vols., vol. 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), 201-16, 46-48. 449 Pamela Norris, Eve: A Biography (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1998), 166.

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In a letter to his sister from 385 C.E., Ambrose describes a conflict with the Arians over control of a new basilica. The emperor Valentinian sent soldiers to seize the basilica because his mother Justina was Arian. The public was in uproar, according to Ambrose, when he preached a sermon on Job. He called all of his audience “Jobs” because they have withstood adversity with patience and faith. Ambrose compares the great disturbances of his own time—the Goths, the armed men in their presence, and their trials—to the “accumulated tidings of evil” found in Job’s wife’s oppositional speech to her husband: You see what is asked when this command is given: Hand over the basilica—that is: ‘Speak a word against God, and die,’ do not merely speak a word opposing God, but make yourself an opponent of God. The order is: Hand over the altars of God. We are hard-pressed by the royal edicts, but we are strengthened by the words of Scripture, which answered: ‘You have spoken like one of the senseless.’ And that was no slight temptation, because we know that those temptations are more severe which are brought about through women. Indeed, through Eve Adam was deceived, and thus did it come about that he departed from divine commands.450 Ambrose uses the exchange of Job and his wife to argue against relinquishing control of the basilica to the Arians, but he also compares them to Adam and Eve. Underlying the comparison rests a distrust of heresies and a concern to maintain control.

450

Ambrose, Letter XX: To Marcellina as to the Arian Party. Easter, 386. PL, vol. 16, 1041: Advertitis quid jubeatur, cum mandatur: Trade basilicam, hoc est: Dic aliquod verbum in Deum, et morere. Nec solum dic adversum Deum, sed etiam fac adversus Deum. Mandatur: Trade altaria Dei. Urgemur igitur praeceptis regalibus, sed confirmamur Scripturae sermonibus, quae respondit: Tanquam una ex insipientibus locuta es. Non mediocris igitur ista tentatio; namque asperiores tentationes has esse cognovimus, quae fiunt per mulieres. Denique per Evam etiam Adam supplantatus est; eoque factum, ut a mandatis coelestibus deviaret. English translation from Ambrose, Saint Ambrose: Letters, trans. Sister Mary Melchior Beyenka, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1954), 370. Incidentally, C. L. Seow has stated that Job is at the center of every early Christian controversy: Seow, "Christian Consequences of Job".

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Augustine knew of Ambrose as Bishop of Milan in the years 385 to 387, but no letter exists today from Ambrose to Augustine. They held similar views about Job and his wife, sharing an emerging trend for Job and his wife that culminate in Gregory’s Moralia. Earlier writings from Tertullian and Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, do not speak of Job’s wife in terms of Eve. In his treatises from 251 C.E., Cyprian simply suggests that Job’s wife urges Job to curse God in a complaining and envious voice.451 Tertullian makes a vague reference to Job’s wife in the context of the Devil’s agenda against Job, and even mentions the weariness of Job’s wife.452 Though Tertullian wrote in Latin, his view of Job’s wife suggests his encounter with the Greek bible and its addition to Job’s wife’s speech. The Vulgate contains no such addition to the words of Job’s wife. In his commentary on Job, Julian of Eclanum offers no comparison between Job and his wife and Adam and Eve. Rather, he simply describes the situation, noting that Job’s wife speaks out of anger.453 Since Julian was a follower of Pelagius, Julian and Augustine exchanged heated debates. Augustine disagreed with the followers of

451

Treatises of Cyprian VII. 10. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The AnteNicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, American ed., 10 vols., vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996), 471. 452 Patience, ch. 14:14: Quale in illo uiro feretrum Deus de diabolo extruxit, quale uexillum de inimico gloriae suae extulit, cum ille homo ad omnem acerbum nuntium nihil ex ore promeret nisi « Deo gratias », cum uxorem iam malis delassatam et ad praua remedia suadentem execraretur! Tertullian, Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, 218. 453 CCSL vol. 88, 9: Verbis uxoris ostenditur, Iob positum in illa conuulsione membrorum, Deo iugiter gratias egisse, ac dixisse, se inter illas dolorum nimietates eius in uita miseratione seruari. Unde uelut consequenter ei ab uxore dicitur: si vitam tibi praestat tuis precibus exoratus, auferat melius est uoce tuae conquestionis iratus.

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Pelagius who believed that baptized Christians possessed free will to make moral choices. For Augustine, a very negative view of Eden impacts his theology. Even in Augustine’s last years, and after the death of Pelagius, Julian and Augustine continued heated arguments over human will and the ability of Adam’s single willful act to corrupt the structure of the universe into an irrevocable state of sinfulness.454 Augustine suggests that the devil did not destroy Job’s wife along with Job’s children so that he might bring about another Eve-incident with Job, that is, the devil tempting a husband through his wife to deceive him into blasphemy. In his treatise “On Patience,” Augustine compares Job to Adam in husbandly terms: She brought no help to her husband, but went on blaspheming God. Skilled in wrong-doing, the Devil had not deserted her when he had destroyed her sons, for he learned with Eve how necessary woman was for the tempter. But, this time he did not find another Adam whom he could entice through a woman.455 Again, in a sermon “To the Catechumens on the Creed,” Augustine elaborates on Job’s wife’s role: After the pattern of the serpent, who, in Paradise, deceived the first man whom God made, so now she also thought by suggesting blasphemy to succeed in deceiving a man who pleased God. How great were his sufferings, brethren! Who can suffer so much in his possessions, in his house, in his children, in his person, yea, in his wife, the temptress who remained to him? But even her Satan would long before have taken from

454

Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), 130. Augustine, “On Patience,” ch. 9. CSEL vol. 41, 673-674: Aderat uxor nec ferebat opem aliquam uiro, sed in deum blasphemiam suggerebat. Non enim eam diabolus, cum etiam filios abstulisset, tamquam nocendi inperitus reliquerat, quji wuantum esset necessaria temptatori iam in Eua didicerat. Sed modo alterum Adam, quem per mulierem caperet, non inuenerat. English translation from Augustine, Treatises on Various Subjects, 245-46. 455

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him if he had not kept her to be his helper. He had overcome the first man by means of Eve, therefore he had kept his Eve.456 Augustine goes on to say that “His wife, the devil’s helper, not her husband’s comforter, would fain have persuaded him to blaspheme.”457 For Augustine, all women are impacted by Eve’s act in Eden. Therefore, Eve serves as Mary’s “antitype,” her exact opposite in terms of their symbolic roles. Irenaeus (ca. 130-200) makes this clear in his Against Heresies. As Eve was disobedient and brought sin into the world, God will redeem sin of humankind through a woman, who gives birth to Jesus Christ. Just as a woman causes humankind to sin, a woman brings salvation to humankind.458 Joan Gregg Young calls this comparison a “clerical splitting of the female into saints or sinners, Eves or Marys.”459 The Eve/Mary typology was so ubiquitous that countless Middle English sermons note the Eve/Mary relationship, as well as numerous English Cycle plays that would have reached a wide variety of audiences in the Middle Ages.460 Job’s 456

Augustine, A Sermon to Catechumens on the Creed, 10: 235-244. CCSL vol. 46, 192-193: Et tamen eum sua persuasion mala mulier decipere uoluit, habens et haec figuram illius serpentis, qui sicut in paradise decepit hominem primum factum a Deo, ita etiam nunc blasphemiam suggerendo putauit posse decipere placentem hominem deo. Quanta passus est, fraters. Quis potest tanta pati in re sua, in domo sua, in filis suis, in carne sua, in ipsa quae remanserat tentatrice uxore sua? Sed etiam ipsam quae remanserat, olim auferret, nisi adiutricem sibi seuasset, quia primum hominem per Euam debellauerat. Euam seruauerat. English translation from Charles A. Heurtley, ed., On Faith and the Creed: Dogmatic Teaching of the Church of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries (London: Parker and Co., 1886), 44. 457 10: 256. CCSL vol. 46, 193: Voluit mulier illa, diaboli adiutrix, non mariti consolatrix, persuadere blasphemiam. Heurtley, 45. 458 Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” Book 5, Chapter 19. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, The Apostolic Fathers--Justine Martyr--Irenaeus (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1987), 547. 459 Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories, 108. 460 Walter E. Meyers, "Typology and the Audience of the English Cycle Plays," in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1992).

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wife, as another Eve, recalls yet again Augustine’s view of the autonomous woman, in general, in the words of Kim Power as being “a demonic instrument in her potential wilfully to disrupt familial and social order through her pride.”461 Another theologian in the 380s compared Adam and Eve with Job and his wife, with Satan acting as the connective entity between the couples. John Chrysostom, who calls Job an “athlete,” preaches of the devil’s connection with Job’s wife in a sermon on “The Power of Man to Resist the Devil.” Again, a comparison between Adam and Eve exists: For this man will give us greater zeal, so that we may raise our hands against the Devil. There he who deceived and conquered was a serpent; here the tempter was a woman, and she did not prevail: and yet at least she was far more persuasive than he. For to Job after the destruction of his wealth, after the loss of his children, after being stripped bare of all his goods, her wiles were added. But in the other case there was nothing of this kind. Adam did not suffer the destruction of his children, nor did he lose his wealth: he did not sit upon a dunghill, but inhabited a Paradise of luxury and enjoyed all manner of fruits, and fountains and rivers, and every other kind of security.462 461

Kim Power, Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women (New York: Continuum, 1996), 170. Power discusses that Augustine held several views of women. First, the “real” women of his life held positive matronly images, such as his mother and his concubine. Second, Augustine wrote of autonomous woman in a general sense. Third, a sexual woman, represents for Augustine the locus of desire and danger in need of restraint. In the last two images, Mary functions as a “meta-symbol” who could exemplify the opposite of both his autonomous and sexual woman. 462 Homily III, “On the Power of Man to Resist the Devil,” section 4. Joannis Chrysostomi Opera Omnia, Paris, vol. 2, 321-322: Ille namque majores nobis animos faciet, ut manus cum diabolo conseramus. Illic serpens erat, qui decipiebat, et vicit; hic mulier, quae non praevaluit, tametsi ad persuadendum aptior, quam ille. Ac Jobo quidem post pecuniarum jacturam, filiorum amissionem, necnon bonorum omnium, machina admovebatur; illic vero nihilerat ejusmodi: filios non amiserat nec pecunias Adam, neque in fimo sedebat, sed in paradiso voluptatis habitabat, et omnis generis Iignorum copia fruebatur, fonte item, fluviis, aliisque omnibus commodis: nusquam labor, non tristitia, non moeror, non contumeliae et convicia, neque innumera illa mala, quae Job immissa sunt; attamen cum nihil adesset hujusmodi, lapsus et supplantatus est. English translation from John Chrysostom, St. Chrysostom: On the Priesthood; Ascetic Treatises; Select Homilies and Letters; Homilies on the Statues, trans. Philip Schaff (New York: Christian Literature Publishing, Co., 1886), 195. Listed as Homily III under the title “Three Homilies Concerning the Power of Demons,” in the 1956 reprint by Eerdmans Publishing, vol. 9, 194-195.

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The connection between Satan and Job’s wife comes through just as clear in Chrysostom’s commentary on Job, in which he comments that the Devil formerly used the serpent, but now he uses the woman.463 Chrysostom considered human nature corrupt enough that wealth, power, and luxury compromised the integrity of the church.464 Thus, Job’s example provides a means to speak to his audience about this corruption—even in Paradise Adam falls victim to his wife’s temptation, and dung is far worse than the luxury of Paradise. Yet, Job prevails. As Vicchio notes, the popular notion of “Saint Job” in the fourth century provides that Job serves as a model for spiritual fortitude.465 Augustine considered Eden the locus of universal human sin. Unlike Pelagius and his followers, or John Chrysostom, Augustine advocated that human nature could not bring about death by act of will, but, rather, that death was the nature of humanity. Also, as Elaine Pagels describes in Augustinian terms, “woman, although created to be man’s helper, became his temptress and led him into disaster. The Genesis account describes the results: God himself reinforced the husband’s authority over his wife.”466 Two important notions emerge for Job and his wife. First, where Adam fails in his marriage, Job succeeds. Job does not give in to his wife’s words. Second, both wives engage problematic speech in the presence of their husbands, due to the Devil’s 463

See chap. II, section 12, in John Chrysostom, Commentaire Sur Job, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1988), 188-89. 464 Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, 104. 465 Vicchio, Job in the Medieval World, 9. 466 Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, 114.

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control over them. Augustine goes so far as to suggest that Job’s wife blasphemes against God. Such Augustinian traditions were carried on well into the Middle Ages. Even a byzantine presbyter in Constantinople during the sixth century, Leontius, preached of Job’s wife as another Eve. Job stands firm, according to Leontius, and does not lose paradise because of his wife, and does not have to hide from God in shame.467 When Leontius preached a sermon on Maundy Thursday, scolding his congregation for breaking a fast, he compares Job’s wife to the woman with the alabaster jar who anointed Jesus (Matt 26:7). The woman who anoints Jesus with perfume serves as a reversal of the kind of blasphemous sin instigated by Job’s wife. Job’s wife served the devil while the other woman attended to the Lord.468 No other text about Job has more influence on medieval traditions of Job than Gregory the Great’s Moralia. Western Europe underwent political disunity and disharmony after the Goths sacked Rome in 410 C.E.. While the Byzantine church continued its establishment in the East for at least a thousand more years, groups known to the Roman Empire as “barbarians” began settling throughout the West. The papacy served as an institution that provided stability throughout the Middle Ages. In order to achieve such stability, Christians needed clear orthodox teachings. Gregory’s reign (590-604) anticipates the shift from the ancient world to the medieval world and signifies all the imperial efforts the old Roman Empire had left in

467

Homily V.20 in Leontius, Fourteen Homilies, trans. Pauline Allen and Cornelis Datema (Brisbane: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1991), 80. 468 Homily VI. 9 in Ibid., 84. The translation calls Job’s wife “a companion of Eve” and “a handmaid of the Devil.”

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the West. War, plague, and pestilence left Rome in shambles. Even in the year he was ordained pope, Gregory fell ill with fever from which he never fully recovered. His own personal life provided the impetus for his exposition on the tribulations of Job, for Gregory assumed that his sickness came as a punishment from God for sin, one that he must bear with relentless patience like Job.469 Gregory, well read in the church fathers, those translations that were available to him in Latin, saw Job as a patient sufferer. A plague hit Rome in 590 and raged for four months.470 Drought affected Italy for most of 591. Due to such events, Gregory believed that the end of the world was imminent. As an active endorser of the true Christian life, he sought to liberate the mind from the flesh, to live a life of contemplation. Spiritual power resulted from disengaging the world and actively contemplating, thus providing an outward sign of God’s power so to convert nonChristians.471 Therefore, Gregory deems Job as one who overcomes diversity through spiritual contemplation. In Gregory’s commentary, Job’s wife functions as just another test Job must overcome. Like Augustine before him, Gregory focuses a great deal on the mouth of Job’s wife: “the old foe put in motion the tongue of his wife” (antiques hostis linguam mouit uxoris). The connection between Adam and Job remains evident for Gregory—Job is “Adam on a dunghill” (Adam in sterquilinio). When Satan attempts 469

Jeffrey Richards, Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 47. 470 Dionysios Ch. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics, ed. Anthony Bryer and John Haldon, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 118. 471 Richards, Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great, 54-57.

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to defeat Job, he does so through Job’s wife, knowing that as Adam was prone to be deceived through his wife Eve, so might Job’s wife persuade Job to curse God. Gregory refers to Satan as the serpent who, through his wife, the one closest to Job, attempted to sway his faith (III. viii). Job rebuked her rightly, especially since he knew from the first fall of man that her “looser mind” needs “manly reproof.”472 Fin the same passage, Gregory uses the incident to explain why women are not worthy to instruct God’s word, citing 1 Timothy 2:12 as support. One common thread throughout the comparisons between Job and his wife and Adam and Eve is the menacing presence of Satan to disrupt their marriage. When Gregory began his papacy, the Devil became the vehicle through which popular superstitions concerning evil spirits were channeled. Rather than the so-called “pagan” notion of numerous spirits at work throughout the world, the church upheld that evil came from God’s judgment or from the Devil’s hand. As Jeffrey Richards notes, “The Devil was everywhere and could take any form he wished in order to work his wicked ways.”473 Although two centuries of Christianity as established religion existed throughout the West, people, especially in rural areas, still kept their loyalties to their gods. For the Church, these gods were known as demons. Supernatural forces still maintained their presence in holy sites across the country landscape. The Church had to deal with idol-worshipping agrarian peasants. As 472

CCSL 143: Dignum quippe era ut fluxam mentem uirilis censura restringeret cum profecto et de ipso primo lapsu humani generis nosset quod docere mulier recta nesciret. Pope Gregory I, S. Gregorii Magni Moralia in Job, vol. 143, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnholti: Brepols, 1979), 122. 473 Richards, Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great, 17.

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Augustine of Hippo before him, Gregory recommended the subtle absorption of paganism into Christianity. Therefore, holy sites were renamed and festival days taken over. The Devil had a large role to play here, for the pagan practices not so easily adaptable to Christianity became the work of the Devil.474 According to an early eleventh century Anglo-Saxon English abbot and authoritative Winchester scholar, Ælfric, when preaching about the pagan custom of divination, states, “every blessing comes from God, and cursing from the devil” as the devil “is an instigator of evil and worker of falsehood, author of sins, and deceiver of souls.”475 In other sermons, Ælfric lifts up the importance of Job as a saint, who overcomes the devil’s malicious acts.476 As a literary construction, the devil acts less as a tempter and more as an ontological symbol that constantly challenges saints. Peter Dendle notes how the devil acts as a prop in Old English literature, a symbol of general evil that saints must overcome. The devil acts as a saint’s shadow, a “continuous reminder of the perils of the present world.”477 The emphasis on heroic moments in the history of redemption is a common theme in early medieval theology. John Damon argues that Ælfric inherited a concept of the non-violent holy martyr who reaches masculinity through struggling against 474

Ibid., 17-20. Kalendas Ianvarii Octabas et Circvmcisio Domini VI: 35-39: “Ælc bletsung is of Gode, and wyrigung of deofle” and “ac he is yfel tihtend, and leas wycrend, synna ordfruma, and sawla bepæcend.” See Peter Clemoes, ed., Ælfric's Catholic Homilies: The First Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1997), 230. 476 Praefatio I: 100, in Ibid., 176. See also his Sermo De Memoria Sanctorum XVI. 477 Peter Dendle, Satan Unbound: The Devil in Old English Narrative Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 61. The Latin tradition carries a certain tension between internal/external sin. The Anglo-Saxons inherited such a tension in dealing with the devil and generally blurs his role as internal/external source of sin. 475

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spiritual temptation and yoked it with a new cultural norm of the “growing ideal of the holy warrior/champion of Christ.”478 As Damon suggests, Ælfric, in his lives of saints, presents both the cleric and the warrior “as equally capable of achieving true Christian sainthood” but in separate sectors of society, “through the spiritual fulfillment of duty.”479 Ælfric was a prolific author and theologian whose sermons meant to educate clergy and expound on Christ’s redemption.480 After a tenth century English revival of monasticism, it was important for Ælfric to clearly delineate the teachings of the church through precise sources and not just apocryphal, anonymous Old English poetry and tradition, which meant basing his teachings on the “exegetical and canonical writings of the most honoured fathers of the Latin West.”481 From his second series of Catholic homilies, Ælfric preaches a sermon on “the first Sunday in September, when Job is read” (Dominica I in Mense Septembri. Quando Legitur Iob). In typical fashion in terms of the sentiments that came before him from Augustine and Gregory, Ælfric understood Job as part of the universal history of Christian salvation. Job’s wife embodies Satan’s temptations, in her “witlessness,” (gewitleast), as Eve did for Adam: The guileful devil took to him the woman as a helper, that he might through her deceive the holy man, as he had before deceived Adam through Eve; but the same God that permitted him to be so tempted, 478

John Edward Damon, Soldier Saints and Holy Warriors: Warfare and Sanctity in the Literature of Early England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 196. 479 Ibid. 480 For more on Ælfric, see Milton McC. Gatch, Preaching and Theology in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric and Wulfstan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 481 Ibid., 120.

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preserved him against the devil’s machinations, and against the loss of his soul.482 In the early thirteenth century, the case of Job and his wife remain the same. In a time in Western culture when Aristotle’s writings became accessible in Latin translation, Thomas Aquinas’ Literal Exposition on Job recounts much of the same themes as did earlier writings. Like Augustine, Aquinas notes that Satan keeps Job’s wife alive so that he might attempt to bring him down through his wife like he did with Adam. Job, however, maintains his constant innocence.483 Aquinas’ commentary on Job includes Aristotelian influences and philosophical conclusions about how divine providence functions in human matters, but his view of Job’s wife follows suite of his Latin predecessors.484 In the time of Aquinas, religious reforms reinforced male clerical celibacy and strictor, more traditional roles, for married men. Furthermore, Aristotle’s views provided “biological explanations and justifications for the social and cultural inequalities between men and women.”485

482

Dominica I in Mense Septembri I: 125-129: Se swicola deofol genam pæt wif him to gefyl/stan. pæt he ðone halgan wer ðurh hí beswice. Swa swa he ær Adam purh euan beswac. ac se ylca god ðe geðafode pæt hé swa gecostnod wære heold hine wið pæs deofles syrwungum. and wið his sawle lyre. Anglo-Saxon text in Malcolm Godden, ed., Ælfric's Catholic Homilies: The Second Series (London: Oxford University Press, for The Early English Text Society, 1979). English translation from Ælfric, Sermones Catholici; or, Homilies of Aelfric, trans. Benjamin Thorpe, 2 vols., vol. 2 (London: Taylor, 1844-1846), 453-55. 483 Thomas Aquinas, The Literal Exposition on Job: A Scriptural Commentary Concerning Providence, ed. Carl A. Raschke, trans. Anthony Damico, Classics in Religious Studies (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 94-95. 484 Martin D. Yaffe, "Providence in Medieval Aristotelianism: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas on the Book of Job," in The Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting the Book of Job, ed. Leo G. Perdue and W. Clark Gilpin (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992). 485 Sharon Farmer, "Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives," Speculum 61, no. 3 (1986): 520.

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Evidence of a trend to compare Adam with Job and Eve with Job’s wife continues throughout the Middle Ages. In twelfth century France, Heloise makes mention of Job’s wife in one her letters to Abelard. In the context of marriage, she places herself among “bad” wives of the Bible, including Delilah, the wives of Solomon, and Job’s wife: It was the first woman in the beginning who lured man from Paradise, and she who had been created by the Lord as his helpmate became the instrument of his total downfall . . . . Job, holiest of men, fought his last and hardest battle against his wife, who urged him to curse God. The cunning arch-tempter well knew from repeated experience that men are most easily brought to ruin through their wives.486 The letter offers a unique look into a female appropriation of the Adam/Eve-Job/Wife juxtaposition. Susan Smith discusses Heloise’s use of the “Power of Women” topos and defines topos as “the representational practice of bringing together at least two, but usually more, well-known figures from the Bible. . . to exemplify a cluster of interrelated themes that include the wiles of women, the power of love, and the trials of marriage.”487 Here, Heloise demonstrates the instability of gender hierarchy. On the surface, her letter reads as if she accepts the ideology of patriarchal discourse that supports women as a “weaker sex.” According to Smith, she does so in order to keep Abelard’s guidance and love, thus claiming moral weakness to maintain power over 486

Letter III, from Heloise to Abelard: Prima statim mulier de paradise virum captivavit et, quae ei a Domino creata fuerat in auxilium, in summum ei conversa est exitium . . . .Iob sanctissimus in uxore novissimam atque gravissiam sustinuit pugnam, quae eum ad maledicendum Deo stimulabat. Et callidissimus tentator hoc optime noverat, quod saepius expertus fuerat, virorum videlicet ruinam in uxoribus esse facillimam. Latin from J.T. Muckle, "The Personal Letters between Abelard and Heloise," Mediaeval Studies 15 (1953): 80. English translation from Peter Abelard, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 77-78. 487 Susan L. Smith, The Power of Women: A Topos in Medieval Art and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 2.

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Abelard’s desire.488 In any case, Job’s wife and Eve share a basic characteristic. They bring, or attempt to bring, the downfall of their husbands through their persuasive and powerful speech. The idea of Job’s wife’s damaging speech, and her connection with Eve, develops in many more sources. A copy of SHS from the fifteenth century (fig. 3.4) demonstrates how to visually present Job’s wife dominance over her husband without the clear presence of words. In figure 3.4, Job’s wife is dressed in common modest fashion for a presentable married woman. Her close-fitting bodice cut to show the neck with a long skirt was a common dress. Her headdress, a padded circlet of fabric, a bourrelet, rolled and worn like a turban, was common in the early fifteenth century.489 Figure 3.4 follows blockbook illustrations but presents the miniatures in a more sophisticated Ghent-Bruges style, a Flemish style that synthesized the qualities of art from both its neighbors, England and France.490 The stance of Job’s wife in figure 3.4 merits attention. She stands with both hands on her hips, a gesture known as “akimbo.” Both hands on the hips, or just one hand the hip, signifies a “scornful sense of superiority” for the posture “extends the amount of space claimed by a body.”491 Figure 3.4 fits cultural attitudes of the time. Late medieval French literature, according to many medieval scholars, holds a propensity to perpetuate the intellectual inferiority of women, especially in marriage 488

Ibid., 39. Joan Evans, Dress in Mediaeval France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 50-51. 490 Wilson and Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324-1500, 81. 491 Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative, 44-45. For how this extends into Renaissance art, see Joaneath Spicer, "The Renaissance Elbow," in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). 489

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literature that presents marriage as a form of torture to the husband because of a demanding, outspoken, quarrelsome, and scold of a wife. A Benedictine monk, John Lydgate (c. 1370-c.1451), who studied in Oxford and Cambridge, and who also traveled to France, was a prolific author in the Chaucerian tradition. His poem, “Examples Against Women,” follows examples of biblical women, from Eve to Delilah, to suggest that Christ was wise not to marry. Job’s wife qualifies as one of those examples: Wasn’t it a pity that in Job’s “most povert and moste myserie,/ His wyf hym rebuked & on a donghyll left hym lye?”492

492

John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, vol. 2: The Secular Poems, The Early English Text Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 444.

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Figure 4.4 Mirror of Human Salvation. France, 15th C.E.. Ms.139, fol.22 recto, 15th century. RenéGabriel Ojéda at Musée Condé, Chantilly, France Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

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The fabliaux—French tales from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—also present stereotypes of the cuckolded husband, but in often humorous accounts. 493 The satire Le Miroir de Mariage written by Eustache Deschamps between 1381 and 1420, for instance, attempts to persuade the reader that a contemplative life is better than marriage because women ultimately lead men to unhappiness.494 He mentions Job’s wife as an example of wifely nastiness because if Job would have listened to her advice, he would have missed paradise, just like Adam did when he listened to Eve.495 The cultural convention of making fun of marriage lurks in the background of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Chaucer writes the Wife of Bath based out of, and in response to, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of French writing.496 Alisoun, the wife, recounts her five marriages and mentions that her fifth husband, Jankyn, reads aloud to her out of the “book of wikked wyves” (v. 685). She concludes that no clerk will speak well of wives (vv. 688-89). Behind Alisoun’s assumption about clerks rests what Michael Cherniss suggests is “a sort of model for unfortunate husbands.”497 The assumption of the

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Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, 77. Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250-1500, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 448-53. 495 LVIII, lines 5982-6019. Eustache Deschamps, Le Miroir De Mariage, vol. 9, Oeuvres Complètes De Eustache Deschamps (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1966), 196-97. 496 Alain Renoir, "Eve's I.Q. Rating: Two Sexist Views of Genesis B," in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 263. See also Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 497 Michael D. Cherniss, "The 'Clerk's Tale' and 'Envoy,' the Wife of Bath's Purgatory, and the 'Merchant's Tale'," The Chaucer Review 6, no. 4 (1972). Cherniss explains the Clerk’s ironic metaphor for the Wife of Bath as one who performed a spiritual service to her fourth husband by keeping him in purgatory on earth in order to pave the way for heaven after death, thus aligning her with Job’s wife (pp. 244-245). 494

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reputation of Job’s wife as a shrew underlies the Wife of Bath’s mentioning of Job in terms of a husband’s patience for his wife: Or so you preach of Job and his patience! Always be patient; practice what you preach, for if you don’t, we’ve got a thing to teach. Which is: it’s good to have one’s wife in peace! One of us has got to knuckle under. And since man is more rational a creature than woman is, it’s you who must forbear.498 The Wife of Bath subverts an allegation of inferior female rationality by requiring the husband to give in to the wife, all along keeping in line with Job’s proverbial patience. In essence, she reveals the hypocrisy of clerics who call upon the patience of Job yet fail to live up to the task. Furthermore, her discourse about marriage demonstrates how both men and women fall victim to a cultural text, the book of wicked wives, which supports misogyny and wives’ bitterness towards their husbands.499 Ann Astell compares Alisoun (the Wife of Bath) to Job’s wife—a “dangerous rhetor, speaking words of bad persuasion (“verba malae persuasionis”) that repeat Eve’s temptation.”500Astell goes on to suggest that Chaucer refashions Job’s wife in his two characters—the Wife of Bath and the Wife of Walter. In the Clerk’s Tale, the narrator offers a picture of Griselda, the Wife of Walter, who, as Astell points out, is 498

Wife of Bath’s Tale, vv. 436-442: Sith ye so preche of jobes pacience. Suffreth alwey, syn ye so wel kan preche; And but ye do, certein we shal yow teche. That it is fair to have a wyf in pees. Oon of us two moste bowen, doutelees; And sith a man is moore reasonable. Than womman is, ye moste been suffrable. All middle English quotes come from John H. Fisher and Mark Allen, eds., The Complete Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006). All modern English translations come from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. David Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 499 Ann Astell, "Job's Wife, Walter's Wife, and the Wife of Bath," in Old Testament Women in Western Literature, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1991), 98. 500 Ibid., 97.

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“Job in female form” or “Chaucer’s bold reinvention of Job’s wife,” a “Marylike New Eve at the side of a New Adam.”501 Several different versions of the Griselda story can be found in Boccaccio and Petrarch. As Chaucer tells it, Walter chooses a peasant wife, Griselda, on the condition that she obey him unconditionally. She agrees and soon thereafter, she bears a daughter, whom Walter sends to be raised by his sister unbeknownst to Griselda, who thinks the child has been killed. Walter repeats the same scenario at the birth of their son. Then, Walter sends his wife back to her old life and requires that she make wedding preparations for him and his new bride. Upon her dismissal, she echoes Job’s words from 1:21: “’Naked out of my fadres hous,’ quod she, ‘I cam, and naked moot I turne agayn’” (vv. 871-72). Walter disguises their daughter as the new bride-to-be. Griselda accepts both the disguised bride-to-be and her brother, whereupon Walter reveals his plot and rejoices that Griselda has proven herself worthy. The Clerk himself makes the comparison between Job and Griselda: Men speak of Job, and most of all of his humility, as scholars can well explain when they wish to speak concerning holy men. But in truth, though clerks praise women rather little, no man can behave as humbly as a woman can, nor can be half so loyal as a woman can be, unless it has happened very recently.502

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Ibid., 101. vv. 932-38: Men speke of Job, and moost for his humblesse, As clerkes, whan hem list, konne wel endite,Namely of men, but as in soothfastnesse,Though clerkes preise wommen but a lite,Ther kan no man in humblesse hym acquite As womman kan, ne kan been half so trewe. As wommen been, but it be falle of newe. For discussion of this passage, see Lawrence Besserman, "Biblical Exegesis, Typology, and the Imagination of Chaucer," in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh T. Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1992). 502

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Chaucer, through the Clerk, makes novel, and ironical, use of the patient Job legend by advocating for a patient wife.503 In both cases, it is Chaucer’s discourse of women in a culture that reinforces a gender ideology of the dangerous rhetoric of women that makes for unsettling, pleasurable, and memorable characters.504 Versions of Patient Griselda often circulated with the popular Book of the Knight of the Tower or Livre pour l'enseignement de ses filles written in the 1370s by Chevalier de La Tour Landry, a French aristocrat widower concerned with instructing his daughters on proper behavior.505 It was translated into English in 1483 and in German (Der Ritter vom Turn) in 1493. As a pedagogical manual, it encodes gendered behavior for young women based on traditional male and scholastic expectations. Therefore, Job’s wife receives a mixed review in The Knight of the Tower because of the strong connection with the devil in traditional theology alongside the author’s need to find a wifely redemptive value in the story to communicate to medieval young women. The Knight of the Tower describes Job’s wife bringing him food, even in her great misery to see Job lying on a dunghill with worms on his body, until the Devil got ahold of her and tempted her: “as the deuyll tempted her/she felle in wrathe against her lord” and spoke her words out of wrath.506 The marriage of Job and his wife withstood this test. Job’s wife, “a good woman as 503

Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages, 112-13. As discussed in chapter 2 of Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 56-92. 505 Rebecca Barnhouse, The Book of the Knight of the Tower: Manners for Young Medieval Women (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 86-87. 506 Chapter 29 in Geoffrey de la Tour Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, trans. William Caxton, Early English Text Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 110. 504

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she was” received, according to de la Tour de Landry, the answer of a “good man,” and Job maintained exemplary patience and humility.507 Another fourteenth century medieval household manual for women, Le Ménagier de Paris (The Good Wife of Paris), couches the example of Job and his wife within a section on how a wife should provide her husband good counsel. Keeping with the story of Griselda as a model example of a proper wife, the author and compiler of The Good Wife also tells the story of Melibee and his wife Prudence. Melibee, a rich young man, came home one day to find that his enemies invaded his home and beat his wife and daughter. He wailed with grief, exhibiting an uncomposed display of lamentation. Prudence advises her husband that he act like Job and reserve his grief in a more dignified way. She quotes Job’s response to his wife: “Our Lord gave it to me. Our Lord took it away. He did to me just as He wished. Blessed be the name of the Lord!”508 Just as Griselda embodies the patient virtues of Job, so too does Prudence exemplify a female reversal of Job by reminding her husband of the expected gender roles required in displays of grief. Prudence’s gentle words to her husband overturn the harsh words Job’s wife speaks to her husband. The characters of Job and his wife continue to make an impact on medieval audiences. The “Life of Job” from the fifteenth century resonates with medieval pageant progressions common in the Low Countries and France, where an interest of 507

Ibid. 9th article in The Good Wife's Guide: Le Ménagier De Paris, a Medieval Household Book, trans. Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 150. 508

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Job certainly existed.509 The Middle English poem, “Life of Job,” which survives in one manuscript, describes Satan as a serpent, reminiscent of Eden.510 Bessermen notes that the poem emphasizes “the identity between Satan, who in the Book of Job is portrayed as a member of the Lord’s heavenly assembly, and the more familiar medieval devil of hell.”511 The “Life of Job” also recounts the conversation between Job and his wife. Job’s wife suggests that he will never recover, so his patience is futile in the face of such adversity (92-98). Similar to the biblical account, Job responds: “Folysshe woman, I counsel the, be styll, for he that takyth gode thing sumtyme must take ill” (97-98). Interestingly, God appears to Job and rebukes him for speaking hastily and insolently to his wife (115-119). This departure from tradition is obscure. Besserman suggests that the poet understood that Job is not patient with his wife in the biblical account, so the poet singles it out in order to recover Job’s paradigmatic patience.512 At any rate, it becomes clear that the poem upholds Job’s saintliness while, at the same time, presents his wife as one who continues to scold Job. Whereas Job receives divine guidance concerning his speech, Job’s wife is left to continue without any spiritual direction, which leads to another misunderstanding. When minstrels come to play for Job, he pays them with scabs from his body that turn to gold. After the minstrels show the gold to his wife, she accuses Job of 509

G. N. Garmonsway and R. M. Raymo, "A Middle English Metrical Life of Job," in Early English and Norse Studies, ed. Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London: Methuen & Co, 1963), 78. 510 Line 29. All references to “Life of Job” come from Garmonsway and Raymo, 89-96. 511 Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages, 92. 512 Ibid.

