Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England 9780812296563

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Early Modern Histories of Time

Early Modern Histories of Time The Periodizations of Sixteenth-­and Seventeenth-­Century ­England

Edited by Kristen Poole and Owen Williams

Published in Cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Poole, Kristen, editor. | Williams, Owen, 1970– editor. Title: Early modern histories of time : the periodizations of sixteenth- and   seventeenth-century England / edited by Kristen Poole and Owen Williams. Description: First edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania   Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017140 | ISBN 9780812251524 (hardcover : alk. paper) |   ISBN 0812251520 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Periodization. |   English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. |   History—Periodization—History—16th century. | History—Periodization—   History—17th century. | Great Britain—History—16th century—   Periodization. | Great Britain—History—17th century—Periodization. Classification: LCC PR414 .E38 2019 | DDC 820.9/0030722—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017140

Contents

Introduction 1 Kristen Poole and Owen Williams PER IODIZ ATION IN HISTOR IOGR A PH Y A ND LITER A RY STUDIES: A N OV ERV IEW

Chapter 1. Periodizing the Early Modern: The Historian’s View Tim Harris Chapter 2. Time Bound­aries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies Nigel Smith

21

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PA RT I. R ELIGION

Chapter 3. How Early Modern Church Historians Defined Periods in History Euan Cameron

55

Chapter 4. Periodization and the Secular Ethan H. Shagan

72

Chapter 5. Trans-­Reformation En­glish Literary History James Simpson

88

PA RT II. M ATER I A LIT Y

Chapter 6. Time and Place in Shakespeare’s Stratford-­upon-­Avon Kate Giles

105

vi C o nt ents

Chapter 7. Much Ado About Ruffs: Laundry Time in Feminist Counter-­Archives Natasha Korda

124

PA RT III. POETICS

Chapter 8. The Period Concept and Seventeenth-­Century Poetry Gordon Teskey

145

Chapter 9. Love Poetry and Periodization Julianne Werlin

163

PA RT I V. SH A K ESPE A R E

Chapter 10. Shakespeare, Period Douglas Bruster

181

Chapter 11. Periodic Shakespeare Julia Reinhard Lupton

198

PA RT V. SELF-­E MPL ACEMENT

Chapter 12. John Dryden and Restoration Time: Writing the Self Within Time, Through Time, Beyond Time Steven N. Zwicker Chapter 13. Did the En­glish Seventeenth ­Century ­Really End at 1660? Subaltern Perspectives on the Continuing Impact of the En­glish Civil Wars Mihoko Suzuki

215

230

PA RT V I. BEYOND TIME

Chapter 14. Space Travel: Spatiality and/or Temporality in the Study of Periodization Heather Dubrow

251

C o nt ents

vii

Chapter 15. Always, Already, Again: ­Toward a New Typological Historiography 267 Kristen Poole Notes 283 List of Contributors

337

Index 341 Acknowl­edgments

361

Early Modern Histories of Time

Introduction Kristen Poole and Owen Williams

The Dialectic of Chronologies This volume explores historical periodization from two perspectives: it ad­ dresses how ­today’s scholars of early modern ­England work with and within the idea of historical periods, and how ­people living during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries understood chronology, antecedent, and temporal di­ vision. In par­tic­u­lar, the authors of t­ hese essays are interested in how tempo­ ral models that are indigenous to the early modern period might inform our own intellectual habits of conceptualizing time and history. What happens when we take up early modern models of historicity and use them to assess early modern culture, lit­er­a­ture, and art? (As discussed below, the need to use a period label like “early modern” even when rethinking period labels dem­ onstrates why such naming is both necessary and deeply problematic.) In what ways are our modes of chronology indebted to the historiography of the very times that are the object of our study, thus prescribing our historical narra­ tive? Conversely, in what ways have we imposed historical categories on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that chafe against the temporal epistemol­ ogies of the ­people we seek to understand? A text that demonstrates some of t­ hese prob­lems is Thomas Blundev­ille’s theoretical treatise on historiography, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574). H ­ ere, Blundev­ille laments what passed for his­ torical understanding for many of his contemporaries: I can not tell whyther I may deryde, or rather pittie the ­great follie of ­those which having consumed all theyr lyfe tyme in hystories, doe

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know nothing in the ende, but the discents, genealoges, and petygrees, of noble men, and when such a King or Emperour raigned, & such lyke stuffe, which knowledge though it be necessarie and meete to be observed, yet it is not to be co[m]pared to the knowledge that is gotten by such observacions as we require, & be of greater impor­ taunce.1 Instead of knowing the dates and genealogies of monarchs “& such lyke stuffe,” Blundev­ille insists on learning more impor­tant information—­such as the weather and the time of day when vari­ous deeds took place: “It shalbe needefull sometyme to note the daies according as they be eyther whote [hot] or colde, cleare or clowdye, drye or moyste, windye or snowye, holy dayes or working dayes, and wh[e]ther it be in the morning, at noonetyde, or in the eve­ning, and likewise the nights togither with the differences of the tymes and seasons ­ ere: to thereof, and fynally the very houre.”2 ­There is intentional shock value h claim that learning about the “petygrees, of noble men” is to “know nothing in the ende,” and that it is more impor­tant to know that someone in the past did something on a cloudy Sunday around noon, is to radically upend inher­ ited notions of what constitutes “history” and its worth. The purpose of his­ torical study, asserts the humanist Blundev­ille, is not to memorize information about a chain of rulers but “to gather thereof such iudgement and knowledge as you may therby be the more able, as well to direct your private actions, as to give Counsell lyke a most prudent Counseller in publyke ­causes.”3 Blunde­ v­ille’s historical ideology thus informs both private and public actions, and works at both a micro-­and a macrolevel. For in addition to knowing the weather at the time of par­tic­u­lar deeds, Blundev­ille asserts that a good his­ tory also needs to address issues of trade, public revenues, the military force, and the manner of a government.4 This combination of both micro-­and macro­ forces is impor­tant for understanding the rise and fall that, for Blundev­ille, marks historical movement, “the beginning, augmentacion, state, declynacion, and ende of a Countrie or Citie,” or empire.5 The self-­evident goal of learning about history in this way is “that we may learne thereby to acknowledge the providence of God, wherby all ­things are governed and directed.”6 In many ways, we are the inheritors of the humanist ethos that informed Blundev­ille’s concept of historiography. We largely reject historical teaching that focuses on memorizing a parade of leaders (say, the kings and queens of ­England, or the presidents of the United States). We value the specificity of the microstudies of social history, and the systemic analy­sis of economic his­

Introduction 3

tory. We largely continue to think of time in terms of epochs, of historical arcs that have a beginning, an augmentation, stasis, a decline, and an end; microhistories are subsumed u ­ nder t­hese larger arcs. But in other ways, Blundev­ille’s habits of thought and his wider epistemology are strange to us. The particulars of the weather—­which in Blundev­ille’s account, suggest an explanatory correspondence with the qualities (wet or dry, cold or hot) that defined the model of the humoral body that dominated con­temporary medi­ cal and psychological theories—­rarely f­ actor into our accounts of history. And while we or­ga­nize time into epochs, adapting inherited models like Francesco Petrarch’s while developing new concepts like the anthropocene, our narra­ tives of rise and fall are not in the interest of discerning the patterns of divine providence. Where Blundev­ille is looking to history to find the hand of God, we might be looking to trace, say, the development of capitalism. Blundev­ille’s historiography, then, can be seen as both consonant and dis­ cordant with the prevailing modes of current history writing. Of par­tic­u­lar interest to the topic of this volume is Blundev­ille’s idea of historical period. He does not use the word “period,” but that is understandable: the use of the word to mean “a length of time in history characterized by some prevalent or distinguishing condition, circumstance, occurrence, ­etc., or by the rule of a par­tic­u­lar government, dynasty, e­ tc.; an age, era” does not come about u ­ ntil 7 the very end of the sixteenth ­century. But if Blundev­ille does not yet have our familiar word to name the concept, he is nonetheless arguing that history should not be recorded and understood as a string of consecutive individual lives, but as larger stretches of time that trace the rise and fall of a country, city, or empire. He is essentially arguing for a shift from thinking of histori­ cal chronology through individual p ­ eople to larger geopo­liti­cal units that en­ dure over a longer stretch of time than a h ­ uman life. ­Here, again, we find both consonance and dissonance with modern historiography: modern histo­ rians also mea­sure time in periods, not individual lives, and also look for patterns of emergence and fading, although t­ oday we more often consider so­ cial, po­liti­cal, or epistemological ­factors instead of the life and death of a par­tic­u­lar place. The example of Blundev­ille thus illustrates a curious feature of historiog­ raphy: our understandings of chronology and historical period frequently do not correspond with t­ hose of the very p ­ eople being periodized. This fundamen­ tal disjunction—we categorize ­people from the past with categories that would have been unfamiliar and strange to them, even as we adapt inherited models of thinking about time—­sparks a new set of historiographical questions. How

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do current models of the past encounter, accommodate, and account for the models of history prevalent within the period being studied? How might con­ ceptual models from the past shape or subvert models of the past? And how can ­these models (­those from the past, ­those of the pre­sent) enter into a pro­ ductive intellectual dialectic? While this volume’s experiment in repurposing indigenous temporal mod­ els for our own historiographical ends is innovative, it also retraces the path of the humanists who ­were so intellectually influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Thomas M. Greene has shown, “dialectical imita­ tion” was a central humanist strategy, one that did not merely call attention to the textual/historical layering that occurred when authors imitated and strove to outdo ancient antecedents. It was an approach that si­mul­ta­neously drew the texts into active, even agonistic dialogue with each other. Thus dia­ lectical imitation offers “an implicit perspective on history” and anachronism, even as it profoundly “responds to that re­sis­tance or ambivalence t­ oward imi­ tation that was a necessary and congenital feature of humanism.” 8 Like the sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century humanists who could si­mul­ta­neously ap­ propriate and resist inherited forms, the authors of the essays in this volume use early modern texts in a way that sustains the fraught relationship between recovery, estrangement, and understanding. In recent de­cades, many scholars have debated how we should divide up the past (e.g., where epochal shifts occurred, ­whether periods are primarily defined by events, or even which discernible qualities distinguish a period). Si­mul­ta­neously but often separately, many scholars have interrogated how pre­ vious thinkers conceived of time itself. Th ­ ose interested in con­temporary de­ bates about the politics of periodization and ­those interested in the historical epistemology of time have not necessarily been in dialogue. This volume aims to bridge ­these conversations in the hopes that attending to early modern ideas about time, chronology, and historicity can prompt vibrant thinking about ­these same concerns in our own historical context. Periodization, at its most basic, is the division of the idea of time into dis­ crete categories according to intellectually or historically valued characteris­ tics or qualities. It is one of the ways in which we try to know time and we try to explain it to ourselves and to ­others. Since many p ­ eople in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries w ­ ere keenly interested in their place within a vari­ ety of overlapping historical models (think Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Gre­ cians and Romans, translated into En­glish around the same time Blundev­ille was writing, versus Petrarch’s ­grand tripartite scheme of history) and ­were ac­

Introduction 5

tively developing innovative ways to pre­sent and relate to the past, engaging sympathetically with t­ hese varied chronological models leads us to think more dynamically about periodization itself. The motivation for this kind of a turn to the past is not antiquarian or nostalgic, a wistful desire to recover m ­ ental habits from days of yore. Nor is the goal to discover a more au­then­tic under­ standing of period, as if applying indigenous temporal models to a given his­ torical era could somehow produce a more genuine or accurate understanding of how we partition and qualify time. Rather, the early modern experimenta­ tion with dif­fer­ent temporal figurations—an experimentation that could be lively, anxious, delightful, or profound—­pre­sents us with an occasion for the serious work of intellectual play. Sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century concep­ tions of chronology and temporality offer provocative, creative intellectual ave­ nues for reconceptualizing debates over periodization altogether. This volume sets out to recover the diversity and complexity of ­these ­earlier temporal models and habits of thought, and to consider their con­temporary effects on a number of scholarly areas that include religion, material culture, poetics, Shakespeare, and self-­emplacement. The essays work with, not against, the ambiguity built into that very word “con­temporary”: they consider early modern temporality in its local historical context, and also the ways it affects us t­ oday. In other words, t­ hese essays think at once about how sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century temporal models s­ haped the thought-­worlds of ­those liv­ ing during ­those centuries, and how they can fruitfully influence our own working concepts of historical period. While recognizing the alterity of the “then,” the volume throws the past into an intellectual dialogue with the “now.” The collection also considers what may lie beyond periodization, that is, ways of conceptualizing history that reach beyond chronological division to con­ template the role of space/place and multiple temporal frames. The contributors to this volume take up the challenge of using early mod­ ern chronological models—­ranging from models based on eschatology to ­those based on laundry, for example, or ­those based on social traditions of marriage to ­those emanating from the materiality of the architectural palimpsest—to rethink our own notions of historicity in strikingly diverse ways. But they share a core set of questions that speak to the current stakes in the profession: How do indigenous historical categories provide us with a new vocabulary for discussing and organ­izing time? How do we avoid the tautology of valo­ rizing the early modern simply through our recognition of protomodern and progressive ideas of time? How do the historical categories we find within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries compel us to embrace, realign, or jettison

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our own traditional (anachronistic) period divisions? Th ­ ese essays pre­sent a range of approaches from scholars in early modern studies taking up the question of the temporal categorization of lit­er­a­ture and history in ways that challenge, profess, critique, confirm, and reject models drawn from within the very texts and cultural constructs we study.

Periodic Reassessments ­ ose living in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ­were also questioning Th and redefining their placement in time; they, too, ­were interested in charting temporal bound­aries, distinguishing themselves from their ancestors by plac­ ing themselves in new temporal settings vis-­à-­vis the past. This was an intel­ lectual proj­ect that was happening across Eu­rope, and especially in religious contexts. In Germany, for instance, the Magdeburg Centuries established a formal time scheme that grounded dif­fer­ent historical eras in perceived levels of ecclesiastical purity. In ­England, numerous sectarians sought to return to the purer forms of Christian practice they believed existed in the early Church; this movement of repristination led to an intensified awareness of historical eras, differences, and distances. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ­people had an array of schemes for organ­izing historical time, including in­ herited models that coincided or clashed in vari­ous ways. Hesiod had offered the ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron before Ovid eliminated the Heroic Age; Saint Paul introduced the tripartite division of history into the age of nature, the age of Mosaic law, and the age of grace; Petrarch contrib­ uted the famous (or infamous) classification of Antiquity-­ Medieval-­ Renaissance. The early Christians had adapted the Roman habit of documenting time according to the year of an emperor’s reign by recording time in terms of the ongoing reign of Christ (Anno Domini); medieval and l­ater chroni­ clers continued to register time through monarchal and imperial reigns; and early modern reformers and antiquarians, armed with advances in transla­ tion, mathe­matics, and archaeology, attempted to date time from the origins of the world. Then as now, many of t­hese temporal markers had become naturalized to the point of becoming culturally unconscious: we use the word “centuries” without thinking of its military association with Roman legions, and some­ one could know that his or her birth year is 1982 without considering (or, in­ creasingly, even knowing) that this means 1,982 years a­ fter the posited nativity

Introduction 7

of Christ. But in the sixteenth c­entury especially, a number of cultural developments—­the printing press; humanist recovery of ancient languages; advances in cartography; an expanded bureaucracy and enhanced rec­ord keep­ ing; encounters with the “primitive” socie­ties of the New World—­could sud­ denly defamiliarize par­tic­u­lar temporal habits of thought. For instance, an En­glish mandate of 1538 requiring all birth and death years to be recorded in the new parish registers established the value of calendric time as distinctive from the knowledge that someone was born during the harvest (thereby priv­ ileging seasonal cycle), or in a postlapsarian world (thereby emphasizing cos­ mic time). In a dif­fer­ent way, ­there is a strangeness in the early modern use of the word “age” as a chronological marker. “Age” as historical period coincides comfortably with the notion of ­human chronological age, and we can find the word signaling a strong sense of temporal self-­emplacement (“some do thinke, that it is in vaine for men to write in this age”9). Yet the concept of an “age” can also move into the abstract. Most famously, we find Shakespeare—­ whose plays resound with emphatic insistence on the “now”10 —­being hailed by Ben Jonson in the First Folio as “not of an age, but for all time.” Jonson’s encomium has been used as a slogan for Shakespeare’s universality, but it sig­ nals a con­temporary habit of trying to calculate temporal emplacement, and perhaps the difficulty of d ­ oing so. A vibrant interest in dynastic history at both elite and popu­lar levels also prompted a heightened consciousness about historical divisions and one’s lo­ cation within the flow of time. The rapid rise of En­glish nationalism, the at­ tendant market demand for extensive chronicle histories of Britain, and what D. R. Woolf has called “that peculiar dialogue with history which was so much a part of Tudor statesmanship” led to the listing of monarchical genealogies and accounts of national origins that usually reached back to vari­ous origin myths involving Brut or other legendary ancients. 11 ­These varied accounts of En­glish history and chronology resulted in multiple temporal frameworks that would seem to sit incongruously side by side, and might even point to a de­ gree of temporal anxiety: witness the account of Henry V’s life in Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles, where the start of the king’s reign is temporally placed “in the yeare of the world 5375, ­after the birth of our saviour, by our account 1413, the third of the emperor Sigismund: the three and thirtith [sic] of Charles the sixt [sic] French king, and in the seventh yeare of governance in Scotland ­under . . . ​ Robert the third.”12 ­Here, Genesiacal, Christological, imperial, and monar­ chical frameworks are piled on one another to situate the En­glish king; ­these seem to denote not so much a confusion of authority as the multiplicity of