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hiding gold from her. This incorporation comes not only from the LXX rendition of her needing to continue to procure food for Job, but, also, from a Christian folk understanding of magical transformation of bodily flesh into gold, a notion of expiating “their guilt by mortification of the flesh.”513 She openly rebukes him with sharp language: “And with many seducious wordes openly/There hym rebuked with language most sharply” (130-1). Job’s wife continues her reputation for verbal chastisement of Job in a Middle French mystery play, Patience of Job, which survives in one manuscript from around 1475. 514 The play itself was popular, having been performed at least thirteen times from 1514 to 1651. The author and exact location are unknown. The play incorporates an entire assembly of devils in hell—Satan gets the assignment to capture Job’s soul for hell.515 The play reflects a popular version of the tradition of Job and his wife from Latin authors; Satan in the play declares his intent to try to dupe Job through his wife like he did Adam through Eve (5525-5543). As in T. Job, Satan disguises himself as a beggar, tricking Job’s wife into thinking he received gold coins from Job which makes her suspect he is withholding his wealth. After he shows her the worms on his

513

Garmonsway and Raymo, "A Middle English Metrical Life of Job," 85. All citations of Pacience de Job come from Albert Meiller, ed., La Pacience De Job (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1971). For a helpful discussion, see Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages, 94-107. 515 Lines 1431-1698. The costumes for Satan and various devils, according to English records, were expensive to construct and maintain with elaborate animal-grotesque faces, no doubt providing quite a visual presence on stage. See Barbara D. Palmer, "The Inhabitants of Hell: Devils," in The Iconography of Hell, ed. Clifford Davidson and Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1992), 32-35. 514

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body, proclaiming that they are his treasure in heaven, his wife laments the curse that is her marriage and abandons Job to go to her brother-in-law’s house (5609-5714). As in the “Life of Job,” the disgusting things from Job’s body turn into gold, and Job’s wife doesn’t seem to understand, or is not privy to, the ascetical aspects of Job’s life. The external worldly motivations of Job’s wife compare sharply with Job’s internal spiritual motivations. The words in SHS describe this external/internal contrast between carnal and spiritual. The SHS encapsulates a long tradition of interpretation that suggests Satan made Job’s wife act wickedly toward her husband with problematic speech: Job was whipped two ways. Satan scourged him with whips, and his wife lashed him with words, the one causing pain in his body, and other causing pain in his heart. Satan felt the hurt that he caused in the flesh was not sufficient so that he instigated Job’s wife to wound her husband’s spirit.516 Though variances exist, illustrations in the SHS function to highlight Job’s whippings. Figure 3.5, a German woodcut from SHS, offers an example of illustrating Job’s whippings as they anticipate Christ’s scorging. Satan holds an actual whip, whereas Job’s wife needs nothing in her hands because her pointing left index finger indicates that she engages speech. The gesture is a common one for Job’s wife in SHS and in other sources. In Figure 3.6, another woodcut from around 1481, Job’s wife not only points with her left index finger, to indicate speech, but she also raises a

516

SHS XX, II. 69-74: Beatus Job fuit flagellates doubus modis/Quia Satan flagellavit eum verberibus, et uxor verbis;/De flagello Satanae sustenuit dolorem in carne,/De flagello linguae habuit turbationem in corde;/Non suffecit diabolo quod flagellabat carnem exterius,/Nisi etiam instigaret uxorem, quae irritaret cor interius.

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bout Job’s heead in her right hand. Inn yet another illustration now in palm frond ab C Copenhagen (fig. 3.7), Joob’s wife poiints again. The T medievall artists engaage a Romann arrtistic gesturre for speechh, which is thhe presence of raised hannds or of poiinting.517

Figure 3.5. A German Wooodcut out of Speeculum Humannae Salvationiss, 1476 from The Th Illustrated Bartsch, vol. v 81. Photo: ARTstor. 517

As noted n in terms of the iconography of Trajann’s Column on fig. 7 in Lawreence Nees, E Early Medieval Art (Oxford: Oxford O Universsity Press, 20022), 19.

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Figure 3.6. A German Woodcut out of Speculum Humanae Salvationis, c. 1481 from The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 83, fol. 94v, col. 1. Photo: ARTstor.

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Figure 3.7. GKS 80.2 Speculum Humane Salvationis, fol. 42v. 1400-50. Photo used with permission from The Royal Library, Copenhagen.

Also, in figure 3.7, Job’s wife points to a scroll. In other words, Job’s wife points to her words, which are encapsulated in writing. Job’s wife often points to a scroll, for in medieval illumination “scrolls were used iconographically to indicate speech.”518 Michael Camille elaborates: As opposed to the roll of earlier times, the codex allowed the reader to recapitulate, skim, check text against picture and refer forwards in ways not possible with the roll, which like speech itself, unfolds in one linear 518

M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 257. For an example, Job’s wife holds a scroll in her left hand and points her right index finger in front of Job as he sits on his dung heap in the Bury Bible, a twelfth century bible that survives in only one volume. For a reproduction, see C. M. Kauffmann, Biblical Imagery in Medieval England, 700-1550 (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2003), fig. 71, p. 103. For a detailed discussion, consult C.M. Kauffmann, "The Bury Bible (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms. 2)," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966).

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direction. It is probably for this reason that 'speech' is signified in medieval art by scrolls held by the talkers in images.519 The visual incorporation of speech is a method of taking an impersonal past event and making it part of the historic present. In religious contexts, a parchment roll distinguishes a Jew from a Christian because Jews used scrolls in synagogues whereas Christians used books in churches. Furthermore, in legal proceedings, Jews swore by the roll and Christians by the book. In painting and sculpture, the God and prophets of the Old Testament hold scrolls, but Christ of the New Testament does not, for he often holds the Book of Judgment to remind the faithful of the Last Judgment.520 From a practical standpoint, the bubbles of speech communicate a real-time effect that shows influence from medieval mystery plays. Pächt argues for a correlation between the portrayal of speech and the dramas that emerged in medieval society beginning in the twelfth century: “the revival of story-telling in the twelfth century started with an enactment of spoken narrative in visual form and that it is only later that we find pictorial narrative gradually proceeding from the literal transcription of words to the visual realization of scenes and actions.”521 Furthermore, Pächt suggests that “it was the word that became flesh,” and this word-image or

519

Camille, "Seeing and Reading: Some Visual Implications of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," 29. 520 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 139-140. 521 Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative, 59.

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figure of speech “applied to portray the real situation,” so that “the mystery itself became tangible.”522 The realness and seriousness of words in medieval theology create gendered complications. Much more could be discussed about the sources listed in this section, but they function here to place Job and his wife within a thread of tradition that relates their verbal exchange to Adam’s marital weakness when it comes to his wife’s words, a marital response that is weaker than Job’s. Also, the power of Job’s wife’s words causes anxiety, especially in a culture that stifles women’s voices. As Danielle Régnier-Bohler states, “Eve became the model of an arduous relation to language” because the first dialogue in which she engages “led to the expulsion from Eden and set humankind on the path of history. Women with voices, speaking for their sisters, would atone for this imprudent dialogue.”523 The SHS presents this clearly enough: “Although it is not found in the text of the Bible, it is certain that Eve had adulated Adam with flattering words. Be attentive, therefore, to the ability of a woman to deceive.”524 Not only do theologians engage Eve and Job’s wife in terms of right and wrong speech, but they also reflect a general attitude toward women and speech prevalent in various parts of medieval society. Georges Duby notes the general 522

Otto Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 56. 523 Danielle Régnier-Bohler, "Literary and Mystical Voices," in A History of Women in the West: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 428. 524 SHS Chapter 1. Labriola and Smeltz, eds., The Mirror of Salvation [Speculum Humanae Salvationis]: An Edition of British Library Blockbook G. 11784, 19.

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attitude from preachers: “‘chatter’ was among the foremost of the faults of women denounced by preachers.”525 The next section elaborates even more fully on the cultural convention adapted by theologians for Eve and Job’s wife—the convention of gendered deviant speech, or, “the cultural coding of women as garrulous and of garrulity as feminine” that “was firmly entrenched in late medieval culture.”526 Medieval Gendered Deviant Speech The poem, Piers Plowman, of the fourteenth century English poet, William Langland, depicts a series of allegorical characters who engage in conversation about morality and seek the true Christian life in the context of the medieval Christian church. 527 The poem’s narrator, at first Piers the Plowman, seeks the life of Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best. 528 In one section, Study, the wife of Wit, engages in an angry speech against Wit, calling out curses, and noting how “the holy prophet Job” asks why sinners prosper (cf. Job 21:7). It’s a question Study lingers on in her long speech 525

According to Duby, no records of authentic female voice exist until the end of the thirteenth century. Georges Duby, "Affidavits and Confessions," in A History of Women in the West: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 482. 526 Sandy Bardsley, Venemous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 66. 527 Over 50 manuscripts of this poem survive, and many in fragments. The poem is divided into three major texts—the A text, B text, and C text. The unfinished A text is the earliest (c. 1360s) while the B text, c. 1377, revises A and is the most complete and the C text is a revision of B. For coverage of these issues, see James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (New York: Longman, 1990). For the C-text, see William Langland, Piers Plowman: The C Version, trans. George Economou (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). All references and quotations from Piers Plowman come from the B-text unless otherwise stated. 528 Piers Plowman uses a form of personification-allegory which personifies moral types to demonstrate some aspect of human intelligence and learning. For more on this type of literature, see Robert Worth Frank, "The Art of Reading Medieval Personification-Allegory," in Interpretations of Piers Plowman, ed. Edward Vasta (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). Both Augustine and Gregory the Great play large roles in the poem, being referenced numerous times for their authoritative teachings. The poem also incorporates much of Job.

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while arriving at the conclusion that one should not desire to know why God lets Satan lead humans astray because everything happens according to God’s will.529 At the end of the speech, Wit demonstrates “ironical deference to his wife,” by stepping back, laughing, bowing, and glancing at Will, which suggests to Will to allow his attention to entirely fall on Study.530 The exchange offers one example of a medieval play on gendered communication. Just as the Devil provides very real situations of social deviance in the Middle Ages, so too does the act of speech, for speech represents a social act. As early as Irenaeus, the complexities of speech and gender play a role in the Eve/Mary dichotomy, as he argues that just as Eve was seduced by the speech of an angel, so too did Mary receive good news through an angel’s speech.531 In his De Carne Christi, Tertullian also compares Eve and Mary in terms of “the word,” for the word of death passed into Eve and brought about death, but the Word of God came into the Virgin Mary so as to bring about life.532 Bardsley suggests that “even the most

529

Piers Plowman, B Passus X. For a discussion on the role of Satan in Piers Plowman, see Chapter 6 in C. W. Marx, The Devil's Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 100-13. For more about Langland’s use of the Bible, see Mary Clemente Davlin, "William Langland," in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. Rebecca Lemon, et al. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 530 Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative, 102. For a discussion on masculinity and marriage in Piers Plowman, see Chapter 1, “The Masculine Ethics of Langland’s Piers Plowman,” in Isabel Davis, Writing Masculinity in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12-37. 531 Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” Book 5, Chapter 19. See Roberts and Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 547. 532 Ernest Evans, ed., Tertullian's Treatise on the Incarnation (London: S.P.C.K., 1956), 61.

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traditional binary in medieval representation of women—that of Eve versus Mary— lent itself to a moral lesson about speech.”533 Examples from preaching and literature make up the countless cultural artifacts reiterating the stereotype of the chatty woman, a feminine performance that plays, ballads, books, paintings, and sermons repeat in the Middle Ages. Medieval pastoral sources quote the Latin text of Proverbs 18:21: Mors et vita in minibus linguae, or “Life and death are in the hands of the tongue.”534 Gender norms of speech were more solidified for women than for men because stereotypes of scolding and garrulousness belonged to wives. John of Trevisa’s fourteenth-century translation of De proprietatibus rerum notes, that an “euyll wife, cryenge and janglynge, chydynge and skoldynge” causes a husband great woe.535 John of Trevisa, a translator and scholar trained in Oxford, carries the common association of scolding with wives all the way from Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the author of De proprietatibus rerum, or, On the Properties of Things, an English author who completed the work in 1245. The nineteen books span the physical universe, beginning with God and angels ending with weights and measures.536

533

Bardsley, Venemous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England, 51. As noted especially by Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Edwin D. Craun, ed., The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2007). 535 As cited in Sandy Bardsley, "Men's Voices in Late Medieval England," in The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech, ed. Edwin D. Craun (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2007), 166. 536 For more information on John of Trevisa, see David C. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 534

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Such notions of the gendered performance of scolding show up in a later example, a sermon by Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester in 1535, who recounts the story Solomon and the two supposed mothers (1 Kgs 3:16-18) and explains that they “held up the matter with scolding after a womanlike fashion.”537 “Troublesome speech in general was associated with women,” so that poets and sermon authors “were quick to imply womanliness” speech upon chattering men.538 The mid-twelfth century “Proverbs of Alfred” warns husbands that wives cannot control their tongues so they should refrain from telling them secrets. A woman is “word-mad,” (wordwod) having “too swift a tongue (tunge to swift).”539 These proverbs circulated throughout the Middle Ages. Inappropriate speech is identified as a female crime from various sources in various locations. A popular exemplum exists from as early as the twelfth century in which a demon sits behind chattering females in church, writing their words on parchment. Though variations exist from several countries, the chattering people in church are always female.540 Public art in parish churches sponsored by the laity

537

Second sermon preached before King Edward the Sixth. See Hugh Latimer, Sermons, by Hugh Latimer, Sometime Bishop of Worcester (London: Dent & Co., 1926), 107. 538 Bardsley, "Men's Voices in Late Medieval England," 170. 539 “Proverbs of Alfred,” 280-281. The Proverbs of Alfred probably originate in the twelfthcentury, although the earliest surviving manuscript dates to the thirteenth-century. The proverbs are attributed to King Alfred and hold close parallels to Proverbs 14-17 in warning men about how to choose a wife. See Elaine Treharne, ed., Old and Middle English C. 890-C.1450: An Anthology, Third ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 451. 540 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 187-188.

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visually depicts the exemplum of the connection between speech, the female, and the demonic.541 A thirteenth century text addressed to anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse, holds up Mary as an example of speech for all women because she hardly speaks in scripture. The woman who “opens her mouth with a lot of chatter” will lose “spiritual strength against the devil.”542 The concern upheld in Ancrene Wisse for proper speech, against the female chatterbox (meaðelilt), resonates with its function to provide spiritual guidance and “proper” female social behavior of the time. Ancrene Wisse also explains how a restrained tongue leads to a pious life. Job’s friends remained silent for a week, it points out, but, “once they had begun to speak, they simply could not stop talking.”543 Ancrene Wisse does not mention Job’s wife, but, instead focuses on what Denis Renevey calls “earthly deprivation” that was important to anchorite communities. By recalling the texts about Job from the Office of the Dead, Job comes off better as a solitary, a fitting companion to the readers. In other words, Ancrene Wisse employs a strategy of using Job to reinforce its “dead-to-the-world motif which characterizes the anchoritic life.”544

541

Bardsley, Venemous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England, 52-66. Ancrene Wisse 2.21: “ah heo þe openeð hire muð wið muche meaðelunge” and “leoseð aƺein þe feond gastelich strengðe.” All original text quotes come from the Corpus Christi text found in Bella Millett, ed., Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 402, Early Text Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). All English translations are from Bella Millett, ed., Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, a Translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009). 543 Ancrene Wisse 2:19: “ah þa ha hefden alles bigunnen to speokene, þa ne cuðen ha neauer stutten hare cleappe.” 544 Renevey, "Looking for a Context: Rolle, Anchoritic Culture, and the Office of the Dead," 199-201. 542

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The sins of the tongue, however, offered a threat to both sexes, as seen in two sources of instructions to children. The fourteenth century anonymous text, “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” survives as one of the few medieval texts that speak just to women. It instructs that a good woman will attend church and avoid gossip, being of “good tongue” (good tunge).545 The fact that the text begins with remarks about church attendance suggests a clerical concern for gendered social expectations of behavior through the use of the “literary device of maternal instruction.”546 In relation to her husband, the wife should answer meekly and not like a shrew, for then she will preserve his good mood: “Meekly þou him answere, And not as an attirling, And so maist þou slake his mood.”547 Several decades later, the early fifteenth century text “How the Wise Man Taught His Son,” also warns boys to “beware of what you say, for your own tongue may be your foe.”548 In terms of marriage, it is unwise to call his wife villainous names, or as Bardsley translates, “And if you shall not your wife displease, neither call her by no villainous name, and if you do, you are not wise, to call her foul it is

545

Frederick J. Furnivall, ed., The Babees' Book, Etc., Early English Text Society (London: Trübner, 1868), 37. See also Tauno F. Mustanoja, ed., The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran, 1948). For English translation, see also Edith Rickert, The Babees' Book: Medieval Manners for the Young (New York: Duffield & Co., 1908), 31-42. 546 Mirian Gill, "Female Piety and Impiety: Selected Images of Women in Wall Paintings in England after 1300," in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samatha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (New York: Routledge, 2002), 101. 547 Furnivall, ed. The Babees’ Book, etc., 38. 548 Þin owne tunge may be þi foo; before be waar what þou doist say. Furnivall, ed. The Babees’ Book, etc., 49. English translation from Rickert, The Babees' Book: Medieval Manners for the Young, 43. See also George Shuffelton, ed., Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, Medieval Institute Publications, 2008).

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your shame.”549 Both poems may not represent social practice, but as Kim Phillips notes, they act “as attempts at engineering gender.”550 They address an urban audience yet clerics found the poems handy in pointing out proper behavior as well. Both poems mention problematic speech but “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” warns women more often and in a variety of contexts, especially in the public arena.551 Interestingly, the sin of blasphemy belonged primarily to men, or, at least the exempla of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries include a number of didactic tales of the male swearer, a foul mouth individual who throws away great oaths, who receives a vision from the Virgin Mary.552 Bardsley offers an explanation as to why problematic speech belonged to women but the specific form of speech, swearing and blasphemy, belonged to men. She claims that blasphemy carried real physical results for Christ’s body, as it dismembers the church: “Contemporary aphorisms and maxims suggest that an important distinction existed in late medieval and early modern England between words (typically gendered female) and deeds (associated primarily with men).”553 The kind of blasphemy to which Bardsley references comes in the form of swearing by the bones of Christ or by Christ’s body. As David Lawton 549

And þou shcalt not þi wijf displease, neiþer calle hir bi no vilouns name; And if þou do, þou art not wijs, to calle hir foule it is þi schame. Furnivall, ed. The Babees’ Book, etc., 51. Translation from Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 49-50. 550 Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270-1540, Manchester Medieval Studies (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 92. 551 Sandy Bardsley, Venomous Tongues, 51. 552 Miriam Gill, "From Urban Myth to Didactic Image: The Warning to Swearers," in The Hands of the Tongue: Essays on Deviant Speech, ed. Edwin D. Craun (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2007). 553 Bardsley, “Men’s Voices in Late Medieval England,” 170.

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notes in his study on blasphemy, it is “identified as an active threat to the body politic.”554 Blasphemy, in other words, is relative to the societies that attempt to regulate it. Blasphemy defines difference. In most medieval cases, from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, blasphemy falls under the category of heresy. Lawton connects a broader sense of blasphemy to anti-Jewish propaganda beginning in the fourteenthcentury.555 Since blasphemy was a sin dishonoring the God of Christians in speech and act, “Jews constituted perhaps the earliest blasphemous archetype in the Christian West.”556 The indication here of the life/death situation of speech also reflects in the doctrinal speech-acts, creeds, of Christianity. In this era of Christianity, speech crosses lines between orthodoxy and blasphemy, between the marginal and those in power.557 John Wyclif’s Latin treatise De Blasphemia (Of Blasphemy) opens with a stereotype of a blasphemer—the foolish woman. He elaborates on a word-play on blasphemy: blas-femina, a foolish and blabbering woman.558 Wyclif writes against the Roman Curia, because the Roman Pontiff’s pride and luxury provides a discord between word and deed, which is the form of blasphemy Wyclif expounds upon in his

554

David A. Lawton, Blasphemy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 10. Ibid., 86-87. 556 David Nash, Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 42-71. 557 Lawton, Blasphemy, 54-55. 558 Est autem blasfemia insipiens detraccio honoris domini. Et dicitur a blas et femina, que quasi rane blaterant, communiter nimis stulte. Michael Henry Dziewicki, ed., Iohannis Wyclif: Tractus De Blasphemia (London; New York: Trübner and Co.; Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1893; reprint, 1966), 1. 555

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treatise. Social constraints on speech were important because anyone who could speak on behalf of God could wield power.559 Lawton notes that scandalized orthodoxy gives rise to heresy and blasphemy.560 If blasphemy, in a religious sense, is the attacking or damaging of religious orthodoxy, then it is possible that Job’s rants qualify as blasphemous speeches. Therefore, it is in the best interest of orthodox writers to uphold Job’s virtue, despite his problematic complaints against God. Blasphemy remains subjective not by virtue of speech but by virtue of judgment of speech. Therefore, blasphemy is constructed based on those who draw the lines between the divine and human.561 Augustine, for instance, suggests that Job’s wife commits blasphemy.562 Moreover, inn his sermon on Job, for instance, Ælfric notes the importance of the fact that Job did not sin with his lips (Job 2:10). He explains: “In two ways men sin with their lips; that is, if they speak contrary to right, or silently withhold the right.”563 In the biblical book of Job, Job himself breaks a long period of silence with curses for the day of his birth (ch. 3). Gregory notes how such language borders on malediction, or “maledictio.” But, for Gregory, Job’s words are problematic only on the surface, when read superficially (“si superficie tenus attenditur;” IV.ii). Gregory 559

For a discussion of early modern English contexts concerning women, see Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 560 David A. Lawton, Blasphemy, 86. 561 Alain Cabantous, Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 1-8. 562 “On Patience,” chap. 9. CSEL vol. 41, 673-674. 563 Dominica I in Mense Septembri I: 98-99: On twa wison men syngiað on heora welerum. Pæt is gif hí unriht sprecað. Oþþe riht forsuwiað. Godden, ed., Ælfric's Catholic Homilies: The Second Series, 263. English translation from Ælfric, Sermones Catholici; or, Homilies of Aelfric, 453.

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differentiates the kind of cursing suggested by Job’s wife and the kind of cursing engaged by Job. The first kind is motivated by malice of revenge and agitated passion, while the latter kind spoken out of right judgment (IV.ii).564 Gregory relates Job’s wife’s ill-advisement to carnal thinking (“carnalis cogitatio;” III. xxxii), which allows Ann Astell to comment that Gregory “underscores the emotive carnality of the wife’s discourse while denying altogether the carnal dimension of Job’s despairing outcry,” because passionate language “is marked as feminine.”565 Summary Like a devil lingering behind the gossiping women in church, Satan lingers behind traditions of the power of Job’s wife’s speech to impact Job emotionally and spiritually. Her words wield power—the power of the Devil. Female susceptibility to satanic influence, as well as social notions of the perils of marriage when wives speak perilously to their husbands, and theological claims that Job and his wife repeat Eden make-up the background to the illustrations of Job and his wife in Chapter 20 of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis. Theologians writing about Job and his wife demonstrate a level of anxiety for oral transmissions of teachings and culturally encode those concerns in gendered deviant speech.

564

CCSL, CXLIII, 165. Astell, "Job's Wife, Walter's Wife, and the Wife of Bath," 95. In another part of Moralia, though, Gregory uses the carnal sense of the flesh to argue for why women “stuck” to Christ, i.e. did not run away from his tomb (XIV. 49). This lent to medieval ideas about women at the Passion. For more discussion, see Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 146-48. 565

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Job’s wife in the SHS falls into the category of a problematic feminine speaker constructed by male authors. Though evidence about real blasphemy cases brought to courts reveals a mixed bag of problematic speakers, and, the speeches of Job himself in the biblical book border on obscene, the literary and visual construction of gender for Job and his wife focus on her speech. Her speech conjures up notions of what Eve did to Adam, a wife’s use of speech to entice her husband to do something, what it means to blaspheme, and what social conventions about speech and gender mean for illustrations of Job’s wife in the SHS. In the SHS illustrations thus far presented, Job remains naked on his dung heap. Another part of an artistic form found in SHS and beyond is that of Job lying on the ground surrounded by dung while his wife consistently stands by. The next chapter will revisit some more illustrations of the SHS, as well as many other artistic sources, to examine the connotations of dung in Joban illustrations, Satan’s presence at the dunghill, Job’s standing wife, and subsequent consequences for Job’s masculinity and his wife’s femininity.

CHAPTER FOUR: “MORE SHAMELESS THAN THE DEVIL”: EARLY MODERN FORMS OF THE DEVIL AT THE DUNG HEAP AND DEBATES ON MARRIAGE In line with medieval artistic tendencies to present Job, his wife, and Satan all together at the dung heap, the troublesome trio appears on the Chartres Cathedral. Their presence attests to the popularity, especially in medieval French drama and literature, of visually presenting the three in proximity of one another in order to highlight certain popular theological messages about the book of Job (see fig. 1.1). Everyday encounters with such messages took place. Chartres Cathedral dominated the town in the Middle Ages, serving as a center not only for religious authorities but for civic events as well. People had homes built right against the cathedral, local festivals were held out front, and stores existed around it. Artisans and craftspeople came from all parts of the country to serve the Church’s commission and patronage for the religious arts.566 The present cathedral is mostly a result of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which is the time period assigned to the sculpture of Job, his wife, friends, and Satan on the north portal.567 The sculpture depicts Job lying down scraping his left arm with a shard while Satan rests his right hand on Job’s head. Satan’s claw-like left hand holds on to Job’s left foot. Job’s wife’s hands extend outwards, but the damage to the sculpture does not allow a clear idea of her gesture. She does, however, have a small smile on her face, one that Terrien interprets as a 566

Robert Branner, ed., Chartres Cathedral, Norton Critical Study in Art History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969). 567 Job, Satan, and his wife, c. 1220. Chartres Cathedral, north transept portal, right tympanum.

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sign of loving and humane administration and support of her husband.568 The three friends look on and God sits above Job’s head.569 In similar fashion, Job and his wife appear with Satan at the Reims Cathedral, which dates from around 1220 C.E.570 The Reims sculpture includes mourning women indicative of Roman iconography, and it remains unknown if the grieving woman at Job’s head, or at his feet, is his wife.571 For Reims and Chartres, large workshops headed by master sculptors worked for years to produce the sculptures. They retrieved the stone from thousands of limestone quarries throughout Europe. It was common in the thirteenth century for sculptors to work with separate blocks in workshops, allowing wage-workers the task of heaving the individually carved sculptures to their places. Before, in the twelfth century, artists would carve statues in situ. In most cases, clergy made the decisions on the kinds of subjects to be depicted, whereas the master builders negotiated the practical work of building and production.572 Sculptors’ workshops produced various forms of typological art on Job

568

76.

569

Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters,

The image of God above, flanked by two angels on each side, while Job is menaced by demons, can also be seen in “Job on the Dungheap,” Rouen Book of Hours, 15th century. MS. Buchanen e. 3, Fol. 055r, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The image does not include Job’s wife or friends, but, rather, a group of four demons that wield clubs in anticipation to strike Job while he reclines on a pile of dung. 570 Tympanum of the north portal, also called the Portal of S. Remi by Arthur Gardner, "The Sculptures of Rheims Cathedral," The Burlington Magazine 26, no. 140 (1914): 54. 571 Terrien believes that Elihu is presented as a feminine figure in the sculpture at Reims in the group of four people on the sculpture’s right side. Therefore, he identifies the woman with the hands clasped over her mouth as his wife. Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters, 79. 572 The master builder of Chartres remains unknown because of missing records. The master builder of Reims has a tomb inside the cathedral itself. For more on the roles of the master builders,

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for cathedrals such as Rheims and Chartres based on popular themes, especially those recounted in SHS.573 Despite the unknown iconographical issues, both the Reims and the Chartres sculptures include a devilish figure that stands among Job and Job’s wife. The same holds true for a rendition of Job and his wife with Satan standing behind them, juxtaposed with Jesus being mocked by soldiers, on the Doberan Abbey altarpiece from 1360-66 in Mecklenburg, Germany.574 The depictions of Job and his wife in the stained-glass windows of St. Patrice from the sixteenth century in Rouen include the inscription concerning both Satan and Job’s wife’s torture of Job: Satan réduit le bon Job en grand misère/ Et sa femme en sa colère/Insulte méchamment à sa simplicité.575 Job’s one-line lament from Patience sums up an entire motif in medieval art that depicts Satan on one side of Job and his wife on another: “On the one hand I am hunted by the devil,/On the other I am menaced by my wife.”576 A French manuscript of SHS made in Bruges in 1455 features this motif (fig. 4.1).

see Philip Ball, Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 139-69. 573 Cardon, Manuscripts of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis in the Southern Netherlands (C. 1410-C. 1470), 19. 574 For a full view of the altarpiece and discussion of its architecture, see Donald L. Ehresmann, "Some Observations on the Role of Liturgy in the Early Winged Altarpiece," The Art Bulletin 64, no. 3 (1982): plate 1. 575 Garmonsway and Raymo, "A Middle English Metrical Life of Job," 82, n.3. 576 Lines 5718-5719: D’une part le dyable me chasse, / L’aultre ma femme me mesnasse. Translation from Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages, 104.

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Fig. 4.1. Miroir de l’humaine salvation. MS Hunter 60, fol. 29v. Bruges, 1455. Glasgow University Library. Photo courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Special Collections Department.

Medieval art of cathedrals and churches functioned as “the necessary link” between the powers of ecclesiastical commissioners and the emerging unification of political systems. The centralizing of political power and monarchic government over and against the feudal and vassal systems of the early Middle Ages, attributed to the formation of a clear-cut Satan in fourteenth century art. “Art produced a very specific and highly figurative discourse” on a demonic kingdom to emphasize the power of sin that compels a Christian to confession: “the portrayal of Satan and the related pastoral message encouraged not only religious obedience, but recognition of the power of Church and State, cementing the social order by recourse to a strict moral code.”577 It need not matter to medieval artists that both Satan and Job’s wife disappear in the book after the second chapter because both Job’s wife and Satan

577

Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean Birrell (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2003), 24.