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temporal conceptions within which the reader might be placed, or might place him-­or herself. If sixteenth-­century developments compelled a heightened interest in thinking about chronology, our own moment is again interrogating the ways in which we construct historical time. ­Until recently, professional scholars of history and lit­er­a­ture had settled on a set of categories that provided a stable working vocabulary to talk about the past. The traditional divisions of Clas­ sical (or Ancient), Medieval, Re­nais­sance, Reformation, and Enlightenment seemed to work well enough. But then we started to question t­hese catego­ ries. In one vein, scholars started to question the implications of the labels themselves. The Re­nais­sance became the Early Modern—­a lways anticipating the Modern (itself a highly problematic term)—­before becoming (in some cir­ cles) the Post-­Medieval. The Enlightenment became the less charged Eigh­ teenth ­Century, which promptly prefaced itself with “the Long” to gobble up much of the seventeenth ­century; then the ­Middle Ages also became “the Long,” extending from the third c­ entury to the eigh­teenth (very long indeed!).13 In another vein, some scholars have questioned the intellectual validity of his­ torical periods at all (an issue that becomes more pressing with the accelerat­ ing rate of globalization and the corresponding need to understand history in a global context). As Lawrence Besserman notes in the opening of his 1996 collection The Challenge of Periodization, “In some of the most influen­ tial and innovative quarters of con­temporary literary and cultural studies, periodization . . . ​finds itself in very bad odor indeed.”14 In his introduction to the volume, Besserman traces how vari­ous strands of poststructuralist thought, ranging from that of Fredric Jameson to Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida, rendered the epistemological stability of historical periods intellectually dubious. Indeed, as Lee Patterson observes, historical periods even came to be questionable on ethical grounds: “If it is true that we now live in a postmodern world that has subverted all centralized, totalized and hierarchized systems, that affirms the marginal, the hybrid, and the regional, and that has decentered the subject, then periodization is an agency of repres­ sion that must be discarded.”15 More than two de­cades ­after Besserman’s collection, we seem to be en­ tering a moment where the only ­thing settled about all of our period catego­ ries is that they are unsettled. While Patterson’s assertion that historical periods are agents of repression might be ideologically extreme, ­there have recently been more pragmatic calls for reconsidering how periodization drives the cur­ ricular organ­ization of literary studies (as Ted Underwood argues in his in­

Introduction 9

fluential Why Literary Periods Mattered 16 ). ­There have been calls for abandoning periodization altogether. Noting, among other ­factors, the implications of pe­ riodization for the academic job market, Eric Hayot contends, “The profes­ sion has failed, first, to institutionalize a reasonable range of competing concepts that would mitigate some of the obvious limitations of periodiza­ tion as a method, and, second, to formalize in institutional form significant transconceptual categories that would call attention to the bound­aries peri­ odization creates within the historical field of lit­er­a­ture.” 17 More theoretically, the very nature of time is at issue. Bruno Latour asserts that we have never been modern,18 and Jonathan Gil Harris rethinks time as pleated and palimp­ sested, adapting Michel Serres’s notions of time into the multitemporal and the polychronic.19 As is doubtlessly apparent, neither of ­these temporal epis­ temologies lend themselves to periodization as it has been practiced. Already postmodern—or, if Latour has his way, “nonmodern”—­are we now postperi­ odization as well?20 If so, how does our potentially metahistoric moment shape our discussions of the past and our objects of study? Or do we find that the more we question period divisions, the more they assert their pragmatic intel­ lectual and professional necessity? Our own moment of theorizing the organ­ization of historical time thus shares an affinity with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During this period (­here, and throughout the volume, use of the term becomes inevitable even as the very concept is questioned), time was not always, or even primar­ ily, hegemonic and teleological. We find a tremendous diversity in terms of temporal models and habits of thought concerning one’s place in time. Some of t­ hese modes continued and proliferated or reinforced the inherited schemes that relied on scriptural or classical idioms; ­others offered radically new chro­ nologies and temporalities. The pre­sent volume problematizes the periodiza­ tion of the “early modern” by resuscitating a wide range of ­these ­earlier chronological models, ways of thinking about time that affected (and continue to affect) our perception and construction of lit­er­a­ture and history.

Modeling Time: Lines and Circles In many ways, then, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries experienced trans­ formations in the conceptualization of history. For our own par­tic­u­lar his­ torical moment, one that is arguably a sea change of the post–­World War II Western cultural and intellectual order, inherited models of historicity are

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similarly seeming less intuitive, as a variety of pressures—­new technologies, new epistemologies, and a shifting of the economic sands of the acad­emy—­ are causing a reor­ga­ni­za­tion of our working models of chronology. (The no­ tion of a “sea change” is itself an indigenous concept, as it is a term borrowed from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest). As we reconceive our ways of under­ standing and organ­izing the past, previous temporal modes can provide use­ ful, germane, and imaginative paths for intellectual engagement. It is impor­tant at the outset to contend with a ­couple of challenges to this discussion, however. First, as much as t­ hese essays seek new models of time and chronology, rethinking or even challenging historical periodization in­ evitably requires the use of historical periods. More particularly, even as the authors in this volume recognize the well-­rehearsed po­liti­cal prob­lems with the label of “early modern,” we find ourselves needing to return to a label that is often also the subject of the critique. Like a popu­lar early modern emblem of cyclicality, the drakon ouroboros (the ancient image of a serpent devouring its tail), even attempts to move away from conventional historical periods reg­ ularly return to the working vocabulary of conventional historical periods. This intellectual prob­lem demonstrates the fundamental necessity of naming temporal areas in order to do historically informed work and of gathering dis­ ciplines into mutually constitutive knowledge communities focused on par­ tic­u­lar moments of the past. We acknowledge this circularity of logic, while at the same time we recognize the historicity of our working categories—­the challenge is at once inherent and inherited. Indeed, the circular mode of us­ ing “period” to critique period structurally reflects the dominant mode of early modern historicity, which, as Achsah Guibbory has shown, was cyclical.21 We do well to remember that the etymological meaning of “period” is circular; Guibbory cites Sir William ­Temple’s An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning (1690), particularly ­Temple’s observation that “Science and Arts have run their circles, and had their periods in the Several Parts of the World.”22 Like the ouroboros, or the idea of “revolution,” time for the early moderns was largely understood as circular and recursive. Yet the ouroboros itself pre­sents at once a synchronic and closed system and also a diachronic exemplar of the migration of models across time, as it moved from Egyptian through Greek, Roman, and medieval culture into the seventeenth ­century, absorbing and preserving associations from classical phi­ losophy, gnosticism, hermeticism, and alchemy. Recognizing the historical baggage of our inherited intellectual models similarly forces us to confront the cognitive force of the timeline. And h ­ ere we encounter the second pervasive

Introduction 11

challenge to discussions of periodization. The timeline has become such a naturalized and dominant way of conceiving history that it can seem episte­ mologically inescapable. The intellectual energies and technological advances that led to the sixteenth-­century cartographic revolution in the conceptualiza­ tion of space spurred a corresponding flourishing of models for depicting time, as Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have shown in their beauti­ fully illustrated Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline.23 But the pro­ fusion of creative experiments for visualizing chronology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had, by the eigh­teenth c­ entury, settled into normative linear depictions, and “over the course of the nineteenth ­century, envisioning history in the form of a timeline became second nature.”24 (We might note, for instance, the seemingly unself-­conscious irony in Besserman’s description of cyclical history, which he nonetheless pictures in linear terms: “If we sight along points marking configurations of the ideas of pro­gress, decline, and re­ newal in history, a line from Petrarch, to Polydore Vergil, to Hegel, to Marx and beyond is plainly evident.”25) Establishing the par­a meters of the Early Modern, or the Medieval, or the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century has often been conceived as repositioning historical endpoints along a sliding linear scale. Moderns have therefore distorted the idea of period—­taking a circular concept and rendering it linear so that it may be segmented—­and, more profoundly, have discussed the lives and events of p ­ eople in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a temporal model that not only is anachronistic (the timeline) but also works against the ways in which t­hese p ­ eople primarily conceptual­ ized their own place in history. The essays in this volume seek to explore, through vari­ous approaches, this and other intellectual contradictions. The timeline and the notion of h ­ uman time as fundamentally progres­ sive or teleological are mutually informative, and both influence modern hab­ its of periodization. Patterson has defined periodization as “a sequence that insisted upon discontinuity, ascribed to each period its own special quality, and then or­ga­nized them into a teleological pattern culminating in itself.”26 This conceptual structure has been woven into the intellectual fabric of most con­temporary humanities disciplines, thus creating the illusion of having al­ ways already been pre­sent. In the wake of the theoretical writings of Fredric Jameson and Michel Foucault (among many ­others), the understanding of te­ leological pro­gress implicit in nearly all periodizing schemes has been largely rejected by the current generation of scholars,27 as has the corresponding im­ plication that history can be understood as a series of ruptures and rejections of that which came before. In this moment of reimagining historical time in

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experimental ways that rebut latent progressive, teleological prejudices, return­ ing to the time experiments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offers suggestive new forms of temporality and chronology. Th ­ ese can inform intel­ lectual and literary history in ways that can contradict, complicate, or com­ plement one another.

The Essays in This Volume The essays ­here offer not so much definitive assertions of new temporalities and chronologies as a series of explorations and thought experiments. In vari­ ous ways—­some direct and appropriative, some oblique and subtle—­a ll the authors take up an early modern mode of temporal thinking and contemplate how it might help us to rethink our own habits of chronologizing. The essays have been grouped to offer sets of complementary studies focused on par­tic­ u­lar aspects of temporal concerns. The collection opens with an overview of the current state of periodiza­ tion in two major disciplines interested in the question: historiography and literary studies. As a matched pair, the essays trace out the issues that periods pre­sent to historians (concerned with identifying and unpacking social, po­ liti­cal, and economic patterns) and literary scholars (concerned with such pat­ terns but also with the aesthetic). Some of the prob­lems of periodization are shared by ­these disciplines, but impor­tant distinctions also result from their objects of study and their approaches. Noting that historians “study prob­lems rather than periods,” Tim Harris reviews the history of “early modern,” both as a term employed by modern historians—­for far longer than many have thought—­and as a mode of periodization. Harris encourages an increase in transperiod studies, more extensive theoretical work in early modern histori­ ography, and a greater attention to larger historical metanarratives in order to create a more dynamic and critical field of study. Central to his essay is the claim that historians’ subfields—­ economic, po­ liti­ c al, religious, social/ demographic—­and their available sources significantly influence the time frames that they adopt. Nigel Smith takes us into the vari­ous complexities of periodization in literary studies, flagging the prob­lems presented when “En­ glish” lit­er­a­ture is considered in its broader international context. He notes that a par­tic­u­lar concern for periodizing early modern literary texts is that they are often “explic­itly concerned with time and how time is to be represented,” thereby presenting and analyzing temporalities that fall outside of the histo­

Introduction 13

rian’s purview.28 Attending to questions of literary style raises a set of critical concerns and models that differ from ­those of historiography, and Smith of­ fers new formalism as a critical approach that elucidates the transhistorical nature of the imaginative texts of the period(s). Following this introductory overview, the three essays in Part I take up questions related to religion and periodization. How did Christians concep­ tually or­ga­nize historical time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How did this organ­ization influence subsequent historiographical understandings of historical period? How does studying the dif­fer­ent ways believers concep­ tualized time cause us to rethink our own historiographical terms and divi­ sions? The section opens with an essay by religious historian Euan Cameron that addresses the fundamental issue of the ways early modern historians con­ ceived of time. Not surprisingly in a belief system structured around a Messiah’s Second Coming, time was of central concern to Christian theologians and church historians. Observing that much of historiography is an exercise of trying to find order in chaos, Cameron notes the par­t ic­u ­lar religious rele­ vance of this search in the sixteenth c­ entury: “Finding meaning in the confu­ sion of events was not just a quest to understand humanity: it was a search for the marks of God. One way to discern meaning, to keep the chaos at bay, was to identify meaningful periods and phases in the history of the world.”29 Ethan H. Shagan reexamines the crucial notion of the secular, which has of­ ten been considered progressive and thus associated with the modern. Sha­ gan observes that the distinction of the religious and the secular is a false binary in early modern Chris­tian­ity, since “the secular” is constituted by the entirety of time ­after Christ’s ascension—­that is, the saeculum awaiting the saecula saeculorum, the worldly anticipation of the world without end. What marks the early modern period is not a move t­ oward modern secularity, then, but a historical time when Chris­tian­ity was firmly established in the saecu­ lum, and Shagan argues that we should re­spect and perhaps even use the early modern construct of the secular to inform our scholarship. James Simpson contributes to the debate over periodization and religion from a position on the late medieval/early modern margins, and he offers Trans-­Reformation Studies as a useful literary-­historical approach for expanding our understand­ ing of En­glish religious culture. While Simpson focuses on early modern re­ ligion, he also broadens that perspective when he argues, “Periodization is not simply a m ­ atter of the shape of history itself but also a m ­ atter of what we need 30 from history when.” Emerging at the dawn of the new millennium when medievalists began crossing “the periodic boundary of 1534,”31 this critical

14

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approach recognizes the importance of the Reformation itself as an early modern temporal episteme; corrects the prejudices of Whig historicisms not quite dead; and bolsters a diachronic historicism. The essays in Part II explore how periodization relates to materiality. How did the material conditions of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century En­glish life shape notions of time? How did buildings, ­labor, and artifacts correspond to historical categories? How might this relationship of the material and the his­ torical shape our own habits of periodization? Archaeologist Kate Giles pro­ vides a case study of temporality and material culture in early modern ­England. Studying a handful of medieval buildings in Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-­upon-­Avon, she argues that archaeology’s “stratigraphic methodol­ ogies” reveal the palimpsestic nature of ­matter and time in the guild build­ ings and, by extension, early modern E ­ ngland in general. In an essay that w ­ ill resonate with both social and religious historians and scholars of lit­er­a­ture, she explains that “the material legacy of the past informs communities’ nego­ tiation of the pre­sent, and thus, the construction of the f­ uture.”32 Specifically, she traces how local politics and religion can have intergenerational impact on physical structures that defy neat concepts of historical period. Working on a very dif­fer­ent scale, Natasha Korda pre­sents “laundry time” as a feminist counternarrative to traditional modes of reckoning time and history that have long been the domain of male scholars. Focusing on the ruff as perhaps the most prominent t­hing that reifies Elizabethan culture, Korda advocates ar­ chival work focused on the everyday, with the goal of chronicling the history not of traditional periodization, but of ordinary, quotidian periodicity. She reminds us of the scholarly ­labor performed by forgotten pioneering female historians who recovered the material pro­cesses that anticipated our recent “material turn” in the archive, and points to ­Virginia Woolf’s use of the Eliz­ abethan ruff as a meditation on the cyclical temporality of recurrence. Part III considers the relationship of periodization and poetics. How did early modern poets conceptualize historical time? In what ways does poetry replicate or repudiate con­temporary models of temporal movement, divisions, and structures? How did/do poetic tropes pre­sent temporal movements that help us to think through issues of periodization? In his reading of poetics and periodization, Gordon Teskey claims that a work of art has a starting point, but no definite conclusion; t­here is no way to predict what it ­will propheti­ cally inspire for ­later creators. He suggests that the term “period” is as much a cultural concept as a historical one, a term that weaves together time, place, style, and language. To show this is the case, Teskey considers vari­ous stylis­

Introduction 15

tic systems and the shifting cosmologies that they express, moving from the sixteenth ­century’s belief in cosmological correspondences to the figurative lan­ guage of the seventeenth ­century’s metaphysical poets and beyond. In a dif­ fer­ent vein, Julianne Werlin investigates the span of an individual life as an often-­overlooked marker of periodization. She argues that early modern love poetry offers an intimate perspective on historical temporality that reflects de­ mographic trends, and that, in turn, the shifting marriage demographics during the period have pronounced effects on the products of poets. Looking at lyric poetry and sonnet cycles as both a response to cultural real­ity and a means of examining that real­ity, she traces the relationship between love po­ etry and the increasing eroticization of courtship and married love during the seventeenth ­century. Part IV engages the place of Shakespeare in our understanding of his­ torical period. How do Shakespeare’s models of time or ways of thinking about historicity continue to shape our own engagement with the plays? Conversely, how do Shakespeare’s plays—­manifestly interested in the construction of history—­influence our notions of temporality? In “Shakespeare, Period,” Douglas Bruster goes so far as to argue that Shakespeare has become the em­ blem of En­glish literary history before considering the liabilities of such syn­ ecdoche. According to Bruster, “developments in our own time have made it pos­si­ble, even likely, for some readers to equate Shakespeare with the past, as the figure who represents that g­ reat gulf of time in which printed words be­ came the very currency of civilization,”33 and he traces the extent to which Shakespeare studies has usurped attention from other periods, texts, and au­ thors. Working with Shakespeare’s use of ghosts and memory, Bruster also argues that, as a monument to the past, Shakespeare risks accusations of ob­ solescence and oversaturation, ­whether they originate in the classroom, with university administrators, or from budget-­cutting politicians. In “Periodic Shakespeare,” Julia Reinhard Lupton approaches periodization as “an ongo­ ing pro­cess of responsiveness to shifting interpretive, social, and per­for­mance conditions.”34 Working through the dynamic relationships of the characters in The Winter’s Tale, she theorizes the nature of Shakespearean drama, argu­ ing that the plays’ signature virtue is their renewability throughout dif­fer­ent times, periods, and expressive modes; Shakespeare’s virtue comes from his ask­ ing “artists and audiences to consider their own sense of historical location and dislocation, to mark the ages of man as they reread Shakespeare over the course of a lifetime, and to participate in the cocreative work of judgment, memory, and imagination.”35

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The essays in Part V contemplate the experience of historical self-­ emplacement. How did individuals living within the early modern period understand and experience their own historical subjectivity? What expressions of conscious historical self-­emplacement do we find, and how do ­these differ for vari­ous artistic, historiographic, or literary expressions? Steven N. Zwicker unpacks how experiences of time and the relationship between time and En­ glish politics and society during the Restoration are expressed in the writing of John Dryden. Zwicker focuses on the vari­ous temporalities found in Dryden’s poetry, temporalities that range from the “un-­apocalyptic mood” of his Heroique Stanzas (1658) to “the teasing sense of Old Testament time and typologies” in the ironic sacred history of Absalom and Achitophel (1681).36 Zwicker rec­ords Dryden’s responses to life in Stuart E ­ ngland, reactions that the poet articulates through vari­ous periodization schemas in his verse. He highlights the extent to which Dryden’s poetry reflects “the troubled uncer­ tainty of the status and meaning of the Interregnum,” provoking “questions about realms and ­orders of time” as it did so.37 Continuing the challenge to our traditional period divisions and what qualities scholars have used to char­ acterize them, Mihoko Suzuki places studies of periodization in conversation with subaltern criticism, arguing that we can reassess the extent to which the Restoration was an epochal shift by considering w ­ omen’s writings a­ fter 1660. The manuscript writings of Royalist Anne Halkett (1623–99), for one, offer an experience of the Restoration as a time-­space contiguous with the Civil War and the Interregnum. By focusing on the ­women writers who had, ­until re­ cently, all too often dropped out of literary history, Suzuki identifies a mode of Restoration self-­emplacement that conflicts with and challenges the model typically advanced in seventeenth-­century court culture and successive histo­ riographies. Part VI, “Beyond Time,” offers alternative modes of thinking about his­ toricity and period, modes that do not rely on linear temporality. Heather Dubrow emphasizes the importance of spatiality for understanding early modern time and periodization; for instance, we could construct an “Age of Elizabeth” through tracing the dynamics of the queen’s London spectacles or royal progresses. Dubrow argues that we might better understand early mod­ ern periodization ­after recognizing the extent to which spatiality—­geographical, public, domestic, and so forth—­informed early modern senses of time, age, and epoch. In short, for many an En­g lish subject during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where they lived determined when they lived. Kristen Poole imagines what models of historical work might emerge if we embrace the

Introduction 17

temporalities offered by biblical typology, an interpretive mode that recog­ nizes a type/antitype relationship between biblical figures and offers a col­ lapsed temporality of past, pre­sent, and ­future. Typology was a dominant form of exegesis for both patristic and early modern interpreters; it models a multidi­ mensional historiography that brings together the Hexapla of the third-­century theologian Origen and the Hexaplae of the seventeenth-­century writer Andrew Willet. With a history that moves across time, typology thus connects the seemingly distinct temporalities and interpretive modes attending the material-­ textual forms of scroll, codex, and film.

The contributors to this collection thus bring together an eclectic range of top­ ics and historical concerns. Each author has produced his or her own ­angle on temporality and con­temporary negotiations of it, on the multiple pasts that have come down to us. Historiographical issues that still resonate ­today stand alongside ­those long forgotten by all but a few scholars. Yet none of the au­ thors claim to have resolved the question of periodization. Rather, they ex­ plore the compatibilities, the incongruities, and even the inadequacies that emerge when considering the interplay of past and pre­sent constructions of time. As Thomas Greene has pointed out, “The past always reaches us across a space which we want to deny. It reaches us incomplete, and in attempting to make it ­whole we merely create a new incompleteness.”38 Periodization may be thought of as a shared culture’s aide-­mémoire of this always incomplete past; just as often, as ­these authors show, it has been employed to relegate as­ pects of our past to the shadows of history. On offer in this volume is abun­ dant food for thought about the past—­ideas about what has changed, what remains, and what is worth studying and teaching—­and an invitation to join in the creative rethinking of historical periodization.

Chapter 1

Periodizing the Early Modern The Historian’s View Tim Harris

The British phi­los­o­pher and historian R. G. Collingwood famously observed that it was the historian’s duty to study not just the outside but also the inside of an event. The outside of an event Collingwood took to be the past action or deed itself: the passage of Caesar across the Rubicon on one date, say, or his assassination in the senate ­house on another. By the inside he meant the thought ­behind the action: “Caesar’s defiance of Republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins.” We must always remember that “the event was an action,” Collingwood insisted, and the his­ torian’s “main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent.”1 I first read Collingwood in the mid-1970s, when the reaction against structuralist approaches to the study of the past was picking up mo­ mentum. At the time, historians ­were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with interpretive frameworks that emphasized impersonal forces or structural shifts at the expense of ­human agency. Collingwood’s strictures served as a reminder that history is made by ­people whose motives, ambitions, fears, and anx­i­eties historians have a duty to try to understand. I readily admit to having been deeply influenced by Collingwood in my own scholarly practice. And this pre­ sent volume might well have been conceived in the spirit of Collingwood: instead of applying extrinsic conceptual models for how to periodize the past, the objective is to extricate a variety of chronological models that w ­ ere intrin­ sic to the thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 It is an enter­ prise for which I have considerable sympathy.

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Yet Collingwood, it should not be forgotten, stressed the need to study both the inside and the outside of an event: “The historian is never concerned with ­either of ­these to the exclusion of the other.”3 Moreover, the outside of an event, one might suggest, is not just what ­people did; it also includes im­ personal forces and structural shifts—­developments and trends that ­people who lived in the past might not have comprehended, and indeed might not even have been in a position to perceive. Historians certainly need to do their best to uncover why, in the face of such developments, ­those who lived in the past acted in the way they did. But their analyses can never be restricted solely to how t­ hose who inhabited the past understood their own lived experience. Historical periods are by definition extrinsic conceptual models. If in any way meaningful as analytical categories, they reflect patterns that have become discernible only from the vantage of hindsight. If nothing ­else, the transgen­ erational nature of historical periods should make it obvious that they cannot be defined simply in terms that ­were intrinsic to the thought of contempo­ raries. Historical actors in the past could only have seen themselves in rela­ tion to what had come before, not in relation to what was to come. Th ­ ose alive during the 1660s and 1670s, for example, would have been strongly conscious of how their lived experience was s­haped by the revolutionary upheavals of the two previous de­cades. They might indeed also have possessed a vision of what they ­imagined the ­future might bring—­a vision that, depending on their po­liti­cal or religious outlook, they might have regarded with optimism or fore­ boding. Yet they could not have seen themselves, for instance, as being at the beginning of a prolonged period of population stagnation and concomitant rising real wages. The demographic and economic contexts in which they ­were to be situated w ­ ere very dif­fer­ent from t­ hose of the ­century and a half before, which had seen rapid population growth and high inflation. Th ­ ese ­were con­ texts that linked the generation of the 1660s and 1670s to the early eigh­teenth ­century in a way in which it would have been impossible for the generation of the 1660s and 1670s to have appreciated. Historians deal with both structures and mentalities. They cannot restrict themselves to investigating what contemporaries themselves thought, felt, and believed; they must also scrutinize ­those historical trends, forces, and devel­ opments of which contemporaries might not have been aware, or have been fully aware, or have fully understood. And since any form of historical analy­ sis has to be framed, in some way, by time, understanding how historical trends, forces, and developments s­ haped past lived experience involves the his­ torian placing t­ hose whom he or she is studying in a temporal or chronologi­



Periodizing the Early Modern 23

cal frame of reference—­that is, in some form of historical period. In short, historians have no option but to impose their own extrinsic analytical models or interpretive frameworks on the past in order to understand the past. Given that this is the case, however, the chronological frames of reference we em­ ploy need to be subjected to continual critical scrutiny. We have to ask what the appropriate chronological bound­aries of our study should be, ­whether the periods we adopt are useful categories of analy­sis, and what analytical weight we are attaching to the periodization we use. How, then, do historians of ­England periodize the early modern? What, indeed, is meant by “early modern ­England?” The answers to ­these questions are far from straightforward, since historical practice varies enormously. I ­will start by discussing the meaning of the term “early modern”: when it was coined, what period of En­glish history it was used to designate, and what its analyti­ cal purpose was. I ­will then examine the vari­ous ways in which early modern En­glish historians have tended to frame their proj­ects chronologically. Histo­ rians, I ­will argue, study prob­lems rather than periods. Although some might take as their prob­lem “early modernity,” most in fact who work in the early modern period do not work on it, and dif­fer­ent types of historians, working in dif­fer­ent subfields of history, define the chronological bound­aries of their studies in a variety of dif­fer­ent ways according to distinct rationales. I ­will conclude by considering some of the challenges that remain to be confronted and w ­ hether recent transformations in the field might require us to reevalu­ ate how we think of early modernity.

Defining the Early Modern Conceptually, it was not pos­si­ble to see history as divided into distinct peri­ ods ­until ­people abandoned a cyclical sense of time in ­favor of a linear one. The view of the past had to emerge not simply as prior but as fundamentally dif­fer­ent. This shift in the conceptualization of time was a pro­cess that began with the Re­nais­sance but was not complete ­until the late eigh­teenth ­century. The notion that history might be periodized, in other words, was itself intro­ duced during the era that we have since come to label the early modern.4 The term “early modern” did not become common currency among his­ torians u ­ ntil the latter part of the twentieth ­century. Keith Thomas recalled that when he gave a lecture to the British Acad­emy in 1976 titled “Age and Authority in Early Modern E ­ ngland,” the then President of the Acad­emy, Sir

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Isaiah Berlin, “remarked that he had never previously encountered the expres­ sion.” 5 Yet the term was in fact a Victorian coinage. According to Phil With­ ington, “early modern” first appeared in print as a category of historical analy­sis in 1869, with the publication of a course of lectures titled Early Modern Eu­ rope by William Johnson, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and an as­ sistant master at Eton College.6 Johnson used “early modern,” Withington informs us, “as a term of cultural analy­sis” to depict “the beginning of a dia­ logue . . . ​between the relatively recent and the thoroughly ancient past.”7 From its inception, then, the term was linked with the quest to explain the rise of modernity and the eclipsing of a medieval past. Johnson located the key de­ velopments in the sixteenth c­ entury with “the end of feudalism, new educa­ tional and social opportunities, the formation of the Protestant nation-­state, the emergence of national vernaculars, and the fostering of trans-­national ar­ rangements between Christian states.” 8 He believed “early modern” was pref­ erable to the then popu­lar “Tudor period,” which could not be extended to the ­whole of Eu­rope, and also to the French word “Re­nais­sance,” which had been embraced by Jacob Burckhardt for Italy and by Jules Michelet for France.9 Although the term “Re­nais­sance” became the preferred nomenclature of Eu­ro­pean cultural historians, “early modern” was reintroduced into histori­ cal discourse in the twentieth ­century, notably by economic historians—­ starting with J. H. Clapham as early as 1913, though particularly in the period from the late 1920s to the early 1940s—­and came to be embraced by scholars not just in ­England but also in North Amer­i­ca. For economic historians, the concept of early modernity was crucial to their theorization of modern capi­ talism, though precisely what period of time the early modern was said to des­ ignate varied from scholar to scholar, depending on the par­tic­u­lar prob­lem they ­were studying: for Clapham, it was circa 1500 to circa 1750; for John U. Nef, 1540 to 1640; and for N. S. B. Graf, the ­later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.10 The habit of dividing the postclassical world into three phases—­ the medieval, the modern, and that in-­between—­was reinforced by British publishers. H ­ ere we might note the highly influential Pelican economic his­ tories of Britain that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the medieval­ ist Michael Postan produced volume 1, the modernist Eric Hobsbawn volume 3, and Christopher Hill covered the years circa 1530 to 1780, from the Refor­ mation to the Industrial Revolution. Hill believed that this period “witnessed the making of modern En­glish society,” preparing “En­glish society for the take-­off into the modern industrial world”—­though he did not embrace the term “early modern” in the book. 11



Periodizing the Early Modern 25

More precise dates for the period from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution in ­England might be 1529 (the calling of the Reformation Parlia­ ment) to 1783 (the year economic historian W. W. Rostow identified as sig­ naling the “take-­off into self-­sustained growth”).12 The year 1783 now seems too early for the start of the Industrial Revolution in ­England, though its value as a terminal date for the early modern period is perhaps reinforced by the fact that it was also the year Britain lost its American colonies. In his Ends of Life, Keith Thomas followed Hill’s periodization of early modernity, namely, 1530–1780 (Thomas had been a student of Hill’s at Oxford), but described this as the period “from the Reformation to the American War of In­de­pen­dence.” However, the American Revolution is not pertinent to his analy­sis in any way (it does not even have an index entry), and Thomas insists that his “dates are only approximate” and that he has “frequently strayed across them.” 13 ­There is thus some imprecision concerning how historians of ­England de­ fine the early modern. Nevertheless, most historians who work on ­England, I would suggest, see the early modern period as beginning with the Reforma­ tion and concluding with the start of the Industrial Revolution. 14 Within this periodization the key stepping-­stones on the path to modernity would be the Protestant Reformation, the seventeenth-­century po­liti­cal revolutions, and the Enlightenment (on the religious, po­liti­cal, intellectual, and cultural fronts), and the agricultural revolution, protoindustrialization, and the rise of capi­ talism (on the economic front). Such thinking was reinforced by Max We­ ber’s and R. H. Tawney’s claims that the emergence of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism w ­ ere intrinsically connected. 15 Fundamental to this view of early modernity is the belief that modernity was “created” not simply by the Industrial Revolution, but rather by trends, developments, and pro­cesses set in motion from the beginning of the sixteenth ­century that w ­ ere ultimately to culminate in the rise of industrial capitalism. Put this way, “early modern” appears be to an intrinsically loaded con­ cept, one that embodies both assumptions and value judgments about the path to modernity, with the Western model—of industrial capitalism, secularism, and constitutional democracy—­taken as normative. Withington has noted the “troubling antecedents of the concept and the potentially hazardous assump­ tions lingering in it.”16 Kathleen Davis suggests that our habit of positing a basic dichotomy between the medieval and the modern, with the early mod­ ern serving as a bridge between the two, has helped ensure the survival of two entrenched monoliths—­t he medieval (religious and feudal) versus the modern (secular and cap­i­tal­ist). Such periodization, Davis claims, imposes

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“homogeneities that not only mask the existence of ‘modern’ characteristics in the ­Middle Ages, and ‘medieval’ characteristics of modernity, but also distort the histories of fields such as medicine and philosophy and occlude minority histories such as ­those of ­women and the racially and religiously oppressed.” 17 Similarly, J. Hillis Miller has insisted that periods are “concep­ tualizing categories, which are posited as homogenous,” and that “the sin­ gleness of the label”—­whether that label be the M ­ iddle Ages, the Baroque, the Re­nais­sance, the Enlightenment, or whatever—­“implies the singleness of what is labelled” and “invites identification of that singularity.”18 ­These warnings are salutary. Yet one may question w ­ hether in practice such periodization does impose such homogeneities. Historians have been in­ sisting since Victorian times that feudalism was not a monolith: that “the feu­ dalism of France,” as Frederic William Maitland put it, differed “radically from the feudalism of ­England,” and “the feudalism of the thirteenth [­century] . . . ​ from that of the eleventh.”19 Most En­glish historians would be skeptical of the notion that E ­ ngland became increasingly secularized during the early modern era.20 Scholars have long been aware that older belief systems and frameworks for thinking about how the world operated persisted well into the nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries.21 Historians tend to be skeptical of sweep­ ing generalization or crude model building. The heart of the historical enter­ prise is to challenge, question, deconstruct, and complicate. (Davis’s book is, of course, written very much in that tradition.) We work on complex past socie­ties and our goal is to understand the complexity of such socie­ties: identifying sin­ gularity is simply not what historians do. The three-­hundred-­year period from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution in ­England was one of dramatic religious, po­liti­cal, intellectual, economic, social, and cultural upheaval and change. Historians who work on this era explore the cleavages, tensions, and conflicts within this society. Not only do historians not see the early modern period as homogeneous, but the very dif­fer­ent and quite fractured ways in which specialists in vari­ous subfields explore the period—in what is now a very diverse, rich, and complex historiography—­militate against any clear or simpli­ fied vision of early modernity as a ­whole.