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serve as symbols of Job’s story in terms of his ability to overcome temptation. Even if Job’s wife offers a loving nursemaid presence, as argued by some,578 she still serves as a reminder to medieval audiences, alongside Satan, of Job’s spiritual struggle and physical defamation. This chapter begins with a brief section on concepts of Satan as they pertain to bodily configurations of evil in medieval renditions of Job on the dung heap, accompanied by his wife. The first section highlights a central theme, that of Job’s sore-ridden body sending a message of spiritual endurance in light of a grotesque and blatant presence of the demonic body. When humanisms, and other movements, call into question the nature of Satan, images of the evil that plague Job become more subtle. Furthermore, when changes in common medieval iconography of Job on the dung heap take place during the Renaissance, they reflect ideas about Job’s role in Christian salvation. By the late sixteenth century, images of Job reflect a kind of sentimentalism that displayed Job in agony, and his wife as another cause of his agony. When Satan’s grotesque body disappears, or takes on more generic forms in early modern art of the dung heap, the images also place less emphasis on Job’s wife as part of Satan’s schemes, and instead emphasize more general visualizations of Job’s wife as a shrew. Rather than visually recall Job’s wife as an actor of deviant speech, reminiscent of Eve with Adam, as evident in the SHS, Baroque artists reduce Job’s wife to a simple shrew, a “bad wife.” After introducing some examples of Job’s 578

For instance, Terrien states that the presence of Satan unites the human figures in solidarity, interpreting Job’s wife at Chartres as a sympathetic companion: Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters, 73-74.

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wife’s shrewish image, the final part of this chapter provides some explanation for her presentation as a shrew based on a booming literary market of domestic conduct literature. Medieval Bodies The physical characteristics of Satan in medieval art on Job signal common medieval messages of Job’s outward signs of a spiritual struggle against Satan. In figure 4.1, an illustration from a manuscript of SHS, the animalistic body of Satan, including the traditional clawed feet and bat wings, also includes large breasts. Wilson and Wilson describe the 1455 French translation of SHS produced in Bruges by an anonymous artist for an anonymous patron (compare with fig. 3.4), as “de luxe manuscript” with its rich touches of gold, possibly produced for Philip the Good.579 The composite-beast Satan remains common in illustrations.580 The warped Satan with misshaped and shriveled breasts appears in an anonymous woodcut from Ulrich Pinder’s Speculum Patientiae from Nürnberg, 1509; Satan also whips Job while he sits in a melancholic pose (fig. 4.2).581

579

Wilson and Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324-1500, 19, 73. Under the influence of the Burgundian court, Bruges served as the center of de luxe manuscript production, which provided that scribes copied text leaving no room for illustrations. The illustrations, produced in artistic workshops, were then added later and thus were large, full-page, paintings. 580 For instance, The Temptation of Christ, Chapter 13, Mirror of Human Salvation. France, 15th C.E.. Ms.139, fol.14 verso. At Musée Condé, Chantilly, France. 581 Another painting of scenes from the life of Job by an unknown Flemish artist from around 1480 also incorporates bestial devils. The one that whips Job has large nipples; another devil with a penis stands amidst the group of devils behind the one whipping Job: Flemish master, “Scenes from the Life of Job,” 1480-90. Wallraf-Ricartz Museum, Cologne. The painting is the right wing of a triptych altarpiece commissioned by an Italian merchant working in the Netherlands, Claudio Villa. His brother Pietro Villa built a chapel of Job in Chieri. The whole painting actually depicts elements from the Testament of Job and from the French mystery play. Yet another Flemish source from around

2008

F 4.2. Anony Fig. ymous artist, “JJob on the Dunngheap,” in Ulrrich Pinder, Sppeculum Patienntie, Nurenburgg, 1509. Photo used u with perm mission from Bayersiche B StaaatsBibliothek.

15525 by Simon Bening featurees Job seated, his h wife standinng by pointing her finger at Job, J while two sm mall devils whiip him, one of which has fem minine features:: Simon Beningg, border of illuuminated m manuscript of Jo ob 1, Flemish, Bruges, c. 15225-1530, MS. Ludwig L IX 19, Fol. 155, The J. Paul Getty M Museum, Los Angeles. A

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Satan’s “grotesque” form, though hard to define, blurs lines between human and inhuman, between ideal and abnormal, and between control and chaos. Whereas Margaret Miles has argued that the female body in Western art has come to be associated with the grotesque because of an association between the female body and materiality,582 it is more likely that Satan’s breasts represent the Devil’s monstrosity and lack of adherence to socially approved behavior. The grotesque body, Miles notes, functions “to identify, define, and thus to stabilize a feared and fantasized object.”583 David Lawton makes note of the importance of the body politic in understanding the carnivalesque Satanic body for medieval Christians. The grotesque body of the Devil counteracts the ideal body of Christian believers, or, “the carnival representation of the bad thus serves to reflect and stabilize the image of the good.”584 Lawton’s notion lends itself to a medieval theological interpretation of the juxtaposition between Job’s suffering body and the disgusting body of Satan in medieval illustrations. The sexualized Satan, almost pleasurable in its ambiguous masculine strength and its feminine attributes, crosses boundaries.585 Job’s body, on the other hand, stabilizes Satan’s animalistic and spiritually unsound flesh. Job’s bodily suffering indicates his spiritual fortitude, over and against the grotesque demonic body and the female body of his wife that accompanies him at the 582

Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West, Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 145-68. 583 Ibid., 152. 584 Lawton, Blasphemy, 51. 585 Or, to put it another way, “he enfolds his victim like a woman and penetrates like a man, until the boundary between possessor and possessed is erased.” In Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 34.

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dung heap. Medieval artists do not hesitate to portray Job nude with sores covering his body. His nudity, very rampant in medieval depictions, falls under the category of nuditas virtualis, the nakedness that symbolizes “primordial innocence to which everyone shall return at the resurrection of the flesh.”586 In this Christian medieval tradition, the primordial innocence of nudity harkens back to Eden, as even Philippe Guillaume notes that Job, in refusing the fruit of his wife (her suggestion to curse God and die) Job also rejects the coverings God provided for the first humans (Gen 3:21), maintaining his Eden-like innocence. Whether his nudity in the MT provides a cue to sapiential wisdom and the discarding of illusions of earthly protection, as suggested by Guillaume, medieval minds would have understood the nuditas virtualis message in representations of Job’s body.587 The body, according to Mary Douglas, serves as the primary instrument through which societies communicate their limits and beliefs.588 The main belief echoed in portraying Job naked comes from Vrudny’s observation that the church “combated a fatalistic view of the world with its promise of redemption,” especially in terms of the soul’s resurrection despite what the body might suffer.589 Therefore, when sores cover his body in medieval art, they function as external signs inviting the viewer to reflect on human failings of sin indicative of Satan’s work. “In the manner 586 587

(1997). 1970).

588 589

Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, 304. Philippe Guillaume, "Job Le Nudiste Ou La Genèse De La Sagesse," Biblische Notizen 88 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books,

Vrudny, "Scribes, Corpses, and Friars: Lay Devotion to the Genetrix, Mediatrix, and Redemptrix through Dominican Didactic Use of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis in Late Medieval Europe", 48.

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of Job’s ‘agew,’” remarks Margaret Healy, Job’s visual sores “verify the presence of man’s inner corruption through original sin, and . . . bring the elect to timely repentance.”590 As Carol Walker Bynum states about the body in the Middle Ages, “the cultivation of bodily experience” meant that the body was “a place for encounter with meaning, a locus of redemption.”591 The proliferation of demonic presence in scenes depicting Job in the Middle Ages attests to an increase in the Devil’s intensity to frighten, an increase Jeffrey Burton Russell attributes to the “terrifying famines and plagues” of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.592 An illustration found in a rare book written by an Alsatian army surgeon Hans von Gersdorff demonstrates how a demonic form of the Devil gets blamed for causing illness. Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney, acted as a “Field Manual for Wound Doctors,” in the early 1500s. The section illustrating skin diseases, such as leprosy and sexually transmitted diseases, features Job, his wife, and a hovering Satan (fig. 4.3). Numerous examples exist that include Job as an illustration of skin disease,593 such as a woodcut image of Job sitting on his dung

590

Margaret Healy, "'Seeing' Contagious Bodies in Early Modern London," in The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000). 591 C. W. Bynum, "Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective," Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 15. 592 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 208. 593 Martin Jan Bok’s (1597-1671) painting of a scene of inmates at the St. Job hospital in Utrecht, witnesses to the existence of medical Job traditions. The painting, at Utrecht’s Centraal Museum, is but one of many given to the hospital. Another hospital was established near the San Giobbe church in Venice. Hamburg also had a St. Job’s hospital for smallpox patients founded in 1505. Apparently, Job’s role to the skin diseases also relates to his connection with music in terms of the role musicians play in soothing the sick. See Kathi Meyer, "St. Job as a Patron of Music," The Art Bulletin 36, no. 1 (1954).For an analysis of the wider cultural condition in England, including the body

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heap, resting his left hand on his chin in a melancholic pose, being whipped from the devil standing behind him, while musicians play in his presence.594 The monogrammist “Bos with a Knife” (possibly Michiel van Gemert) depicts Job on his dung heap with his arms crossed on his chest, with three musicians playing in front of him, and with a grotesque devil standing behind him raising a whip above his head.595 A broadside of the text On the Pox Called Malafrantzosa from around 1500 depicts Job inflicted with sores while sitting on the dung heap in melancholic fashion, with Satan appearing in grotesque form similar to that in figure 4.2, accompanied by two musicians.596

politic, see Sarah Covington, Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 594 For examples, consult Meyer, "St. Job as a Patron of Music." 595 See fig. III.44, “Job Consoled by Musicians,” ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 1500-25, at Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, in Jos Koldeweij, "Hieronymus Bosch and His City," in Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, ed. Jos Koldeweij, Paul Vandenbroeck, and Bernard Vermet (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 2001), 47. 596 Anon., On the Pox called Malafrantzosa, c. 1500, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Sign.: Einbl. VII, 9f, Munich.

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Fig. 4.3. Anonymous artist, “Job on the Dungheap,” in Hans von Gersdorff, Feldtbuch der Wundartzney, Ausburg, c. 1532. Photo used with permission from Bayersiche StaatsBibliothek.

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An artistic concern to portray Satan as the cause of Job’s illness remained strong in the early sixteenth century. For Christians who needed “a hero exemplary for a wide Christian audience,” according to Ann Astell, Job provided the basis.597 To do so, a loss of attention toward the poetic sections of Job in favor of the prose tale takes place, especially evident in Gregory’s Moralia.598 Milton reaches a climatic point in terms of engaging the tradition of Job as Christian heroic poetry in Paradise Regained from 1671. Paradise Regained consists of a series of dialogues between Satan as Christ, as Satan tempts Christ in the wilderness. Like many exegetes before him, Milton recalls Job’s dung heap trials as an unsuccessful repeat of Eden: God suggest that Satan “might have learned . . . since he failed in Job” (I, 146-147).599 Jesus also remarks that Satan misdeemed Job, “his patience won” (I, 426). Like Job, Christ acts as a young warrior laying down his “great warfare” in order “to conquer Sin and Death the two grand foes,/By Humiliation and strong Sufference” (I, 155160). Neil Forsyth suggests that before 1700 Satan’s role within Christian theology fit into “the combat myth.” In other words, “separate devil-tales were all seen as cases of one basic opposition, that of Christ and Satan,” and Forsyth refers to that basic opposition in terms of “one of the most widespread of Near Eastern narrative patterns,

597

98.

598

Ann Astell, Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994),

Ibid., 85. All quotes from Paradise Regained come from Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds., John Milton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 599

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the combat myth.”600 The Christian combat myth reads like the following: “A rebel god challenges the power of Yahweh, takes over the whole earth as an extension of his empire, and rules it through the power of sin and death.”601 In his discussion on the character of Satan as hero-villain in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Harold Bloom highlights Milton’s Satan as a climactic rendition of the combat myth.602 Satan reaches his monumental peak through Milton’s mid-seventeenth century portrayal in Paradise Lost. Yet, Milton’s rendition of the character Satan blurs the line between human and non-human because of Satan’s being an empathetic emotional character. Jeffrey Burton Russell calls Milton’s character of Satan “the epic hero” in which “the reader could see the emptiness of loveless heroism in a world governed in reality by love.”603 In Paradise Regained, however, Milton renders Satan worthless in light of Christ’s ability to resist his temptations, still maintaining his focus on “the only direct confrontation between Christ and Satan reported in the Bible.”604 Despite the prolific writings, theological nuances, and socially situated thoughts of the Reformed theologians, such as Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, the issue at hand—cultural notions of diabology and the Job story—does not change much

600

Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 6. 601 Ibid., 6-7. 602 Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 98. 603 Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 99. 604 Ibid., 127.

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from tradition for Protestant leaders.605 Forsyth notes that the Devil plays a large part in Luther’s ideas of the atonement, keeping with medieval tradition, because Satan continues to play an adversarial role for humankind until his defeat at the end of history. “Luther clearly identifies the Satan of Job with the devil,” remarks Vicchio; “It is just as clear that he sees Satan as a demonic force.”606 In other words, Satan was very real for Luther, and the Devil presented threats to his faith and needed proper spiritual weapons to battle those threats. Luther even suggested that Satan daily disrupted his life with the stench of feces and even made his home in Luther’s bowels.607 Luther held a strong view of the Devil and scatology; he believed that Satan smelled of excrement, representing a kind of no-good “shit.” “After all,” notes Heiko Oberman, “the monks knew all about the Devil’s affinity to cesspool and toilet,” so “Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary, who threatens both flesh and spirit.”608 In his Lectures on Genesis, Luther expounds on the ways Satan afflicts and torment humans and offers Job as an example of faithful endurance. Job’s wife, however, acts as an example of hopelessness, disbelief, and despair, engaging in blasphemous words, the kind of words that represent Satan’s slanderous ways. She 605

The variances of their understanding of sin, human will, and salvation belong to another study. Russel notes that for Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, their diabology remained similar: Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 46-50. 606 Vicchio, Job in the Medieval World, 181. 607 Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 37-40. 608 Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen WalliserSchwarzbart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 108-09.

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encourages him to die in the devil’s name!609 God allows Satan to engage people in such afflictions and temptations so as to allow men to pledge their certainty that they are faithful.610 Carnal men, however, despise such afflictions. Elsewhere, Luther refers to Job’s wife in terms of Job’s “carnal mind” in time of temptation.611 Alcuin Blamires writes of the medieval model of head and body in terms of gender, noting that a head/body polarity exists in patristic theology based on ideas in Ephesians (5:22-23) and 1 Corinthians (2:3-15). In sum, a gender hierarchy continues: “God is head of Christ who is head of man who is head of woman,” while the hierarchy also extends to the church so that the following results: “Christ, head; Church, body; (in turn compromising) husband, head; wife, body.”612 Men who think carnally are morally depraved of their ideal masculinity. Since Luther assumes that a pious life attracts the Devil, Job’s afflictions result from Satan’s schemes. Both Satan and Job’s wife figure into a theological scheme to render Job as hero, a prefigurement of Christ’s suffering and ultimate victory. By the end of the fourteenth century, Satan is a ubiquitous presence in art, frightening believers into repentance. As the sixteenth century winds down, however, and humanism, along with religious reformations, shows its effects in European societies, more subtle 609

Luther makes Job’s wife and the wife of Tobias as examples, although he quotes Job entirely. Genesis 41, Martin Luther, Luther's Works trans. Paul D. Pahl, vol. 7: Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 38-44 (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1965), 132-33. 610 Ibid., 133. 611 Fourteen Consolations, Martin Luther, Luther's Works, trans. Martin H. Bertram, vol. 42: Devotional Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955), 146-47. 612 Alcuin Blamires, "Paradox in the Medieval Gender Doctrine of Head and Body," in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 1997), 14-15. This metaphor is not without its vague and underdeveloped definitions, which Blamires explains well.

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demonic cues appear in art of Job and his wife. This is because the role of Satan undergoes development in early modern theology. At the same time that satanic presence becomes more generic, complex, or even invisible in art of Job, a less subtle message emerges for Job’s wife. In general, Job’s wife in early modern art represents a shrew, a “bad wife” in a more generic form than she does in medieval art. The second part of this chapter examines the popular role of Job’s wife in early modern renditions of the dung heap. To do so, I turn to a lengthy and substantial literary debate in Europe, that of the Christian nature of marriage in domestic manuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When it comes to the reception of Job and his wife in Christian conduct literature, authors focus not on the loss of Job’s wife’s children, or on her devious speech and relation to Eve, as in medieval literature, but in the marital relationship of Job and his wife as it relates to an individualistic Christian ideal. Changing Views of Roles at the Dung Heap In his cultural study of right and left in Western art, James Hall traces a medieval convention to parse right and left as spirit and flesh. The left side of the body held a reputation as the “worldly” side, the physical fleshy side. Medical myths of the left side having more blood, less heat, and a large vein leading from the heart to the ring finger come into play as well as symbolic theological notions of the right

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hand as “good” and the left hand as “bad.”613 St. John Cassian (c.370-c.435), a founding monastic father and influential author on the organization of monastic life, wrote his Conferences to train the inner man against temptation. He speaks of “leftsided” trials facing a monk, such as deep sorrow, carnal lust, vanity, and the loss of spiritual warmth—all trials that come from the Devil.614 According to Cassian’s Sixth Conference, Job triumphed on this left side because he did not blaspheme God even after the Devil took away everything, leaving Job sitting on a dunghill and gouging his fingers into his sores and retrieving large masses of worms from his body.615 The fact that Job wards off the Devil’s advances from his left side, the weaker side of his body, attests to Job’s spiritual fortitude. The worst of Job’s trials are represented by the strength of his uncorrupted soul in light of his corrupted flesh. Therefore, Cassian provides a clear example of traditional concern for Job’s heroism, beginning in early Christianity and continuing on in the Middle Ages. However, as the Middle Ages unwind and the early modern period emerges, however, the importance of Job’s ability to “fight” Satan’s temptations wanes. Particularized portraits of Job emerge, especially in Italian art, as early as the mid thirteenth century when Nicola Pisano paints St. Sebastian on a tree, with Joseph and Job standing on opposite sides.616 Around 1518-1521, the school of Dosso Dossi 613

James Hall, The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44-67. 614 Ibid., 43-44. 615 John Cassian, The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 225-26. 616 Nicola Pisano, c. 1220-1287. Saint Sebastian, Joseph, Job and Devotees, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Ferrara, Italy.

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puts Job alongside Sebastian, with John the Baptist on the other side, in an altarpiece of St. Sebastian.617 Giovanni Bellini places Job in two separate paintings alone, alongside St. Sebastian, as well. St. Sebastian offers a youthful and traditionally nude counterpart to Job’s aging body. Furthermore, they both “were considered efficacious intermediaries against the plague” of 1478.618 In the San Giobbe altarpiece, Job stands beside the Madonna on the throne in an altarpiece for a church of the hospital of San Giobbe in Venice between 1483 and 1495. The traditional iconography of Job, on his dung, with sores on his body, accompanied by his wife and Satan, disappears for Bellini. For Bellini, Job’s important role comes with his ability to recognize God incarnate in the Redeemer passage of Job (19:25-27). The relevance for this passage in terms of changing Joban iconography is immense because of the reception of the Redeemer passage in the Christian West pertaining to the idea that Job, in resurrected flesh, shall see God (v. 26). As a result, Job leaves no doubt that there will be a resurrection of the flesh, a true restoration of the body.619 In another of Bellini’s paintings, Sacred Allegory, from around 1504 in the Uffizi, Florence, Job stands, hands in prayer, by S. Sebastian at the extreme right of the painting. Terrien interprets both paintings in terms of Venetian tradition, in light of a syphilis outbreak in Europe in 1505, to call upon Saint Job to intercede on behalf of those afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases. Most art historians suggest a 617 618

59, 65.

619

Dossi, Dosso, c. 1518-1521. Altarpiece of St. Sebastian. Duomo, Modena, Italy. Rona Goffen, "Bellini, S. Giobbe and Altar Egos," Artibus et Historiae 7, no. 14 (1986):

For more on ideas about resurrection at this time, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

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Christological function at work in the paintings, that is, Job’s prefiguration of the suffering of Christ and the ultimate resurrection of Christ in the flesh.620 No overall agreed upon interpretation of Sacred Allegory exists, but the basic idea that it reflects the redemption of humankind through Christ’s incarnation and passion holds.621 A growing blatant connection between Christ and Job in Renaissance art removes Job from the dung heap. A student of Bellini, Vicctore Carpaccio, also painted two paintings of Job. In Job and the Death of Christ, Carpaccio has Job leaning against a tree, resting his chin on his hand while holding a cane in the other.622 Earlier, Carpaccio seats Job on a cement block inscribed with the Hebrew from Job 19:25-27 in Meditation on the Passion from around 1495.623 Job’s aged body is a significant trademark of this style, with Brigit Blass-Simmen commenting that Job’s body means to communicate the morbidity of the scene, or, to reflect how Carpaccio took several motifs from the study of nature and assembled them to provide an example of death and decomposition.624 However, in all the cases of interpretations of Job by Bellini and Carpaccio, no visible sores appear on Job’s skin. The lack of sores indicates a developing connection with Job and Christ in the context of renewal, reconciliation between humanity, and Christ reflected by 620

A connection does exist between Job’s intercession for venereal disease and for S…The role of Saint Sebastian 621 Meinolf Dalhoff, "Trouble at the Hermitage: A Note on Giovanni Bellini's 'Sacred Allegory'," The Burlington Magazine 144, no. 14 (2002). 622 Vittore Carpaccio, Job and the Dead Christ, c. 1505-10. Staatliche Museen zu Berline, Preussischer Kulturbesitz Gemäldegalerie. 623 Vittore Carpaccio, Meditation on the Passion, c. 1495. Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Steward Kennedy Fund, 1911, New York. 624 Brigit Blass-Simmen, "Studi Dal Vivo E Dal Non Più Vivo: Carpaccio's Passion Paintings with Saint Job," Metropolitan Museum Journal 41 (2006).

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traditional Christian interpretations of the “Redeemer lives” passage in Job (19:25). Fra Bartolommeo’s 1516 triptych, called Salvator Mundi, for the chapel of Salvatore Billi in SS Annunziata in Florence depicts Christ and the four evangelists; Job and Isaiah flank the sides.625 Hendrick Goltzius, in 1616, has Job sitting alone on straw holding a potsherd with no visible sores on his skin.626 He holds his right hand to his chest and looks off into the distance; Job’s clutching both hands together and looking up to heaven becomes a standard form for Job in the early modern period.627 Hendrick Goltzius, a Dutch painter, connects Job with the iconography of “Christ in Distress,” which begins to strongly develop in the mid-fourteenth century. The idea of Christ’s “distress” owes its form to the tradition of the mourning Job in art.628 Job’s suffering changes from medieval heroic endurance of Satan’s blows as God’s athlete to early modern attention toward controlled introspection of Christ-like patience in assurance of restoration. Job continues to display outward suffering, but his sores no longer foreshadow Christ’s sufferings. Through displays of Job’s introspective suffering, Renaissance art visually communicates the emulation of the life of faith for the individual Christian and the promise of resurrection. 625

The triptych is now at Florence: Galleria dell'Accademia. Hendrick Goltzius, Job in Distress, 1616. New York, Trade Art Investments. Given the nature of a solo Job, with no sores, art historians took a great deal of time identifying the man as Job. For more, see Lawrence W. Nichols, "'Job in Distress,' a Newly-Discovered Painting of Hendrick Goltzius," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 13, no. 3/4 (1983). 627 See also Jusepe de Ribera, “Job in Prayer,” c. 1640, Parma Pinacoteca, another individualized portrait of Job with clasped hands, no sores, and gazing into heaven. See fig. 96 in Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters, 184. 628 Von der Osten argues that it matters not whether Job’s wife, his friends, or the Devil accompany Job in the illustrations, but that Job’s attitude and gesture indicate his pious suffering. G. Von der Osten, "Job and Christ: The Development of a Devotional Image," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16, no. 1/2 (1953). 626

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The notion of an individual’s ability to triumph in Christian life, though trials abound, as reflected in Renaissance art, comes from a male perspective. The marriage of Job and his wife signifies another way Job emulates controlled patience in his Christian life, as opposed to his wife, who comes to represent the failing of good Christian marriage. An artistic trend develops at the same time that Satan’s grotesque form dissipates in art that means to depict Job’s wife as a shrew; Terrien notes this when he states, “Religious painters in the Low Countries during the Baroque Age stressed without restraint the motif of the cantankerous wife,” but he fails to posture reasons for the clear presentation of Job’s wife in such a fashion.629 After discussing this trend, I turn to an analysis of why Job’s wife comes to this role. The reason for Job’s wife’s visual presentation as a “bad wife” relates both to changing views of evil and to a widespread literary category in Europe, domestic conduct literature, addressing about how an ideal Christian marriage should function. Martin van Heemskerck joins Job in artistic form with the genre of Triumph, thanks to Francesco Petrarch’s influential Italian poetry on Triumphs (Trionfi) that Petrarch begins writing in the mid-fourteenth century. One of van Heemskerck’s many engravings of Job from 1559 displays his triumph in terms of slow and steady patient suffering (fig. 4.4). In the left background, Job sits with the typical mourning gesture, resting his chin on his hand, while his friends sit on the ground in front of him. His wife holds her arms wide open in emphatic gesture. In the foreground, Job

629

187.

Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters,

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rides upon a tortoise—he holds a shackled entourage of his wife, friends, and the Devil trailing behind him in his left hand. In keeping with traditional iconography, the Devil holds whips. Van Heemskerck visually lumps all of Job’s trials in one group, with Job the clear victor. Van Heemskerck clearly shows Job’s wife as one of the menacing characters in Job’s story.630

Fig. 4.4. Martin van Heemskerck, “Triumph of Job,” 1559. Used with permission from Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1981.

630

In another engraving, Heemskerck places Job on a seat in the midst of ruined stone structures. His wife stands behind him, holding her hands, one shrouded, up to her face. Here, echoes of early Christian art exist but with early modern adaptations.

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Traditional notions of “Patient Job” still exist, but artists include more characters and more elaborate scenes, often at the expense of clear demonic presence and filthy dung in Job’s story. The Dutch Northern Renaissance artist Jan Mandyn (c. 1500-1560) depicts a mocking scene for Job (fig. 4.5). On the right side of the painting, the townspeople have gathered to gaze upon Job, while musicians play amongst the crowd. Job’s wife stands next to Job holding keys that are attached to her belt. Mandyn imitates the style of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, making a clear interpretation of the painting difficult. The workshop of Bosch also painted the life of Job on a triptych in Bruges from 1507, which uses similar groupings of musicians and townspeople but omits Job’s wife. 631 The mocking tone is quite apparent in both paintings, yet the exact functions of the characters remain a mystery, especially in terms of why Mandyn places keys in the hands of Job’s wife. In Christianity, keys symbolize ecclesiastical authority. Depictions of Saint Genevieve often include keys on her belt or girdle, as patroness of Paris and the holder of the keys to the city. In Flemish art, Martha of Bethany, patroness of housewives, often holds household items in her hands, including cooking utensils and keys.632 Sixteenth and seventeenth century sources that uphold female virture cite Martha as exuding Christian hospitality, and Karel van Mallery, after Maarten de 631

See fig. III. 80b, “Job Consoled by Musicians,” at Bruges, Groeningemuseum, in Jos Koldeweij, Paul Vandenbroeck, and Bernard Vermet, eds., Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 109. 632 Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Dictionary of Christian Art (New York: Continuum, 1994), 200; 29-30. Keys can be found in a grouping of household items in the foreground of a painting by Peter Aertsen, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, 1552, Kuntshistorische Museum, Vienna. See Margaret A. Sullivan, "Aertsen's Kitchen and Market Scenes: Audience and Innovation in Northern Art," The Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 (1999): fig. 4, 239.

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Vos, in a series on exceptional New Testament women from the 1590s illustrate her holding a ladel and wearing a girdle on which keys hang.633 Furthermore, her story of sainthood relates to an instance of her tying a dragon to her girdle so that townspeople could stone it to death.634

Fig. 4.5. Jan Mandyn (1500-1560). “Les épreuves de Job,” Le Musée de la Chartreuse de Douai. Photo courtesy of Photothèque—Musée de Douai.

To complicate matters, however, popular theological assumptions about Martha include a dichotomy between her domestic action and her sister Mary’s contemplation (Luke 10:38-42), with Martha’s domesticity representing concern for worldly affairs. An example comes from the Flemish 1569 A Theatre of Volumptuous

633

Yvonne Bleyerveld, "Chaste, Obedient and Devout: Biblical Women as Patterns of Female Virtue in Netherlandish and German Graphic Art, Ca. 1500-1750," Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 28, no. 4 (2000-2001): fig. 17, 235-36. 634 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols., vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 23-26.

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Worldings by Jean vander Noot. After citing Jesus’ words to Martha, that she is “troubled aboute many thingses, but one thyng is necessary,” vander Noot editorializes: “Whereby sheweth Christe unto us, that it is not good to be musyng and studying upon worldely affaires, wherein is nothyng else but troubleand unquietness of minde.”635 The example from vander Noot represents a trend, based on northern humanist ideals, to criticize materialistic values, to “look beyond these objects of daily life, beyond present converns, one’s daily bread and acquisition of properties and money” and instead “be reminded of the duties required of a Christian.”636 Given Mandyn’s context as a northern painter around this time, it seems more likely that Job’s wife’s keys function as a signal of her concern for temporal things, contrasting with Job’s spiritual nature. For instance, Job also holds a gold coin as he faces the musicians in the tradition that the scabs from his skin turn into gold with which he pays the musicians in the medieval “Life of Job.” Similarly, the worms from his body turn to gold in Patience of Job. The transcendence of Job’s earthly flesh contrasts with his wife’s accusation that he was hiding gold, indicative of her concern for worldly treasures. Mandyn instigates keys as a gendered symbol of his time to communicate this tradition. A scene by Albrecht Dürer shares similarities with Mandyn’s painting in terms of the presence of musicians, and in terms of enigmatic depictions of Job’s wife, in an

635

Jan Van Der Noot, Theatre of Worldlings (New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints,

1569), 6r.

636

Sullivan, "Aertsen's Kitchen and Market Scenes: Audience and Innovation in Northern Art," 254-55.

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altarpiece known as the Jabach altarpiece because of its use in a private chapel of the Jabach family in Cologne. The Jabach altarpiece supposedly has three parts. One wing depicts Job’s wife pouring a bucket of water over Job’s head, or the back of his neck, while Job sits on the ground, looking down at the ground, resting his chin in his left hand. The other wing of the painting includes two musicians, one of which carries a liking to Dürer himself. The piece with Job and his wife can be found at the Städel Institute in Frankfurt. Since Fredrick the Wise, Duke of Saxony, commissioned a painting of the Adoration of the Magi, now at the Uffizi in Florence, and the size and period match the Job painting, art historians debate whether the three pieces actually belonged to the same altarpiece.637 Nevertheless, the supposed commissioner, Frederick the Wise, like Giovanni Bellini, probably accepted the incorporation of Job because of Job’s role in intercessory healing. Dürer traveled to Venice several times in his life and could have encountered Job’s saintly status in Venice as a local saint and protector from the plague.638 Paul Bacon takes Dürer’s use of Job in terms of the plague a step further considering Frederick the Wise and the liturgical context of his Wittenburg Castle Church, which enacted memorial masses and vigils on a daily basis, including monthly recitations of the Office of the Dead. In the Jabach altarpiece, Job functions as a prophet of Christ’s resurrection.639 637

This theory was first developed by Hans Kauffmann, and is explained in further detail in Paul M. Bacon, "Mirror of a Christian Prince: Frederick the Wise and Art Patronage in Electoral Saxony, 1486-1525" (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004), 175-88. 638 Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 93. 639 Bacon, "Mirror of a Christian Prince: Frederick the Wise and Art Patronage in Electoral Saxony, 1486-1525", 186.

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Like other early sixteenth century renditions of Job, many traditional iconographical elements are omitted or gain more complexity. For one thing, artists remove Job from his dung heap to make a Christological point about ultimate redemption. They also take away Satan’s presence. For another thing, Job’s wife takes on more enigmatic functions. Mandyn includes Job’s wife with keys. Also, critics remain divided on whether the act of Job’s wife pouring water on Job’s head constitutes, for Dürer, “cruel action”640 or one of “therapeutic explanation.”641 Though destruction looms in the background, Dürer does not include any rendition of Satan, which leaves the viewer to speculate how Job’s wife functions.642 Job’s pose, supporting his head by one hand with one knee bent, is echoed in one of Dürer’s most mysterious and complex engravings, Melencolia I.643 The similarities in form suggest

640

Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 94. Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters, 143. For an argument of Job’s wife’s positive portrayal, see Seow, "Job's Wife." On the other hand, another interprets Job’s wife in negative terms: Zefira Gitay, "The Portrayal of Job's Wife and Her Representation in the Visual Arts," in Fortunate the Eyes That See, ed. et. al. Astrid Beck (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). 642 I am more likely to agree with art critics who note another wife of a patient sufferer who pours water on her husband’s head—Xantippe, the wife of Socrates. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath mentions the popular story of when Xantippe pours filthy water on Socrates’ head (lines 735-738), as noted earlier by Jerome. Jerome, in 393, makes mention of a time when Socrates opposed his abusive wife, Xantippe. Xantippe responded by sousing him with dirty water, after which he remarked that rain follows thunder (“Letter Against Jovianus,” I. 48; PL 23: 278-279). Though somewhat later than Dürer, in 1607, a Flemish artist Otto van Veen (or Vaenius) published Emblemata Horatiana in which he depicts Socrates in his melancholic pose, sitting outdoors, while Xantippe pours liquid over his head from the interior of an above-story structure. The theme comes up again in Joost van den Vondel’s Gulden Winckel from 1613, which reproduced the illustrations from the emblematic work about philosophers’ stories from 1579, Laurent van Haecht’s Microcosmos or Parvus Mundus. One electronic source, incorporating the work of numerous art critics, notes a connection between Xantippe in Reyer van Blommendael’s painting and Dürer’s painting of Job’s wife: Emil Krén, "Web Gallery of Art," http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b/blommend/xantippe.html. [accessed May, 2010] 643 From 1514, now at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. For more on this subject, see Patrick Doorly, "Dürer's 'Melencolia I': Plato's Abandoned Search for the Beautiful," The Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (2004). 641

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Dürer wishes to communicate Job’s melancholy state, which, in its widest sense, emphasizes one’s search for wisdom, even when an ability to search for higher knowledge and creative genius leads one to depression.644 The presence of the musicians also signals medieval melancholy ideas at work, such as the soothing power of music.645 With one of the musicians acting as a self portrait for Dürer, the representation references the state of being an artist, displaying the melancholic effects of a sage’s life.646 With the emergence of Baroque art, appeals to direct and dramatic Joban iconography, with less ambiguous gestures and meanings of Mannerist art, exists. Compared to the early sixteenth century paintings of Job and his wife discussed above, a Baroque trend emerges in the late sixteenth century that clearly gives Job’s wife a shrewish presence. The trend coincides with a literary concern prevalent throughout Europe to uphold Christian ideals of marriage. Job and his wife provide an example of an improper marriage.

644

Heinz Lüdecke, Albrecht Dürer, trans. Richard Rickett (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972), 37. For a more detailed discussion of the role of melancholy in art at this time, see Piers Britton, "'Mio Malinchonico, O Vero . . . Mio Pazzo': Michelangelo, Vasari, and the Problem of Artists' Melancholy in Sixteenth-Century Italy," Sixteenth Century Journal 34, no. 3 (2003). 645 Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 93. 646 Given Job’s sage-like appearance, a possible connection between Job and Socrates might be at work for Dürer. Both men become celebrated for their patience, especially in Flemish traditions.

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Paintings of Job and his Wife from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a more meditative nature of the human frailty of Job and the often hidden realms of sin and evil which befall humanity are reflected in many images of Job and his wife. In general, Frederick Hartt notes a change in the meaning of Job’s suffering as expressed artistically: In Gothic art Job’s verbal cudgellings at the hands of his wife and the devil appear on cathedral portals as prefigurements of Christ’s own afflictions, but by the Renaissance they are merely examples of the sufferings and heroism of a perfect Christian.647 Job’s wife and the Devil still torment Job, but, they do so for a different purpose. A shift in portraying Job and his wife from Satan himself to a more complex or generic presence of evil results from cultural attitudes concerning evil and the inner-person that developed at this time. It became the duty of a Christian to inwardly ponder sin and salvation: “But now it was you versus the Devil; you alone, the individual, who had the responsibility for fending him off” because of a “new introspection placed upon the individual.”648 Furthermore, the ubiquitous image of a saint battling against Satan, a hero of faith and an “athlete of God,” as seen with ideas about Job, gives way to less triumphant notions of facing the power of temptation.649 Artists reflect such trends; Job’s suffering becomes more poignant, dark, elaborate, dramatic, and

647

Frederick Hartt, "Carpaccio's Meditation on the Passion," The Art Bulletin 22, no. 1

(1940): 29.

648

Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 31. See, for instance, the triptych at Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels by Bernaert van Orley, a Flemish artist with Italian style. His 1521 triptych, possibly commissioned by Margaret of Austria, the governor of the Low Countries, is meant to communicate the triumph of patience. In the central panel, a dark ominous demonic cloud above threatens his children, while in the background to the right, Job’s wife gestures wildly at a naked Job. 649

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introspective. The 1631 painting by Jan Lievens (fig. 4.6), a Baroque Dutch painter contemporary to Rembrandt, anticipates Russell’s point that by the end of the seventeenth century, demonic evil reflects not so much an external figure known as Satan, but, rather the dark recesses of one’s soul.

Fig. 4.6. Job in His Misery, Jan Lievens, 1631. The National Gallery of Canada. Photo: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_zoom_e.jsp?mkey=9686

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Both Lievens and Rembrandt competed for the patronage of Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the Prince of Orange and promoter of Dutch art in the court in The Hague. By this time, Lievens was demonstrating influence from Peter Paul Rubens, a contemporary Flemish Baroque painter. Between 1628 and 1631, Rembrandt and Lievens painted parallel themes. Rembrandt’s old man in Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem shows similar expression as Job in Lievens’ Job in his Misery.650 Rembrandt, around 1648-1650, also sketched Job, his wife, and friends, in which he shows Job resting his right hand on his forehead in similar melancholic expression.651 Both Rembrandt’s Jeremiah and Job wear robes in the depictions. Lievens, however, paints a nearly nude Job with the flaccid body of a defeated man. An aging body in the early modern period communicated the natural and inevitable process of living life, but, in religious and didactic contexts, it also represented the transience of life, the vanity of pursuing worldly things.652 A few years later, around 1650, the French artist Georges de La Tour renders Job and his wife in a dark, cavernous space with Job’s wife also holding the light which illuminates the region.653 La Tour and Lievens differ in terms of what La Tour excludes. He does not include devilish figures. His exclusion of demonic elements, alongside his portrayal of Job’s wife as a comforter, gazing into Job’s eyes, with her 650

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 11-12. 651 Otto Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, 6 vols., vol. 3 (London: Phaidon Press, 1973), 169. 652 Shulamith Shahar, "The Middle Ages and Renaissance," in A History of Old Age, ed. Pat Thane (London: Thames & Hudson, 2055). 653 Georges de La Tour. Job and his Wife. c. 1650. Musée Départemental des Vosges, Épinal, France.

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left hand delicately touching Job’s forehead palm-up, diverges from a norm for Job and his wife at the dung heap, and led to the mislabeling of his painting as Saint Peter Delivered from Prison by an Angel. Werner Weisbach developed an argument for a title change to Job Mocked by his Wife, so that what was once an angelic female presence changed to fit the iconography of the time, Job’s wife as a problematic presence.654 However, as many have noted, La Tour strays from a stylistic presentation of Job’s wife as a hostile woman.655 La Tour follows a trend of his time, however, in presenting Job as a depleted old man, devoid of his sores and his large dung pile. In his use of light, La Tour follows chiaroscuro style, light and dark contrasts. As seen in the paintings above, a Baroque style of painting, with its dramatic use of light and movement and the reality of human condition, heralded by Caravaggio and extended by Georges de La Tour and Rubens, brings with it a sense of the “mystical force” of light countered with intense shadows. But, as more and more artists incorporated such themes in the seventeenth century, light (and by contrast, shadows) became simply a “powerful stylistic device” rather than a symbol of transcendence.656 A painting from 1635 by Gioacchino Assereto, an Italian Baroque painter of the Genoese school in Genova, which had contact with Flemish artists, puts Job in a cavernous setting with lurking demonic presence in the background and a shrewish 654

W. Weisbach, "L'histoire De Job Dans Les Arts: A Propos Du Tableau Du Georges De La Tour Au Musee D'epinal," Gazette des beaux-arts 78 (1936). 655 La Tour’s departure from the tradition led to the mislabeling of his painting. See Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters, 166-69. 656 Marco Bussagli and Mattia Reiche, Baroque & Rococo, trans. Patrick McKeown (New York: Sterling, 2009), 24.

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wife (fig. 4.7).657 Job’s wife is old in appearance. Her left hand rests on her hip or lifts her skirt in akimbo fashion. The akimbo gesture, one or both hands on one’s hips with the elbow sticking out, communicates disassociation or disagreement, an “anti-social sign.”658 With her left hand, she makes the “fig sign,” a gesture in which the thumb partly pokes out of the middle and index finger of a clenched fist. It seems that even the demon in the background is horrified at her gesture. Amulets of the “fig sign” have been found in ancient Greece and more than likely functioned to ward off the evil eye with its offensiveness because of the gesture’s sexual symbolism of a penis inserted into a vagina. Cross-culturally, though, the gesture has many derivations, including a gesture meaning “I’ll give you nothing,” since the fig represents a fruit of low value. Or, according to Italian legends, the gesture communicates derision or degradation.659 As with many gestures, complex usages come with time and with cultural differences. Florio’s 1611 Italian/English Dictionary helps illuminate possible functions of the gesture for Asserto’s cultural background. At this time, the gesture was given in disgrace, as a symbol for a woman’s vagina, and fáre le fíca meant “to bid a fig for one,” also used by Italian women as a means to “swear by,” as

657

Gioacchino Assereto, “Job im Elend,” 1635, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. See fig. 83, page 79, in vol. 3 of A. Pigler, ed., Barockthemen: Eine Auswahl Von Verzeichnissen Zur Ikonographie Des 17 Und 18 Jahrhunderts, 3 vols. (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1974). 658 Desmond Morris, Bodywatching: A Field Guide to the Human Species (New York: Crown, 1985), 195-96.A gendered study of this gesture, in terms of cultural use for females, has not been undertaken to the best of my knowledge. 659 Desmond Morris et al., Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 148-60.

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Florio’s dictionary compares the phrase to “our Englishwomen say by my apronstrings.”660 Another source which supports the idea that Job’s wife gives Job the fig out of defiance and vulgarity comes from the fourteenth century Dante’s Inferno, in Canto XXV when, in the eighth circle, seventh pit, the thief, Vanni Fucci, “made figs with both fists” aimed at God, a “gesture common enough to be expressly forbidden,” especially in Italian provinces.661 It is possible that Job’s wife gives the fig gesture to the demonic figure that stands behind Job, at which case Job’s wife supports him and the satanic presence shows dismay. However, given the Italian backgrounds of the gesture in terms of its relation to God, the general attitude of Job’s wife in Asserto’s painting (fig. 4.7) does not promote nurturing wifehood. The gesture relates to her urging Job to “curse God,” a suggestion Asserto interprets as directed toward God in a blasphemous, theologically defiant way.662

660

John Florio (1553-1625) was born in London, a son of an Italian ex-friar who converted to Protestantism and moved to England to avoid persecution. John Florio, "Fica," in Queen Anna's New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues (London: Edwin Blount and William Barret, 1611), 186. The 1611 version is expanded from the 1598 edition; the latter does not include the mention of a woman’s swearing. 661 Anthony Oldcorn, "Notes," in Dante: Inferno (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009), 403. 662 Oldcorn points out that a town near Florence, Prato, in 1297, put a law in effect that imposed a fine or flogging against one who would make the fig sign toward heaven or toward God. Anthony Oldcorn, "The Perverse Image: Canto Xxv," in Lectura Dantis, Inferno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 333.

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Fig. 4.7. Gioacchio Asserto, “Hiob im Elend,” Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 1635. Drawn to scale from the painting by Teresa Ann Ellis. Photo used with permission from the artist.

Asserto’s painting of Job and his wife shares similarities with an earlier rendition by Gaspard de Crayer from 1619 (fig. 4.8).663 In both cases, Job clasps both hands while looking toward heaven. His body shows no visible marks. Job’s wife, who also looks elderly, puts one hand on her hip while gesturing with the other hand.

663

An almost exact repeat of her gesture and that of Job’s gazing to the heavens sitting amongst ruins can be found in the anonymous painting of Job and his wife in the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique, Brussels, from around 1635. See fig. 101 in Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters, 190.

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Fig. 4.8. Gaspard de Crayer, “Job’s Adversity,” 1619. Toulouse, Musée des Augustins, photo: Daniel Martin. Courtesy of Toulouse, Musee des Augustins.

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Fig. 4.9. Gerard Seghers (1591-1651), “The Patience of Job,” date unknown. National Gallery, Prague. Photo: Wikipedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seghersjob.jpg.

Gerard Seghers, a Flemish artist, continues Job’s pensive mood and dark surroundings, now in the National Gallery in Prague (fig. 4.9).664 Seghers visited Italy around 1620 and became a noteworthy Flemish Caravaggesque painter, but by the late 1600s, he demonstrated influence of Rubens in his work. His painting of Job from the late 1600s is an example. Rubens himself painted Job around 1612. A copy of his lost painting exists in the Louvre and demonstrates, in torment of Saint Anthony fashion, the drama of the demonic (fig. 4.10). Around 1620, the School of Vlaamse rendered Job in a way similar to that of Rubens in a painting of Job, his 664

Similarly, Job’s wife points at Job in a painting by Mattia Preti (also known as Il Calabrese) in which Job and his friends sit amongst columned ruins and no sores show on Job’s skin. Job’s wife stands beside him and points at him while she looks at his friends. To the right of her feet lay a shadowy human figure on the ground, a man, though, with horns, the Satanic presence becoming more human. He holds himself up with his right elbow, pointing and sneering at Job. See fig. 100 in Ibid., 189.

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wife, and demons for the Chapel of Beguines, Louvain. Job’s wife, an old woman, has both hands on her hips, glaring at Job, while three demons, one holding a snake, grasp at Job in attempt to drag him away.665

Fig. 4.10. Rubens (after), Job Tormented by Demons, Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. 665

See fig. 101 in Ibid.

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The eighteenth century embraces an eventual fading, or complicating, of traditional Christian notions of Satan.666 A poignant example of the disappearance of satanic presence at the dung heap, while dramatically emphasizing the anger of Job’s wife, comes from the engraving by Matthaeus Merian the elder, a Swiss engraver who settled in Frankfurt, in Icones Biblicae from around 1630 (fig. 4.11a). The Icones Biblicae (1625-1630) contained 230 engravings of the Bible, with accompanying descriptions in German, Latin, and French. In his engravings, Merian captured the form of seventeenth-century European landscapes while maintaining piety without sentimentalism.667 His engraving of Job captures the tradition of Job’s sore-covered body on the dung heap, as well as a form of Satan which dawns female characteristics. As customary with engravings, publishers reprinted them in many other works. Other engravers copied Merian’s representation as well, such as in the case of anonymous reproductions found in Nicolas Fontaine’s L’Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament published in 1670 and again in 1699.668 The same engraving shows up in a German bible history from around 1765 published by Raspischen Handlung, only the reproducer of the image omits the hovering bat-winged demonic force, leaving behind only Job’s wife and friends, also emphasizing more of the 666

Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 128-67. Matthaeus Merian, Great Scenes from the Bible: 230 Magnificent 17th-Century Engravings (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002). 668 1670Font and 1699Font, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. And, also, Nicolaus Vissher copied the image in Afbeeldingen…Soo van het Oude als Nieuwe Testament, fig. 96, in Bo Lindberg, William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job (Abo: Abo Akademi, 1973). 667

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landscape and taking away the other mourners behind them. Job’s wife remains defiant in her demenour (fig. 4.11b).

Fig. 4.11a. Matthaeus Merian, c. 1630, “Job on the dungheap,” in Icones Biblicae. Photo: Katherine Low.

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Fig. 4.11b. Matthaeus Merian, c. 1630, “Job on the dungheap,” in Icones Biblicae as published in a German bible history by Raspischen Handlung, c. 1765. Photo: Katherine Low.

As in the case of Merian’s engraving, by omitting devilish presence, the evil presence in Job’s story seems to visually transfer to Job’s wife. By 1700, Bernard Picart had engraved over fifty biblical scenes for the Mortier Bible, published concurrently in Antwerp and Amsterdam, which depicted scenes from both the Old

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and New Testaments. Like the artists before him, Picart maintains Job’s clasped hands and sore-less body, and, the demonic presence hides in the shadows, behind a tree, and points to Job (fig. 4.12). The devilish crouching figure does not have traditional satanic features, such as bat-wings; he appears more like a sinister human. Job’s wife burrows her brow and emphatically gestures at Job. During his years in Paris, 1698-1710, Picart became highly successful in printmaking; his images were reproduced and copied in many different volumes throughout Europe. Picart also worked during the emergence of tension between “moderns” and their adherence to Descartes and the “ancients” who maintained the superiority of Greek and Roman Antiquity. Picart illustrated an academic thesis that supported Descartes in 1707, and he owned Descartes’ literary works, so it follows that Picart’s emphasis on the limitations of the traditional iconography for Satan puts emotions back into the human mind, the area in which Descartes centered his philosophical work.669 Picart’s engraving of the dung heap, the human face expressing the deformity of evil and de-emphasizing the grotesqueness of Satan himself, stresses what Russell names as “the demonic immanent in the human mind.”670 Russell also points out that new philosophies, like those from Descartes, paved the way for the weakening and eventual fading of traditional Christian ideas

669

Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010), 45-70. 670 Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 91.

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about the Devil during the eighteenth century.671 The fading of traditional ideas about the devil also put Job’s wife in a precarious position.

Fig. 4.12. Bernard Picart “Job 2:9,” late seventeenth century. As reproduced in an English family Bible printed by Henry Galbraith between 1763 and 1764. Photo: Katherine Low. 671

Ibid., 128.

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“More Shameless Than the Devil”: How Job and His Wife Figure in Early Modern Marital Literature From the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the presence of the Devil stays strong, gradual changes concerning transcendent evil begin to take hold, as reflected in many paintings of Job. Artists relegate Satan to the shadows, and the Devil fades under the influence of humanism and other movements. The human struggle against evil, dramatically represented with lavish and expensive devilish costumes in mystery plays of the Middle Ages, gives way to the kind of struggle found in the human heart evident in Elizabethan theater.672 When it comes to Baroque art, especially from Italian and Flemish provinces, Job’s wife does not help her husband with his struggle. Her akimbo gestures, or, “hands upon her hips” is “the pose of the legendary shrew.”673 Along with scowled faces, older visages, and domineering physical presence, another underlying theme for the artists, besides relegating Satan to generic demonic presence or shadowy manifestations, is the portrayal of Job’s wife as a shrew. The evil that was clearly embodied by Satan now transfers to Job’s wife. Her ugly features do not demonstrate a form of piety, and in her case, her old age associates with reprehensible behavior, expressing a principle that “being ugly in old age can point to culpability.”674 At the

672 673

188.

674

Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 76. Terrien, The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters,

Anouk Janssen, "The Good, the Bad, and the Elderly: The Representation of Old Age in Netherlandish Prints (Ca. 1550-1650)," in Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 453.

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same time that artists diminish Satan’s demonic role, they demonize Job’s wife as a dangerous old woman. Sixteenth and seventeenth century artists overwhelmingly represent Job’s wife in the guise of an aged woman (see figs. 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, 4.10, 4.11). Caspar Luyken, a Dutch engraver (1672-1708) visualizes Job’s wife walking with a cane (fig. 4.13). Luyken emphasizes her elongated chin and nose, another stereotype of what happens to the body as one gets older.675 Functioning for Luyken, like for Asserto, who makes Job’s wife give Job the “fig sign” (fig. 4.7), is a seventeenth century idealization and symbolization of an old woman as threatening because she fits outside ideal gendered boundaries. Older women were tried more often as witches than younger women.676 Among other factors, a woman’s aging body signified a lack of her ability to fulfill her “natural” role as wife and mother.677 Whether or not artists think his wife bears Job’s children at a period of restoration (Job 42:10-17), the art depicts Job’s wife as an old woman who reminds the viewer, in Renaissance iconography, of an old crone, bordering on acting as a harbinger of destruction. The artists use the iconography to express a popular idealized view of marriage in the Renaissance and Job’s wife’s place in contrast to

675

Lynn A. Bothelho, "The 17th Century," in A History of Old Age, ed. Pat Thane (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005). 676 Reasons for this remain complex. For a detailed discussion, see Edward Bever, "Old Age and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe," in Old Age in Preindustrial Society, ed. Peter N. Stearns (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1982). See also, Alison Rowlands, "Witchcraft and Old Women in Early Modern Germany," Past & Present, no. 173 (2001). 677 Bothelho, "The 17th Century," 127. See also, Jeanne Addison Roberts, "Types of Crone: The Nurse and the Wise Woman in English Renaissance Drama," Renaissance Papers 2000 (2000).

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that ideal—she acts outside the confines of how a proper wife should act. Popular literature of the age elaborates on her role more fully. This section sheds more light on the role of Job’s wife for the artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mentioned above by examining cultural attitudes about Job and his wife reflected in popular religious discourse on the proper nature of Christian marriage. The art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflects the place of Job and his wife in an explosion of didactic domestic manuals throughout Europe. Martha Peacock states that the “topos of a shrewish and overbearing woman enslaving a man through marriage occurs early in Netherlandish literature and art but reaches a high point in the mid-sixteenth century that continues through the first half of the seventeenth century.”678 Rather than providing the Church Fathers with an example of deviant speech and another Eden, the story of Job and his wife provide a prooftext, as the Bible reached the hands of many readers, for those with concern for reformations and puritan ideals and, more specifically, for those who wanted to provide men and women with examples of socially appropriate marital behaviors.679 In the artistic pieces discussed above, Job and his wife offer a visual metaphor for tensions about the place of husbands and wives in marriage and the dominant ideology of gender in early modern Europe. 678

This topos reflects clearly in humorous representations of the cuckold, or the husband whose wife is cheating on him. Martha Peacock, "Hoorndragers and Hennetasters: The Old Impotent Cuckold As "Other" In Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Art," in Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 493. 679 For a compilation of medieval marriage sermons, in which Job and his wife are not mentioned, see D. L. D'Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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Fig. 4.13. Caspar Luyken, “Job II,” as published in Historia Celebriores Veteris Testamenti by Christopher Weigel, 1712. Photo: Katherine Low.

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Issues of gender remain complex in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The witch craze reached its height during the Renaissance and Reformation periods for both Catholics and Protestants, peaking, according to Russell, from 1550 to 1650.680 In 1487, Job presented an exceptional problem for Heinrich Kramer and his assistant Jakob Sprenger, Dominican authors of a major and influential work on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witchcraft). Both men acted as “successful” inquisitors in that they convicted many people of witchcraft in the name of papal supremacy and monastic reform in southern Germany. In Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger describe, in much detail, elements of witchcraft. Writing in terms of an encyclopedic entry of verifying the existence of witches, they discuss the harms of witchcraft, remedies, and methods to exterminate witches. Overwhelmingly, they assume witches are women, and explicitly, women who make sexual pacts with the Devil.681 Job’s wife, according to Kramer and Sprenger, was not a witch. The text states clearly that Satan himself caused the suffering of Job (I, Question 2, 16A-B, 110).682 Yet, even to mention Job’s wife, Kramer and Sprenger bring her in line with devilish practices. The Devil used his wife to vex him (II, Chap. 15, 144D, 380). Then, why do witches exist if the Devil can do his tormenting without the use of other humans, 680

Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, 301. European women accused of witchcraft were the poorer of the communities, more likely single than married, and more likely older than younger. On some level, those who accused them were “upholding women to conventional standards of female conduct:” Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (London: Pearson, 2006), 141-63. 682 All references from Malleus come from Jacobus Sprenger, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Christopher S. Mackay (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 681

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as evident in the book of Job? Kramer and Sprenger suggest that witches make Satan’s work easier, and women, especially, with their weak and vulnerable nature, are more susceptible to the Devil (I, Question 3, 40A-46A, 159-173).683 Early modern English readers would have inherited such a notion for Job’s wife, since, for example, a translation, published in London, from the French of John Calvin’s sermons on Job in 1574 calls Job’s wife an “instrument of Satan” (organum satani).684 Job’s wife’s connection with the Devil, alongside her traditional Christian reputation, makes her what Sigrid Brauner translates as a “bad wife”; though not a witch, the notion of a “bad wife” (böses wîp) functioned in early modern Germany as a way to speak about married women who violated gendered social behavioral codes. Brauner argues that often the lines between categories for female unruliness blurred, so that by sixteenth-century vernacular literature, “the bad wife increasingly comes to resemble the modern witch” because of an increase in depictions of bad wives’ violating social codes that extended beyond marriage.685 The topos of a “bad wife” coincides with the topos of the “slacker husband,” (der lose man) who drinks, gambles, or engages in other gluttonous pursuits to the detriment of the family wealth 683

For more on the gendered implications of women as witches in Malleus, see Sigrid Brauner, Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 31-49. 684 Calvin preached 159 sermons on Job in 1554-5, recorded and translated in 1549. The ninth sermon on Job, which is the second sermon on the second chapter: a facsimile copy of a 1574 English edition attests to the circulation of Calvin’s sermons in England. John Calvin, Sermons on Job, trans. Arthur Golding, 16th-17th Century Facsimile ed. (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1993). For further discussion of Calvin’s sermons, see Susan E. Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin's Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 685 Brauner, Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany, 73.

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and sustainability.686 Such a gendered marital code extends beyond early modern Germany throughout Europe. At the same time that European societies dealt with issues of witchcraft, issues of marriage surfaced as well. The tensions involved do not simply take the form of men writing misogynistic ideas about women; authors of marriage manuals reacted to changing shifting models of gendered behavior. The witchcraft trials of early modern Europe represent just one example of the phenomena of societal instability of sexual identities. The debate concerned what Joy Wiltenburg names as “the place of women and gender in cultural thinking about authority, order, and individuality.”687 With cultural value leaning toward rational individualism, a growing early modern emphasis on what Wiltenburg describes as “a conception of society as a collection of self-sufficient individuals” began to take root.688 Fragmentations of religious beliefs that took place under various Reformations confused and complicated issues of identity. Such a complication led to “a new emphasis on inwardness,” because one’s performance in public did not always match one’s private convictions.689 Gender plays a large role in the experience of the self, and, as John Jeffries Martin explains, “it becomes clear that in the Renaissance the boundary that divided an internal sense of experience—one’s thoughts, and memories—from the outside 686

Ibid., 97. Also echoed in Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994), 107-24. 687 Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 19. 688 Ibid. 689 John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 48.

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world and that brought the internal and external in relation to one another was a locus of danger.”690 Deep anxieties about masculinity and femininity emerged during the Reformation because when reformers called into question religious foundations, they also brought about the instability of the ideal roles of masculine and feminine behavior. Lyndal Roper states, “there was certainly a period of intense flux in gender relations in sixteenth century Europe,” for masculine as well as for feminine performance, because “a movement which changes the sexual status of its clergy, turning models of chastity into exemplars of matrimonial harmony, clearly transforms the meaning of manhood.”691 Therefore, in order for society to function in order, not disorder, determinate teachings about marriage as a serious undertaking, especially for reformers from Lutherans to Anglicans, emerge. Although many areas of European society and culture experienced transformations due to religious reforms, this section focuses on one key area— marriage. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a wide-spread literary concern for marriage spread throughout Europe.692 The debate began in Latin and French literature over the education of women, a “literary quarrel known as the Querelle des femmes,” (the woman question) out of which one woman took part, Chrstine de Pisan, author of Book of the City of Ladies from 1405.693 In England, the Querelle des femmes took on heated forms because of the question of women rulers. 690

Ibid., 86. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, 37-38. 692 Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. 693 Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, 166. 691

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Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christian Woman (1523), for instance, centered on the education of Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, the future Mary I, queen of England. When it came to publications about and for women, such domestic manuals basically acted like catalogues of famous and infamous women and men, with authors using biblical and classical examples to make their cases about the ideal type of husband, wife, and marriage.694 The conduct manuals construct prescriptive, rather than descriptive, modes of behavior. Yet, they witness to the tensions and pressures undergoing gender relations in the midst of continuous traditional understandings of the social customs involved for the household.695 Taking part in a shared ideal presentation of proper gendered behavior for marriage, European household manuals borrowed heavily from one another. Therefore, this section focuses mainly on English sources and publications of European literature, partly because of the availability of such literature and because England’s reformations built upon the reforms that began earlier in Germany and Switzerland. Furthermore, functions of marriage became a public issue, religiously

694

Space does not allow for a discussion of the links between marriage and sexuality in the Renaissance. For an introduction to the subject, see Todd W. Reeser, "Moderation and Masculinity in Renaissance Marriage Discourse and in Rabelais's Tiers Livre," The Romanic Review 90, no. 1 (1999). See also Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe. For thorough anthologies, and sourcebooks, consult Kate Aughterson, ed., Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1995); Kate Aughterson, ed., The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (New York: Routledge, 1998); Lloyd Davis, ed., Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998); Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982). For a more specific discussion of Shakespeare and sources, see Frances E. Dolan, ed., The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996). 695 As suggested in the introduction, Davis, ed., Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents, xii-xxiii.

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and socially relevant in England, with the controversy of the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon and his subsequent break from the Catholic Church, and his declaration that he was the head of the Church of England in 1536.696 This section also focuses on English sources because of their abundance and availability during the peak of the Renaissance. In Germany, the existence of popular literature attests to the spread of literacy in the sixteenth century. The advance of literacy declined throughout the seventeenth century, due to outbreak of war in Germany. In terms of the availability of literature, England held the advantage, especially in the seventeenth century, with London as a single center which contained a sustained print industry.697 Among that industry, women acted as consumers. Margaret King states, “In England from 1475 to 1640, 163 titles were produced specifically for women, of whom 800 were explicitly named.”698 Even more striking is the acceleration of vernacular books for Englishwomen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “From 1570 through 1640, assuming a press run of 1,500 and counting multiple editions, there were printed perhaps 400,000 volumes targeted for a female audience.”699 When reformers advocated for lay and clerical marriage, they called for a reconsideration of marriage. If sexual renunciation no longer served as a sign of holiness, then theologians had to reconfigure how a hierarchal marital relationship 696

Dolan, ed., The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts, 161. Ibid; Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany. 698 Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 174. 699 Ibid., 175. 697

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brought with it sanctification.700 In her analysis of the engagement of Christian humanism by protestant reformers, Margo Todd notes that the Bible served as a means to transform society, to aid in the achievement of human potential and godly behavior for prince and commoner alike. Todd applies “Christian humanist social thought” to the Renaissance household. Christian humanists engaged classical domestic ideas, such as from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, and combined them with biblical examples to form household religious instruction.701 Religious ideas about the household directed toward women begin as early as the fourteenth century with the Book of the Knight of the Tower (Livre pour l'enseignement de ses filles), translated into English in 1484 by William Caxton, which mentions Job and his wife in the context of their marriage. Chevalier de La Tour Landry’s work exists within the context of medieval courtesy literature. Landry fits Job and his wife into his scheme of a “successful” marriage, one in which “women should be models of morality and patience whose virtues compensate for the faults of men.”702 Therefore, he pictures Job’s wife as a sympathetic wife, who brings

700

Ibid., 40. Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary, trans. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See also, Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). One important contribution made by this work is Todd’s reconfiguration of Puritanism as part of protestant mainstream England, thus tracing the development of Puritanism within a broader religious and intellectual context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 702 Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for Women (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), 52. 701

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him food and shares in his misery, until she has a temporary lapse under Satan’s temptations and verbally demonstrated anger.703 The 1541 Schole House of Women heralded an entire trend of circulating sixteenth and seventeenth century pamphlets about marriage in England, whether in instructional manuals, sermons, or in satirical poems and ballads. The anonymous poem Schole House seems to be based on an old French poem, un poëme des tourmens de Mariage.704 The author launches into scripture for proof texts, beginning with Adam and Eve, and picks up biblical examples again beginning in line 742. In some cases, according to the author, a husband must ask the devil to show his wife’s true nature, because if a husband thinks that all is well in his marriage, it is certainly Satan’s job to show a woman’s true self (574-594). Job’s wife fits in with the other biblical examples of troublesome wives. The author elaborates on her speech: The wife of Job, the man elect,/Saluted him with scornes and mocks,/And ful unseemly oft his chect,/Saying, thou fool, ful of the pocks,/Ful like a fool thy brest thou knocks;/Weenest thou for thy fair speech/God wil come the for to seech./Thy prating leue, foule thee befall,/Trust me he wil thee neuer heale;/Thy beasts, thy goods, and thy children all,/Be dead and brent, now euery deale,/And thou liest heer with many a bile/Prating and praying to the deuine,/And wurse thou stinkest then a dead swine (776790).705 The Schole House of Women fits with the cultural focus on the “moral education of girls and woman in higher urban circles” which led to using classical and biblical sources to present “gender-specific virtues” on how to be a good wife and 703

Chapter 29 in Landry, The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 110. Edward Vernon Utterson, ed., Select Pieces of Early Popular Poetry, 2 vols., vol. 2 (London: William Pickering, 1825), 53-54. 705 Ibid., 83-84. 704

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mother.706 Biblical women remained at the heart of heated debates on the nature of womanhood. For instance, the Schole House of Women did not go unchallenged. Edward More responded in his The Defence of Women in 1560. More, an Oxford scholar and minor poet, notes that Lucifer lies at the heart of human problems. The serpent, after all, tempted Eve (43-44), and Eve just repeated what the serpent said (48).707 More offers Susanna and Judith as examples of good wives, as are Lot’s daughters in terms of their desire to multiply their descendents upon the earth (178, 198). He also sprinkles in various comments about Venus being a good wife and mother. More’s counter-argument against Schole House of Women was only printed once, as opposed to the many printings of Schole House of Women.708 Joannes Ludovicus Vives (Juan Luis Vives), a Spanish scholar and humanist, first wrote his Instruction of Christen Woman (De institutione feminae christianae) in Latin in 1523. His concern of the education of women came from his role as adviser to Queen Catherine of Aragon on matters concerning her daughter’s education. Queen Catherine’s daughter, Mary, became Queen Mary I in 1553. After its appearance in English around 1529, Vives’ Education of a Christian Woman became influential. It appeared in at least forty editions translated into English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.709 As part of an early sixteenth century humanist movement that supported education and the value of reading for most women, creating a “middle 706

Bleyerveld, "Chaste, Obedient and Devout: Biblical Women as Patterns of Female Virtue in Netherlandish and German Graphic Art, Ca. 1500-1750," 220. 707 Utterson, ed., Select Pieces of Early Popular Poetry. 708 Ibid., 96. 709 King, Women of the Renaissance, 164.