Va­ri­e­ties of Periodization Most historians, as Lord Acton famously urged in 1895, “study prob­lems in preference to periods.”22 It is true that historians might choose as their prob­



Periodizing the Early Modern 27

lem early modernity itself. Indeed, a number of famous studies that appeared in the 1970s did precisely that. Lawrence Stone’s F ­ amily, Sex and Marriage in ­England 1500–1800, for instance, was an attempt to explore how the En­glish ­family became “modern” during the early modern period and as a result of transformations wrought by early modernity. 23 Peter Burke’s Popu­lar Culture in Early Modern Eu­rope (which included ­England) was conceived as an ex­ amination of how the pro­cesses of reformation and industrialization trans­ formed popu­lar culture in the three centuries from around 1500 to 1800.24 Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, although addressing a slightly shorter time period, was nevertheless very much a book about early modernity—­about the cultural transformations that E ­ ngland underwent be­ tween the Reformation and the Enlightenment.25 Alan Macfarlane’s pioneer­ ing investigation of witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex sought an explanation of the En­glish witch craze in terms of the stresses and strains that ­England experienced as it underwent a transition from feudalism to capitalism.26 Yet if such master narratives of early modernity w ­ ere once fash­ion­able, they w ­ ere coming u ­ nder increasing attack by the l­ater 1970s. Macfarlane first expressed his own dissatisfaction with the transition model in his Origins of En­glish Individualism of 1978, a work in which he argued that En­glish individualism—­normally taken to be an impor­tant precursor to modernity and thus a product of early modernity—­could be traced back to the thirteenth ­century. He continued his denunciation of the transition thesis in his 1986 monograph attacking Stone’s vision of the rise of the modern ­family. 27 Mac­ farlane’s own account of his intellectual evolution is revealing. As a student in the 1960s, he subsequently admitted, he had absorbed “a ‘revolutionary’ view of En­glish history”: according to this account, up ­until “about 1450 ­England was a ‘traditional,’ ‘peasant,’ ‘feudal’ society,” but was transformed by “a series of revolutionary and connected changes” that took place during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eigh­teenth centuries, so that by 1800 or so ­England was “fully established as ‘modern,’ ‘individualist,’ ‘cap­i­tal­ist.’ ” By the late 1970s, however, Macfarlane states, he had come to realize “that t­ here was much more conti­ nuity between the medieval and early modern period” than he had once be­ lieved. 28 It would be wrong to say that Macfarlane won the debate; many thought he overdid the argument for continuity. Yet his work was symptomatic of the way scholarship was shifting. En­glish historians w ­ ere becoming less interested in broader questions concerning the transition from feudalism to capitalism or with the problematic of early modernity. By the 1990s, anything that

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smacked of modernization theory was treated with extreme skepticism, not to say disdain. Not that Macfarlane was the first historian to argue for conti­ nuity over change between the late medieval and the early modern. When, in 1953, Geoffrey Elton posited his claims for a Tudor Revolution in government, he was heavi­ly criticized by medieval historians who insisted that what Elton saw as new in the 1530s—­a more bureaucratic system of royal government—­ was nothing of the sort, since medieval royal government had also been bu­ reaucratic.29 If one aim of this volume is to remind us that we should be questioning our periodization, it is worth recalling that historians have been ­doing this for a very long time. Nowadays few who regard themselves as historians of early modern ­England take early modernity as their central problematic. They simply situ­ ate their work, loosely, within the early modern period. They may break their studies up into discrete periods of time, but t­hese are not periodizations in any meaningfully theorized sense of the term. Historians tend to take a prag­ matic approach to how they define the chronological bounds of their studies, related to the par­tic­u­lar questions they want to ask and how they propose to test for change over time. The time frames early modernists adopt vary con­ siderably according to the subfield of historical inquiry in which they are en­ gaged. Po­liti­cal historians, for instance, might use regnal dates, constitutional landmarks, or po­liti­c al upheavals to frame their studies. They might write books on the reigns of individual monarchs, groups of monarchs, or entire dynasties (the Tudors, the Stuarts), or about wars or revolutions. They tend to divide the seventeenth c­ entury into three periods: the early Stuarts, 1603–42; the Civil War and Revolution, 1642–60; and the ­later Stuarts, 1660–1714 (or 1715, with the failure of the Jacobite challenge to the Hanoverian succession). Yet this is largely a pragmatic division of l­abor, a reflection of the fact that it is impossible for one individual to have a complete mastery of the relevant source material for the seventeenth c­ entury as a ­whole. Early Stuart and l­ater Stuart have never been theorized as distinct periods in the way, say, Medieval and Re­nais­sance have been. Religious historians might frame their study by the reigns of bishops or by ecclesiastical landmarks.30 A major subject of inquiry for early modern re­ ligious historians is, of course, the Reformation, and all would now agree that the En­glish Reformation was not an event but a long, drawn-­out pro­ cess. Peter Marshall’s excellent textbook on the En­glish Reformation starts in 1480, with the state of the late medieval Church in ­England, and takes the



Periodizing the Early Modern 29

story up to the outbreak of the En­glish Civil War in 1642. 31 One might won­ der why stop t­here, especially if one subscribes to the view that the En­glish civil wars ­were wars of religion. Perhaps a more appropriate terminal date for the Long Reformation should be 1662, with the passage of the Restoration Act of Uniformity, or 1689, with the Toleration Act. For Nicholas Tyacke, E ­ ngland’s Long Reformation spanned the years 1500 to 1800.32 Historians of religion sometimes delimit their studies by regnal years—­the early Reformation u ­ nder Henry VIII and Edward VI, the Counter-­Reformation u ­ nder Mary, the l­ater Reformation u ­ nder Elizabeth—­a reflection of the fact that the En­glish crown played a vital role in shaping the pro­cess of religious change in Tudor ­England. Some see the reigns of Elizabeth Tudor and James Stuart as a coherent pe­ riod, even embracing the adjective “Jacobethan” to describe the Church pol­ ity in ­England at this time,33 though one can find this a fruitful period for study without necessarily subscribing to the view that t­ here was as Jacobethan consensus in the Church.34 Michael Questier’s excellent study Catholicism and Community in Early Modern E ­ ngland covers the years from circa 1550 to 1640, which coincide with neither regnal dates nor major po­liti­cal or reli­ gious landmarks.35 For certain types of history it can make sense to define the chronological span of one’s study by source. David Cressy, in his examination of the chang­ ing literacy profiles in Tudor and Stuart E ­ ngland, used a series of nationally imposed oaths—­the Succession Oath of 1534, the Protestation, Vow and Cov­ enant, and Solemn League and Covenant of 1641–44, and the Association Oath of 1696—to mea­sure how the ability to sign one’s name changed over time. 36 Keith Wrightson and David Levine’s microhistory of Terling in Essex used tax rec­ords from 1524–25 (subsidy returns) to 1671 (hearth tax returns) to reconstitute the demographic structures of the village, although the sources deployed to test for literacy ­were local rec­ords spanning the period 1580 to 1699. Wrightson and Levine’s terminal date, then, was an arbitrary one—­the end of the c­ entury; their starting point, by contrast, was the date of a particularly rich source that made pos­si­ble the type of study they ­were undertaking.37 The authors ­were asking questions about how a par­tic­u­lar community in ­England experienced and responded to the pressures that En­glish society was under­ going from the early sixteenth ­century to the end of the seventeenth ­century, challenges that ­were set in motion by rapid demographic growth, inflation, and religious change. But their period was defined by their prob­lem and by their methodology—­that is, by the types of sources that ­were available and would enable them to address the sorts of questions they wanted to pose.

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Social historians responded to Wrightson and Levine’s work by setting out to test their conclusions through looking at other communities across dif­fer­ent time periods.38 The advancement of historical knowledge and understanding, in other words, necessitated not embracing Wrightson and Levine’s periodiza­ tion but challenging it. Tony Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s landmark Population History of ­England ranged from 1541 to 1871—­from just a­ fter the introduction of the re­ quirement that parishes keep registers recording baptisms, burials, and mar­ riages in 1538 (few register books survive from 1538, hence 1541 became their starting point) through to the census of 1871 (while the first modern U.K. cen­ sus was in 1841, that of 1871 was the first that was suitable for the authors’ methodology of back projection). Wrigley and Schofield ­were interested in ex­ amining “what changes took place in a pre­-­industrial population over a pe­ riod of time long enough to encompass a secular cycle of population development,” to enable them “to investigate the relationship between demo­ graphic and economic change during its course.” This was a study, then, about pre­industrial ­England, and in their concluding chapter Wrigley and Schofield sought to posit “a dynamic model of the relationship between population and environment in early modern ­England”: the work was published in 1981, the outgrowth of many years of painstaking research conducted at a time when historians ­were still very much interested in the problematic of early moder­ nity. Nevertheless, the questions they w ­ ere posing necessitated g­ oing beyond the early modern and into the period normally thought of as being that of the Industrial Revolution.39 One might also periodize by demographic regime. The period circa 1500 to circa 1650, for example, was one of rapid demographic growth, which saw the population of ­England and Wales nearly double. The years from about 1348 (with the arrival of the Black Death in E ­ ngland) to the end of the fif­ teenth ­century, by contrast, had seen rapid population decline, whereas the period from the Restoration to the m ­ iddle of the eigh­teenth c­ entury saw pop­ ulation stagnation. Each of t­hese distinctive demographic regimes brought with them concomitant social and economic developments, transformations, and dislocations.40 Economic historians might alternatively periodize accord­ ing to economic systems (pre­industrial ­England, say) or phases of economic development (the agricultural revolution, protoindustrialization). Certainly ­there has been interest in testing for how the combined impact of rapid de­ mographic growth, inflation, religious reformation, changes in agricultural production, and protoindustrialization helped transform ­England from circa



Periodizing the Early Modern 31

1500 onward. Testing for that impact, as indicated already, has always involved looking at what happened both ­earlier and ­later. Rather than forcing com­ partmentalization into the medieval, early modern, and modern, it has required research that has transcended the medieval/early modern or preindustrial/ industrial divides. Then t­ here are historical approaches that do not operate within conven­ tional linear timescales. Certain kinds of histories of ideas would be a case in point. Let us take John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, written in the early 1680s and first published in 1689. One could write a contextualized his­ tory of the ideas articulated in this work that is firmly rooted in the reign of Charles II, and especially the radical politics of the late 1670s and early 1680s: why did Locke argue the way he did, at this par­tic­u­lar time, and with what anticipated effect?41 One could also unravel the history of the ideas that Locke articulated—of where the ideas came from—­a quest that would take one back to the 1640s in E ­ ngland (and the writings of Philip Hunton), to both Calvin­ ist and Catholic re­sis­tance theorists of the second half of the sixteenth c­ entury in ­England, Scotland, and Eu­rope, to the conciliarists of the l­ater M ­ iddle Ages, to Medieval Scholasticism, and even to classical antiquity: Locke’s idea that it is legitimate to resist force by force (vim vi licet repellere), for instance, comes from the Emperor Justinian’s Digest of Roman law (sixth ­century), while his notion that the welfare of the p ­ eople should be the supreme law (salus populi suprema lex esto) derives from Cicero (first c­ entury b.c.).42 One could also trace forward the influence of Locke’s ideas, how they affected subsequent generations—in the same culture or in dif­fer­ent cultures—in the short term, the medium term, or the longer term. 43 Printed works that have survived into the pre­sent and that continue to be available, and thus presumably continue to be read, have a history that tran­ scends the immediate temporal context in which they ­were produced. One can analyze Locke in the Collingwoodian sense of the inside of the event by trying to get to the root of what Locke was trying to say when he chose to express the views he did in the way he did in the 1680s. But Locke could not have foreseen how subsequent generations would appropriate his ideas. Liter­ ary artifacts—­and indeed many other kinds of physical objects (such as build­ ings, works of art, church ornaments, or silver tableware)—­have afterlives in a way that ­human beings do not. Yet, although such artifacts might survive to the pre­sent, the impact they have might not be consistent across the gen­ erations: works can be forgotten and subsequently rediscovered. The study of such artifacts, in other words, might require not only a dif­fer­ent type of

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chronological frame of reference but also a way of thinking about historical time dif­fer­ent from, say, the study of the life or reign of a par­tic­u­lar monarch. It is the precise nature of the intellectual inquiry in which we are engaged, then, that determines the appropriate temporal contextualization. That tem­ poral contextualization might be singular and quite specific: the reign of Elizabeth, for instance, or the reign of James I or of Charles II. It might be singular and quite broad: Tudor-­Stuart ­England, or early modern ­England. But it might be plural. Appropriate temporal contextualizations, in certain types of historical inquiry, might require knowing a ­great deal about a par­tic­ u­lar de­cade (say, the 1680s), but also involve exploring deeper roots (pushing back to the medieval and classical periods) and investigating influence and legacy (moving forward in time). History sometimes needs to be written on dif­fer­ent timescales, depending on the prob­lem that the historian has set for him-­or herself to consider.

Remaining Challenges If we look at what historians of early modern ­England actually do, then, we find a ­great variety of approaches to periodizing the early modern. Neverthe­ less, it might be suggested that the very pro­cess of labeling the early modern has negative implications for ­those who work on the period deemed prior. As Margreta de Grazia has put it, the medieval/modern divide “works less as a historical marker than a massive value judgement,” since “every­thing a­ fter that divide has relevance to the pre­sent,” while “every­thing before it is irrelevant.”44 Similarly, it might be said that to invoke the notion of the early modern, a term that by definition anticipates the modern, further serves to marginalize the medieval. ­There is a way in which the intermediary category of early modern can be, and indeed has been, invoked in order to emphasize a breaking with the past, as witnessing a series of developments—­Reformation, Revolution, En­ lightenment, the rise of print, the rise of capitalism, and so forth—­that w ­ ere to mark off the modern (what we are t­ oday) from the medieval (what we had once been). However, the concept of early modernity also carries with it a sense of continuity as well as rupture. It emphasizes as much what joins the medi­ eval to the modern as what separates them. Certainly ­those who lived in six­ teenth-­and seventeenth-­century E ­ ngland would not have thought what we now call the medieval as irrelevant to their lived experience. Anyone who has



Periodizing the Early Modern 33

worked on the po­liti­cal and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seven­ teenth centuries is fully aware of how the controversies of this time ­were framed in terms of debates about the significance of ­England’s medieval inheritance. If we look at the po­liti­cal strug­gles of the seventeenth c­ entury, for example, contemporaries ­were animated by ­England’s ancient (Anglo-­Saxon) constitu­ tion, the purported freedoms guaranteed by Magna Carta (1215), and Sir John Fortescue’s characterization (ca. 1468–71) of ­England as a mixed monarchy (dominium politicum et regale). With regard to religion, it would be mislead­ ing to suggest that contemporaries saw the Reformation as marking a rupture from the medieval past: many ­people from a wide range of theological per­ suasions saw the medieval as deeply relevant to what the Church in E ­ ngland became in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Again, it partly depends on the prob­lem one is studying w ­ hether one emphasizes rupture or continu­ ity. While some early modern historians have been interested in the rise of modernity, ­others have been very much concerned about the medieval con­ nections. Let me conclude, though, by reflecting on some of the challenges we still face and issues that remain to be addressed. Early modern En­glish history has tended to be written in the empirical tradition and is thus somewhat under­ theorized. Indeed, many early modern En­glish historians harbor a deep sus­ picion of anything that smacks of theory. Undertheorized practice can create its own difficulties, especially when we are talking across disciplines. It might be obvious to early modern En­glish historians, thoroughly immersed as they are in their own historiography, what par­tic­u­lar meaning is being attached to “early modern” in any given context. Yet is it always obvious to o­ thers whose training and practice leads them to be immersed in a dif­fer­ent type of schol­ arly lit­er­a­ture? In the field of historical linguistics, for instance, “Early Mod­ ern En­glish” is used to designate “a phase in the history of the En­glish language lasting from approximately 1500–1700”: this phase was clearly before the mod­ ern and a­ fter the medieval, but to what extent was the En­glish language at this time ­shaped by the forces of “early modernity,” as historians would un­ derstand them?45 Engaging more with scholars who work in cognate disciplines might require historians to be more self-­reflective about the labels and cate­ gories they employ. The fact that early modern historians tend to work not on periods but within them has encouraged a tendency—or perhaps, more accurately, is a reflection of a tendency—to shy away from larger metanarratives.46 This is un­ fortunate. Yet ­were we to return to examining metanarratives, how should

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they be framed? Steven Pincus’s attempt to classify the Revolution of 1688 in ­England as the first modern revolution might seem to suggest that the rise-­of-­ modernity narrative is enjoying a comeback, though Pincus’s work has been ­ ill the increasing internationalization of early mod­ heavi­ly criticized.47 How w ern En­glish history—­the desire to set E ­ ngland’s early modern past in more transnational or global contexts (­whether Britannic, Eu­ro­pean, Atlantic, trans­ oceanic, or imperial)—­a ffect not only our periodizations but also our con­ cept of the early modern? ­Because much of the recent research in this area seems to be geared t­ oward understanding the rise of globalization and of in­ ternational capitalism, again it might seem to be inviting us to revisit teleo­ logical questions about the path to modernity. Early modernists have not yet thought critically and reflectively enough about this. It would be unfortunate, however, if we resorted to old interpretive paradigms simply b­ ecause we have not had the self-­awareness to investigate w ­ hether their revival is appropriate.48 If historians are to search for alternative ways to label the early modern, what might ­those labels be? My survey of the practices of early modernists perhaps suggests that early modernity had ­earlier and ­later phases. Might it be preferable to talk of the long Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment? Or to employ a tripartite division of Reformation, Revolution, and Enlight­ enment? My own inclination is to resist period labels such as “Reformation” or “Enlightenment” b­ ecause they risk encouraging us to associate a par­tic­u­lar age with a singular defining characteristic. The term “early modern” is at least a label that implies plurality. It might seem to prioritize a peculiarly Western Eu­ro­pean version of modernity (which might be less an issue in works focused on Western Eu­rope), but at least it is a term that of necessity requires us to recognize that multiple trends and developments went into making that mo­ dernity. Any form of periodization we adopt risks positing arbitrary watersheds. The very fuzziness of “early modern” thus has its attractions, since it invites us to question when the beginning and ending points of early modernity ­really ­were. The purported watersheds ­here are cultural and economic pro­cesses and transformations—­Reformation, Industrial Revolution—­not fixed dates, and thus remain open to interpretation. The danger comes when a purported watershed becomes attached to a specific event—­such as the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, following the failure of the mid-­century revolution. The 1660 watershed has proved remarkably resilient in early modern En­glish his­ toriography. Historians might work on the early Stuarts, or the Tudor and early Stuart period, or, alternatively, on the ­later Stuarts, or on the ­later Stuarts and



Periodizing the Early Modern 35

the Hanoverians, or the long eigh­teenth c­ entury (which might run from 1660 to 1832), but very few work across the seventeenth ­century as a ­whole.49 This makes it very difficult to see continuities across the ­century, even though, for de­cades, Restoration historians have been insisting that t­ here w ­ ere power­ful continuities with the early Stuart period and that of the Civil War and Inter­ regnum.50 ­Those studies that have sought to transcend the 1660 divide stand out as exceptions.51 ­There are signs that the trend ­toward a more globalized approach to the study of seventeenth-­century En­glish history might help erode the 1660 watershed, although that remains to be seen. It is ironic that in a field of inquiry as deeply empirical as early modern En­glish history, the em­ piricist rationale for overturning the stubbornly per­sis­tent 1660 divide has yet to prevail.

Chapter 2

Time Bound­aries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies Nigel Smith

Problematizing Periods for “En­glish” Lit­er­a­ture The understanding of periodization in early modern literary studies is currently in a state of considerable transformation. The temporal categories that have served us for over a c­ entury are in flux, as I w ­ ill trace in this essay. This move­ ment is particularly prominent in the study of lit­er­a­ture, where text produc­ tion and reception raise a set of concerns dif­fer­ent from ­those that preoccupy po­liti­cal and social historians. In what follows, I w ­ ill also consider what hap­ pens to notions of historical period in the context of international and trans­ national aspects of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century “En­glish” lit­er­a­ture; the significance of the fact that literary texts often interrogate the nature of time, influencing the perception of a text’s par­tic­u­lar “period”; and the recent focus on form and style that leads us to rethink conventional modes of period. In order to open up ­these questions, I ­will first give some thought to the meaning of the word “period” itself. We can begin by noting that, per the Oxford En­glish Dictionary (OED), the word “periodization” is modern, noticed first in 1898 in the American Historical Review: “Since the product of t­ hese ­factors forms a unity, it is the ­factors all together which vary from epoch to epoch; and their varying can be subjected to periodization.” 1 This account con­ tains the two central features of the concept of historical period: that periods are determined by a perceived commonality of ­factors (cultural, social, eco­ nomic, philosophic, e­ tc.), and that distinctions between periods are designated by moments of perceived change in this set of f­ actors (“their varying”). It was



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 37

not too long, however, before the tail was seen to wag the dog. This pitfall of periodization is revealed in another OED example from 1938 (forty years a­ fter that first definition, and also from the United States): “This concept-­chasing is a consequence of the more or less arbitrary ‘periodization’ of literary his­ tory.” The use of quotation marks indicates the relative novelty of the term, but t­here is already a sense h ­ ere that the period defines the set of concepts, rather than the other way around. If the modern word “periodization” and its inherent contradictions enter the language nearly si­mul­ta­neously, the early modern word “period” was also fraught.2 The full etymology of the En­glish word “period” is immediately sug­ gestive of complication. The En­glish word, derived from fourteenth-­century ­Middle French, originally meant the length of time a disease lasts; by con­ trast periodus of postclassical Latin means the interval between recurrences of a disease. The root word thus held diametrically opposed meanings, signify­ ing e­ ither the presence or absence of pathology. Furthermore, while t­ hese two root definitions express a length or interval, in the fifteenth c­ entury “period” also comes to mean the cyclical passage of time, signifying the successive stages of an empire’s history—­from the “ancient Greek περίοδος [which means a] ­going round, way round, cir­cuit, revolution, cycle of years, periodic recurrence, course.” This notion of cyclicality is also pre­sent in “period” as the “occur­ rence of menstruation,” and as the “orbit of a celestial object,” the latter used by Copernicus in 1543. The conception of a cyclical pattern or a recurrent phe­ nomenon was understood to have astrological significance in the early mod­ ern period: “Periods used as chronological units are usually marked by the coincidence of a par­tic­u­lar point in the lunar cycle with a par­tic­u­lar point in the solar year, so that new and full moons occur on the same days in corre­ sponding years of successive periods,” with an initial En­glish usage being found ­ ill see, many words to do with in Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimage (1613).3 As we w the calculation of time periods find their first En­glish usage in the late six­ teenth and, more frequently, the seventeenth ­century. We can draw the con­ clusion that in the En­glish language the precise sense of periodization as a distinguishing between occurrences or noting of recurrences in a given space of time is a post-1500 rediscovery of a sense known to the ancient Greeks. And yet, much as the early modern “period” encompasses cyclicality and recurrence, it also, paradoxically, means an ending. The OED cites the earli­ est example for this meaning from the poet John Lydgate in 1554.4 But the evidence that the meaning of the word signifying an ending is early modern is supported by the appearance of “period” as a verb: “trans. To bring to an

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end; to terminate” (William Covell, Polimanteia [1595]), and “intr. To come to a conclusion, conclude” (Owen Felltham, Resolves: 2nd Cent. [1628]).5 Fi­ nally, in Greek t­ here is the sense of a “rounded sentence” (applicable in Hel­ lenistic Greek to prosody and m ­ usic), and then through to Latin where periodus is the “complete sentence.” In En­glish we do not find examples of this usage ­until the l­ater sixteenth c­ entury (in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar [1579]).6 Even in this rhetorical figure we find contradictory impulses, one about round­ ing, and the other about ending. As we enter into a discussion of periodiza­ tion, then, we should recognize that we are working with a word—­a nd a concept—­that is highly unstable, and often even paradoxical. “Period” can signal presence and/or absence, the cyclical and/or a point of ending. Given the profound epistemological burden carried by periods in historical work, the inherent complexities need to be noted. In fact, as the next part of this essay ­will show, the complexities of the concept “period” are not merely t­hose of the historical lexicon, but of the basic notions of causality and categorization. With t­ hese contradictory notions si­mul­ta­neously in use, it should not sur­ prise us that periods are thought of in figurative ways. Periods are time shapes. They can be rounded or linear, with beginnings and endings (“a length of time, esp. one marked by the occurrence of a phenomenon”7). Historical thought uses ­these figuratively framed conceptions of periods to think about the past, to put the past into shape as it addresses its fundamental question: the explanation of causation, that is, an explanation of how ­things came about in that past, and ultimately how t­ hings came to be as they are now. As a key question in historical inquiry, causation holds dif­fer­ent value in dif­fer­ent disciplines. Historians are generally concerned with ­people and so­ ciety, whereas literary critics are in the first instance concerned with texts and how they came about. Unlike historians, literary historians do not have the express need to provide causation for a set of events or circumstances in the past. They usually analyze a text very closely and contextualize it in its mo­ ment of composition or consumption, and thus the m ­ atter of literary periods or questions of periodization are often viewed at one remove from the central object of analy­sis. ­Those who defend traditional literary history may feel that a demonstration of causation is nonetheless at least somewhat pre­sent: how an author or genre emerged, how one style led to another, and so forth. Liter­ ary history is also a way of remembering the past as well as remembering lit­ er­a­ture: “the Age of Shakespeare,” “the Age of Milton.” Salman Rushdie has said that g­ reat works of lit­er­a­ture are the way by which the past w ­ ill be most remembered in the f­ uture, not by incidental or contingent events, or by high-­



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 39

powered explanations of events or major trends in the past (which, especially ­today, are increasingly the preserve of analytical, scholarly elites).8 Literary his­ tory then becomes a way of arranging g­ reat works or lesser works. Causation does not m ­ atter, although literary texts in such literary histories are tradition­ ally seen as reflections of the society from which they emerge, the society in history being the backdrop against which we might see them evolving in com­ position or being disseminated and received. This approach is illustrated by the title of the first chapter of Douglas Bush’s subtle En­glish Lit­er­a­ture in the ­Earlier Seventeenth C ­ entury, 1600–1660: “The Background of the Age.”9 Literary history usually requires, on top of necessary bibliography, an ex­ planation of the evolving technologies by which production and dissemina­ tion of texts happen: in the early modern period, this would primarily be the rise of the printing press and its consequences (like paper production) as well as systems of manuscript circulation.10 The 1930s saw the first serious impact of Marxist theories of historical development among British intellectuals; for instance, L. C. Knights’s explanation of En­glish Re­nais­sance drama as a con­ sequence of the rise of the commercial ­middle classes, themselves available to make an avid audience for the plays.11 Eventually, the most widely read histo­ rian of the period from the 1950s through the 1980s, Christopher Hill, was not only a Marxist historian but also one who wrote with no l­ittle success on literary topics, and who became widely influential in literary studies.12 A more adventurous way of proceeding with literary history has been to look at the text as an intervention in historical events themselves, rather than as a mere reflecting surface. John Milton’s pamphlet treatises would be an exam­ ple h ­ ere, as would Andrew Marvell’s or John Dryden’s po­liti­cal poems. Al­ though evidence about reception depends on how widely a text in a given genre circulated, this approach greatly enhances our ability to tie down probable meaning in an ambiguous or other­wise difficult text with greater certainty. The method is older than both Marxist-­driven literary history and its successor, the Foucault-­inspired New Historicism of the 1980s, but it has emerged with re­ newed vigor in the wake of the popularity of t­hose critical methods. The ap­ proaches and outlooks of ­those investigating the agency of texts have sometimes sharply differed, but it is notable that in this area historians and literary schol­ ars have shared much the same territory.13 By contrast, t­ hose scholars interested in rich interpretation and plenitude of meanings—­such as t­ hose evolving prac­ tical criticism in 1930s Britain, the American New Critics of the 1940s onward, and their more recent formalist or “presentist” descendants—­have always felt unacceptably l­imited by the claims of historical context. Words, if so

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interpreted, can mean anything, or anything a reading individual or group feels they can mean. We remember the fierce controversy about Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode” between the literary historian Douglas Bush and the New Critic Cleanth Brooks, for whom ­there was no other goal but the identification and veneration of as many levels of irony as pos­si­ble.14 The accumulation of dif­fer­ent themes and recent foci of attention in a va­ riety of disciplinary fields means that a work of early modern lit­er­a­ture might also be understood in terms of the history of po­liti­cal thought, history of phi­ losophy, art history, theology, history of media (not least where early journal­ ism interacts with circulated poetry), and of course the history of the book. A newer or renovated literary history with this level of cross-­disciplinary refer­ ence might still be much more like a genuine piece of historical explanation. Such approaches can stand right at the heart of both disciplines of lit­er­a­ture and history, just as Peter Lake has shown how early modern plays entertain the most significant domestic debates current in the theory of the h ­ ouse­hold and the parish (comedies and tragicomedies) or with regard to high politics and international relations (history plays and tragedies).15 But nearly all t­ hese studies accept established early modern period bound­ aries: the early modern begins roughly with the end of the Wars of the Roses, the accession of Henry VII, and the Reformation; it concludes with the final resolution of Britain’s revolutionary wars in 1688 with the settlement of a Prot­ estant monarchy, or, for some scholars, a ­century l­ater with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. This holds true too for the literary studies that have centrally focused on texts not traditionally regarded as lit­er­a­ture but now analyzed for their rhetorical and aesthetic content, such as Lancelot Andrew­ es’s sermons, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, or the historically emergent cate­ gory of printed news reportage in the period. Early modern literary studies have indeed accepted the most obvious markers of change, such as the reigns of monarchs, or the connected m ­ atter of huge confessional shifts, such as the amalgamation of the thrones of Cas­ tile and Aragon in Spain, and hence the introduction of single-­faith Chris­ tian states, as opposed to the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish triangulation of the preceding period, or the Eu­ro­pean Protestant Reformation as it played out in dif­fer­ent countries.16 This is ­because such historical transformations have often had considerable literary consequences, such as official sanction for ver­ nacular Bible usage. Moreover, the lit­er­a­ture of praise is at the heart of the central canon, written by highly skilled poets who w ­ ere often dignitaries and officeholders: they generally praised or most delicately and underhandedly crit­



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 41

icized rulers and regimes. Poetry was politics, and governed by the paradigm of the regime. Sir Philip Sidney, soldier, courtier, diplomat, was writing in Son­ net 30 of his sequence Astrophil and Stella about his frustrated love for “Stella,” usually assumed to be Penelope Rich, but in that sonnet he makes specific reference to events at the bound­aries of Christian Eu­rope (in Turkey, Muscovy, and Poland), the strug­gle of the Dutch against the Spanish in the Netherlands (in which he would fi­nally lose his life), and the success of his ­father in subduing re­sis­tance to the Elizabethan settlement of Ulster. Other places with their own languages and lit­er­a­tures have completely dif­fer­ent senses of periodization to En­glish categories, especially ­those imposed retrospectively by disciplinary perspectives and requirements upon the past. This m ­ atters greatly when ­these places or their lit­er­a­tures have an impact on En­glish lit­er­a­ture. Italian lit­er­a­ture, for example, has an entirely dif­fer­ent time frame from En­glish lit­er­a­ture. Much of Italian Re­nais­sance lit­er­a­ture was com­ posed and first circulated during the En­glish ­Middle Ages, indeed in the time of Chaucer. We do not even call it “early modern.” The t­ hings we think of as quintessentially Re­nais­sance happened in Italy during the time of the En­glish ­Middle Ages, such as the composition of the first modern, postclassi­ cal, and ex-­medieval tragedy.17 The shape of Italian history, with its city states falling into signorial governance and where neither nation state nor empire was part of the story ­until the 1800s (Venice had a very dif­fer­ent and e­ arlier kind of empire compared to t­ hose of the colonized Amer­i­cas), is radically dif­ fer­ent from that of the British Isles. The conventional literary period bound­aries that exist in other literary ver­ naculars may be connected with par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal shifts. This seems so with the Spanish canon of the sixteenth c­ entury and the rise of the unified Spanish monarchy and empire; a more abrupt and difficult shift for En­glish lit­er­a­ture is its near neighbor, French lit­er­a­ture.18 The instability suffered by the French monarch ­after the untimely death of Henri II in 1559 might have been temporar­ ily allayed by the accession of Henri IV in 1589, but the crown was not properly settled u ­ ntil the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715). In the early and mid-­seventeenth ­century, strong central administrators instituted a cultural policy that promoted what we know as French neoclassical lit­er­a­ture in poetry and on the stage. ­There is thus a sharply perceived difference between the looser connections and in some genres (such as drama) the more sparsely populated literary ground of the “French Re­nais­sance,” and the apparently coherent world of what is convention­ ally regarded as the ­later period of neoclassical drama and poetry, driven by the ambition of the Academie Française, established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635,

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and the salon society of Bourbon Paris. Howsoever wealthy aristocrats reigned over their own literary worlds, and howsoever lettered ­people with official posi­ tions enjoyed considerable freedom to speculate and to print their writings, all was driven by a cultural proj­ect emanating from the ancien régime. This period division is not at all compatible with the divisions in En­glish politics or lit­er­a­ture, even though French lit­er­a­ture exerted, through the force of translation, a continuing and undeniable influence on En­ glish lit­ er­ a­ ture.19 ­Because so many royalist exiles returned to E ­ ngland a­ fter 1660, t­ here is a sense in which Restoration lit­er­a­ture and culture begins to look French, and even su­ perficially French neoclassical: Charles II was worried enough to encourage a revived insistence on En­glish values. This picture underwrites the sense of a clean break with the past in 1660, and the beginnings of the “Augustan vision,” a more traditional view in En­glish literary studies, with the promotion of a pe­ riod upheld by professional associations and curricula of 1660 to 1789. Yet such a picture overlooks the literary significance of the convulsions of the British Civil Wars and the En­glish Revolution, and the evidence that this highly contested set of concerns and issues carries on into the Restoration, even to the crisis of the Clarendon regime in 1667 or the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672.20 It is also a view that overlooks another very in­ter­est­ing feature of early modern literary life that is both geopo­liti­cal and spatial: ­because ­there was a French court in West­ minster through the presence of Charles I’s queen Henrietta Maria, ­there was an active French-­language literary scene in the En­glish capital, with French poets visiting the country in the 1620s and 1630s. French politics happened in Somer­ set House as well as in the Tuileries. During this period t­here is a situation of mutual influence between French and En­glish poets, a phenomenon that can­ not easily be accommodated to conventional literary periodization.21 Mostly unnoticed by En­glish lit­er­a­ture students are period divisions cru­ cial to other vernacular lit­er­a­tures, divisions where En­glish lit­er­a­ture has an influence on foreign developments but not vice versa. For instance, the Dutch Revolt in 1568 creates a new Protestant nation-­state in northwest Eu­rope dur­ ing the span of several de­cades, leading to the import of En­glish literary forms; the revived Dutch theater of circa 1615 onward, although several de­cades b­ ehind the En­glish, borrowed from En­glish as well as Spanish drama. Meanwhile, German poets, hopeful of the creation of a Protestant nation-­state for Ger­ man speakers in northern Eu­rope, looked to both Dutch and En­glish models as examples of reformed lit­er­a­ture.22 The influence of En­glish lit­er­a­ture on cul­ tures speaking other languages has attracted l­ittle interest, and is usually considered a subcategory of somebody ­else’s literary history.23 Perhaps the ex­