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path” between advocating for complete subordination of women in society and total equality of women to men, Vives granted that women had intellectual capacity for education. But, that education should be just enough to center on a woman’s chastity, her religious duty (made even more central by Protestantism ideals that all must learn to read the scriptures), and her future as a leader of a household. 710 The Education of a Christian Woman surfaced on the edges of the development of basic education for women of the elite, who, by the fourteenth century, could read vernacular books, though many were not trained to read Latin.711 Vives also includes a section on marital instruction, in which Job’s wife fairs badly: I think Job’s wife was the only possession left to him so that she could add to his misery and with her malicious tongue make his burden even greater. O detestable and impious woman! You reproach your husband for his holiness as if it were a crime! Not even devils would dare to do this. The devil destroyed all of Job’s fortunes, slew all his servants, took away his children, covered him with ulcerous sores, but he never reproached him for persevering in his original purity of soul. His wife reproached him, showing that she was more shameless than the devil.712 Vives made it clear that Job’s wife acted on her own accord and her words did not come from Satan. Whether one agreed with Vives’ assessment of Job’s wife, it continues that authors assume the lack of satanic influence on Job’s wife. In the realm of their discussions on marriage, it behooves the authors to maintain a more martially realistic interpretation of Job and his wife than that of Job and his wife as another Adam and Eve tempted by Satan. Edmund Tilney, in A Brief and Pleasant Discourse 710

Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640, 56-57. King, Women of the Renaissance, 172-73. 712 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 198-99. 711

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of Duties in Mariage, Called the Flower of Friendshippe from 1568, includes Vives as a dialogue partner in the text. Tilney dedicated the book to Queen Elizabeth I and was not married when he wrote his treatise, but married later in 1583.713 In Tilney’s case, “the pacience of Job” was “all to little” because an ideal husband suffers the matters of his wife, no matter how trifle (764-765).714 Tilney’s advice shows concern for a masculine ideal, that of master, but that a man must also master himself. Tilney presents Job’s ability to maintain his patience and thereby, sustain his authority with “rational discretion,” like that of many other husbands, as a “constant and extremely challenging labour.”715 The Church of England puritan pastor William Whately released his A Care-Cloth to the streets of London in 1624, and he also uses Job’s patience as a model for husbands, even when all the comforts of marriage do not exist for them. Whately does not mention Job’s wife, but instead quotes Job’s words to her: “Job said, Shall we receive good at Gods hand, and not evil? Lo, the speedy remembrance of what prosperity he had enjoyed enabled him to be quiet in his present tribulation: so must the married persons do in their estate, for Job is our president for patience.”716 The harmony of society depends on a quiet and orderly household, so advocate John Dod and Robert Cleaver, in A Godly Form of Household Government, 713

Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 71. 714 Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage, ed. Valerie Wayne (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 121. 715 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, 78. 716 Chap. II, William Whately, A Care-Cloth, or the Cumbers and Troubles of Marriage (Norwood, NJ: Walter J. Johnson, 1976), 82.

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one of the most popular household instruction manuals of the period, first published in 1598. Dod and Cleaver, presumably the authors, were both dissenters of the Anglican church and puritan in their ideals.717 They suggest that a wife maintains silence when her husband begins to complain because once a husband begins to chide, the wife begins to scold: “now and then, most unnaturally, they come to handygripes, more beast-like then Christian-like, which their so doing is both a great shame, and foul discredit to them both.” Therefore, the answer to such a dilemma is for the wife to support her husband’s anger or pain in silence and obedience.718 Mutual support remains an overwhelmingly important goal of marriage in conduct manuals. Companionship in marriage, after all, for both Catholics and Protestants, reflects the humanist ideal based on the Aristotelian notion that marriage is natural and leads to a harmonious commonwealth.719 William Gouge’s popular and comprehensive work Of Domestical Duties from 1622 turns to Job and his wife to point to the issue of both husband and wife supporting one another in times of need. They both failed at their marriage because they did not maintain one of the most principal components of marriage, which is to be a continual comfort and help each to other, and to ease the burdens of one another: in which respect they are made yoke-fellows. Job’s wife by her unnatural carriage towards him in his affliction did much aggravate his misery when he stood in most need of her help, she afforded least unto him it appears by Job’s complaint of her, in these 717

Dolan, ed., The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts, 201-02. From the excerpt of A Godly Form of Household Government in Aughterson, ed., The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, 450. 719 Todd’s chapter, “The Spiritualized Household,” is particularly relevant here: Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order, 96-117. 718

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words, my breath is strange to my wife, that she altogether neglected him in his misery.720 Still, Gouge affords Job’s wife a “shrewish disposition,” in how she disgracefully spoke to her husband.721 Henry Smith, a puritan minister in London, preached A Preparative to Marriage, first published in 1591. He also uses the term “yokefellow,” when it comes to Job’s wife’s failings to support her husband in his illness. The Devil sent Job’s wife to torment him, to tempt to him blaspheme, according to Smith, “when he [the devil] took away all beside.”722 Smith’s publication when through four editions in its first year; in the 1580s, Smith gained the title as “silvertongued Smith” because of his successful preaching career in London. Smith never married.723 George Swinnock, another English Puritan concerned with living a godly life, warns his male readers that a wife can be, “next to thyself” a “best friend or worst foe that godliness can have in thy family.” According to Swinnock, many biblical men were defeated by their wicked wives, including Job, when Satan spared his wife in order that she may, on Satan’s behalf, “cross him,” because “the devil knew that none was so fit to present that poisonous potion with success to Job, as his wife; that if he ever took it, her fair hands must give it, and her sugared words sweeten it.”724 Richard Baxter’s A Christian Directory was first published in 1673. In the part about the 720

The second treatise, part II: “Of Common-Mutual Duties Betwixt Man and Wife,” in William Gouge, Of Domestical Duties, ed. Greg Fox (lulu.com, 2006), 176. 721 The third treatise, paragraph 15, “Of Wives’ Particular Duties,” ibid. 722 Aughterson, ed., Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook, 82. 723 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, 71. 724 First published in 1662 in London, The Christian Man’s Calling (Part I, Chap. XXVII) in George Swinnock, The Works of George Swinnock, vol. 1 (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1868), 336.

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“Mutual Duties of Husbands and Wives Toward Each Other,” Baxter, an influential puritan theologian, alludes to Job and his wife in terms of one partner hindering the holiness and salvation of the other (II. v.8).725 In his The Golden Grove, William Vaughn takes up a revival of economic writing in 1608, in the fashion of pseudo-Aristotelian Economics. A marriage that can run smoothly reflects the harmonious nature of society as a whole. In terms of the roles expected of them as husband and wife, in the words of Alexandra Shepard, “conduct writers insisted that it was not only the terms of manhood that were at stake, but the entire social order.”726 Therefore, a husband holds several duties toward his wife, such as putting up with her hastiness and feebleness. He must also keep her happy by sharing a bed with her and remaining faithful. Vaughn captures Job’s wife in an example of what not to do: “the wife must not forsake her husband in adversity, or deride him as Job’s wife did when she bade him, curse God and die, but she ought to comfort and cherish him as a part of her own body.”727 The motivation behind Job’s wife’s speech to her husband became another topic of interest for commentators, especially when it concerns her attempt to get Job to blaspheme. One of the most popular books in the printed debate came from Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women in 1615, with ten editions to follow by 1637. When a man marries “a woman of evil report,” it 725

II. vi.I. Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of Richard Baxter, 4 vols., vol. 1 (Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1673), 434. 726 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, 73. 727 William Vaughan, The Golden Grove, as provided in Aughterson, ed., Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook, 97.

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reflects negatively on his character. For example, “Job's wife gave her husband counsel to blaspheme God and to curse him (chapter 1).”728 Rachel Speght, a daughter of a Calvinist minister in middle class London, challenged Swetnam’s accusation of blasphemy in her line-by-line direct reinterpretation of the biblical passages used by Swetnam in Certaine Quaeres to the Bayter of Women.729 Speght responds: “you misconster the Text; for the true construction thereof will shew it to bee a Sarcasmus or Ironicall speech, and not an instigation to blasphemie (34-36).”730 Speght’s main critique of Swetnam is his uneducated statements and general use of biblical examples to make his point on the depravity of women. F. W. Van Heertum’s critical edition of The Araignment argues that publishers kept printing Swetnam’s work because it appealed to the popular masses and not necessarily to an educated audience. Swetnam “relies on assumptions about the nature of women which were the staple fare of attacks on women,” thus he “does not raise any serious issues concerning the status of women.”731 Swetnam, nevertheless, reverberates popular ideas about the nature of Job’s wife’s words as urging Job to commit blasphemy. One of Milton’s literary sources,

728

F. W. Van Heertum, ed., A Critical Edition of Joseph Swetnam's the Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615) (Nijmegen: The Cicero Press, 1989), 205. 729 For this and other responses written by women, see The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Part I: Printed Writings, 1500-1640, ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen, vol. 4, Defences of Women: Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, Constantia Munda (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 1996). 730 Rachel Speght, "Certaine Quaeres to the Bayter of Women," in The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 35. 731 Heertum, ed., A Critical Edition of Joseph Swetnam's the Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615), 19.

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Job Militant from 1624 by Francis Quarles, an English poet, upholds the suggested blasphemy of Job’s wife’s words. 732 Quarles paraphrases Job’s wife’s speech: Her passion waxt, made strong, with scorne and spleene; Like as the Winds, imprison’d in the earth, and barr’d the passage of their naturall birth, Grow fierce; and nilling to be longer pent, Breake in an Earthquake, shake the World, and vent; So brake she forth, so forth her Fury brake, Till now pent in with shame; and thus she spake. Fond Saint, thine Innocence finds timely speed, A foolish Saint receives a Saintly meed; Is this the lust man’s Recompence? Or hath Heaven no requital for thy painefull Faith Other than this? What, have thy zealous Qualmes, Abstemious Fastings, and thy hopefull Almes, Thy private Groanes, and often-bended knees, No other End, no other Thanks, but these? Fond man, submit thee to a kinder Fate, Cease to be righteous, at so deare a rate: ‘Tis Heaven and Fortune, that thy Weale debarres; Curse Heaven then, and not thy wayward Starres: ‘Tis God that plagues thee, God not knowing why; Curse then that God, revenge thy Wrongs, and Dye (V, 3050). 733 The potential of her words to instigate Job’s potential suicide makes her, according to one of the most interesting examples of advice literature, more daring than the Devil. Similarly, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, in Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, uggests that Job’s wife acted far more superior than the devil in terms of being able to “dislodge him from his original simplicity and patience of spirit and provoke him to anger.”734 Rather than catalogue women of importance, like Petrarch or Boccaccio, Agrippa utilized the biblical sources commonly used to support the inferiority of women in order to subvert their standard meanings. The words of Job’s wife held power; she was “more daring” than the devil, 732

As argued by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1966), 129. 733 Alexander Grosart, ed., The Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Francis Quarles, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1880), 78. 734 Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, trans. Albert Rabil (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 66.

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being able to incite Job “to use abusive language.” Agrippa, a German student of occult philosophy and theology, travelled throughout France and Italy, and originally wrote his treatise, Declamatio de nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus in 1529; it quickly became available in French, German, Italian and English. Contrary to medieval interpretations that accord Satan’s power as the primary mover of Job’s wife’s words, Agrippa assumes autonomy of her actions. He writes of the power of women, because, “Aristotle may say that of all the animals the males are stronger and wiser than the females, but St. Paul writes that weak things have been chosen to confound the strong.”735 Agrippa lists biblical instances to prove his point, including the notion that “Job was patient” until a woman, not Satan, provoked him to anger, “therein proving herself stronger than the devil.”736 Agrippa implicitly holds a masculine expectation for Job in his writing; he expected Job to show rational selfcontrol, but, his wife, more threatening than the Devil, caused him to lapse in his control. Men, fulfilling the role as husband, should exercise sound governance of the household, with mastery reflective of the governing powers of society. The concept of “masterhood” in all of one’s roles meant that even an unmarried man experienced insecure masculinity. The married man was expected to function as the “household head.”737 Yet, contradictions and tensions existed in conduct literature because the authors prescribed husbands their autonomy, while at the same time, implying their 735

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, The Philosophy of Natural Magic (Chicago: The deLaurence Company, 1913), 267. 736 Ibid. 737 Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, 46.

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mutual dependence upon their wives.738 R. W. Connell, for instance, notes gradient forms of masculine constructions in the world of the West, naming “complicity,” as one of them. Complicit masculinity is crafted because “marriage, fatherhood and community life often involve extensive compromises with women rather than naked domination.”739 A paradoxical message exists in an ideal of marriage for achieving masculinity, a husband’s domination over a wife, yet becoming a “yoke-fellow” to his wife. Marriage threatens manhood, yet remains part of how one achieves manhood.740 Sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings register Job’s emotion with controlled Christian piety in the form of his Christ-like pose of clasped hands. For Agrippa, as for many others, demonstration of emotion belonged to the weak or effeminate.741 In popular preaching, Job’s wife becomes an example of the weakness of sensuality, a feminine characteristic found in women. John Donne, appointed Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1621, not only preached but also wrote poetry and epigrams. In a sermon from 1620, Donne recalls Augustine’s teachings on Job’s story, only to make a point about temporal suffering and the relation of husband and wife as “one flesh,” for good and bad: Uxor relicta erat, Job had not lost all, because his wife was left, Misericordem putatis diabolum, says that father, qui ei reliquit Uxorem? Do you think that Job lighted upon a merciful and good-natured devil, that the devil did this out of pity and compassion to Job, or that Job was 738

A topic discussed in Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Connell, Masculinities, 79. 740 The discrepancy, for Alexandra Shepard, evidences a gap in what the conduct literature prescribed and how marriage actually practiced. Of concern for this chapter, though, is the ideal presentation made by the authors. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, 84. 741 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 739

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beholden to the devil for this, that he left his wife? Norerat per quam deceperat Adam, says he, the devil knew by what instrument he had deceived the first man, and by the same instrument he practices upon Job; Suam reliquit adjutricem, non mariti consolatricem, He left Job a helper, but a helper for his own ends, but for her husband a miserable comforter. Caro conjux, says the same father in another place, this flesh, this sensual part of ours, is our wife: and when these temporal things by any occasion are taken from us, that wife, that flesh, that sensuality is left to murmur and repine at God’s corrections, and that is all the benefit we have by that wife, and all the portion we have with that wife.742 Another preacher later than Donne, Thomas Watson, a well-known minister dismissed from his post at St. Stepehen’s, Walbrook, in London under the Act of Uniformity under the reign of King Charles II in 1662, covers the subtlety and underhandedness of the devil. Satan uses those ones closest to people to tempt them, as “he tempted Job by a proxy,--he handed over a temptation to him, by his wife.”743 Watson explains: “Thus Satan made use of Job’s wife to do his work; the woman was made of the rib, and Satan made a bow of this rib, out of which he shot the arrow of his temptation.”744 Matthew Poole, an English biblical scholar with Presbyterian leanings and antipapal writings, took up a large task of writing a biblical commentary. Poole’s friends helped finish his English Annotations on the Holy Bible after his death in 1679. Though considered a religious non-conformist, he still echoes the old adage

742

Sermon 74, Preached at Whitehall, April 30, 1620, on Psalm 144.15, in John Donne, The Works of John Donne, ed. Henry Alford, 6 vols., vol. 3 (London: John W. Parker, 1839), 332-33. 743 “Of the Sixth Petition in the Lord’s Prayer,” in Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: In a Series of Sermons on the Shorter Catechism (Philadelphia: James Kay, Jun. & Co., 1833), 559. 744 Ibid.

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that the devil spared Job’s wife “with cruel intent to be the instrument of his temptations, and the aggravation of Job’s misery.”745 Some theologians, preachers, and exegetes seriously engage the topic, and some use the example of Job and his wife in cheaply printed sources that booksellers and printers produced to sell to the masses. The anonymous ironic response to the 1706 The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony provides an example. The Batchelors and Maids Answer to the Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony refutes each comfort of marriage, and in the sixth “mock comfort,” the poet states, “but here I differ from the Poet’s Thought,/Who says, A Schold as even good for nought,/For like Job’s Wife she will Man’s Patience try,/And bring Repentance too, before he die:/Then who’d live single, if a Scolding Wife/Works such great Wonders in a Husband’s Life?”746 The anonymous uses the example of Job’s wife to illustrate a point that marriage brings the possibility of a scolding wife. When it comes to humorous ballads and prose, Samuel Colville in 1643 composed a pasquil, a satirical lampoon, of Sir Alexander Gibson. Little is known of Colville’s profession, although his brother taught theology and Hebrew at Edinburgh. Gibson was a Commissioner from Scotland who attended the English Parliament in 1642. Gibson died in London in 1656. Colville pokes fun at the tense submission of Gibson to the powers-that-be: “Nor this no furder can thou flie./Bot with Job’s wyffe

745

Matthew Poole, A Commentary on the Holy Bible, vol. 1 (London: Banner of Truth Trust,

1962), 925. 746

Christ Mounsey and Rictor Norton, eds., Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, vol. 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), 62.

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curse God and die./Quhen thou shalt suffer all this evill,/Thou shalt be pitied of the devil.”747 Even Shakespeare jokingly uses the example of Job’s wife. Scholars have compared Shakespeare’s tragic characters of Hamlet and King Lear with Job in terms of suffering and the human condition,748 yet Shakespeare’s comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, published in 1602, references Job’s wife. The connection with the devil continues for Job’s wife in a conversation between Ford and Page. The conversation takes place in a context of cuckolded husbands, in fashion of fabliau, when Sir John Falstaff’s desire to sleep with Mrs. Page is revealed. The wives trick Falstaff in the play. Mrs. Page asks Falstaff if he ever really thought that “ever the devil could have made you our delight,” after which the husbands Ford and Page chime in, adding to the list of Falstaff’s faults: Ford. And one that is as slanderous as Sathan? Page. And as poor as Job? Ford. And as wicked as his wife?749 Falstaff, being compared to Job’s wife, becomes a character of “comic wooing,” a “broad target for women’s jests.”750 Analogous sources for Merry Wives elude scholars; the biblical references in the play come directly from Shakespeare’s cultural 747

See pages 142-144, Anonymous, A Book of Scotish Pasquils, 1568-1715 (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1868). 748 For Hamlet and Job, see William Burgess, The Bible in Shakespeare (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1968), 64-66. See also Chapter 4, “’Within a Foot of the Extreme Verge’: The Book of Job and King Lear” in Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 59-78. 749 Merry Wives of Windsor, V, 5: 155-157. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 355. 750 Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 47.

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setting and purpose in writing, especially in comedies, to use the holy text for a brief joke.751 Richmond Noble suggests that Shakespeare mainly consulted two versions of the Bible, the Bishops’ Bible (1568) and the Geneva Bible (1560). The Bishops’ Bible was read in churches, whereas the Geneva Bible was a somewhat scholarly translation in Calvin tradition, not read in church,752 but printed in popular formats. Both formats contained marginal notes. Interestingly, the marginal note for Job 2:9 in the Bishops’ Bibles from 1568 and 1572 describes the situation as “a cruel temptation of an evil and ungodly wife.” The Geneva Bible from 1585, however, does not contain the note.753 For Shakespeare and many others, Job and his wife act as a biblical couple who exemplify the wiles of marriage. Robert Burton, an Oxford scholar of the Church of England, published Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621 under the pseudonym Democritius Junior. The work was very popular, demonstrating a theoretical dependency on Aristotelian humors, a variety of ironical statements about melancholy, and witty, humorous insights. In the section on Love-Melancholy, 751

Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion and Shakespeare 1592-1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 22-25. 752 A group of English exiles who left England for Geneva created the Geneva Bible in 1560. They fled England due to religious frustrations, especially during Queen Mary’s attempt at restoring Catholic dogma. The Reformers who produced the Geneva Bible felt that study aids were needed, and, that an English translation should be available to every man. For more details, visit Donald L. Brake, A Visual History of the English Bible: The Tumultuous Tale of the World's Bestselling Book (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerBooks, 2008), 143-70. For more on biblical translation in English, see David Lawton, "The Bible," in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 753 Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (New York: Octagon Books, 1970), 272.

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Burton draws from a vast collection of sources of the cultural history of melancholy.754 Burton explains how Job’s wife caused Job’s melancholy. Job had a “wicked wife,” whom the devil left to “vex and gall him worse” than “all the fiends in hell, as knowing the conditions of a bad woman” (part III, sec. 2).755 In the same section, Burton quotes Jacobus de Voragine, who “elegantly delivered . . . twelve motions to mitigate the miseries of marriage.”756 Jacobus de Voragine, the author of The Golden Legend from the thirteenth century, relates the life of Saint Eustace (previously Placidus) and his sufferings to the sufferings of Job. At least Job had dung to sit on, suggests Eustace, and the company of his wife.757 The German mystic Hermann von Fritzlar refers to Job’s wife in his poem on the Eustace legend as well.758 The connection with Job and the Eustace legend, though, does not figure in Burton’s discussion of marriage. Burton attempts to persuade the reader, perhaps in an ironical sense, that marriage is both a cure and a cause of lovemelancholy. He adds his response to Jacobus de Voragine’s mitigations of the misery of marriage with a bit on Job’s wife: “Art in adversity? Like Job’s wife, she’ll 754

A fact that has led to Mark Breitenberg’s discussion on cultural manifestations of masculinity in relation to melancholy in Burton’s work in a chapter “Fearful Fluidity: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,” : Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35-68. For a context of the idea of melancholy in the Renaissance, see Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 755 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 3 (London: John C. Nimmo, 1886), 229. 756 Ibid., 272. 757 See, respectively, section 50, St. Eustace, 20 September, in Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Selections, trans. Christopher Stace (New York: Penguin Putnam), 236-42. 758 Franz Pfeiffer, ed., Deutsche Mystiker Des Vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 2: Hermann Von Fritslar, Nicolaus Von Strassburg, David Von Augsburg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1907), 233. For more discussion on Fritzlar’s work and the Eustace/Job connection, see Ulf Wielandt, "Hiob in Der Alt-Und Mittelhochdeutschen Literatur" (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität zu Freiburg, 1970), 88-90, 96-100.

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aggravate thy misery, vex thy soul, make thy burden intolerable.”759 Yet, Burton concludes that marriage is a viable alternative to the kinds of sexual lusts that lead to melancholy. Burton’s support of marriage, Mark Breitenberg explains, comes from a Protestant “valorization of marriage and family as analogous to the patriarchal state and as primary means to contain and legitimate male and female sexual desire.”760 Burton’s work, influential among many nineteenth and twentieth century authors, represents the use of continued use of Job and his wife for those who wish to make a point about marriage. The nineteenth century text How to Be Happy Though Married quotes this section from Burton, continuing with the allusion to Job’s wife as an irritant to the marital state.761 However, Helen Beecher Long reverses the misery in the early twentieth century, having her character, Mrs. Day, scold her husband for not fixing the water pump: “no woman never had to put up with all I hafter put up with—not even Job’s wife!”762 Summary Art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries portrays Job’s wife as a problematic old woman, while at the same time, the popular literature of the time keeps discussing her role as wife, mostly a “bad wife” who fails to live up to her wifely responsibilities to support her husband. This connection is not coincidental, for

759

Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 273. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, 41-42. 761 E. J. Hardy, How to Be Happy Though Married (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, c. 1900), 15. 762 Helen Beecher Long, Janice Day at Poketown (Cleveland: Goldsmith Publishing, 1914), chap. 5. 760

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in giving Job’s wife aged features and vulgar gestures, the artists communicate the gendered stereotype of Job’s wife as an unfit wife. Sometimes, domestic manuals will also highlight Job’s expected role as supportive husband. The authors of conduct literature throughout Europe lay down theoretic principles for ideal marriage, and overwhelmingly, though not always, Job’s wife falls short. Beginning in the seventeenth century, artistic images also begin to down-play Satan’s company at the dung heap, with evil taking on generic or dramatic demonic forms. Baroque style in general influences many artists, with attention to light and the human condition. Humanist movements sparked individualized portraits of Job, and both Catholic and Protestant Renaissance art was keen to emphasize Job’s relationship to Christ. Job’s sufferings signaled the possibility of ultimate restoration for the individual Christian, and, therefore, Job’s once afflicted flesh radiates with a Christ-like glow, even as Job clasps his hands and looks toward heaven. Even Job’s dung heap, which figured prominently in the Trés Riches Book of Hours for instance, no longer offers a necessary symbol of the transience of life and the need for immediate salvation. This notion of inwardness holds implication for Joban art. With a focus on inwardness comes a disappearance of clear Satanic forms at the dung heap in early sixteenth century art. Furthermore, as noted above, the disappearance, or fading, of Satan in favor of generic forms of evil, changes Job’s wife’s role as part of Satan’s schemes to just another “bad wife.” Late sixteenth and seventeenth century art of

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Job’s wife reflects how authors add Job’s wife to their list of “bad wives” to make arguments about the nature of marriage. Satan’s grotesque image prevalent in medieval art and a Gothic emphasis on Satan as a fleshed entity reminds viewers of the need for salvation. Baroque art does the same, only, through the subtle adjustments of imagery, like Job’s Christ-like pose, or his melancholic demeanor which emphasizes more of an inner struggle. The modern artist William Blake, the subject of the next chapter, carries the notion of Job’s inner struggle to new Romantic and Christological heights. The place of Job’s wife within the interior spaces of Job’s miseries, and within Blake’s system of gender and mythology, raises more questions than it answers. Though, as usual in Christian art, Job’s wife stays by Job’s side throughout the perilous journey.

CHAPTER FIVE: FROM COMPLACENCY TO CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION: JOB AND HIS WIFE IN WILLIAM BLAKE’S ENGRAVINGS

Introduction: Romantic Sublimity and Job One of the most striking characteristics of Baroque art of Job and his wife is the presentation of Job’s wife as a shrew, an old woman with a scowled face and menacing gestures, while Job remains in a Christ-like pensive state. An investigation into domestic conduct manuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals a cultural concern for the marriage of Job and his wife, often using Job’s wife as an example of a bad wife. An intertextual relationship exists between art and literature in the previous chapter. The last chapter also considered how the concept of Satan as an external evil force capable of tempting humanity gives way to a more introspective kind of evil as the eighteenth century emerged. The development affected the way Baroque artists paint Job at the dung heap. Artists remove the grotesque medieval Satan from images of the dunghill in favor of more complex, individualistic, and even skeptical kinds of presentations of evil that reflect a change in ways of thinking about evil and Satan that took root by the 1700s. Satan still remains a key player in the Job story; theologians continue to point to Satan’s presence in the book in the eighteenth century. In a poetic rendition of the book of Job in five books, Daniel Baker maintains Miltonic representation of Satan, as he returns to hell after visiting God at the throne. Belial, one of the angels who

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rebelled against God in Paradise Lost, speaks up and reminds the council that they tempted the first man through his wife.763 So, an agent of the Devil changes Job’s wife’s appearance to “hollow Cheeks, sunk Eyes, and Toothless Mouth,” and whispers to her in her sleep to encourage Job to provoke his God. Then, the gods that Job’s wife worships will provide her with a better, second husband. Job’s wife goes to Job, telling him that “with bold Curses I would satisfy/My just Revenge, and then with Pleasure die.”764 To recall Eve and Adam, Baker adds the image of a serpent which curls around Job’s feet after Job’s wife makes her speech. Job responds, “From GOD come Good and Evil; Both design’d/By different Methods to improve Mankind:/And Both we ought to take with a contented Mind.”765 The sublime design of God, according to Baker’s rendition of Job, is meant to capture and pacify the human mind. As the 1700s unfolded, as James May has pointed out, poets focused on the natural descriptions in Job in order to maintain God’s beautiful and sublime design of nature.766 Even though they considered the poem of Job among the oldest of the Hebrew Bible, they still turned to Job for its representation of Christian morality and God’s just rule of the world. In other words, God’s creation stirs humanity’s faith in its sublimity. 763

33-34.

764

Book 2, Daniel Baker, The History of Job: A Sacred Poem (London: Robert Clavel, 1706),

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 44. 766 James E. May, "Early Eighteenth-Century Paraphrases of the Book of Job," in Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, ed. Donald Charles Mell and Theodore E. D. Braun (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1988). 765

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Eighteenth century writers tend to grapple with one main idea—whether Job’s sufferings represent a historical situation in the past or an ongoing symbol of the suffering of the body politic. William Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses, first written around 1738, represents Job as an allegory of the Jews after the Babylonian exile and Job’s wife acts as a symbol of the exogamous marriages reproved by Nehemiah. Warburton served as Bishop of Gloucester in the mideighteenth century and opposed the Deists. Warburton’s allegorical reading remained controversial, especially when it comes to Job and the idea that Job’s sufferings can apply allegorically as a symbol of the suffering of a people.767 According to Warburton, Satan took possession of Job’s wife so as to spiritually assault him; she is Satan’s agent. More of a concern for Warburton is how Job could marry such an infidel. Warburton concludes that Moses, the “sacred writer,” meant to teach his audience a lesson through Job’s wife to deter marriages to heathens (Book VI, Section II).768 Theologians contemporary to Warburton argued this point. For example, John Garnett critiques Warburton’s assumption of the pagan descent of Job’s wife, noting that even Jewish wives can “utter blasphemy upon occasion.”769 Regardless, Garnett suspects that since the Devil failed to get Job to

767

See, for example, William Worthington, An Essay on the Scheme and Conduct, Procedure and Extent of Man's Redemption . . . To Which Is Annexed a Dissertation on the Design and Argumentation of the Book of Job (London: Edward Cave at St. John's Gate, 1743). 768 William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, 2 vols., vol. 2 (London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1837), 405-08. In this work, Warburton writes to establish Moses’ divinely inspired authorship, against the deists. 769 John Garnett, A Dissertation on the Book of Job: Its Nature, Argument, Age and Author (London: M. Cooper, 1749), 123. After all, Garnett argues, Job’s wife understood Israelite custom that to curse God would lead to suicide.

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curse God to his face, “he laid hold of” his wife, “the next instrument” in his experiment, engaging Job in a “domestic affliction.”770 In a similar way, Charles Peters suggests that Job’s wife would have attempted to lead Job into idolatry if she were in fact a Pagan. Rather, Peters suggests that she is a wicked woman, wishing Job to blaspheme God, but that her presence with God remains sufficient in the end because God reproves Job’s friends but does not mention Job’s wife at the conclusion of the poem.771 One of Warburton’s most serious opponents, Robert Lowth, who served as a Bishop of the Church of England, dates and locates Job in its historical setting, maintaining the historical details of the real Job, his personal affliction, and his innocence. Like many commentators of his time, Lowth believes that the debate between Job and his friends concerns Job’s innocence, rather than theodicy. Lowth contests Warburton’s argument that Job’s wife actually suggests that Job “curse” God because she expresses a Pagan impiety and practice, but opts for the alternative translation which suggests that Job’s wife means for Job to “bless” God and go on living a pious life. She suggests this because she believes that Job will end up dying for his pains and for his piety. Job’s answer to her represents the preservation of his “constancy and moderation,” expressing “himself rightly and properly with regard to

770

Ibid., 124-127. Charles Peters, A Critical Dissertation on the Book of Job, Wherein the Account Given by That Book by the Author of the Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (London: W. Johnston, in St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1757), 51-58. 771

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God’s justice.”772 As a Hebrew scholar, Lowth demonstrates a harmonization of “discrete historical particulars” of Job “with figures of the sublime.”773 A major contribution of Lowth’s Hebrew poetry scholarship comes from his challenging the notion that “sublimity requires conformity to a single standard of diction, of imagery, and of subject.”774 In general, eighteenth century commentators on Job, like Lowth, debate the book’s terrible sublimity of Job’s character and his lack of vindication. Lowth maintains that Job, the true object of the poem, is irreverent of God’s justice and irrationally blames God for moral suffering. God, the omnipotent judge, demonstrates the greatness of the role as Creator to Job and thus provides all of humanity a moral lesson of the beautiful, magnificent, and powerful view of nature. In this view, Job, not God, is the object of question in terms of behavior.775 God can present magnificent terror. That terror transfers to the readers; that their “delight” in reading Job comes when Job is vindicated and thus the readers experience a removal of pain and a moral message to find sublimity in God’s magnificence.776 This stems from Edmund Burke’s notion that sublime “delight,” or

772

Robert Lowth, A Letter to the Right Reverend Author of the the Divine Legation of Moses, Fourth ed. (London: A. Millar and J. Dodsley, 1766), 59-60. 773 Jonathan Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 119. For a discussion on the Warburton/Lowth debate on the nature of Job, see Lamb’s “Chapter Six: The Job Controversy,” pp. 110-127. 774 David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18thCentury England (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 163. 775 Thomas A. Vogler, "Eighteenth-Century Logology and the Book of Job," Religion & Literature 20, no. 3 (1988): 28-29. 776 Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century, 12324.