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 43

ception is the ­career of Shakespeare in Germany. But this history of En­glish transnational literary flight, with period bound­aries inherently dif­fer­ent from conventional En­glish ones, is just as much a part of our literary history.24 Re­ latedly, ­those religious ­houses of En­glish Roman Catholicism, compelled ­after the Reformation to exist in continental Eu­rope, had their own far lon­ ger sense of a history populated by valuable literary texts; this material, too, is many leagues outside of conventional national literary history narratives. Within Roman Catholicism, some evidence shows that time was experienced and represented in a gender-­differentiated way: a very obvious case is that of En­glish Roman Catholic ­women residing in convents in continental Eu­rope.25 No less significant are the dif­fer­ent periods suggested by the Scottish and Irish worlds, with a coherent courtly lit­er­a­ture surviving from the late ­Middle Ages through to the reign of James VI. ­There is no “British Lit­er­a­ture” in any po­liti­cal sense ­until the ­union of the kingdoms of ­England and Scotland in 1707; Wales was defined as an assimilated principality since the M ­ iddle Ages, but with no naming of En­glish lit­er­a­ture written by Welsh ­people as “British.”26 The Scottish literary canon in this period is usually regarded as a dead zone, marked at one end by the end of courtly culture and, at the other, by that amaz­ ing cultural revival known as the Scottish Enlightenment. It is a ­great pity that Sir David Lindsay, Drummond of Hawthornden, Sir Thomas Urquhart, and so on, all go missing in nearly all taught accounts of the lit­er­a­ture of this period.27 The story of Irish cultural occlusion might be said to be even more severe than that in Scotland, and involves a far more extensive degree of military oppression. One established key moment for the rise of En­glish literary great­ ness is the publication of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), a circumstance intimately connected with Elizabethan settlement policy in Ire­ land, a pro­cess in which Spenser played a part. Howsoever devastating ­those years w ­ ere, the demise of Celtic literary culture that followed the Flight of the Earls in 1607 was an additional major catastrophe, which left Ireland with the prospect of a hybrid (Anglo-­Irish) literary tradition to grow in the ­future and an Irish-­language canon that still remains very largely locked up in un­ edited manuscripts in Dublin ­today.28 Even while recognizing that a study of periodization requires attending to historical localities, we should also acknowledge the influence of f­ actors that cut across period divisions. Language, and literary language in par­tic­u­lar, takes far longer than the life of po­liti­cal regimes or religious movements to change. Any sensitive literary scholar should be aware of long-­term ele­ments of survival in literary language from hundreds of years ago.29 The deliberate archaism of some

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Elizabethan poets, such as Spenser, is a famous feature, but some grammar and word order features remain for a long time. To this extent the sixteenth ­century in ­England is surely a time of enormous transformation. John Skelton’s polyvo­ cal poetry at the beginning of the ­century still embodies medieval rhythms and colloquial pronunciation. A hundred years l­ater, all this is eschewed by Ben Jonson, whose “modern” diction, meter, and most of all the regularity of his verse show how substantially En­glish poetry had transformed. A long period of En­glish poetic language (Chaucer through Wyatt to Spenser) coincides in the early modern En­glish poetic mind with very abrupt change (Jonson). The other kind of canon that ­matters in literary study beyond poetry, drama, and prose fiction is that of philosophy. The temporality, or sense of pe­ riods, that exists in philosophy is very, very long indeed, and involves a disci­ pline in which advances are made at a very slow rate. How frequently do new questions appear in addition to ­those raised by ancient philosophy? Not very often. Do the moderns replace the ancients, and where do the ­people in the ­middle like Aquinas, or for that ­matter Saint Augustine before him, fit? I take it that po­liti­cal theory is part of philosophy, and to some extent so is theology. Philosophy is written in ways continuous with the literary, sharing rhe­toric and logic as expressive foundations. Highly original philosophy is rare and when it occurs it is usually very influential upon many kinds of nonphilosophical dis­ course. Montaigne is such a writer. His recuperation of ancient skepticism in­ troduces a categorical transformation in intellectual history, and such an impact that he effects a new period in the history of philosophy that is regis­ tered across the lit­er­a­ture of early modern Eu­rope, not least in Shakespeare.30 Montaigne’s presence is one ele­ment that makes Shakespeare fi­nally quite dif­ fer­ent from medieval culture, howsoever that culture might leave its traces in his texts, as Sarah Beckwith has argued.31 Other works, such as some in po­liti­ cal theory and law, leave the distinct sense of extending a long reach from the ­Middle Ages into and through the early modern period by virtue of the sur­ vival and widespread use of key terms and concepts, even when, in the case of po­liti­cal theory, ­there are major innovators at the beginning of the early mod­ ern period, like Machiavelli, usually associated with the making of a new era.32

Literary Time Yet the elephant in the room for this essay thus far is that early modern lit­ er­a­ture, like much lit­er­a­ture from other periods, is explic­itly concerned



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 45

with time and how time is to be represented. While historians of the writ­ ing of history (historiography) are concerned with how the passing of time and the compartmentalization of time are made in works of history at points in the past, the pro­cessing of time in literary works is everywhere to be observed, and often has been.33 Think of the Chorus of Time in Shake­ speare’s The Winter’s Tale, registering the passing of sixteen years between the crisis produced by Leontes’s jealousy and its much ­later resolution (in order to cope with such a “wide gap,” the audience is asked to imagine that they have simply “slept between”), or the more elaborate and ­earlier topos ­ ese are such clichés of the seven ages of man.34 Why does Hamlet delay? Th in very basic criticism that we see how fundamental the issue of time is in early modern lit­er­a­ture. By the 1630s, a pocket watch could appear onstage as the ultimate material fetish, as in the character of Petrutio in Shakerley Marmion’s play The Antiquary (mid-1630s; published in 1641), whose idling away of time by watch-­watching also ironically pointed up an apposite awareness of the preciousness of time: “How, ne’re a Watch? oh monstrous! how do you consume your hours, ne’re a Watch?”35 Perhaps Marmion’s line carried the further intention of showing how the fetish obsession obliter­ ated the sense that one should reflect productively on what has gone tempo­ rally before. More recent work on early modern lit­er­a­ture’s concern with time focuses on the impact of the empirical experience of time by early modern ­people, as opposed to its iconic or schematic presence in chronicle history form. The rise of interest in material culture is significant ­here, so that the effect of the time­ piece (aka clock) on the ability to mea­sure time, as we have just seen in the instance of Marmion, m ­ atters. The unreliability of clocks introduces the pros­ pect of si­mul­ta­neously dif­fer­ent accounts, unlike, for instance, the singular time offered by older devices such as the sundial.36 This should be seen as very much the consequence of the conception of time emerging as something that obeyed its own laws, separate from anything ­else, and increasingly as a linear rather than cyclical or rhythmic entity. ­These considerable shifts need not be seen as necessarily separate from conceptions of time dependent on a sacred order, and where time is implicitly related to something ­else in the cosmos. So this is not necessarily or at all an instance of “secularization,” although that has been a common critical assumption. Indeed, ­there has been a reassertion of the relevance of the Latin term saeculum or seculum, meaning the ­human race living at a par­tic­u­lar time as opposed to the divine world, but not abso­ lutely distinct from that world.37

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Nonetheless the interest in establishing precisely datable historical peri­ ods does date from the early modern period, with the OED recording first usages for words associated with temporal compartmentalization occurring during the seventeenth ­century: “epoch” (as “system of chronology” [1614], “beginning of a new era” [1673], as “date of an origin” [1659], the “date of an event in a chronological sequence” [1660], and “a period of history defined by the prevalence of some par­tic­u­lar state of ­things” [1629]); “era” (as a “system of chronological notation” [1646], the “initial point assumed in a system of chronology” [1615], and as “date of origin” [1646]).38 It should of course be noted that ­these are instances in En­glish writing. The etymologies point to ­earlier usages in other languages that again challenge ­simple periodization: for instance, the OED etymology of “era” states: “late Latin aera, feminine singular ‘a number expressed in figures’ . . . ​prob­ably < aera ­counters used in calculation, plural of aes brass, money. . . . ​The chronological use of the word appears to have originated in Spain; where (as also in Southern Gaul and North Africa) it is found in inscriptions prefixed to the number of years elapsed since 38 bc.” By contrast, “age” is a much older, early medieval En­glish word in ori­ gin, including in its meanings the sense of a “distinctive era or period of ­human history” (1325), while “time” as a “finite extent or stretch of continued existence” has a first usage dated to 1225. Perhaps t­ here is a sense of some shift of awareness with the first recorded instance of “time” as “the pre­sent age” being in Caxton, from 1484. “­Century” as a temporal division of a hundred years comes into En­glish in 1566 through reference to the Magdeburg Centu­ ries, a Protestant work chronicling church history up to 1300 (published at Magdeburg, 1559–74); in 1585 the word is first used as we have come to know it—­that is, as a regular division of one hundred years successively forward or backward from the birth of Christ.39 It may well be that the Reformation and humanism produced an interest in greater chronological accuracy, but we are also witnessing in time the rise of vernaculars as arenas in which learned dis­ cussion, such as that concerned with dates and dating, was growing. ­These new conceptions of time w ­ ere discussed in Latin e­ arlier than they w ­ ere dis­ cussed in En­glish. Literary critics have been happy to work with the compelling cases made for a shift in the understanding and experience of time by authorities such as Reinhart Koselleck and Ricardo Quinones, who argue that the early modern experience of time becomes linear and hence experience is “sped up,” since it is no longer entirely subject to regular repeated rhythms.40 Time proclaimed by the sounding of bells was supplemented by public clocks where one could



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 47

observe the graphic pre­sen­ta­tion of the passing of time in a circular clock face. (The first of t­ hese was installed in London in the late 1300s, the time of Chau­ cer, so once again, conventional periodization is challenged.) A more detailed means of temporal calibration, combined with new conceptual models of his­ torical division, leads to a new sense of the past as distinctly lost, except in historical rec­ord. In a related phenomenon, time became eco­nom­ically quan­ tified according to utility as a consequence of the commercialization that swept across southeast ­England in the ­later sixteenth ­century. And if time was money, how much time should a play­house offer to its audience? Sufficient to be value for money? Not too much to prevent p ­ eople getting on with their occupations? The challenge is to show how t­ hese transformations ­were operating in literary texts and on the stage. We ­will see more critical revelations held out by such contexts in the interpretation of texts such as the Elizabethan history plays. No one disputes the sophistication with which temporality was handled in plays such as The Famous Victories of Henry V or The History of Cardenio, the famous lost play of Shakespeare and Fletcher, insofar as we can tell from the probable ­later reworking by Theobald and based on an episode in Cervantes’s Don Quijote.41 The early modern obsession with the past is now shown through analy­sis of poetry and drama to be a way of thinking about futurity, indeed a means of constructing an ethical improvement in futurity.42 ­Grand time schemes, articulating universal truths, such as millenarian or apocalyptic eschatology, contrast with but might also be embodied by the very sense of the time it takes a local experience, such as death from poison­ ­ ill ing, to happen.43 And even the most aesthetic focus in literary analy­sis w have a crucial time component: beauty in the h ­ uman world w ­ ill not last and ­will fade. We may have more medical knowledge than our forebears and, for many, better health care, but we have not yet achieved h ­ uman immortality, so aging remains a crucial concern and the subject of much serious literary-­ philosophical inquiry.44 Seventeenth-­century lit­er­a­ture seems especially good at bringing ­these dif­ fer­ent senses of time together into points of simultaneous awareness, just as its religious lit­er­a­ture affords some of the best examples of typology in the en­ tire canon. The g­ reat goal of all narrative is to explain the passing of time even as the writing of a narrative, and the reading of one, or the witnessing of an acted one, take time. When a narrative is in verse, the ­matter of time pass­ ing becomes especially impor­tant ­because time in ­earlier poetry is metered, which is to say that its repre­sen­ta­tion is fundamentally a m ­ atter of the poten­ tials of its chosen prosody. We might repeat here that the other major sense of

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“period” is as the end of a sentence: a unit of sense and of time. Famously, Paradise Lost justifies the ways of God to men in a poetic style that facilitates the multiple senses of passing time, angelic as well as h ­ uman time, eternity, and the interaction of all t­hese ele­ments, even as the poem begins, as epics should, in medias res.45

Transhistorical Critical Acts Just as the texts that we study can bring together temporalities that do not fit within the frame of a historiographer’s schemes of periodization, so too the literary scholar can dwell on engagements with time that range across con­ ventional borders. Close attention to the quality of writing, the traditional vir­ tue of literary criticism, may reveal more about the experience of events in time than many historians would choose to admit. In early modern texts we find, for instance, a lingering sense of nostalgia for the pre-­reformed world, the sense that even a hundred years and more ­later, the Reformation was a recent event, or that it repeated itself monstrously through time in a series of unstoppable and gross recurrences, a destructive interruption in the natu­ral order.46 The complexity of moods ­here, even on the part of reformers who ­were convinced Protestants, is compellingly and touchingly exposed, as Philip Schwyzer observes: For Denham, Shakespeare, and the Walsingham poet, the percep­ tion of “lateness” does not emerge out of what they apprehend with their senses, but out of what they fail to see or hear. Denham looks on a bare hilltop and thinks of the chapel that once stood ­there. The Walsingham poet hears owls shrieking and Shakespeare, perhaps, hears nothing at all, yet both are prompted thereby to think of the sweet songs that once filled the desolate space. For Hooker and ­later historians, likewise, the empty space that had once held Grandisson’s tomb—­hovered over by a pitying Christ whose gaze rested only on blank slabs—­served as a power­ful reminder of that lost memorial. Had another monument been erected in the same place, or the cha­ pel been other­wise renovated, it is unlikely that the removal of the tomb could have maintained its status as a recent event across so many de­cades. In this case, it is tempting to speak of an intentional or un­ intentional curation of absence.47



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 49

Historians tend to keep their findings within time bound­aries and let their readerships draw their own implicit comparison with events in the con­ temporary world, and of course t­here is a general history that seeks signifi­ cance by arguing across conventional period borders.48 However, in the discipline of literary studies, focused on verbal expression and the compari­ son of dif­fer­ent kinds of artistic creation, time is no final boundary. Schwyzer is thus at pains to make comparisons with very recent responses to violent, irreversible events: While the Reformation has long since ceased to be late, a similar sort of telescoping of collective memory can be detected in mod­ ern responses to incidents of loss and destruction, especially where the loss in question has been sudden and apparently abso­ lute. The proximity of t­hese disastrous events to the pre­sent is maintained through memorial practices that are often grounded, as in the early modern period, in the curation of absence. The spectacle of annihilation at New York’s “Ground Zero” has been sanitised yet perpetuated in the “Reflecting Absence” memorial, which preserves the footprints of the Twin Towers as eternally vacant space.49 This might appear to be an obvious transhistorical comparison, facilitated methodologically by the author’s e­ arlier invocation of Walter Benjamin as a way of opening up the issue of post-­Reformation nostalgia. But it might also be seen as part of an inflection in the “new formalism”—if that is what it is—­a critical movement that has succeeded historicism in early modern liter­ ary studies. The New Formalism enables quite striking transhistorical literary com­ parisons. Or is it a kind of historically conscious presentism? As an example of this mode, we can look to Jeff Dolven’s new study of literary style that fixes its subject by reading the resolutely early modern Sir Thomas Wyatt against the resolutely twentieth-­century Frank O’Hara.50 Wyatt is a poet who can be historically located with considerable precision; for instance, in poetic dialogue with the g­ reat Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega, and against Philip II’s im­ perialism.51 But in Dolven’s proj­ect, O’Hara’s keen interest in Wyatt’s poetic style is a way of stretching (if that is not an understatement) the Re­nais­sance poet’s period far outside of its normal ambit of consideration. Dolven juxta­ poses Erasmus’s recommendations with regard to rhe­toric and O’Hara’s