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aesthetic pleasure, comes when one’s pain is removed through an encounter with the “sublime object.”777 For Burke, the sublime arises from terror, which opens the mind to God’s moralistic message.778 As noted, God remains the sublime object. Job’s afflicted body, surrounded by uncertain and incomprehensible affect, becomes the sublime object for William Blackmore in his Paraphrase on Job, in that Job’s sufferings and ultimate restoration reflect the body politic.779 Since Job, a wealthy man, experiences loss and torturous pain, then releases that in his expressions, only to receive God’s justice in the end, the story provided the Whigs, like Blackmore, with a reason to support a peoples’ common law during the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries.780 Alexander Pope, in Torian fashion, debates Blackmore and questions Job as a human form of the sublime object when that place should be reserved only for the divine; he was also suspect of the political use of Job.781

777

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). 778 For more on the historical context of the sublime, consult Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 779 As argued in James Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 105. Richard Blackmore first published his paraphrase in 1700, but his second edition in 1716 was used by Alexander Pope: Richard Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the Book of Job, 2nd ed. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1716). During the eighteenth century, the literary category of biblical paraphrase stems from sublimity and the desire to render biblical books in verse and poetry for aesthetical purposes: Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England, 104-14. 780 Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists, 104-07. See also, Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century, 132-35. 781 Pope heavily quotes Blackmore in his attempt to de-sublime Job in Alexander Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry: Martinus Scriblerus', ed. Edna Leake Steeves (New York: King's Crown Press, 1952). For more detail see Chapter 10, “’Deformed he lay, disfigur’d’: Pope Reads Blackmore’s Job,” in Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century, 205-25.

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The controversy between Blackmore and Pope becomes part of William Blake’s life when a critic of his 1784 exhibition in the Royal Academy alludes to Pope’s reaction to Blackmore’s over-the-top and strange impressions as an example of the critics’ response to Blake’s work.782 In 1816, during the middle part of Blake’s career, bibliographer Thomas Frognall Didbin remarked that Blake sometimes “reached the sublime; but the sublime and the grotesque seemed, somehow or the other, to be ever amalgamated in his imagination.”783 Romanticism, a vague movement that emphasizes emotional over the rational and a literary and artistic movement against neoclassicism, and sublimity remain linked because the sublime stems from that which is terrifying and obscure. Romantics, such as William Blake, located the sublime within human inspiration and imagination rather than in God and the Devil alone.784 Romanticism maintains ambivalence about good and evil and, therefore, as in the case of William Blake, expresses dissatisfaction with the established church and bourgeois control. If, then, a Romantic could make Job out as one who questions God’s established authority, the book could provide a Romantic model of the hero who

782

G. E. Bentley, Blake Records, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2004), 32. Throughout this chapter, I will refer to Bentley’s work by its shortened form, Blake Records. 783 Blake Records, 327. Although not referring to Blake’s designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the quote can refer to Blake’s engravings for the work in 1797. Young’s Night Thoughts is a modern theodicy, and Young’s Paraphrase of Job recounts similar themes: Lamb, The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century, 77-81.See also Stephen Cornford, ed., Night-Thoughts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Edward Young, Night Thoughts, and a Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job (London: Chiswick Press, 1812). 784 Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 174.

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encounters the terrifying object and stands as an assertive individual in the end.785 This makes God an oppressive opponent, and Satan’s rebellion as a formative moment of liberation. William Blake’s work stands in the midst of this often confusing reversal in which Satan represents a true form of Selfhood and God sequesters human freedom in rigid judgment. In this complex model, Jesus represents the rebellious religious leader who embodies active energy and human freedom as the true God. Romantics saw Satan, as Milton depicts him, as representative of the beginnings of liberation for humanity and a symbol of rebellion against religious authority.786 In his poem, Milton (1804-1810), Blake casts John Milton as his main character, placing him on a spiritual journey that culminates in his confrontation with Satan. Milton realizes that he must both annihilate and embrace his own Satanic selfhood or meld both the physical world and the divine world into his being in order to achieve his full role as prophet. In other words, Blake suggests that Milton, especially in Paradise Lost, created a fragmented reality which kept a division between God and Satan, heaven and hell, and the divine and the human, and so Blake attempts to redeem Milton’s prophetic vision in light of utopian reunification.787 As an example of a response to the popularity of Milton’s Satan in terms of radical political dissonance and Romantic sublimity, Daniel Defoe wrote a treatise on 785

The ultimate vindication of Job by God in the end is problematic for this argument. As Lamb points out, 786 Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 175. 787 For a critical version of this work, see William Blake, Milton, ed. Kay Parkhurst Easson and Roger R. Easson (New York: Random House, 1978).

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the Political History of the Devil in 1726, in which he criticizes Milton’s Paradise Lost, which had reached staggering heights of popularity in the early eighteenth century. Defoe thought Milton engaged in fanciful mythography, portraying the devil in ways that violate scripture and common sense. Defoe’s debt to reason, biblical history, and the experience of the natural world leads him to maintain logical argumentation that the Devil exists and continues to work as a dynamic evil force within human affairs. Defoe consulted Matthew Poole’s commentary on the Bible, used satire to convey his message, and attempted, in the words of R. Michael Bowerman, “to achieve the impossible: to write an interesting, instructive, humorous, yet corrective, orthodox work on the devil which would sell in the marketplace.”788 As for Milton, Defoe criticizes his poetical liberties on hell, making a poetical, yet satirical, account of his own, in which he uses Milton’s style to describe the time in hell between Lucifer’s fall from heaven and the creation of human beings. The frightful, shamed, little devils are horrified at their defeated pride and lament their misery of their damned state. Defoe notes that devils can’t die, because then hell would end. Humans at least have the option to die whereas Satan does not; according to the devils: “The Wretch, whose crimes had shut him out on high,/Could be reveng’d on God himself and die;/Job’s Wife was in the right, and always we/Might end by death all human misery,/Might have it in our choice, to be or not to be.”789

788

R. Michael Bowerman, "Headnote," in The Political History of the Devil, ed. Irving N. Rothman and R. Michael Bowerman (New York: AMS Press, 2003), lxiii. 789 Chapter 3 in Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 32.

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Defoe turns the words of Job’s wife into powerful symbols of human responsibility to God by having devils claim that she was in the right in terms of human will, when in a Romantic context, her words could connote rebellion against God, who, for William Blake, represented the evil tyrant under whose name traditional Christians established “a tyrannical system of reason and external morality.”790 Blake’s view of God was not one of mainstream Protestant Christianity. When John Warton, a rural pastor who writes of his eighteenth century pastoral care situations in Death-bed Scenes and Pastoral Conversations, tells of a young woman named Martha who fell under the unfortunate ruse of a man who wedded her, took her money, told her he was married to another, and abandoned her pregnant, the case of Job naturally comes up. Warton responds to Martha’s situation with acknowledgement of her trials and with assurance that in all things, she must thank God for all that makes her stronger in faith. Warton uses Job’s wife as an example of what not to do: “if Job’s wife could have persuaded herself of this certain truth, that all which comes from God is good, she would have acted otherwise, and her name would not have been so detested throughout all ages as it has been.”791 What happens when Job’s wife actually speaks the truth in terms of the assumption that God might not have good intentions? Unfortunately, William Blake did not directly answer the

790

Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, 179. John Warton, Death-Bed Scenes and Pastoral Conversations, Fourth ed., 3 vols., vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1860), 51-52. 791

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question. However, as the quintessential Romantic artist and poet, Blake goes an entirely different direction in his artistic depictions of Job and his wife.792 William Blake’s Exceptional Take of Job’s Wife Given an overwhelming iconographical tradition that represents Job’s wife as a shrew, and, in light of literary sources that relate her existence in terms of Satan’s interests, many commentators have noted William Blake’s exceptional take on Job’s wife. Blake’s 21-plate series on the Book of Job published in 1826 features Job’s wife in almost every scene. When Anna Jameson (1794-1860), a London author in the late 19th century died, her successor Lady Eastlake took over her art history project, The History of Our Lord As Exemplified in Works of Art. She observes a history of “calumnious treatment” of Job’s wife by “older Art,” and conjectures that Blake knew of this history and sought to vindicate it by “tenderly” depicting the “gentle sympathizing” woman.793 Blake not only demonstrates a clear divergence from the text and from traditional Christian commentaries but also from the dominant early modern iconographical depictions that feature Job seated on a dung heap accompanied by his shrew wife, as evident in the chiaroscuro style of Baroque artists. In fact, one of his earliest biographers, Allan Cunningham (1830), noted how Blake spoke against the “Chiaro-Scuro demons, like the Venetian and Flemish demons whose laboring 792

Audrey Schindler, "One Who Has Bourne Most: The Cri De Coeur of Job's Wife," Australian Biblical Review 54 (2006). 793 Anna Jameson, History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 229-31.

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destroy imaginative power, blocking it with brown shadows; they put the artist in fear and doubt of his own original conception.”794 Blake’s work reflects Romanticism as a reaction to neoclassicism, and it also builds upon his contemporary society, one that witnesses the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. Those two impactful events of Blake’s generation symbolized for him three social ideals: “freedom, equality and brotherly love.”795 When it comes to sentiments of equality and friendship among the sexes, Blake’s generation also witnessed Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).796 Wollstonecraft makes claims of individuality, freedom, and friendship, yet clearly delineates the sexes; women have rights but, in their own sphere, women should civilize men and educate children in moral virtue.797 Michael Ackland claims that “crucial conceptual links between the works of Blake and Wollstonecraft testify to the enduring impact on him of her impassioned call for harmony, equality and true friendship between the sexes.”798 Such friendship, however, has limits in Blake’s own time and place. Blake’s women actively engage his poetry—they do not serve an ornamental function—but they are relegated to power within their own sphere because of supposed sexual differences. Women, at this time, supposedly radiated morality and an emotion toward corporeal tranquility. 794

Cunningham takes this statement of Blake’s as proof that Blake felt insecure about his artistic abilities in light of the Masters. As quoted in Bentley, Blake Records, 647. 795 David Fuller, Blake's Heroic Argument (New York: Croom Helm, 1988), 49. 796 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Second ed. (London: William Godwin, 1792). 797 Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 193-205. 798 Michael Ackland, "The Embattled Sexes: Blake's Debt to Wollstonecraft in the Four Zoas," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly Winter (1982-83): 172.

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Thomas Laqueur labels the desire for equality alongside separate special roles for males and females as “domestic ideology” which “in England at any rate” united Anglicans and Dissenters alike.799 Blake had some exposure to early feminist thought, although it remains unclear as to how much.800 He illustrated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, 1791 and 1796 through a connection with Joseph Johnson, a bookseller.801 Joseph Johnson published Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings and she even stayed at his house on occasion. He held conversations in his home with his liberal friends which included Wollstonecraft. It remains unknown whether Blake actually met her in person.802 His exposure to some of the social leanings of Wollstonecraft could have partly led to his inclusion of Job’s wife throughout the series, noting the importance of her role and her constant companionship for Job. However, a more likely explanation comes from Blake’s poetry and his mythological vocabulary, upon which this chapter will elaborate. In determining how Job and his wife function together in the Job series, Blake’s theology interplays with his social, marital, and economic backgrounds. Why does Blake portray Job and his wife together, side by side, in all of the plates of the series expect two? What does Blake attempt to communicate about Job and his wife’s 799

Laqueur, Making Sex, 204. Magnus Ankarsjö, William Blake and Gender (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 5; 54-59. 801 See Roger Easson and Robert Essick, William Blake: Book Illustrator, vol. 1 (Normal, IL: Illinois State University 1972), 9-12. 802 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, 108-110. See also Ackland, "The Embattled Sexes: Blake's Debt to Wollstonecraft in the Four Zoas." 800

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relationship, and how does their relationship correspond with his overall interpretation of the book of Job? This chapter focuses on such questions, ultimately bringing together numerous aspects of Blake’s work, his theological influences, and his artistic mythology, and iconography, in order to demonstrate how the marriage of Job and his wife functions in the interpretation of Blake’s engraved series. This chapter builds upon the scholarly consensus that, for Blake, Job’s wife functions as Job’s emanation. The word emanation comes from the Latin term emanare, which means “to flow from.” Blake completely sexualizes the concept in his poetry, making an emanation a feminine counterpart to a masculine individual; they are secondary to the individual but necessary for a male/female reunification to an Eden-like state.803 This chapter situates Job and his wife within Blake’s overall message for Job and then examines the nature of emanation in Blake’s overall scheme of gender. Countless interpreters have made claims for pro-feminist Blake and anti-feminist Blake in terms of his view on women because Blake provides enough evidence for both sides. Rather than argue for one side or another, this chapter avoids presenting positive or negative arguments about how Blake thought about women; it mingles Job’s wife in the middle of Blake’s complex imagery of religion and gender. Recent critics on gender in the work of William Blake have begun to explore the complexities of ideology, androgyny, and utopia in Blake’s view of gender.804 This

803

Samuel Foster Damon, "Emanation," in A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), 120-22. 804 Ankarsjö, William Blake and Gender; Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

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chapter builds upon their work, applying it to the Job series and any gendered components of Job and his wife. Blake’s Theological Outlooks In terms of the portrayal of Job in modern art, nothing surpasses the popularity of William Blake’s artistic interpretations of the book of Job. William Blake scholars consider Blake’s series on Job his “greatest triumphs in line engraving.”805 Yet, Blake began engraving a 21-plate series on the Book of Job in 1825 and published the series in 1826 with very little financial success. He only sold a few copies of the series to his friends.806 Blake’s popularity in 20th century culture of the West, however, has catapulted his images of Job into the category of popular culture. Blake made it to number 38 on the BBC's public vote for the 100 Greatest Britons in 2002.807 The Hutchinson Dictionary of Symbols in Art lists Blake’s illustrations of the book of Job as the only example under its “Job” heading. A scholar of Blake’s cultural popularity, Jason Whittaker, contends that Blake’s ability to capture something of the mystical nature of good and evil in esoteric language, without absolute objectivity, continues to engage post-modern imaginations.808 Indeed, Blake scholars have not reached any consensus on the exact meaning of his work. Despite the high level of scholarship

805

G. E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 334. 806 Publishers note, William Blake, Blake's Illustrations for the Book of Job (New York: Dover Publications, 1995). 807 BBC News, "100 Great British Heroes," BBC News, World Edition, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2208532.stm. 808 Jason Whittaker, "From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture," in Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture, ed. Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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surrounding William Blake today, Blake’s own lifetime brought him little success or attention as an artist. William Blake was born in London in 1757. Blake’s parents, who participated in the “Dissenting tradition,” maintained devotional Bible reading and private worship in the home.809 His parents engaged in a synthesized religious life (Blake was soon to follow this synthesis), attending meetings of the New Jerusalem Church or possibly engaging in Muggletonian gatherings in private homes or ale houses. Not much is known about Blake’s childhood religious life, except that Blake learned to reject state church and public displays of pomp and circumstance and personally read the Bible with devotion, expecting to participate in prophecy and vision in his own time.810 Blake himself only experienced three major Church of England rituals— baptism, marriage, and burial—no other evidence of his participation within the established church exists.811 Blake was not theologically trained; he participated in nontraditional forms of Christianity. Blake historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have attempted to uncover various influences on Blake, including Plato, Neoplatonism, Emanuel Swedenborg, the “Dissenters,” Kabbalism, and the Muggletonians.812

809

Bentley, Blake Records, 7-9. Bentley suggests the Dissenting tradition comes from eighteenth century Enthusiasm. He also suggests the tradition might be a form of Baptist. 810 Ibid. 811 J. G. Davies, The Theology of William Blake (London: Archon Books, 1966), 8. 812 Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake, 1.

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With emphasis on prophecy and vision in everyday life, Blake felt comfortable speaking about his religious visions as a child and as an adult. At age four, he saw God at his window; a few years later he experienced a vision of a tree filled with angels while he and his father traveled through the countryside.813 Such visions carried on throughout his life, and he drew many pictures of spirits who came to speak to him (called “Visionary Heads”), including Voltaire and the Scottish patriot William Wallace.814 Blake held a steady, contemplative, life-long relationship with the book of Job, as evidenced throughout Blake’s whole portfolio. Blake entered the Royal Academy in 1779 where he exhibited historical works in the 1780s. He even listed his “historical engraving” of Job in the Academy’s list of works for sale in1793.815 Throughout this time in the Academy, he sketched Ezekiel and Job, who Blake saw as two “biblical and mythical figures from a sublime past who have the power of revelation and who generally stand alone against the world.”816 In his Dissenting conceptualization, the prophetic tradition also spoke against the rationalism of his day.817 Therefore, the theological background of William Blake remains crucial to determining the meanings of his engravings of the book of Job. One of Blake’s greatest influences was the philosopher and spiritualist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Swedenborg’s father, a bishop of the Swedish 813

Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake, 7-21. Blake Records, 368-371. 815 Peter Ackroyd, Blake: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 96. 816 Ibid., 167. 817 Kathleen Raine, The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 23. 814

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Church, raised Emanuel in a devout Christian context. Like Blake, Swedenborg also experienced visions; one such powerful vision came in 1745 which influenced Swedenborg’s decision to stop studying physical science and instead focus on theology.818 From this point onward, the Bible, the Protestant canon anyway, became central to Swedenborg’s study and analysis. Over thirty theological volumes written by Swedenborg followed. Swedenborg visited England around seven times, where he published Heaven and Hell, Earths in the Universe, Last Judgment, New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine, and White Horse of the Apocalypse in 1758. His spiritualization of scripture was met with criticism and claims that his method was nothing more than allegorical. This holds true especially for Germany, where Immanuel Kant published his critical work against Swedenborg, Dreams of a SpiritSeer, in 1766.819 Around 1788, Blake bought Swedenborg’s writings, A Treatise Concerning Heaven and Hell (after which Blake names his artistic work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and The Wisdom of Angels and, subsequently, William and his wife Catherine joined a meeting of over sixty Swedenborg readers and followers in London in 1789.820 The meeting, calling themselves the New Jerusalem Church, adopted thirty-two Swedenborg spiritual propositions, including the following resolutions: “The Old Church, which means all other churches, is dead”; “The Old 818

Harvey F. Bellin and Darrell Ruhl, eds., Blake and Swedenborg: Opposition Is True Friendship (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1985), 5-6. 819 Robert H. Kirven and Robin Larsen, "Emanuel Swedenborg: A Pictorial Biography," in Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision, ed. Robin Larse, et al. (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1988). 820 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, 127.

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Church faith should be abolished”; and “The Second Coming, which has begun, involves the destruction of the Old Church and the formation of the New.”821 Interestingly, one of the propositions excluded the book of Job from the canon, along with Proverbs and Song of Songs, calling them “The other Books, not having the Internal Sense, are not the Word.”822 Michael Stanley notes that Swedenborg addressed the Bible “as an allegorical account of the Journey of the soul itself.”823 By “Internal Sense” of the “Word” Swedenborg and his followers meant the psychodynamic elements present within the Bible that portray Swedenborg’s understanding of the spiritual journey of humankind. The journey proceeded for Swedenborg in the following way: Infancy Period (most Ancient Church), as presented by the traditional Christian notion of “the Fall” in Genesis 2-3 and the assumed universal flood in Genesis 6-9; the Childhood Period (Ancient Church), from the time of Noah to the call of Abram in Genesis 12; the Youth Period, from Abraham to the coming of Jesus; Early Adulthood Period, the Christian church from Jesus Christ until the 18th century. 824 Thus, the book of Job, Proverbs, and Song of Songs did not fit in the scheme.825 821

The entire list can be found in Blake Records, 51-53. See also Robert Hindmarsh, "An Account of the First General Conference of the Members of the New Jerusalem Church," in Blake and Swedenborg: Opposition Is True Friendship, ed. Harvey F. Bellin and Darrell Ruhl (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1985). 822 Blake Records, 51-53. 823 Michael Stanley, ed., Emanuel Swedenborg: Essential Readings (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2003), 23. 824 Ibid., 144-156. 825 The canon approved by Swedenborg was Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, two books of Samuel, two books of Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Revelation.

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Swedenborg did consider Job “a book of the Ancient church” that is “full of correspondences.”826 For Swedenborg, scripture carried “correspondences” which are psychological-spiritual archetypes, outer images that communicate the presence of inner realities and experiences.827 The inner world and the outer world remain intricately connected. The power of the human imagination to create symbols suggests that the human inner arena constantly attempts to connect with the divine. Since Swedenborg considered the Christian protestant canon divinely inspired and holy, even words of the Bible stand as symbols of meaning.828 Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790s) directly stems from Swedenborgian thought. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell exists as “a kind of fictional autobiography” in which Blake both embraces Swedenborg elements and struggles with Swedenborg thought.829 The words of plates 21-22 directly name Blake’s concern for Swedenborg: Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falshoods. And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro' his conceited notions (M 22; E 43).830 826

Samuel M. Warren, ed., A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1974), 99. 827 Harvey F. Bellin and Darrell Ruhl, eds., Blake and Swedenborg, 9. 828 Samuel M. Warren, ed., A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, 95-144. 829 Everett C. Frost, "The Education of the Prophetic Character: Blake's the Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a Primer in Visionary Autography," in Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. Alexander S. Gourlay (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2002), 71. 830 Marriage, plate 21. Unless otherwise indicated, all Blake quotes come from David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1988). Erdman’s edition is abbreviated with “E” followed by the corresponding page number.

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Blake eventually found Swedenborg’s theology just another set of dogmatic disciplines, but his relationship with Swedenborgian thought remains ambivalent. Those who knew Blake noted the influence Swedenborg had on Blake.831 Blake himself called Swedenborg “a divine teacher.”832 Though his Marriage of Heaven and Hell renounces his friendship with Swedenborg theology, Blake also included some overall themes from Swedenborg in his work. At the bottom of plate 20 in Marriage, Blake paints a picture of a serpent or Leviathan, under which he states, “Opposition is True Friendship” (M 20; E 42). This relates to the Swedenborgian theology of the complementary nature of good and evil. This becomes evident when the Angel guide in Marriage later turns out to be Satan. Blake communicates the Swedenborgian sense that “there is a shadow side as well as a light side in every individual.”833 For Blake, shadow and light are complementary partners. Blake did not accept Swedenborg’s doctrine wholeheartedly, but Swedenborg’s influence carried on throughout his entire life’s work. In a psychological treatment of Blake, as a psychological opposition to the theological authorities of his day and age, Brenda Webster suggests that Blake challenges categories of right and wrong in Marriage.834 Certainly, Swedenborg appealed to

831

Blake Records, 292-293; 335-337; 423. Ibid., 423. 833 June Singer, The Unholy Bible: A Psychological Interpretation of William Blake (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970), 151. 834 Brenda S. Webster, Blake's Prophetic Psychology (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1983), 61. Webster applies Freudian Oedipal complex aspects to Blake, suggesting that Blake’s understanding of sexual freedom (his desire for incest), forces guilt upon him, and he reaches a compromise between Christian ideals of self-sacrifice and self-defacing desires. 832

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Blake’s desire for freedom of the human imagination, something he celebrated in America: A Prophecy (1793), in which he poetically renders the 1776 Revolutionary Declaration of Independence. Blake expresses such hope in “A Song of Liberty,” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Look up! Look up! O citizen of London, enlarge/thy countenance! O Jew, leave counting gold!/” (M 25; E 44).835 The poem responds to the French Revolution. Blake rejects the Romantic Imperialism of his day and celebrates the French Revolution with excitement that similar reforms would reach his country.836 Of course, the sentiment concerning Jews in his poem reflects anti-Semitic prejudices. At any rate, normative English citizens, especially clergy, feared “subversion of the English way of life that would result from the revolution in France,” but Blake, as a dissenter, celebrated it as a sign of regeneration.837 This form of Christian freedom of human creativity and thought over and against reason rings true for Blake’s interpretation of Job as well. Blake’s Book of Job William Blake’s large mythical works, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790s), America (1793), and Jerusalem (1804, finished in 1818) hardly attracted any purchasers. His final copy of Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, a series of poetry and engravings of twenty-five pages in four separate books,

835

Blake, "Song of Liberty," in Marriage, Plate 26. See David V. Erdman, The Illuminated

Blake, 123.

836

Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 837 Bernard Glassman, Protean Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in England's Age of Reason (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 134-37.

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100 plates, and Blake’s culminating epic poem, was not published during Blake’s lifetime.838 Needless to say, it was not easy for Blake to secure a wide audience; he was also at the mercy of patrons who could support his ideology and eccentricities. One such patron, Thomas Butts, a steady commissioner of Blake, offered enough work to support Blake and his wife Catherine from 1799-1810. Blake included Job and His Daughters in a Butts’ commission of fifty bible paintings from 1799-1800. Job Confessing His Presumption to God Who Answers Him from the Whirlwind came a few years later (1803-5). Butts then went on to commission a series of nineteen designs of Job in 1805-1806, which Blake and Catherine colored together with water colors.839 After a failed exhibition in 1809, Blake nearly sunk into “total obscurity, neglect and indigency.”840 For ten years afterward, Blake withdrew from the public. Then, in 1818, Blake met John Linnell, a prosperous engraver, fellow Dissenter, and successful dealer with patrons, who became his good friend. Linnell offered Blake some work by commissioning engravings of Job in 1818. The Linnell watercolor set of illustrations for the book of Job are a result, twenty-one full color page designs, similar to Thomas Butts’ earlier commission.841

838

1964).

839

William Hughes, introduction in William Blake, Jerusalem (New York: Barnes & Noble,

Blake Records, 185-195; 287-289. For more discussion, see chap. 23, "The History of the Job Designs, " in Geoffrey Keynes, Blake Studies: Essays on His Life and Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 176-86. 840 Publisher’s note in William Blake, Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), iii. 841 Blake, Blake's Illustrations for the Book of Job.

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Both the Butts and Linnell watercolor sets provided the designs for what was to become Blake’s engravings for the book of Job. By 1821, Blake still experienced financial hardships, so Linnell petitioned the Royal Academy for a donation in recognition of Blake’s work. The donation was the only expression or recognition Blake received from the Academy. The monetary gift was not enough for Blake to live on, so Linnell also suggested that Blake engrave and publish his designs of the book of Job.842 As a designer and engraver, Blake understood that illuminated books could only supplement his income. Joseph Viscomi points out that Blake’s work with illuminated books happened sporadically over twenty years and not regularly throughout his lifetime because adequate space was needed for ink plates, for stacking paper, and spreading prints to dry. The process consisted of drawing page mock-ups and a completed manuscript on paper. In order to print the manuscript, “the text is written on paper, which is then placed face down on the surface of the plate. Rubbing the paper from the back transfers the text in reverse, thereby saving the printmaker the trouble of having to write it backward.”843 This process of transferring the image is called counterproof. The engraver then etches the image into the plate; Blake used copper. Because of the difficulties in transferring the image in its entirety, the engraver reconstructed the image as well. Scholars remain divided on how exactly Blake transferred his images; some say he invented his own technique while others 842

Blake Records, 395. Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 843

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say he actually engraved his plates freehand, writing backwards.844 What remains significant for the Job illustrations is that even the artistic medium and mode of production reveal the artist’s imagination: Such prints had models, the outlines of which were transferred to the plates, but the final prints are neither imitations nor translations. They are recreations in that they were reconceived in terms of visual effects unique to the graphic medium, and as such, they awakened the eye from its lethargy. . . . Blake was unique in producing work at all points of this reconstructed continuum.845 Even in his artistic production, Blake’s work remains mysterious and complex. Bo Lindberg muses, “The restoration of engraving on copper knows one name, Blake, and it died with him.”846 An anonymous author describes a time when he and Blake “were engaged in criticizing his own extravagant, yet occasionally sublime illustrations of the book of Job.”847 Kathleen Raine states that Blake “executed one of the sublime works of the English imagination, his own crowning achievement, the illustrations of the Book of Job.”848 Such sublimity comes from Blake’s reworking his own visual vocabulary for the artistic presentation of a specific theology. Blake intended that his audience progress through the 21 plates in succession. He designed each plate with a central picture surrounded by cryptic images and textual references from both the Old

844

For a detailed discussion concerning Blake’s Job, see Michael Phillips, "The Printing of Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job," Print Quarterly 22, no. 22 (2005). 845 Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 371. 846 Lindberg, William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, 176. 847 Blake Records, 408. It was at this time, according to the anonymous author, that Blake had a vision of Edward the Third. Blake described his appearance and what he was saying while this author watched him sketch Edward the Third. 848 Raine, The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job, 25.

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Testament and the New Testament. Blake adapted textual references for his own purposes; therefore, the following discussion of the series will quote Blake’s adaptations unless otherwise stated. Job Meets Jesus Christ: Blake’s Overall Meaning for Job Blake creates his own symbolic world in which to relay his messages of how Jesus Christ serves to make fallen humanity whole. Blake brings Job through a Christological journey from stultified piety to the law to creative engagement of the world as revealed through Jesus Christ. For Blake, Job engages in an inner struggle with an Old Testament God which results in Job’s transformation from a complacent follower to an imaginative worshiper of the true God found in Jesus Christ. A political message also comes through in Blake’s Job; Job moves “from belief in the divinely transcendent monarch to a religion of divine immanence,” suggests Christopher Rowland, and the move “corresponds with one of Blake’s major political pre-occupations: a challenge to the way in which theology becomes an ideological undergirding for political monarchy.”849 Blake’s Christology remains part of his own Christian mythology, as rendered in his pivotal and most telling work, Jerusalem. Also in Jerusalem, Blake offers his most expansive view of gender as it functions in his poetry. In Jerusalem, Blake depicts the fall of Albion. Albion represents the human race (sometimes just England)

849

Christopher Rowland, "Wheels within Wheels": William Blake and the Ezekiel's Markabah in Text and Image, The Père Marquette Lecture in Theology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2007), 37.

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that will eventually be united with Jesus. In his systematic treatment of Blake’s entire work, Northrop Frye states, “Albion includes, presumably, all the humanity that we know in the world of time and space, thought visualized as a single Titan or giant.”850 Albion’s “fall” happens in Blake’s understanding of Eden, known as “Beulah.” The reason Albion falls remains obscure, but he relapses “from active creative energy to passivity.”851 Due to the fall, Albion is divided into four personas, known as the Zoas, who attempt to awaken Albion. Blake’s symbolism becomes even more complicated because Blake does not explicitly define the four Zoas. Furthermore, the four Zoas each contain a female counterpart, also called an emanation. One of the Zoas is Los, a hero of Imagination; his counterpart is Enitharmon. The other Zoa is Urizen, the epitome of Reason, with his counterpart, Ahania. Another Zoa, Luvah, personifies Emotion, and is accompanied by Vala. Lastly, Tharmas symbolizes Perception and Enion is his counterpart. Jerusalem, a life-long project for Blake, creates an epic conflict between Los and Urizen, namely, between imagination and reason. Urizen hopes to reach “Selfhood,” a state Satan had wanted to reach, and a state he achieved. Satan, an androgynous “fusion of subject and object into an indivisible abstract or spectral world” is also called Spectre.852 Los, imagination, fights for restoration, not “Self-

850

Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 125. 851 Ibid., 126. 852 Ibid., 135.

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hood.” In other words, only human imagination, when embraced by the human race, will bring wholeness. After the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, Albion is reunited with the various personifications of personality to create a whole entity.853 According to Blake’s mythology, the “fallen” nature of humanity is evident in endless battles, wars, human sufferings and bloodshed of any kind. Such is the case when the Four Zoas do not work together for harmony. In the first plate of the Job series (fig. 5.1) the gothic cathedral behind Job and his family, the books on the laps of the parents and the musical instruments hanging in the trees, offer clues to Blake’s understanding of the seemingly serene pastoral portrait of pious devotion. The sleeping sheep seem at peace, but the altar at the bottom, with the phrase, “thus Job did continually,” symbolizes otherwise. Blake included a message “To the Jews” in Jerusalem, stating that Satan “witherd up the Human Form, by laws of sacrifice for sin: Till it became a Mortal Worm: But O! translucent all within” (J 27: 53-56; E 173).854 Blake’s anti-Jewish tone, a prejudice that the Jews maintain rigid law, casts a negative light on Job’s continual sacrifice in the first plate. Job, like the sleeping sheep, will eventually wake-up to the horrors of blood-sacrifice, according to Blake mythology. In plate 2, figure 5.2, Blake quotes 2 Corinthians 3:6 and 1 Corinthians 2:14, thereby presenting a Christian perspective of Job’s spiritual life resting in Swedenborg’s understanding of the development of humanity from the “Ancient

853 854

William Hughes, ed., William Blake, Jerusalem (1964), 33-37. Blake, Jerusalem, plate 27.