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frankness. It is an inner necessity of many O’Hara poems to break decorum, for instance: disbelieving your own feelings is the worst and you suspect that you are jealous of this death YIPPEE! I’m glad I’m alive “I’m glad ­you’re alive too, baby, ­because I want to fuck you”52 As Dolven comments, “­There is an aphoristic seriousness to the first line; the second is a gnomic, graceful alexandrine. (O’Hara’s French was very good.) Its very grace provokes the ensuing outburst, and then the answer—is it a proposition, or somebody e­ lse’s line coming to mind?”53 While the directness of O’Hara’s poetry might seem a blatant violation of sixteenth-­century deco­ rum, Dolven traces an affinity in engagement with style across the centuries by noting Erasmus’s own stylistic directives: “ ‘The purpose of ­these instruc­ tions,’ writes Erasmus, of his rules and examples, ‘is . . . ​to give you the choice, once you understand the princi­ples, of emulating the Laconic style,’ the low style, ‘or of imitating the exuberance of Asianism,’ the high, ‘or of expressing yourself in the intermediate style of Rhodes,’ the m ­ iddle. Erasmus’s ideal stu­ dent has a choice ­because he understands the princi­ples.”54 Erasmus was cer­ tainly capable of bawdiness but is not known for direct sexual frankness: Dolven generates refined humor by making us realize just where choice of style might eventually lead. Such awareness can also pinpoint “presentism” in the past, such as when Shakespeare deliberately appeals to literary outmodedness in his sonnets. The plural temporality thus invoked speaks the love that is the subject of t­hese poems, resistant on the one hand to notions of fashion and pro­gress, and on the other, to timelessness, ­because the pre­sent moment in which the sonnets are voiced is not beyond time.55 Within this revised and complex awareness of temporality t­here is much and vari­ous new potential for understanding texts as participants in historical pro­cesses of causality.56 Our notion of historical period is thus being shifted by emerging modes of critical analy­sis that entertain a more expansive and elastic notion of his­ torical and literary time. Looking forward, digital technology means that openness to the simultaneous awareness of dif­fer­ent kinds of periodization and temporality in a single moment in the past or the pre­sent, and in a single text or several, is far more likely to happen. It is perhaps like a globalization of time compartments and, like con­temporary economic globalization, it has



Time Bound­aries and Shifts in Early Modern Literary Studies 51

both good and less good consequences. It can ­free us from the genuinely very ­limited, often nationalistic, or in some other way prejudiced, frameworks of perception that have dominated literary history models since the nineteenth ­century. This is exciting and potentially very productive, not least if it is seen as part of interdisciplinary cooperation. But we also need to keep a steady eye on where we have come from in order to see where we are g­ oing. In other words, the abolition of borders, or their substantial redefinition, should not be a reason to abandon what we have regarded as objective truth standards. In literary studies, perhaps, we can also use our close-­reading capacity to see many dif­fer­ent temporalities coming together at once, and across dif­fer­ent times and spaces, as a springboard for a revolution in the understanding of time not only in our own discipline but also in ­others.

Chapter 3

How Early Modern Church Historians Defined Periods in History Euan Cameron

One weakness shown by historians is their assumption that the way t­hings ­were in the past is utterly dif­fer­ent from the way they are t­oday. Another er­ ror, of course, is the precise opposite: it assumes that many if not most ­things ­were the same. Our exercises in assigning periods, in marking frontiers be­ tween periods, tempt us to erect large boundary fences, even walls, between one worldview and another, especially between what we take to be “modern” views and t­ hose of our pre­de­ces­sors. We tend to assume that the readiness to see history as nonteleological and chaotic, as lacking in obvious direction, de­ rives from sources as diverse as belief in a cosmic lack of purpose attributed to nineteenth-­century nihilists, and the disillusionment of Victorian liberal op­ timists in the face of twentieth-­century fascism, state communism, and global warfare. We also tend to assume that the countervailing narrative of scientific and technological pro­gress, according to which h ­ uman history is marching irresistibly to steady improvement and the betterment of life, derives from the naive optimism of some Enlightenment philosophes. That optimism was af­ firmed by the technological-­industrial pro­gress of the nineteenth ­century and reenergized by the medical and scientific innovations of the postwar era. Yet recognition of chaos can coexist in uneasy combination with a belief in ongoing purpose or direction in history, wherever ­human beings strive to make sense of what is ­going on around them. The attempt to see order in the chaos, while not denying the chaos, takes dif­fer­ent forms at dif­fer­ent cultural moments. Early modern historians w ­ ere acutely conscious of how chaotically world events unfolded. Harvests, epidemics, the survival and transmission of

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governments from one dynasty to another, ­were all utterly unpredictable—­ and far more destabilizing, one might add, than is the case with ­either the food supply or most systems of government in the developed world ­today. The moral qualities—or the lack of such qualities—in leading po­liti­cal figures fed through in an unfiltered way to the lives of their subjects and their neighbors. For an example of a culturally inflected ordering of chaos, consider Luther’s interpretation of Daniel’s prophecies. In 1530 Martin Luther wrote a preface to his translation of the book of Daniel. Describing the eleventh chap­ ter, Luther decoded the cryptic language of this late Hellenistic-­era Hebrew text in terms of the fratricidal and destructive ambitions of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, whose regimes arose in Syria and Egypt, respectively, ­after the death of Alexander the ­Great. Rulers from two interrelated and often incestu­ ously entangled dynasties vied for control of the Near East both with each other and with their own relatives. To take but one revealing extract from Luther’s preface: In order to make the peace more secure, [Ptolemy II Philadelphus] gave his only d ­ aughter, Berenice, in marriage to Antiochus Theos; and then he died. Berenice, however, the ­daughter of a mighty mon­ arch and now herself a power­ful queen and lady at court, schemed that her [infant] son should inherit the kingdom of Syria. But the plot failed, for Laodice, the [divorced] former queen of Antiochus Theos, and her two sons, Seleucus Kallinikos and Antiochus Hierax, hated Berenice and her son and desired themselves to inherit the kingdom. Laodice poisoned her lord, Antiochus Theos, and then stirred up her two sons against Berenice, their stepmother. They chased her out and fi­nally murdered not only her but also her child and all her retinue.1 ­ ere, if anywhere, was utterly meaningless conflict. Authors of ultraviolent H dynastic fantasy dramas have nothing to teach the Seleucids and the Ptolemies. Martin Luther, and following him a large number of other commentators, dwelled repeatedly on this confusing, unedifying, and vicious period.2 And ­here is the irony. Theologians and historians charted t­ hese profoundly chaotic events b­ ecause they believed that the unfolding story demonstrated the guiding hand of God. Daniel (they thought) had foreseen and foretold ­t hese events during the exile in Babylon in the sixth ­century bce, and de­ scribed them in coded form. The more humanly incomprehensible the narra­ tive was, the more it foretold what was impossible to predict, the more



How Early Church Historians Defined Periods in History 57

impressive the prophecy. No ­human mind could have anticipated the weav­ ing to and fro of alliances and campaigns in t­ hese fractured dynasties. Only divine inspiration could reveal events hundreds of years in the ­future in such detail. Modern biblical critics are, in the main, persuaded that the eleventh chapter of Daniel is a vaticinium post eventum written shortly ­after the end of the reign of Antiochus IV in 164 or 163 bce.3 Early modern commentators con­ fronted the chaos of a­ctual events with their theological convictions, and found ­these convictions reinforced when events w ­ ere (apparently) foretold.

The Hand of God in H ­ uman History The confrontation between evident chaos and presumed meaning and direc­ tion in history was, arguably, even more problematic for the historians living during the early modern period than it is ­today. The risks if one could only see chaos, if one failed to find some deeper meaning, w ­ ere higher than they are now. One’s faith and existential response to the ­human predicament ­were involved. Finding meaning in the confusion of events was not just a quest to understand humanity: it was a search for the marks of God. One way to dis­ cern meaning, to keep the chaos at bay, was to identify meaningful periods and phases in the history of the world. At one level, historical periods served as rhetorical devices, as they do for us. They broke down the flow of events, gave meaning and sense to the narrative, and served as a resource for explana­ tion. However, other reasons for assigning periods belonged to the theologi­ cally and biblically determined history of the premodern. Period divisions based on the rise and fall of empires ­were often anticipated in prophecy, so biblical historians saw t­ hese regime changes as evidence of the controlling hand of God in history. God de­cided to raise up one ruler and cast down another, even among rulers who did not recognize the true God in the first place. No ruler, however power­ful or arrogant, could stand against the Judaean, and ­later Judeo-­Christian, God. This message mattered for the p ­ eople of Judaea squeezed between more power­ful Hellenistic monarchies in the second ­century bce just as it did for Western Eu­ro­pe­ans faced with an Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna in 1529–30. ­There was an obvious prob­lem with this theistic position. The God of Is­ rael did not appear to make a particularly good or caring job of looking ­after God’s own ­people. Periodization, and the application of prophecy, might make the case for divine management of ­human affairs, but that left the question

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of why the divine habitually left t­ hose affairs in incompetent, wicked, or un­ stable hands. What was God d ­ oing by allowing the rise and atrocities of, for instance, Antiochus IV Epiphanes? Before the Enlightenment, at least, ­there was no reason to expect that God would treat the ­human race, in this life, with compassion or gentleness. Sinful h ­ uman beings deserved what was com­ ing to them. Even ­those who ­were more pious and less egregiously sinful than the rest might be afflicted with bad government for a ­whole range of valid rea­ sons: testing their faith, warning them against backsliding, giving them an opportunity to earn merit through suffering, and so forth. In the l­ ater history of the Christian Church, similar arguments could be used to explain pagan persecution of Christians, heretical persecution of the orthodox, and, l­ater, Catholic persecution of Protestants or vice versa. Just as the man born blind in John’s Gospel was born blind so that God might be glorified in his healing (John 9:1–34), so evil rulers might be permitted for a while so that God’s judg­ ments against them would be all the more impressive.

The Beginning and the End of the World in Early Modern Historiography For early modern historians and chronographers, world history comprised a compact and manageable span of years. ­Until the eigh­teenth ­century, though many ­people knew of classical theories that assigned a greater age, or even eter­ nity, to the world, the consensus in Christian and Jewish Eu­rope stood that the world was as old as one could compute it to be from Hebrew Scripture. The Creation had occurred between 3,950 and 4,000 years before the birth of Christ.4 The earliest and more recent events could be dated against biblical chronology. Moreover, one could integrate biblical chronology into, for ex­ ample, the cyclical chronological schemes of Greek antiquity, such as the Olympiads. Ambitious historians would combine the dates of events in scrip­ ture with ­those of classical history. Many if not most ­people believed that not too much time remained ­until the Second Coming and the end of history. One needs to nuance this point. A few ­adepts and mathematicians believed that one could discover with abso­ lute precision the date of the Second Coming from biblical evidence. A larger number, perhaps a majority, of thinking ­people at the time expected the end of history at sometime within the next few centuries.5 Typical of this kind of approach was the skeptical and thoughtful physician Thomas Browne, who



How Early Church Historians Defined Periods in History 59

wrote in the ­middle of the seventeenth ­century: “And therefore, restless un­ quiet for the diurity of our memories unto pre­sent consideration seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion to the other. ’Tis too late to be ambitious. The g­ reat mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.”6 Some of the educated, including many Roman Catholic thinkers, insisted that the timing of ­these cosmic events was absolutely unknowable.7 Nevertheless, in the early modern t­here was no expectation of a ­future leading on into unimaginable realms of pro­gress and invention. On the contrary, such discoveries as w ­ ere made—­above all, the discoveries of the New World or of printing—­were un­ derstood as evidence that the end of days was approaching.8 ­A fter two centuries of transformative technological and scientific inno­ vation, our default assumption tends to be that the f­ uture lies in humanity’s own hands. E ­ ither we ­shall destroy the world through our feckless abuse of nature or our aggressive pursuit of power, or, if we survive ­these challenges, humanity ­will arrive at sustainable, wiser, more balanced modes of living, less focused on frantic economic growth and material acquisition. Even theistic thinkers tend to see God’s providence working through h ­ uman agencies. Th ­ ese prob­lems ­were unthinkable to premodern ­people: therein lies a large irreduc­ ible difference between our age and theirs. The end of time was conceived not through a human-­generated catastrophe but through a direct, vis­i­ble inter­ vention of God in power beyond h ­ uman control.9

Historical Periodization in Early Modern Histories In one sense, any historical transition could inaugurate a new “era” in history. However, in early modern biblical-­historical writing, three overlapping sys­ tems w ­ ere most often used to make sense of the flow of time. None of ­these was original to the early modern, and using any or all of them required a cer­ tain cultural and religious myopia or tunnel vision. However, t­hese three systems dominated world-­historical writing ­until at least the early eigh­teenth ­century. They are listed h ­ ere, not in the order in which they w ­ ere devised, but in approximately the order in which they assumed prominence in early mod­ ern thought. First, Augustine of Hippo bequeathed a six-­or sevenfold sequence of “ages of the world.” Th ­ ese ages w ­ ere based entirely on events in Hebrew Scripture:

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they punctuated h ­ uman history with turning points in the relationship be­ tween God and God’s p ­ eople. The first age ran from Adam to the Flood, the second from the Flood to Abraham, the third from Abraham to King David, the fourth from David to the Babylonian captivity, the fifth from the captiv­ ity to the coming of Christ, and the sixth from Christ’s birth to the end of time. The hy­po­thet­i­cal seventh age would be that of the reign of the returned Christ on earth. In his compact exposition of this system in On the Catechiz­ ing of the Uninstructed, Augustine interpreted t­ hese bound­aries in thoroughly theological terms. The first two periods belonged to the ancient writings only. In the next three periods, attention was drawn to the “bodily ancestry of Christ,” as references to ­these periods appeared in the New Testament. The sixth age was special: from this point the ­people of God did not serve God in the hope of material benefits, but solely for spiritual reasons and in hope of eternal life.10 In Augustine’s time less than four hundred years since the coming of Jesus Christ needed to be accounted for, and the era since the Incarnation could be viewed as a single period. Nevertheless, this system retained popu­ larity through the ­later ­Middle Ages and into the sixteenth ­century. Among its most famous ­later exponents was Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514), author of the text of the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493.11 Schedel included the age of the world according to the Augustinian system in the r­ unning heads at the tops of the pages of the Nuremberg Chronicle. Another German-­language his­ torian to use this system was the spiritualist radical Protestant Sebastian Franck (ca. 1499–ca. 1543) in his Chronica, Zeÿtbuch vnd Geschÿcht Bibel, issued in mul­ tiple editions from 1531 onward.12 The second system of world history was the simplest, and also in many ways the most problematic. In the tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Tal­ mud, the following statement occurs: “The Tanna debe Eliyyahu teaches: The world is to exist six thousand years. In the first two thousand ­there was desolation; two thousand years the Torah flourished; and the next two thou­ sand years is the Messianic era, but through our many iniquities all ­these years have been lost.” Another tractate, Avodah Zarah, repeated the passage quoted, ending with “through our many sins a number of t­ hese have already passed [and the Messiah is not yet].”13 ­These statements ­were a gift to the Christian reading of biblical history: the saving clauses about the delayed ar­ rival of the Messiah could be omitted or reinterpreted to mean that the third period of two thousand years ­after the coming of the Messiah would not be completed.