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Church.” S. Foster Damon argues that Blake means to depict Job’s rigidity in the Law, which acts as his sole guide. As a result, Job’s life remains unbalanced.855 The same stiff book appears on God’s lap in plate 2 (fig. 6.2) because Blake understood Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of human imagination. God the Father, giver of Law, without Jesus Christ, represents an oppressive force.856 Another clear image of imbalance rests in the instruments hanging in the tree in plate 1 (fig. 5.1). Blake means to make a connection between Job and Psalm 137; similar sentiments in Blake’s water-color drawing of Psalm 137, “By the Waters of Babylon,” exist because the exiles hang their harps on the willow trees refusing to sing their songs for their captives.857 The cross-reference notes alienation and exile— “Job and his family were, so to speak, in exile, alienated from their true good, as symbolized by the unused instruments of their art.”858 Blake’s illustration of “The Hymn of Christ and his Apostles,” the New Testament counterpart to his “By the Waters of Babylon,” depicts Jesus’ disciples singing praises with the accompaniment of musical instruments. The stiffly bound books on the laps of Job and his wife in plate 1 remain in tension with the unused instruments in the tree. This tension resolves itself full-circle in the final illustration, plate 21 (fig. 5.3), when the instruments come down from the tree into the hands of Job’s family. 855

S. Foster Damon, Blake's Job: William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966). 856 As will become apparent in plate 11. Mary Lynn Johnson, "David's Recognition of the Human Face of God in Blake's Designs for the Book of Psalms," in Blake and His Bibles, ed. David V. Erdman (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1990). 857 Lindberg, William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, 196. 858 Harold Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 292-95.

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Figure 5.1. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 3 (Bentley 421.2), "Job and His Family." All William Blake's engraved illustrations of The Book of Job come from the Collection of Robert N. Essick. Copyright (c) 2009 the William Blake Archive. This project is supported in part by a William Blake Archive Reproduction Grant for Graduate Students.

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Figure 5.2. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 4 (Bentley 421.3), "Satan Before the Throne of God."

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Figure 5.3. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 23 (Bentley 421.22), "Job and His Family Restored to Prosperity."

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Job, Humanity, God, and Satan When God appears for the first time in plate 2 (fig. 5.2), God’s face holds a striking similarity to Job’s face. Job and God share similar features, if not identical features. Numerous accounts exist for why God’s face echoes Job’s face. Andrew Wright states that “it is God created by Job in his own image.”859 Jungian psychoanalytical theorists point out that Blake depicts the archetype of the Self in the face of God. According to Jung in his Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, the human psyche contains a deep unconscious level that holds elements common to all humans.860 Those elements, archetypes, manifest differently for different people and become projected outwardly in art, narrative, myth, folklore, and other creative endeavors of humankind. Edward Edinger carries the Jungian archetype of the Self throughout all the plates of Job, claiming that the Job narrative itself is an archetypal story, depicting the ego’s encounter with the Great Personality (God) that results in the perseverance of the ego, its defeat, and its reward with insight into the transpersonal psyche. Edinger maintains that Blake unconsciously meant to communicate the nature of the unconscious human.861 June Singer also reads Blake from a psychological point-of-view, noting that Blake, as he is concerned with the inner spiritual journey of Job, visually depicts God as an archetype of Job’s Self.

859

Andrew Wright, Blake's Job: A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 9. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, vol. 9, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953). 861 Edward F. Edinger, Encounter with the Self: A Jungian Commentary on William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1986). 860

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Accordingly, Blake has an ability to “illuminate the dark and murky regions of the unconscious.”862 Raine describes Blake’s view of Job as “Jungian” in terms of his art anticipating Jungian thought.863 Jung, of course, did not establish his work in psychoanalysis until the early 1900s. Though Jungian theory provides commentators with a wealth of possibilities, it is more likely that Blake adopts Swedenborg’s concept of “correspondences,” which provide an earlier and separate set of ideas that interestingly has overtones in Jung’s Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Both Swedenborg and Jung seek an “innerworld” of the biblical text. Swedenborg argues that “each and all things in nature correspond to spiritual things,”864 so both Satan and God would function for Blake as spiritual correspondences with earthly humanity. Wicksteed suggests that Blake wanted to portray the inward life of Job; according to Blake, one’s inmost being is a reflection of God.865 Blake himself illustrates inner struggle and deep angst over God’s enigmatic nature, loving and gentle and fierce and frightful, in his poetry. His poem The Tyger asks, “When the stars threw down their spears,/And water’d heaven with their tears,/Did he smile his work to see?/ Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” (SIE

862

June Singer, The Unholy Bible: Blake, Jung and the Collective Unconscious (Boston: Sigo Press, 1986), 9. 863 Raine, The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job, 24. 864 Warren, Samuel M., ed. A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, 98-99. 865 Joseph H. Wicksteed, Blake's Vision of the Book of Job (New York: Haskell House, 1971), 51-52.

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42: 17-20; E 24-25).866 In this poem, God remains both beautiful and terrible. “Opposition is True Friendship” provides an important mantra for Blake—God relates to Job in oppositional ways.867 Crabb Robinson, a friend of Blake’s, notes in his diary in 1826 that Blake’s philosophy maintains that humans struggle between human nature and God: His philosophy he repeated—Denying Causation asserting everything to be the work of God or the Devil, That there is a constant falling off from God—Angels becoming Devils [& d del] Every man has a Devil in him and the conflict is eternal between a man’s Self and God.868 For Blake, Eliphaz’s vision (plate 9) held important implications for his understanding of evil. Robinson noted that at times Blake considered “all things as alike the work of God,” and that even error exists in heaven. When Crabb Robinson asked Blake about the existence of evil, Blake quotes Eliphaz and answers, “Do you think there is any purity in Gods eyes—the angels in heaven are no more so than we. ‘he chargeth his Angels with folly.’”869 Blake understood God’s personality incorporating Satan, that “Satan acts both as a contrary voice within God’s personality” and as God’s agent on earth.870 The sleeping sheep-dog at Job’s feet in the plates 1 and 2 (figs. 5.1 and 5.2) recalls that Job is still “asleep” to this struggle between himself and God. At the top of the page in plate 2, Blake anticipates Job’s awakening to the full capacity of his

866

Songs of Experience, Plate 42. Raine, The Human Face of God, 53. 868 Blake Records, 435. 869 Blake Records, 422. Blake also quotes this in Jerusalem, Plate 49. 870 Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 164. 867

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human imagination, for when that occurs, Job will understand God’s true purpose for living as noted on the plate: “We shall awake up in thy Likeness.” Blake’s Satan then arrives in plate 3 (fig. 5.4), delighting in the scene of the destruction of Job’s children. He sits on Roman pillars and extends his bat-wings. The bat-wings, as part of Blake’s visual vocabulary, appear in plate 10 of Marriage. In Marriage, the Devil instructs two others on either side of him with the Proverbs of Hell. His proverbs function as a critical commentary, not only of Swedenborg, but also on a popular book in England during his time, Johann Kasper Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man (1741-1801).871 Lavater, a Swiss minister and physiognomist who suggested that a person’s physical characteristics reflected moral character, melded theology with psychological maxims in Aphorisms. Blake made annotations in his personal copy of Aphorisms.872 Lavater attempted to classify humankind into moral categories—aphorism 533 says, “This discovery of momentary folly, symptoms of which assail the wisest and the best, has thrown a great consolatory light on my inquiries into man’s moral nature; by this the theorist is enable to assign to each class and each individual its own peculiar fit of vice or folly.”873

871

Blake engraved a design by his friend Henry Fuseli for the J.C. Lavater. Aphorisms on Man: translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Casper Lavater, citizen of Zuric.

London: printed for J. Johnson, 1789. Blake Records, 54. 872

Blake Records, 473, 447. As quoted in Jason Allen Snart, The Torn Book: Unreading William Blake's Marginalia (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 164. 873

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Figure 5.4. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 5 (Bentley 421.4) "Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan."

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Blake responds in the margin of his copy of Aphorisms that “man is the ark of God . . . . If thou seekest by human policy to guide this ark remember Uzzah[,] II Sam VI.”874 Upon transporting the ark from the hands of the Philistines to Jerusalem, the oxen stumbled and Uzzah touched the ark to steady it, which rendered him dead, according to law (Num 4:15). Blake denies any system Lavater might set out before him; through his rendition of proverbs, Blake denies any set of morals, but instead insists that humankind has forgotten that “all deities reside in the human breast.”875 The archetypal bat-winged Satan also appears in a watercolor of biblical subjects commissioned by Butts around 1795, “Satan Exulting over Eve.”876 A tradition of the Dissenters speaks of Satan entering Eve’s womb at his outcast from heaven and impregnating her with Cain. Cain, a child of Reason, resulted, whereas Adam fathered Abel, a spiritual man.877 A woman lies in a similar position in plate 3 (fig. 5.4) of the Job illustrations as Eve does in the watercolor. One of the young women lies with a tambourine at her feet and her left hand rests on a lyre in plate 3 as well. Jean Hagstrum suggests that the woman signifies Job’s neglect of art; Job instead is living in “bookish piety.”878 The image relates to both the bat-winged Satan in the proverbs of hell and the Satan with Eve. As with Eve, Satan, the epitome of Reason, has taken over, and spiritual imagination collapses under the weight. 874

As quoted in Snart, The Torn Book, 163. Blake, Marriage, Plate 11. See also Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 51. 876 William Blake, 1795. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California. 877 Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, 10-11. 878 Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 132. 875

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Blake reverses the narrative order in plates 3 and 4; the destruction of goods and property, plate 3 (Job 1:13-17) comes before the destruction of Job and his wife’s children, plate 4 (1:18-19). In plate 4, three messengers run to tell Job and his wife the news. The sheep still serenely graze, but Druid-like columns take the place of the tree that was in plate 1.879 During Blake’s time, a cultural religious reawakening took place, and the Druids, as ancient people occupying Britain before Christians, became part of the popular religious imagination. Popular Druidian literature circulated around London during this time. “The Ancient Order of the Druids” established themselves in an ale house near Blake’s Poland Street London home.880 The Druids represent an Ancient Church (as Swedenborg would argue), in which “the Victim nightly howls beneath the Druids knife” (J 83: 12; E 241).881 In Jerusalem, Druid tradition represents Satan’s chaos; the Druids supposedly sacrificed humans to purge the sin of war.882 The Druid pillars then come after Satan’s destruction of Job and his wife’s children to signify that imagination has been cut off.883 Job’s wife even raises her hands above her head in plate 4 as if holding a knife to carry on a sacrifice; she communicates the previous sacrifice of her children at Satan’s hands. To Blake, the Druid temples do not represent a cruel, heathen, religion, but pre-Christian religion in Ancient Britain.884 Christ has yet to appear to Job. The

879

Wright, Blake’s Job: A Commentary, 17; Wicksteed, Blake’s Vision of the Book of Job, 65. Ackroyd, Blake: A Biography, 99-100. 881 Blake, Jerusalem, plate 83. 882 Blake, Jerusalem, plate 98. 883 Raine, The Human Face of God, 64-65. 884 Lindberg, William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, 220-221. 880

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Gothic Church and the tree of God’s protection disappear after this scene, replaced with Druid temple structures in plate 5. Devils reach up from the fire and grasp Job’s body in plate 11 (fig. 5.5) to indicate Job’s words from King James Version of the Bible, “My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest” (Job 30:17) and “My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat” (Job 30:30). Separated from his wife, Job remains in total isolation. From a Jungian perspective, dreams reveal one’s particular manifestation of the archetypes. Job’s ego encounters the Self and a struggle ensues. The process of encounter remains a personal journey for Job.885 Job’s isolation bolsters his terror. Plate 11 represents the nadir of Job’s inflictions.886 The terror Blake finds in “Jehovah,” the name Blake gives to the God of the Old Testament and the Father of Jesus Christ, culminates in plate 11. The cloven hoofed, snake-wrapped being with the face of Job points to law with his right hand and points down to the fire that licks Job’s body. Is he Satan or God? The creature is both.887 Blake quotes 2 Corinthians 11:14-15 above the image: “Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light & his Ministers into Ministers of Righteousness.” Yet, Blake also quotes 2 Thessalonians 2:4 at the very base of the plate: “Who

885

Edinger, Encounter with the Self, 11-12. Morton D. Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 244. 887 Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 165. 886

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opposeth & exalteth himself above all that is called God, or is worshipped.” Cormack suggests the afflicter is Satan disguised as God.888

Figure 5.5. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 13 (Bentley 421.12) "Job's Evil Dreams."

888

Cormack, William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, 49. Damon says something similar, in that “the God of Justice is only Satan, masquerading as an angel of light” (Blake’s Job, 32).

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When one reads from top to bottom on the plate, one sees that Job discovers that Satan and God as Blake understands him engage in the same work. Job accuses God for his affliction: “Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions” (7:14). The words on the plate read: Why do you persecute me as God & are not satisfied with my flesh. Oh that my words were printed in a Book that they were graven with an iron pen & lead in the rock for ever For I know that my Redeemer liveth & that he shall stand in the latter days upon the Earth & after my skin destroy thou This body yet in my flesh shall I see God whom I shall see for Myself and mine Eyes shall behold & not Another tho consumed be my wrought Image (from Job 19:22-27). Blake holds to the traditional Christian understanding of this passage. Around 1741, Handel composed his Messiah in London, which includes the soprano aria, “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth.”889 For Blake, the redeemer comes in the form of Jesus Christ, who appears to Job and his wife in plate 17. Swedenborg’s theology maintained that Jesus Christ was himself God, the true God who should be worshipped.890 Jehovah, or Jesus Christ’s Father, delves out both good and evil. A. D. Nuttall writes, “Blake hated rationalist theologians of the eighteenth century who liked to point out that God could be inferred from the reasonable;” Blake thought of God in Job as “the source of all that is frighteningly, magnificently unintelligible.”891 Jehovah comes across as the “truly hellish figure” of rationality, as seen in plate 11 (fig. 5.5). Nuttall goes so far as to say that Blake means 889

John Tobin, Handel's 'Messiah': A Critical Account of the Manuscript Sources and Printed Editions (London: Cassell, 1969). 890 This Christology is clearly laid out in Samuel Warren, ed. A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. 891 A.D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 236.

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to draw a parallel between Job and Jesus Christ, that both fall subject to Jehovah at some point; Jesus’ prayer to God in the Garden of Gethsemane as “a moment of weak deference to the cruel Father.”892 In plate 11 (fig. 5.5), God hovers above Job in a like manner of Blake’s painting “Creation of Adam.”893 In “Creation of Adam,” a worm wraps around Adam, a symbol of the “mortal worm” as Job states in 25:6, “how much less a mortal, who is a maggot, and a human being, who is a worm!” The serpent symbolizes “an earthbound, cold-blooded and often venomous form of life imprisoned in its own cycle of death and rebirth.”894 In rendering God in plate 11 like his Elohim in “Creation of Adam,” Blake makes a visual connection between the creator God and Job’s material world, showing that Job struggles, not so much with God, but with God’s multiplicity. Both good and evil reside in God, just as both good and evil reside in humanity.895 Such ambiguity and frightful double-edged archetypes are central to Blake.896 In plate 13 (fig. 5.6), his depiction of the answer from the whirlwind, Blake quotes Psalm 104:3: “Who maketh the Clouds his Chariot & walketh on the Wings of the Wind.” The wind in this engraving becomes so strong it bends over the trees at the base of the engraving. Blake interprets a traditional rendition of God for Christianity. Blake’s God in the whirlwind recalls Michelangelo’s creation of Adam 892

Ibid., 237. William Blake, “Elohim Creating Adam,” Tate Gallery, London. 894 Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, 135. 895 Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 165-166. 896 See the discussion of this painting in Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 25-27. 893

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on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel from several decades earlier. The God who answers Job in the whirlwind is the creator God, Elohim. Blake, in his affinity to incorporate Michelangelo’s themes in this work, utterly transforms Michelangelo’s themes to comment on Christian orthodoxies.897

Figure 5.6. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 15 (Bentley 421.14) "The Lord Answering Job out of the Whirlwind,” image.

897

As in Blake’s rendition of Cain and Abel, as discussed by Jenijoy La Belle, "Blake's Visions and Re-Visions of Michelangelo," in Blake in His Time, ed. Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), 31.

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In comparing Michelangelo’s creation of Adam with Blake’s creation of Adam, insinuations of the complexities of human relations with the divine emerge. For one thing, Blake’s rendition of the creation of Adam, as opposed to Michelangelo’s, maintains physical proximity, radiating darker shades of divine mystery. Also, a symbol of mortality, a worm, wraps around Adam. As Connolly states about Blake’s adaptation of Michelangelo’s bodily forms, Blake exaggerates Michelangelo “to the point of physical impossibility, the limitations and pain of existence in a mortal body.”898 Job’s friends hide their faces from the presence of God, who appears in a whirlwind (Job 38:1) and asks, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge” (Job 38:2). But Job and his wife look at God face-to-face; Blake makes a commentary on biblical injunctions avoiding one’s gaze directly upon God’s face, the understanding from the law his friends hold. Using Paul’s letters to the Corinthians elsewhere in the series, Blake has Job do what Paul states, “Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside” (NRSV, 2 Cor 3:12-13). In Blake’s Christian interpretation, the Law of Moses as the “old covenant” continues to veil the spiritual nature of humanity in moral law-codes. Paul continues: “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a 898

Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 60.

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mirror, are being transformed into the same image…”(NRSV, 2 Cor 3:17-18). This engraving recalls Blake’s own words: “We are all coexistent with God—Members of the Divine Body—And partakers of the divine nature.”899 Seeing God’s face, a reflection of his, provides Job an answer to his suffering—Job remains connected to the divine, and, to the created world in the next plate, plate 14 (fig. 6.7), which depicts God’s display of creation. During his apprenticeship with the engraver James Basire (1772-1779), Blake was sent to sketch Westminster Abbey tombs. Samuel Palmer remembers: “In Westminster Abbey were his earliest and most sacred recollections. I asked him how he would like to paint on glass, for the great west window, his ‘Sons of God shouting for Joy,’ from his designs in the Job. He said, after a pause, ‘I could do it!’ kindling at the thought.”900 In his Linnell and Butts watercolors, Blake only painted four “sons.” The “sons of God” relay Blake’s “Four Zoas”—Tharmas, the flesh; Urizen, the intellect; Luvah, the emotions; and Los, the creative spirit.901 In plate 14, however, Blake adds more arms, to communicate an infinite chorus line. Blake changed this to communicate “the infinite life beyond our life,” or, an infinite world of spiritual imagination. 902

899

Blake Records, 696. Blake Records, 17. 901 As denoted in Damon, Blake’s Job, 38. 902 Wicksteed, Blake’s Vision of the Book of Job, 102. 900

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Figure 5.7. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 16 (Bentley 421.15) "When the Morning Stars Sang Together."

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The six days of creation that rest on each side of the engraving and contain their appropriate quotes from Genesis 1 also speak to this infinite world. Again, the seventh day of creation can be found in the infinities of the human imagination. The leviathan in the sea and the worm at the bottom relate to the essence of the universe marked with light and dark, good and evil, mortality and immortality. The same form of worm wraps around Adam in “God (Elohim) Creating Adam.” The earthly body, created from the dust of the ground, juxtaposes with the spiritual heavenly realm and the “sweet influences” of Plaides and Orion (Job 38:31). The figures under God’s left and right arms represent Apollo, the sun-god, riding his chariot of four horses to “widen the realm of light,” and the moon goddess Diana, riding the dragon of emotion.903 In this picture, Blake brings complementary elements together. Apollo represents intellect that drives the horses of instruction; Diana, the heart, guides the dragon of passion. The picture of the universe depicts a balance between wisdom and experience, between knowledge and emotion.904 The figures represent two aspects of an “incomprehensible whole,” as “two aspects of life are shown in their right relationship one with another; it is the moment of harmony and unitive vision.”905 Job, his wife, and his friends sit in a cave provided by God’s cloud barrier. Jungian commentators find a wealth of imagery to interpret in this image. Raine 903

Milton Klonsky, William Blake: The Seer and His Visions (New York: Harmony Books,

1977), 137. 904

Damon, Blake’s Job, 38. George Wingfield Digby, Symbol and Image in William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 71-72. 905

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suggests an influence of the cave allegory found in Plato’s Republic. Job had seen nothing more than figures projected on a wall of the cave until the revelation of Divine Imagination.906 Lindberg also notes the visual presence of a “Christianplatonic lecture on the separation of the natural world from the spiritual and its reunion with it.”907 For Blake, Elohim created the world, Jehovah gave the law, and Jesus Christ frees humanity from sin and entrapment of that law.908 The image in plate 15 (fig. 5.8) again reveals Blake’s struggle with spiritualism and materialism, reason and imagination. God (Elohim), like Urizen (reason/intellect/law), points down as creator of the material world. Blake’s gesture for God in plate 15 (fig. 5.8) echoes his Urizen pose from his 1794 watercolor “Ancient of Days,” now located in the British Museum, London. Human imagination breaks the bonds of materialism and its result, war. Milton Percival remarks, “This fifteenth illustration is perhaps the finest of all Blake’s comments on the philosophy of materialism.”909 Both the Leviathan and Behemoth symbolize “brutal energy” and “misused power.”910 In Jerusalem, for instance, Blake describes Behemoth and Leviathan as products of the Spectre (Satan) who “reads the Voids Between Stars; among the arches of Albions Tomb sublime Rolling the Sea in rocky paths! Forming Leviathan And Behemoth; the War by Sea enormous & the War By Land astounding: erecting 906

Raine, The Human Face of God, 224. Lindberg, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job, 285. 908 Ibid., 285-290. 909 Milton O. Percival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 290. 910 John Beer, Blake's Visionary Universe (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1969), 272. 907

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pillars in the deepest Hell” (J 91: 36-40; E 251). Blake quotes Job 40:15, 19; 41: 34, to make this point. “Of Behemoth he saith, He is the chief of the ways of God/ Of Leviathan he saith, He is King over all the Children of Pride.” Los (imagination and creativity) breaks those pyramids and pillars of Spectre with his hammer in Jerusalem, “driving down the pyramids of pride.” In a similar way, Satan falls in the next plate of the Job series. Satan represents the “monstrous and perverted energies like Behemoth and Leviathan.”911

Figure 5.8. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 17 (Bentley 421.16) "Behemoth and Leviathan," image. 911

Beer, Blake’s Visionary Universe, 272.

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Northrop Frye, in his essay on Blake’s reading of Job, offers some reflections on Blake’s theological move at the point in which he interpolates Satan’s fall from the throne of God in plate 16 (fig. 5.9) and brings in Christ in plate 17 (fig. 5.10), both events not present within the biblical book of Job. Blake depicts the results of turning the correct way toward salvation. Frye suggests that the God who reveals things out the whirlwind is not the same God Blake depicts with Satan in the opening scenes. In the beginning, Blake regards Job as a sinner for adopting a system of thought that holds to reason and ceremony. God (as creator of such a rational system of thought) actually exists as a reflection of Job’s inner self. The whirlwind opens a portal in which Job and his wife learn of the fully realized realm of human imagination.912 This new world overthrows the state of abusive powers and the results of rational knowledge. Thus, Satan falls in plate 16, an act not present in the book of Job, and Jesus appears in plate 17 (fig. 5.10).

912

Northrop Frye, "Blake's Reading of the Book of Job," in William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1969).

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Figure 5.9. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 18 (Bentley 421.17) "The Fall of Satan."

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Blake originally titled plate 17 (fig. 5.10) “I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eyes seeth thee” (Job 42:5) but later publishers called it “The Vision of Christ.”913 The friends once again hide their faces, although the middle one comically attempts a peek. Blake depicts Christ’s blessing upon Job and his wife. Job’s wife looks up and smiles. The main point of this culminating picture of blessing remains the unity of Father and Son and Spirit and Human (John 10: “I & my Father are One”). In order to drive this point home, Blake quotes extensively from John 14 as the angel at the bottom looks upon the words: “He that seen me hath seen my Father” and “Believe me that I am in the Father & the Father in me.” Blake says to Crabb Robinson, “He [Christ] is the only God . . . And so am I and so are you.”914 This is why Blake quotes 1 John 3:2, “we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him for we shall see him as He Is.” Regarding Blake, W.B. Yeats poetically observes, “He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live—lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old times.”915 Christ’s body is illuminated in this plate to represent heightened senses and transformed vision.916 The vision changes Job’s perception of reality. In his Laocoön engraving, Blake writes that “God himself The Divine Body” and “Jesus we are his 913

Paley, The Traveller in the Evening, 251. Blake Records, 696. 915 W. B. Yeats, "William Blake and the Imagination," in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2007), 85. 916 Connelly, William Blake and the Body, 205. 914

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Members” because Blake means to communicate a Christian concept that “all are like the Saviour, the imagination, the divine body.”917

Figure 5.10. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 19 (Bentley 421.18) "The Vision of Christ." 917

Ibid., 206.

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Blake moves back to the biblical book in the design of plate 18, Job praying

for his friends. From Job 40: “Also the Lord accepted Job; And my Servant Job shall pray for you; And the Lord turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his Friends.” As Matthew 5 states, “pray for them that despitefully use you.” Blake offers a Christian interpretation here; as David Bindman notes, “Job offers them the Christian mercy of forgiveness. Christ is no longer separate from Job.”918 Wicksteed points out that Blake omits the textual note that God ordered Job’s friends to “take seven bulls and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering” (Job 42:8). Blake does not mean to depict this scene as a burnt offering, for, in plate 21 (fig. 5.3), Blake states, “In burnt Offerings for Sin thou hast had no Pleasure.”919 Blake does not include an animal on the altar, but the flame represents the accusation that haunted the relationship with Job and his friends, and “Blake evokes the ambiguity of friendship.”920 The image also relates to Blake’s Noah and the Rainbow watercolor painting.921 The likeness between Noah and Job comes from Blake’s understanding of the Old Testament Patriarchs and their relation to the Christian church. In the plate “To the Jews” in Jerusalem, Blake writes, Ye are united O ye Inhabitants of Earth in One Religion. The Religion of Jesus: the most Ancient, the Eternal: & the Everlasting Gospel . . . . 918

David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 212. Instead, notes Christopher Rowland, Blake means to reinterpret Temple sacrifice in terms of community and friendship: Rowland, "Wheels within Wheels": William Blake and the Ezekiel's Markabah in Text and Image, 34. 920 Jeanne Moskal, "Friendship and Forgiveness in Blake's Illustrations to Job," South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (1990): 26. 921 As noted by Archibald G. B. Russell, The Engravings of William Blake (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968). Also known as “The Covenant,” watercolor painting, c. 1803-05, in Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 919

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Your Ancestors derived their origin from Abraham, Heber, Shem, and Noah who were Druids: as the Druid Temples (which are the Patriarchal Pillars & Oak Groves) over the whole Earth witness to this day (J 27; E 171). Blake associates both Job and Noah with the Druids of the Old Testament, those who worshiped a pre-existent Christ as part of the Ancient Church.922 Therefore, in the next plate, plate 19, the tall Druidic structure that was behind Job’s wife and Job in plate 4 now lies in ruins. Job and his wife sit upon the tree root instead of the Druid seat. In plate 20 (fig. 5.11), Job’s daughters surround him in a structure that resembles a church or sanctuary. Job refers to works of art to tell his story instead of text; “Blake has made Job an artist.”923 Harold Fisch calls this plate “the strangest of the illustrations,” the one that “stands at the greatest possible distance from the text of the biblical book.”924 In the lower margin rests a harp and a lyre. Bo Lindberg argues that Blake knew of the first century text, Testament of Job, but no record exists to support Blake’s exposure to such traditions. And, Blake could not have read T. Job, since it was published in 1833.925 Since Job, in T. Job, gives his daughters musical instruments at the hour of his death in order that they might sing hymns (T. Job 52), a

922

Lindberg, William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job, 221. Lindberg, William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job, 342. 924 Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study, 315. One could argue, however, that the vision of Christ in Plate 17 acts as the most distant from the text of the biblical book of Job, especially in its Christological content. 925 In A. Mai’s ten-volume Scriptorum veterum nova collection a Vaticanis codicibus edita published in 1833. See Russell P. Spittler, "The Testament of Job: A History of Research and Interpretation," in Studies on the Testament of Job, ed. Michael A. Knibb and Pieter W. van der Horst, Society for New Testament Studies, Monograph Series (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 923

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vague connection between Blake and Joban textual traditions exists. However, Blake’s concern for musical instruments here stems from his overall message for Job.

Figure 5.11. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 22 (Bentley 421.21) "Job and His Daughters."

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The notes from Psalm 139 on plate 20 suggest a unity of heaven and hell: “If I ascend up into Heaven thou art there/If I make my bed in hell behold Thou art there.” Job’s values have changed from material to spiritual, as indicated in the quotation, “How precious are thy thoughts unto me O God/how great is the sum of them.” Though the biblical text accounts for Job’s restored fortune, Blake chooses to portray his own version of the daughters’ inheritance (Job 42:15)—his art and his vision of God.926 In the biblical account, Job’s named daughters, Jemimah, Keziah, and Kerenhappuch, contrast with his unnamed sons (Job 42:13-17). Job gives his daughters their inheritance alongside their brothers. An ambiguous reversal of norms takes place in the epilogue.927 As an avid Bible reader, Blake could have noted such a unique aspect of the book. And, as a Dissenter, Blake would recognize societal deviance. Blake’s rational for depicting Job’s daughters, according to Raine, comes from Blake’s sense of imagination: “Societies that give too high a place to rational thought necessarily undervalue woman, who is man’s initiator into the world of Beulah [utopian Eden], a world of feeling and gateway to the world of the Imagination.”928 As Blake sees it, Job discovers a renewed theological outlook, one that reunites the sexes in a utopian vision; Job’s originally “fallen” world becomes redeemed through the spiritual image. 926

La Belle, Words Graven with an Iron Pen, 546. The instruments at the bottom of the engraving also indicate a connection with T. Job. In chap. 52, Job gives his daughters musical instruments at the moment of his death so that they might sign hymns upon his death. A clear connection between Blake and T. Job remains unsubstantiated, due to T. Job’s publishing date. See the discussion on page 36. 927 See Morrow, "Toxic Religion and the Daughters of Job." 928 Raine, The Human Face of God, 255.

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In his drawing of Laocoön,929 Blake exclaims, “Art is the Tree of Life” and “Christianity is Art.”930 His Laocoön functions as a comment on Blake’s distaste for neoclassicism, as he renames the sculpture and thus interprets it as God, along with God’s sons Adam and Satan, wrestling with two serpents.931 The words scattered about the image, however, present Blake’s unique style of “testing the boundary,” as Irene Chayes states, of rational viewing.932 Blake also inscribes around Laocoön that “morality is the weapon of empire”; a real Christian exercises artistic abilities: “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: The Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.”933 Job imparts his “inheritance” to his daughters, the appreciation of art as a Christian family. The final plate provides a culmination of the artistic abilities of Job’s family. As noted earlier, plate 21 (fig. 5.3) serves as a counterpart to plate 1 (fig. 5.2). Job and his wife stand, surrounded by their seven sons and three daughters. The instruments no longer hang in the tree. The sun and the moon have switched places. The altar is inscribed with a quote from Hebrews 10:6, “In burnt Offerings for Sin 929

Blake sketched Laocon during his time in the Royal Academy in 1815 but later reinterpreted and engraved it by surrounding it with marginalia. It seems a personal enterprise for Blake to do so, as only two copies survive and it seems none was sold during his lifetime. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, 427. 930 As pointed out by Wright, who states, "That the story of Job has been made into art is cardinally important in view of Blake’s often iterated view of the primacy of art as a theological fact" (p. 49). The first part of this phrase includes the words “Science is the Tree of Death,” because Blake opposed materialistic science. See Frederick Burwick, "Blake's Laocoon and Job; or, on the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry," in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, ed. Frederick Burwick and Jürgen Klein (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996). 931 Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks, Discovery Series (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 36. 932 Irene H. Chayes, "Words in Pictures. Testing the Boundary: Inscriptions by William Blake," Word & Image 7, no. 2 (1991). 933 As quoted in Bentley, The Stranger From Paradise, 426-427.

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thou hast had no Pleasure.” The spiritual pleasure comes in artistic expression, to sing the apocalyptic song from Revelation 15:3, “Great & Marvellous are thy Works Lord God Almighty/Just & True are they Ways O thou King of Saints.” Job plays the harp, a symbol of the ancient British and Celtic Bardic traditions. Blake understood the ancient Bardic system to contain ancient truths, long forgotten and re-revealed.934 The Bard calls to the “Youth of delight,” to “come hither, and see the opening morn, image of truth new born” (SIE 54 2-3; E 31). Blake sees Job’s responsibility to impart his revealed truths to his children. This is not unlike Blake towards the end of his life, when a group of young men, calling themselves “The Ancients,” gathered around Blake, who they deemed “The Interpreter.” Blake passed on his wisdom of visions to the young men. He spent the last years of his life (1818-1827) boasting in the presence of energetic youth eager to learn of his spiritual, ideological, mythological, and artistic genius. They talked about Christian art and “the divine gift of Art and Letters, and of spiritual vision and inspiration,”935 the same content Job and his family celebrate in plate 21. One of the Ancients recalls his first meeting with Blake: “The copper of the first plate—‘Thus did Job continually’—was lying on the table where he had been working at it. How lovely it looked by the lamplight, strained through the tissue paper.”936 Blake’s thirty-five year relationship with the book of Job thus ends with an autobiographical comment on Blake’s specific Christianity. Gilchrist states, “The 934

Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise, 327. Ibid., 407. 936 Blake Records, 391. 935

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eyes of some of the old men in his Job, recall his own.”937 Inscriptions Blake made on the first and last plates of Job, that he later erased, sum up his intended message: Prayer to God is the Study of Imaginative Art Praise to God is the Exercise of Imaginative Art938 Job and His Wife in Blake’s Job Series Lodowicke Muggleton (1609-1698), a London tailor, began a Protestant movement in 1651; the group known as the Muggletonians gathered with Muggleton and his fellow prophet John Reeve to discuss their theology, which was extremely opposed to philosophical reason. Some biographers have lightly associated Blake’s parents with the Muggletonians, at least claiming they attended a meeting.939 E. P. Thompson goes further than most Blake scholars to associate the ideas of Muggleton with Blake, at least in terms of the London antinomianistic scene of the 1690s. The Muggletonians believed in oppositions, such as God/Nature, Faith/Reason, and good seed/bad seed. After the Fall, Satan implanted himself into Eve’s womb when she gave birth to Cain. But, Seth was the son of Adam who was the son of God. In other words, this Two Seeds doctrine made humanity into the bearers of both evil reason and good faith.940 For example, to demonstrate that no other spirit than the devil gives witches their powers, and the evil of the seed of reason, which comes from Satan, as

937

Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, 358. G. E. Bentley, ed., Blake Books Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 195. 939 G. E. Bentley, Jr. refutes this claim in Blake Records, xxxii fn, and David Erdman dismisses it as well: David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, Revised ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 142, fn. 57. 940 E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: The New Press, 1993), 70-76. 938

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opposed to the seed of faith that comes from God as manifested in Jesus Christ, Muggleton suggests that Job’s wife embodied “the spirit of unclean reason” because through her Satan “tempted Job to curse God and die.”941 Thompson does not set out to prove any direct Muggletonian influence on Blake, but he does point out that “at certain points Blake’s vocabulary has a markedly Muggletonian accent.”942 Blake shares a vocabulary with many different Christian movements besides the Church of England that surfaced in London during his time. Given that Blake himself pits reason against imaginative faith in his Job series, it would follow that Blake could maintain an adversarial position for Job’s wife. Blake does not focus on Job’s wife beyond her role as a wife to her husband. The previous section analyzing Blake’s overall message for Job has already revealed some of Blake’s ideas about the marriage of Job and his wife in terms of a Utopian vision of reunification of man and his emanation. First, a consistent visual separation exists between Job’s friends and Job’s wife, with his friends often cut-off from seeing things that Job and his wife can see. For instance, in the whirlwind illustration on plate 13 (fig. 5.6), Job and his wife look at God with prayerful hands while his friends prostrate with their heads to the ground. Also, when Satan falls in plate 16 (fig. 5.9), Job and his wife sit on one side while the flames of judgment separate Job’s friends to the other side. Finally, like the whirlwind illustration, only Job and his wife receive the blessing from Jesus in plate 17 (fig. 5.10), and only Job and his wife gaze directly 941

Lodowick Muggleton, "A True Interpretation of the Witch of Endor," in The Works of John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton (London: Joseph and Isaac Frost, 1831), Chap. XVI, 69. 942 Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, 86.

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upon the deity. Furthermore, Job and his wife share similar facial expressions and Job’s wife remains by his side in every plate but two, Job’s evil dreams (plate 11) and Job sharing his vision with his daughters (plate 20). The most telling sign of the transformation of both Job and his wife come in plate 16 (fig. 5.9), the “Fall of Satan,” in which two figures accompany Satan in the flames of judgment. The two figures represent the shedding of Job and his wife from their old system of thought, which leads to their embracing Christ in plate 17 (fig. 5.10). The closest Blake gets to traditional iconography of Job on the dung heap comes in plate 7 (fig. 5.12), in which Blake includes Job’s words in response to his wife: “What! Shall we receive Good at the hand of God & shall we not also receive Evil” (2:10). He does not, however, indicate that Job’s wife speaks to him. Rather, she stands behind Job and exhibits a traditional mourning or distress gesture as the friends enter the scene. Even when Blake depicts Satan afflicting Job in the previous plate, plate 6 (fig. 5.13), he includes a sorrowful picture of Job’s wife. Blake imagined Satan as “a classic spirit, such as he appeared to him of Uz, with some of his original splendour about him.”943 The body of Satan in fig. 6.13, with its scaly genitals and haloed head, speaks to divine origins and hermaphrodite profanity of the Spectre. Job’s wife at Job’s feet signals a complete bodily line, symbolic of their continuity. A hermaphrodite, for Blake, is “a sterile fusion of the physical male and

943

Blake Records, 651.

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female,” but the “androgyne transcends divisions to become a spiritual and psychic ideal.”944

Fig. 5.12. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 9 (Bentley 421.8) "Job's Comforters."

944

Diane Long Hoeveler, Romantic Androgyny: The Women Within (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990).

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Figure 5.13. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 8 (Bentley 421.7) "Satan Smiting Job with Boils," image.

Some commentators suggest that Job and his wife reflect the real marriage of William and Catherine Blake. An early biographer of Blake, Alexander Gilchrist, notes parallels with Job and his wife and Blake and his wife Catherine: “To friends who remember Blake in Fountain Court [1821-27], those calm, patriarchal figures of Job and his Wife in the artist’s own designs, still recall the two, as they used to sit together in that humble room.”945 Blake taught Catherine how to read, write, and help him in his trade. Gilchrist also adds, “Not only was she wont to echo what he said, to 945

Blake Records, 322.

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talk as he talked, on religion and other matters—this may be accounted for by the fact that he had educated her; but she, too, learned to have visions.”946 Catherine remained the one person privy to Blake’s artistic process and she even produced her own art work alongside Blake.947 Catherine’s support seems harmonious in this view, and one that Job’s wife seems to mirror in the illustrations, but feminist Blake scholars point out the possibility of masochistic “pious snippets” from authors propagating patriarchal marital assumptions of the passive wife and active husband.948 Anne Mellor sees the Blake marriage in terms of a “subservient wife in a patriarchal marriage.”949 She goes on to suggest that a mutual interdependence of the sexes in Blake’s work “should not obscure the fact that, in Blake’s metaphoric system, the masculine is both logically and physically prior to the feminine.”950 Increasing Enlightenment notions among the urban middle classes influencing Blake and those who comment on his marriage include an expected “emotional compatibility within marriage and cherished domesticity as an ideal that was

946

Ibid., 321. Catherine Blake produced Verso: A Man’s Head and Other Drawings, c. 1805, found at the Tate Gallery (Britian), including Agnes and a head of William Blake as a young man. While it is true that Catherine knew of Blake’s artistic process, Robert Essick also notes the wives of Blake’s major commissioners and the impact they may have had on Blake’s view of gender, especially when one of his commissioners chose Catherine Watson’s engravings over those of Blake. See Robert N. Essick, "William Blake's "Female Will" And Its Biographical Context," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 31, no. 4 (1991). 948 Shirley Dent and Jason Whittaker, Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 124. 949 Anne K. Mellor, "Blake's Portrayal of Women," Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly Winter (1982-83): 154. 950 Ibid, 153. 947

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fundamental to social order.”951 Thus, when Henry Crabb Robinson describes Mrs. Blake in 1852, he does so as the woman “to make him happy,” as if “she had been formed by him Indeed” with “an implicit reverence of her husband . . . . like the first Wife Eve worshipped God in her Husband.”952 Thus assigning Catherine Blake to the domestic role of making her husband happy, Robinson offers an example of such domestic ideology. Yet, such an ideology does not exist in its purest form, especially since William Blake worked from within his home. Industrial production as a mode of creation began to develop in his society during the 1790s. Blake himself critiqued industrial forms of organization that squelch the imagination of its subservient.953 For Blake, Jesus, the “Poetic Genius” inspires humans to use their imaginations to transcend the fallen world.954 The established church, however, is a human-made institution, one that extols “Jehovah,” the law-giver. Blake did not set out to create his own system of gender, but in creating his own point of view about the world, his gendered viewpoint emerges as a consequence. Blake did not ascribe to accepted social systems, or, he worked outside such systems, especially when it came to the established church: Blake denounces the discipline and coerciveness indicative of “state religion and the organized church, and to the industrial mode of production

951

Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 40. 952 Blake Records, 699. 953 Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, 120. 954 Jesus also acts as an agent in the creation of women because Jesus needs women in order to exist: David Fallon, "'She Cuts His Heart out at His Side': Blake, Christianity and Political Virtue," in Blake and Conflict, ed. Sarah Haggarty and Jon Mee (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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emerging so catastrophically in Blake’s own lifetime.”955 In Blake’s “Circle of Destiny,” which Job exemplifies, God intended coexistence in liberty of the human imagination. The Fall, however, destroyed that unity and Albion becomes part of the material world, a shadow of the whole self. Rigid systems become a result, oversimplified parts of the everyday world in which male and female opposition become reinforced by social codes. Through Jesus, humans find forgiveness of others and a realization of one’s infinite capacities of the eternal self. Jesus saves not the world, but saves from the world.956 Above all, Blake plays with contraries.957 As Albert Roe notes, Blake uses aspects of feminine and masculine in both traditional and nontraditional ways. In a non-traditional sense, “every person in this world has both masculine and feminine aspects of personality, not peculiar to the two sexes as we think of them, but mingled in each,” but “man may fall by turning away from the active imaginative life, so may woman through denying her dependence upon man and seeking to dominate him.”958 Feminine need for domination is the dreaded “Female Will.” But, Roe goes on to say that Blake does not imply that there are no jealous and materialistic men and no magnanimous and imaginative women. The dominance of Female Will,

955

Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, 119. Kathleen Raine, Blake and the New Age (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979). 957 For a psycho-social investigation into Blake’s sexual contradictions that argues for Blake’s denial of female sexuality in Jerusalem, see Brenda Webster, "Blake, Women, and Sexuality," in New Casebooks: William Blake, ed. David Punter (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Brenda Webster, "Blake, Sex and Women Revisited," in Women Reading William Blake, ed. Helen P. Bruder (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 958 Albert Roe, "Blake's Symbolism," in Sparks of Fire: Blake in a New Age, ed. James Bogan and Fred Gross (Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1982), 79-80. 956

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which is the besetting sin of life in our world, is the pursuit of vain ends and the disregarding of visionary life.959 Through exploring the challenging concepts of Female Will and Emanation, this final section will give further insight into Blake’s system of gender as found in his art and poetry and how that system applies to Job and his wife. Job’s Wife as Job’s Emanation In his biography of Blake, Gilchrist comments on the women in the last three plates of the series (see figs. 5.3 and 5.11): In the last three designs, I would specially direct attention to the exquisite beauty of the female figures. Nothing proves more thoroughly how free was the spiritualism of Blake’s art from any ascetic tinge. These women are given to us no less noble in body than in soul, large-eyed, and large-armed also; such as a man may love with all his life.960 All the angels in the margins of the series are female as well. Job becomes free to be “more open to the feminine influences” because Blake recognizes “woman as the feminine principle, embodiment of the soul, as the Muse or Emanation of man.”961 Turning toward Blake’s mythology rather than his marriage or personal acquaintances, Kathleen Raine suggests that Blake means to signify Job’s wife as Job’s “emanation” or “feminine counterpart.” She does not elaborate further on Job’s

959 960

333.

961

Ibid., 80. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880), Raine, The Human Face of God, 252.

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wife’s exact function as emanation, although she compares Job with Albion and Job’s wife with Jerusalem, Albion’s emanation.962 Ankarsjö maintains that the sexes must work together to bring about Blake’s utopian sense of reunion of male and female. Eden, as a state of spiritual utopia for Blake, takes place when humanity embraces its unifying divine nature.963 In the meantime, Blake’s Four Zoas and Jerusalem take place within the world of fallen existence. Therefore, the sexes are not equal. The sexualized image makes sense in a utopian, apocalyptic concept, as wholeness restored means harmony between the sexes.964 The watercolor painting of Adam and Eve clothed by the Angel of Divine Presence provides a visual presentation of Blake’s gendered metaphors (fig. 5.14). The Angel of Divine Presence is Satan himself, the creator of the body, the law, and the one who clothes Adam and Eve in order to hide their sexual bodies.965 Blake labels him so in plate 2 of the Job series at the top of the page (fig. 5.2). The Angel of the Divine Presence, and all that he represents, hinders Adam and Eve from reuniting and entering paradise. When Albion and Jerusalem embrace in plate 99 of Jerusalem, they do so in the midst of ascending flames because they symbolize the destruction of

962

Raine, The Human Face of God, 78. Ankarsjö, William Blake and Gender, 158-190. 964 See Magnus Ankarsjö, who states that “Jerusalem being equally strong, the two characters at the end of the poem are thus reunited in togetherness, making them the most successful representation of gender equality in the whole Blake canon” (William Blake and Gender, 162)., 965 Samuel Foster Damon and Morris Eaves, "Angel," in A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England). 963

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the divided Self and the completion of the whole, and thus reverse Adam and Eve’s separation.966

Figure 5.14. William Blake, “The Angel of the Divine Presence Covering Adam and Eve.” Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, c. 1803. Image from and reproduction by permission of the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

966

David V. Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), 378.

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Albion and Jerusalem are a helpful pair in the Blake corpus for understanding Blake’s portrayal of Job and his wife. For Blake, Albion represents Everyman as does Job.967 Furthermore, Blake’s Jerusalem encompasses his life-long personal epic mythology and is his most complete poem. As noted earlier, the Four Zoas each have their own feminine counterparts. Albion becomes whole once again when England, otherwise called Brittannia, another female personification like Jerusalem (Blake has Brittannia function differently in various different plates but she often coincides with Jerusalem), enters Albion’s bosom.968 Visually, Blake connects Jerusalem to Job’s wife. Jerusalem, the female counterpart of Albion, raises her hands in plate 92 of Jerusalem in a similar fashion to that of Job’s wife in plate 7 (fig. 5.12), with elbows to their sides and both palms facing up.969 Jerusalem sits on the ground and laments over the heads of the fallen four Zoas with raised hands and a cocked head. Isaiah 3:25-6 is a possible influence for Blake: “Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her [Jerusalem’s] gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground” (E 371). Druid structures in the background look similar to those in the Job illustrations. Like Jerusalem for Albion, Job’s wife provides Job his counterpart, the one who mourns and shares in his experiences. Does such sharing make her equal to Job?

967

Raine, The Human Face of God, 78. Morton D. Paley, ed., William Blake's Jerusalem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 290-93. 969 Erdman, The Illuminated Blake, 371. 968

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Emanations hold a secondary function in a fallen world. Though emanations can identify with both genders, Blake considered emanations in terms of wives for husbands. Like his wife Catherine, they inspire the creative capacities of their husbands. 970 Damon agrees that Job’s wife “is part of him, his inspiration, his feminine aspect (which Blake elsewhere called an Emanation), who shares his errors.”971 Sharing error, however, is one component of emanation for Blake, for Job and his wife represent a whole. In Mellor’s assessment of Blake’s poetry, the female characters remain dependent on the male characters. If they do not depend on their male characters, then their autonomy ends in disaster. The notion of “Female Will,” which she defines as “egoistic selfhood,” rests at the heart of Mellor’s claim. Male characters have real, intelligent bodies, but “emanations,” as Mellor suggests, are “divided from and intended to be finally reabsorbed into the male.”972 Yet, sexual division does not exist when an emanation is absorbed into the male; neither does she have a separate will after that point: “In Eternity they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (J 30 [34]: 15; E 176). For Blake, a problem exists in a separate “Female Will.” The “Female Will” naturally turns against her consort in selfishness and jealousy, as part of the fallen world: “The Feminine separates from the Masculine & both from Man, Ceasing to be His Emanations, Life to Themselves assuming! And while they circumscribe his Brain, & while they circumscribe His Heart, & while they circumscribe his Loins!” (J 970

Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 175-80. Damon, Blake’s Job, 3. 972 Mellor, "Blake's Portrayal of Women," 148, 51. 971

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90: 1-4; E 249). Meanwhile, the male remains a rational being in need of imaginative and artistic vision. In order to reunite with Jerusalem, Albion annihilates his Selfhood, and like Jesus Christ, sacrifices his Selfhood (J 96; E 375). In other words, “When the Individual appropriates Universality He divides into Male & Female: & when the Male & Female, Appropriate Individuality, they become an Eternal Death” (J 90: 52-54; E 250). Both the “Selfhood of the Male and the Female Will wage ‘war’ on humanity” and, according to Rachel Billigheimer, Blake’s “sublime vision is achieved by self-sacrifice through love and forgiveness.”973 In Jerusalem, Los, Blake’s character of Imagination, states that humanity cannot fully become itself without a unification of both male and female: “For Man cannot unite with Man but by their Emanations Which stand both Male & Female at the Gates of each Humanity” (J 88:10-11; E 246). Common for his time, Blake uses the term “Man” and “Brotherhood,” in the generic sense, and it hasn’t escaped scholars to note the limits of Blake’s genderless utopia in the midst of gendered language.974 At any rate, Enitharmon, Los’ emanation, laments in plate 87 that “in Eden our loves were the same/here they are opposite” (J 87:16; E 246). The Spectre, the reasoning power of man that frames moral law and causes human division, knows that “the Man who respects Woman shall be despised by Woman” (J 88:37). Ankarsjö maintains that utopia, reaching another Eden, remained central to Blake’s portrayal of

973

Rachel V. Billigheimer, "Conflict and Conquests: Creation, Emanation and the Female in William Blake's Mythology," Modern Language Studies 30, no. 1 (2000): 116. 974 Nicolas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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gender: “Blake tries to show the exigency of movement and active male-female cooperation through the symbolic interaction of his male and female characters.”975 The key to Ankarsjö’s understanding of gender in Blake’s work is that Blake insisted that the sexes cooperate and work together to reach pure harmony among the sexes. Discord and gender conjunction exist in a fallen world. A popular yet apocryphal story from Blake’s life offers a sense of Blake’s own utopian Eden vision. Mr. Butts called upon Blake and Catherine in the garden of their summer home in Lambeth one afternoon. He found them sitting naked in the garden reciting words from Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Come in!” cries Blake, “it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!”976 Although the story of Blake and Catherine nude in the garden hoping to regain a form of Eden-like innocence did not take place, the story helps illustrate the gendered issues involved in utopian visions, which, in its very least, associates with pleasure and passion rather than with denial of the flesh, order, and discipline. Blake maintains a hierarchal binary of male/female in his poetry because that binary reflects the reality of his historical location; whether he succeeds in deconstructing or subverting the binary remains debatable.977 The feminine aspects of his main characters, their emanations, remain central to Blake’s creation of the pleasurable and desirable utopian vision beyond the world of reality. Blake states himself that in his 975

Ankarsjö, William Blake and Gender, 36. Blake Records, xxvi-xxvii. For a feminist discussion of this story, see Tracy Chevalier, "Peeking over the Garden Wall," in Women Reading William Blake, ed. Helen P. Bruder (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 977 Some critics claim that Blake’s “Female Will” reflects misogynist stereotypes, while others claim that Blake means to transcend gendered hierarchy through his vision of utopian liberation. 976

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vision, “Humanity is far above/sexual organization” (J 79:73-4; E 236). In Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake, Nicholas Williams argues that Blake not only seeks to mentally or imaginatively depict change in some ideological sense, but also that his use of utopia meant to face a “notion of the social determination of reality with a desire for meaningful liberational change.”978 Williams cautions the reader against reducing Blake’s utopia to mere ideology rather than grounding it in real-world consequences of power dynamics and genuine interest in transformation. Blake, then, observes the inequality of gender relations in the eighteenth century, and, like Wollstonecraft, means to take part in the liberation of women through his portrayal of a utopian liberation of the body.979 A contrary point to Williams is that the androgynous body of liberation in Blake’s poetry always has the female body absorb into the male body, which seems to cancel the female independence while sustaining the male identity.980 Furthermore, as part of his culture, Blake uses sexually differentiated language that cannot sustain an androgynous ideal.981 Gender in utopia is complex. In order for one to create a utopian vision of what is good, an implicit comparison must be made with what is bad. In other words, Blake’s utopia of gender reveals a tension between desire and absence, between imaginary conceptualization of the sexes and actual societal standards. The entire idea 978

Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. Ibid., 70-71. 980 Essick, "William Blake's "Female Will" And Its Biographical Context," 616-17. 981 Kathleen Middleton Murphy, "'All the Lovely Sex': Blake and the Woman Question," in Sparks of Fire: Blake in a New Age, ed. James Bogan and Fred Goss (Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1982). Middleton Murphy distinguishes between “what the concepts imply and what (or how) the language says” (p. 275). 979

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of utopia in Blake’s poetry holds together opposing viewpoints in the same way that, implicitly, his utopian fiction playfully negotiates gender difference. 982 In the very least, gender is unstable: Los asks, “When Souls mingle & join thro all the Fibres of Brotherhood/Can there be any secret joy on Earth greater than this?” (J 88: 14-15; E 246), after which Enitharmon responds, “This is Womans World . . . A triple Female Tabernacle for Moral Law I weave/That he who loves Jesus may loathe terrified Female love/Till God himself become a Male subservient to the Female” (J 88:16-21; E 247). Enitharmon sits at her loom and sings while Los, aware of both Female love and jealousy, wields his hammer, until Jesus appears to Albion as the Good Shepherd demonstrating that humanity cannot exist without Albion’s denying his Selfhood.983 Albion throws himself in the furnaces of affliction, and then Albion unites with all male and female as he stands before Jesus (J 96:27-43; E 256). Finally, it is important to note that among all the interactions between Albion and Jerusalem, Blake’s sense of Christianity remains central. Blake’s unique view of Christianity remains central for Job and his wife as well. Malcolm Cormack, for instance, relates Job’s reclining on his wife in plate 7 (fig. 5.13) to Michelangelo’s

982

The concept of playful negotiations , though not applied to Blake’s work, can be found in Lee Cullen Khanna, "Utopian Exchanges: Negotiating Difference in Utopia," in Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing, ed. Nicole Pohl and Brenda Tooley (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 17. 983 The gendered images of the furnace and the loom provides Essick with another example of a male/primary and female/secondary association in Blake; Blake cannot be separated from his cultural constructs, especially in terms of the gender divisions in the household: Essick, "William Blake's "Female Will" And Its Biographical Context," 619.

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Pietà.984 Job’s head rests on her right side, like Jesus’ head rests on his mother Mary’s right side. In this light, Blake holds to the tradition of Job as a type of Christ, or a Prefiguratio Christi. Blake notes Job’s example of the endurance of the human spirit through his incorporation of James. James 5:11 says, “Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful” (NRSV). Thus, Job remains an example of patient suffering. To continue with the Pieta image, then, Job’s wife would thus relate to Mary, the mother of Jesus. The Virgin Mary also appeared to Blake as a “visionary head.”985 In plate 8, Job’s wife moves to Job’s right side and his friends move to his left. Job laments the day of his birth (Job 3) with his hands raised above his head. His friends and wife hide their faces in mournful sorrow, in what Jean Hagstrum calls “Urizenic grief.”986 The thistles found at the bottom right of plate 6 have now overgrown on the ground in plate 8. The thistles provide a semiotic connection between Albion’s brokenness and Job’s despair. When Albion falls in Jerusalem, his children lament around him similar in position to Job’s friends. As stated, “His Giant beauty and perfection fallen into dust: Till from within his witherd breast grown

984

Malcolm Cormack, William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1997), 39. 985 Blake Records, 360. 986 Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter, 133.

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narrow with his woes: The corn is turn’d to thistles & the apples into poison” (J 19; E 164).987 In plate 10 (fig. 5.15), Job’s wife stays on Job’s right side, while his friends accuse him, despite Wright’s observation that “She is in a state of despair less remediable because her faith is more superficial than Job’s. Her tears are those of self-pity, for she thinks the friends may be right.”988 Wright suggests this because Job’s wife sits on the ground instead of kneeling. Similarly, James Smetham comments, “Then, again, Job kneels, and the six scornful hands of his friends are leveled against his expanded Neptunian breast like spears, as he proclaims his integrity; and worse than this, the fearful hissing whisper of the over-tempted wife of his bosom rises to his ear, bidding him to curse God and die.”989 No visual sign indicates, however, that Job’s wife accepts the words of Job’s friends, for Job’s wife’s right hand gestures that of confusion in plate 10.990 And, if she corresponds with Jerusalem, one could hear the words of Jerusalem coming from Job’s wife in light of the moralization and accusation of human nature and sin: “Jerusalem then stretch’d her hand toward the Moon and spoke: Why should Punishment Weave the Veil with Iron Wheels of War When Forgiveness might it Weave with Wings of Cherubim?” (J 22: 34-35; E 168).

987

Erdman, The Illuminated Blake, 298. Wright, Blake’s Job: A Commentary, 29. 989 James Smetham, reprinted from London Quarterly Review, Jan. 1869, in Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, 348. 990 The gesture of the friends, a three-fold pointing, appears in plate 93 of Jerusalem, and represent accusation of sin. See Erdman, The Illuminated Blake, 372. 988

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Fig. 5.15. William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job, object 12 (Bentley 421.11) "Job Rebuked by His Friends," image.

In plate 16 (fig. 5.9), the two figures that fall with Satan could represent Job’s two accompanying spirits from hell. Wicksteed notes that Job and his wife’s faces appear in Satan’s flames in plate 2 and suggests that the two figures in Satan’s flame in this case represent Job and his wife’s “evil selves as they have been bodied forth into a permanent form, making it possible to cast them out for ever…”991 The casting out of the two spirits from hell becomes a final and necessary step, a Last Judgment for Job and his female emanation, so that the two angels of heaven can fully take

991

Wicksteed, Blake’s Vision of the Book of Job, 107.

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over. In similar fashion, Albion throws himself into the flames of affliction in order that humanity becomes united and Jesus can appear (J 96: 35-43). Summary Blake’s deviation from an artistic norm for Job and his wife at the dung heap becomes even more defined in comparison to Herbert Granville Fell’s illustration of Job and his wife from 1896, seventy years after the creation of Blake’s Job illustrations (fig. 5.16). With the art nouveau tradition sweeping the country at the turn of the twentieth century, British book illustrator H. Granville Fell offers his version of a common theme—the reproval of a wife who turns her arm away from Job, similar in form to Job’s wife’s retreating right arm on the sculpture at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Fell decorates Job’s wife in a highly ornate Oriental fashion. Makdisi suggests that Blake remains radically different in his refusal to “dabble in recognizably Orientalist themes or motifs” which were common in his time, considering Britain’s imperial project and colonial rule.992 The comparison serves as another example of Blake’s counter-cultural mindset, which helps to explain why he transcends a very common artistic representation of Job’s wife as a shrew.

992

Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, 209. One of the best definitions of Orientalism comes from Chung Hyun Kyung: “Orientalism is a form of cultural imperialism, manufactured inside the minds of Westerners” (p. 136): Kyung, "Your Comfort Vs. My Death."

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Figure 6.16. Herbert Granville Fell, “Job Reproveth His Wife,” in The Book of Job With Designs by Herbert Granville Fell and an Introduction by Joseph Jacobs (London, J. M. Dent; New York, Dodd/Mead, 1896). Photo: Katherine Low.

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Blake introduces another level of gendered complexity in his artistic forms for Job and his wife. He diverges from traditional iconography displayed by Granville Fell (fig. 6.16) and many others who continue images of Job on the ground and Job’s wife standing over him making gestures of disapproval. With obvious visual divergence comes complex gendered meanings for Job and his wife in Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job (1826). Blake’s system of gender in his art and poetry identifies with sexual division and seeks to abolish that division in terms of a sublime utopian ideal. His androgynous, unified body in the end of Jerusalem leaves questions of how to achieve gender liberation in a social reality that maintains gendered difference. Such questions linger even today. Blake’s view of gender does not exist outside of his Christian conceptualizations. In Blake’s view, becoming a true Christian takes place when an individual embarks on a journey of the denial the individual which ultimately leads to the open embracing of liberation. In the Job series, this meant that Job and his wife trade-in the books of pious law for the instruments of true Christian expression in art and imagination. In apocalyptic fashion, Blake’s Job bridges a divide between heaven and earth. Blake’s Job pictures a peaceful harmony between male and female in an ideal world which only Blake can create.

CONCLUSION This study has emphasized the valuable places of meanings that reside within readers and their communities, especially in the realm of cultural constructs of gender and biblical interpretation. Cultural ideologies of gender shape the way people have read Job and his wife. This is why cultural studies advances reception history of the Bible; cultural artifacts, including, but not limited to, literature all serve to represent the Bible in culturally defined ways. Biblical interpreters can learn a great deal about how their own cultural ideas about gender shape their exegetical work of biblical texts by understanding how gender has shaped cultural traditions and biblical interpretations of the past. Furthermore, those engaged in cultural and gender studies benefit from turning their attention to biblical studies because religion and the interpretation of sacred texts consistently inform culture and politics. Textual ruptures in the biblical text cause waves of conjectures and expansions. In turn, those conjectures and expansions inspire one to revist the biblical text to explore the richness therein. T. Job expands on Job’s wife, Sitidos, just as early Latin church fathers elaborate on a wife’s tempting speech to her husband, symbolic of unorthodox transmissions throughout their society. When SHS depicts Job’s wife whipping him with words, the symbolic nature of deviant speech brings forth a cultural ideology of the complexity of women and words. In Job 2:9, as part of a male-oriented society, Job’s wife speaks to her husband, and that fact alone requires one to seriously assess the power of gendered speech, not only in Job, but in the entire biblical corpus. 359

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Heather McKay has already pointed out that interruptive speech of women in biblical narratives disrupts normal operations of power.993 Taking her assessment a step further, a reception history study of Job and his wife reveals the ways readers use biblical married couples to broker their power claims. And, in turn, one might reassess some of the religious meanings of marriage and society in biblical times and beyond. Another broader implication of this study allows for analysis of other biblical couples in terms of gender, such as Noah and his wife. Readers take seriously the fissures of a wife’s unnamedness, as evident in early receptions of Job and his wife. Continued analysis of the biblical afterlives of unnamed wives in terms of how readers understand gender roles within marriage remains promising for the future. For instance, when gender theorists and biblical scholars investigate why biblical unnamed women receive names in post-biblical traditions, and the cultural significance of those names, they gain both insight into the functions of the biblical character and the cultures that engage them. A further implication of this study is how the body marks gendered performance. Satan’s grotesque shapes in the Middle Ages serve to confuse that which should be normal in society. On the other hand, Job and his wife in early Christian art serve an overall marital ideal, with proper gender roles in their place. When Baroque artists place Job’s body on the dung heap with a gesture that reflects

993

Heather A. McKay, "She Said to Him, He Said to Her: Power Talk in the Bible or Foucault Listens at the Keyhole," Biblical Theology Bulletin 28, no. 2 (1998).

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images of Jesus they priviledge his male body while his wife stands akimbo in scowling defiance. The shift from displaying the wife’s proper code of conduct in early Christianity to displaying her inappropriate behavior in early modern art evidences the way in which fluid social constructs of gender impress themselves upon the body. The ways authors differentiate between spiritual and material when it comes to Job and his wife also provide evidence for how the body figures prominently in religio-political discourses. One overall observation about the impact of the marriage of Job and his wife is that authors and artists connect marriage, religion, and politics. Early Christianity, as it establishes itself as an institution in wider Greco-Roman society, uplifts the biblical couple as exemplary of a wife’s subservient and modest nature and a husband’s strength and control. Although alternative forms of relationships existed within early Christian society, such virtues for biblical predecessors remained important for Christianity as an established institution. In chapter four, early modern authors engage biblical marriage as a way to uphold political virtues. In other words, gender order reflects political order in a way that reinforces established social hierarchies through prescribed masculine and feminine behaviors. Those who uphold hegemonic masculinity in favor of heterosexual hierarchal marriage suppresses not only the single woman or “bad” wife, but the cuckold husband as well. The authors of such marital instruction engage masculine norms and practices most valuable for maintaining political dominance; during a time of political and religious reformation, they use marriage as a way to maintain

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authority in their society. Therefore, when Blake engages his system of gender for his interpretation of Job, his alternative form of Christian theology holds no sway in his contemporary society. His non-traditional view of Christianity and deviance from the established Church of England demonstrates how engrained some ideals of marriage remain in society. When it comes to marriage, religion, and politics, this study also informs contemporary debates on marriage in current American culture. As evident in a reception history of Job and his wife, societies of the West have consistently negotiated what gendered performances remain important for them in marital relationships. Marriage, then, becomes more about power relations than heterosexual desire. This becomes evident when Christians make claims about how marriage should function in the political realm. Examples come from the early modern domestic manuals that exemplify the marriage of Job and his wife as incorrect reflections of political structures, or, from medieval concerns that a biblical wife’s speech reflects the oral traditions of “pagans.” Marital ideals, for biblical couples and beyond, remain intricately linked to the fluxuating cultural negoations of power, class, religion, and gender.

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