How Early Church Historians Defined Periods in History 61

Thus the German astrologer, historian, and friend of Melanchthon, Jo­ hannes Carion (1499–1537), prefaced his world history thus (­here quoted in the En­glish translation of his 1531 German Chronica): The sayenge of Helias ­house. The worlde s­ hall stande syxe thousand yeres and ­after ­shall it falle. Two thousande yeares wythout the Lawe. Two thousande yeares in the lawe. Two thousande yeares the tyme of Christ. And yf ­these yeares be not accomplyshed, oure synnes ­shall be the cause, whyche are greate and many.14 The initial period up to the time of Moses, before the law was given to the ­people of God, was variously known as “void” or “empty.” Thus described it would appear in many dif­fer­ent chronological ­tables. The belief that the law was given two thousand years a­ fter Creation and two thousand years before the coming of Jesus Christ attracted historical theorists from within Chris­ tian­ity, though neither date computed anywhere near exactly. The idea that the full two thousand years of the era of Christ might not be completed of­ fered a warning—­vague enough not to be tied down to a specific date—­that the Second Coming might occur sooner than 2000 ce. This Christianized reading of the Talmud became popu­lar, especially among German Protestants. Carion’s example was followed by, among o­ thers, Luther’s Supputatio anno­ rum mundi of 1541, George Joye’s exposition of Daniel in 1545, and Melanch­ thon’s revision of Carion. It formed part of the complex framework for Johann Heinrich Alsted’s ­table of world chronology.15 The third system of periodization came from the Book of Daniel, or, more precisely, from the Christian interpretation of the Book of Daniel. From the vision in chapter 2 of the statue made of four metals in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and the vision in chapter 7 of the four apocalyptic monstrous beasts revealed to Daniel, ­there grew the conviction that God had ordained history into four periods defined by four “­great monarchies.” The defining exposition of t­ hese passages came from Jerome in the fourth c­ entury and spread to be­ come almost the normative way to read ­t hese scriptural passages. The four “monarchies,” which ­were not ­really four and not all technically monarchies, ­were first ­those of the Assyrians and Babylonians (treated as one monarchy) then the Medes and Persians (similarly treated as one). Then, in most readings, came the monarchy of Alexander the G ­ reat and his Hellenistic successors,

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including the Seleucids in Syria and the Ptolemies in Egypt. Fi­nally, ­there came the empire of Rome. Rome’s “monarchy” was dated not from when Rome arose to significance as a Mediterranean power, but from when it toppled the Hellenistic monarchies from their position of dominance in the Near East, and became the determining authority in the lands of the Bible. One question then remained to perplex early modern Eu­ro­pe­ans, though it had never troubled Jerome. If the empire of Rome was, as the exegesis of Daniel claimed, only to end with the coming of Christ, could the pre­sent age be regarded in some sense as the continuation of the Roman Empire? This question disturbed historians and biblical interpreters and divided Germans from other Eu­ro­pe­ans. German writers understood the continuation of the Roman Empire into the ­Middle Ages as a basis for ethnic pride. The Empire had been “translated” from the Romans to both the Greeks and the Franks, and from the Franks to the Ottonians and the Hohenstaufen. The Holy Ro­ man Empire of the German Nation was the direct heir of the ancient West­ ern Roman Empire (and ­a fter 1453, arguably of the ­whole Roman Empire, ­whether of the East or the West). Belief in the so-­c alled translatio imperii gained traction in the ­Middle Ages through the writings of Otto, Bishop of Freising, closely related to the Hohenstaufen.16 Martin Luther could evoke this legend with confidence when he wrote in the preface to his translation of Dan­ iel in 1530: “Nevertheless it [the Roman Empire] has continued to grow and, like a plant, has been transplanted or (as they say) transferred [translatum] from the Greeks to the Germans. Yet this has occurred in such a way that its na­ ture as iron was retained, for the empire still has its estates, offices, laws, and statutes as of old.”17 In the detailed image of the statue of Daniel 2 published by Lorenz Faust, pastor of Schirmenitz in Saxony, the two legs of the statue w ­ ere represented as the Eastern and Western Empires, with the names of all their emperors en­ graved on the legs, down to the current holders on the ankles and feet (Fig­ ure 1).18 (Unusually, Faust included the Ottoman Sultans since 1453 on the right calf as the successors of the Eastern Empire.) Faust set up a series of numero­ logical relationships in his engraving: he aligned the four metals of which the statue was made not only with the four beasts of Daniel 7 but also with the planets (two each), the four ele­ments, and the four seasons. The message was clear: the fourfold structure of ruling regimes in the ancient world was writ­ ten into the physical fabric of the universe. History was as much the design of the creator as the elemental material of the cosmos.

Figure 1. ​Lorenz Faust, Anatomia statuae Danielis: kurtze u. eigentl. Erklerung d. grossen Bildnis d. Propheten Danielis (Leipzig: Steinman, 1585).

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For non-­German authors the continuity of the Roman Empire in the Ger­ man Nation posed a more serious challenge. Some, such as John Calvin, could argue that the prophecies of Daniel simply did not apply to the time ­after the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the w ­ hole issue of the succes­ sion of the Roman Empire (along with many other exegetical puzzles) was moot.19 In the notes to their Latin translation of the Bible, the reformed schol­ ars Immanuel Tremellius and Franciscus Junius added to this argument the interpretation that the fourth monarchy was not the Roman Empire at all, but the Seleucid and Ptolemaic monarchies that came ­after Alexander.20 Jean Bodin, in his Methodus, broke ranks with the historical majority: he argued that the ­whole four-­empires system was unhelpful and uninformative b­ ecause it failed to account for the current po­liti­cal state of Eu­rope altogether.21 Exe­ getical theologians expended g­ reat efforts to get the interpretation of what they regarded as prophetic writings absolutely correct, in the belief that such schol­ arship would confirm their understanding of divinely guided history. The ultimate consequence of their scholarship was, in fact, to suggest that the text could not be read in the traditional way a­ fter all. Despite the scholarly disagreement, the four-­monarchies system was em­ ployed in textbook instruction for de­cades a­ fter it had been cast into doubt by Tremellius and Junius, Jean Bodin, and the En­glish Hebraist Hugh Brough­ ton.22 The historical textbook written in 1557 by the Strasbourg humanist Johannes Sleidan, variously titled On the Four ­Great Monarchies or The Key of History, first translated into En­glish in 1563, reappeared in En­glish editions in 1631, 1635, 1661, 1694, 1695, and 1699.23 The per­sis­tence of the four-­monarchies system in religious culture is attested by the rise of a radical movement dur­ ing the mid-­seventeenth-­century Interregnum in ­England whose adherents de­ scribed themselves as the “Fifth Monarchy Men.” They believed that they ­were about to inaugurate the final millennial world order ­after the four world monarchies.24

What Do ­These Systems of Historical Periods Have in Common, and How Do They Differ? Belief in providentially ordered history was as deeply ingrained in radical re­ ligious culture as in biblical scholarship, if not more so. Th ­ ese three interpre­ tative schemes coexisted alongside each other and do not appear to have been seen as mutually exclusive. (By and large, however, the Augustinian six or seven



How Early Church Historians Defined Periods in History 65

ages tended to recede in the early modern period as the Talmudic and Daniel systems gained more attention and scholarly interest.) One can draw some con­ clusions about the shared significance of t­ hese chronological systems, but one ­ought also to observe some impor­tant differences between them. First, t­ hese schemes of world history—­especially ­those of Augustine and the Talmud—­ presupposed that the history of the world, indeed of the ­whole cosmos as it was then understood, was essentially the story of the relationship between God and the h ­ uman species. More particularly, ­human history was about the ­people of God from the Hebrew covenant through to the Christian Church.25 (That such systems ignored the majority of the ­peoples of the world—­those in East Asia, Sub-­Saharan Africa, and the newly discovered Amer­i­cas—­seems to have troubled historians far less than we might anticipate.) Second, world history in this biblical view was linear. In contrast to ­cyclical understandings of history, or beliefs that postulated the eternity of the world, biblical history began from a fixed point, the Creation. A date was as­ signed to it, Anno Mundi 1; from it ­every other date was calculated. History passed through a series of stages that represented dif­fer­ent modes or phases of the evolving relationship between God and humanity. It tended t­oward an end point, an eschaton, expected to be relatively close to the writer’s time. The natu­ral way to express the span of history was the timeline; theologians such as Martin Luther or Heinrich Bullinger expended considerable effort draw­ ing up chronological ­tables that w ­ ere, in effect, timelines.26 Third, all ­these modes of history presupposed the advent of a Messiah. ­W hether in the Talmudic scheme as understood in Rabbinic Judaism or in the dif­fer­ent forms of Christian messianism, the final stage in the story of God’s dealings with humanity was defined by the emergence of a figure who brought the relationship between God and Creation to the closest degree pos­ si­ble before the end of time. ­W hether the appearance of a Messiah was envis­ aged in the ­future (as in Judaism) or in the past (as in Chris­tian­ity), the emergence of God’s anointed was critical to all understandings of history. For this reason the prediction of the coming of “the time of an anointed prince” (Daniel 9:25, NRSV) at a specific moment in time, according to Daniel 9:24– 27, provoked some of the fiercest debates between Christian and Jewish bibli­ cal commentators. A large part of Luther’s appallingly vitriolic rhe­toric in On the Jews and Their Lies (1543) denounced the Rabbinic commentators’ refusal to accept that Daniel had foretold the precise time of Christ’s ministry, in relation to the rebuilding of the t­emple a­ fter the exile.27 The messianic ele­ ment in Judeo-­Christian historical thought explains why the anticipation of

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a dramatic, vis­i­ble, and transformative end of history plays such an impor­ tant role in ­these schemes. Once God had become manifest in a unique way, history could not continue in­def­initely as before. ­These chronological systems all construct a providential cosmic worldview, but they do so through a cultural, social, and geographic focus that garnered attention even during the early modern period. For example, the third of the patterns discussed e­ arlier, the four-­monarchies system of the Book of Daniel, looked at history from the perspective of the ­people of God, but in terms of the actions and rivalries of pagan potentates. The determining moments of his­ torical change w ­ ere not t­ hose that directly changed God’s relationship with God’s p ­ eople, but t­ hose that affected the circumstances ­under which the p ­ eople of God lived: for instance, leading the ­people of Judah into exile, and at the end of the exile allowing their return and the restoration of the ­Temple. As biblical commentators observed with increasing clarity through the sixteenth ­century, the perspective of the Jewish p ­ eople determined their view of world history. ­There would have been no purpose for a prophet among the Israelites describing the empires of the Cartha­ginians, Indians, Ethiopians, or Scythi­ ans.28 That point still left open the question of why a history of the world should structure itself and assign the divisions between periods with reference only to the stretch of territory between the Eastern Mediterranean and the ­Middle East. In the long term, of course, t­here was no answer. The periods assigned by medieval and early modern Western Christian historians reflected their view of what was primary in the h ­ uman story of their relationship with God. What mattered to ­these historians was, to a greater or lesser extent, the history of the covenanted ­people of God. ­There was a cultural myopia ­here, which the advance of exploration and colonization would place u ­ nder se­ vere pressure (though not always with the result of making Eu­ro­pe­a ns more inclusive). One might argue that all schemes of periodization almost invariably in­ volve a more or less arbitrary se­lection of what is impor­tant; they are over­ whelmingly influenced by one’s starting point, and necessarily entail a good deal of cultural myopia. In more recent modernity, historians have tried to escape from the Eurocentric, Judeo-­Christian-­centric view of the world. Some global historians in the modern era seek to define periods according to large-­ scale shifts in the environment, in modes of agriculture or industrial produc­ tion, or in techniques of warfare.29 Comparative religious historians since the nineteenth c­ entury have produced large-­scale typologies of forms of belief and practice, which lend themselves to assigning large-­scale phases of develop­



How Early Church Historians Defined Periods in History 67

ment.30 Sixteenth-­century historians could not have been expected to widen their gaze to the history of cultures far beyond their awareness, or to achieve the detachment from their religious perspective needed to think in such a broad way.

Attempting to See Numerical Patterns? Might ­there a­ fter all be some internal logic to historical events, aside from the inscrutable verdict and ordaining power of God? Some early modern his­ torians speculated ­whether some time span, some interval of years, might typ­ ically represent the longest time that any regime or empire could continue without radical change. An in­ter­est­ing example of this kind of thinking is of­ fered by Caspar Peucer, son-­in-­law of Philipp Melanchthon, and with Mel­ anchthon the coeditor and continuator of the Latin revision of Carion’s Chronica. In his extended prefatory ­matter to the definitive edition of Carion (1572), Peucer wrote: A universal time-­frame is established by the mention of the seventy weeks in Daniel, by which the time is expressed covering the period from the beginning of building the ­Temple ­after the Babylonian Cap­ tivity u ­ ntil [the time of] Christ. That period of time includes around 500 years.31 The histories of all ages, reviewed from remote antiquity, show that this period, as though settled by some divine law, is a fatal one for ­great empires, and brings ­wholesale revolutions. For it emerges by the agreement of a large number of examples, that when that pe­ riod has elapsed, almost in the very moment of the 500th year, or slightly before, revolutions happen whereby e­ ither regimes are over­ thrown, or cease to exist b­ ecause they are transferred to another, or they are changed into a new form.32 Peucer ­here combined theological analy­sis with a kind of proto-­social science determinism. The “seventy weeks” from Daniel 9:24–27 ­were, for Peucer and his contemporaries, the primary example of a divinely inspired prophecy that foretold critical events many centuries before with relatively precise dating. Yet he cited the 490 years of the “seventy weeks” as evidence for a more gen­ eral applicability of the princi­ple of five hundred years as a maximum for any regime. In fairness, Peucer, who shared his mentor’s interest in astrology, was

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trying to have it both ways. He believed as passionately as anyone that God was the authority ­behind changes in governmental systems. However, as a well-­read classical scholar he also wished to consider ­whether ­there ­were or­ ganic, natu­ral ­factors at play as well. ­A fter the passage just quoted, he went on to point out that some “monarchies” such as that of the Medes and the Persians, enjoyed a much briefer time in the sun, lasting at the apex of power for only some 230 years. Ultimately, Peucer concluded, the moral condition of a society gave an indication of its likely durability. One could expect God to administer punishment by transforming states where t­ here existed tyranny, sedition, theft, and fraud. Similarly, if ­family life was corrupted by depraved morals, God would respond.33 Peucer might have added, God would respond in God’s own time. Some of the histories that he reported showed a God who postponed taking action even against the worst examples of po­liti­cal and moral depravity.

And in the Church? The traditions inherited from Christian antiquity had very ­little to say about periods in the life of the Christian Church. The continuing history of the Church was if anything a source of perplexity. Ecclesiastical writers looked at the Church’s experiences for evidence of the coming time when a Church would no longer be necessary. Moreover, the history of the Church was typi­ cally written looking backward rather than forward. The Christian commu­ nity had been at its purest and most perfect when in the presence of its teacher and Savior, and every­thing thereafter was about defending and continuing that legacy. So Eusebius of Caesarea argued in the early fourth ­century that the Christian Church was the ancient, pure mono­the­ism given by God to God’s ­people, and that the task of the continuing Church was to preserve that leg­ acy without alteration.34 What­ever changes did occur tended to be accommodated within a frame­ work of ideas that stressed the uniqueness of orthodoxy and the continuity of the hierarchy. So, diversity in doctrine was inserted into a narrative of “her­ esy” among Catholic historians even when (as in the mid-­fourth c­ entury) the Arians outnumbered the Catholics and had greater influence with the power­ ful. Similarly, if t­here w ­ ere a schism or division in the Church’s leadership, one leader’s faction would retrospectively be determined to be the “true” heir of the Apostles, and the rival candidates to be schismatics. This perspective,



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enshrining the princi­ples of Catholic truth and a continuous Catholic hierar­ chy, persisted in the Western Church well into the ­Middle Ages. From the rise of the Gregorian Papacy to the ­Great Schism, it was practical to argue that ­there was one succession and one truth, if one looked at the continuous power held by the hierarchy and its (often conflicted) relationship with po­liti­ cal authority. Even ­after the Reformation, Catholic Church historians such as Cesare Baronio would describe the history of the Church in terms of one true community, ­doing what it had always done, persisting down the centu­ ries despite the attacks of its adversaries.35 For the theologians and historians of the Protestant Reformation ­t hings ­were very dif­fer­ent. The reformers’ doctrinal rhe­toric invited them to argue that the truth of the Gospel had been progressively obscured and corrupted over time. While occasional voices had been raised against a Church mired deep in error in the l­ater ­Middle Ages, it was ­really only with the advent of the sixteenth-­century Reformation that truth and purity had been restored to Chris­tian­ity. This narrative of purity lost and regained would be devel­ oped, in vari­ous ways, by e­ very reformed thinker who reflected on the jour­ ney of the Church. Some Protestant historians found themselves returning to the model of five-­hundred-­year phases. In a lengthy passage in the re­ working of Carion’s chronicle, Peucer, as we have seen, gave one of the most detailed expressions to the idea that Christian history could be di­ vided into phases of five hundred years each. During the first five hundred years, despite persecutions and the attacks on orthodoxy by the Arian movement, on the w ­ hole the Church conserved the doctrine and discipline that it had inherited from the Apostles. The next five hundred years wit­ nessed a mixture of good and bad: “Falsehood was mixed in with the truth, superstition with the pure faith, idolatry with the true worship of God.”36 Gradually the bad took priority over the good. So, in the third period of five hundred years (ca. 1000–1500) corresponding to the Catholic ­Middle Ages, “idolatry, superstition and ambition” grew and flourished within the Church. Peucer identified three basic areas in which this decline of the Church manifested itself. Worship was contaminated with the cult of saints and other superstitions. The Scholastics adulterated theology with pagan philosophy. Pontiffs and bishops transformed the proper authority of the Church into a po­liti­c al power in which they claimed to raise up and cast down po­liti­c al rulers.37 It was therefore natu­ral and appropriate that around 1500 the g­ reat reversal would take place with the movement around Martin Luther and the Reformation.

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­These five-­hundred-­year phases ­were no more than approximate. Other Protestant writers would identify key popes who marked the transformations of the Church from bad to worse: Gregory I (590–604) would be identified as one of the key figures in promoting Western monasticism, the mass, and prayers for the dead. Gregory VII (1073–85) served Protestant polemic as a poster child for the arrogation by the popes of po­liti­cal authority to depose secular rulers. This pattern of gradual deterioration, followed by a theologically and morally corrupt ­Middle Ages, was very widely shared through Protestant Eu­rope, and not just among Lutherans. Although Peucer was a Philippist and, in the eyes of many strict Lutherans, a suspect revisionist, his view of church history was largely shared by a theologian and historian who in other re­spects stood at the opposite end of the Lutheran spectrum, Matthias Flacius Illyricus. In Protestant E ­ ngland, the martyrologist John Foxe would set forth a sim­ ilar, though not identical, pattern of phases in the history of Chris­tian­ity in the opening chapters of his Acts and Monuments. Foxe’s periodizations varied in the dif­fer­ent editions, but in general he was clear that the first thousand years of the church ­were relatively pure, at least in comparison with what fol­ lowed, but that a gradual degradation set in around the time of the arrival of Augustine of Canterbury in ­England (a missionary of Gregory I, it should be remembered).38 In the 1583 edition, Foxe experimented with a series of three-­ hundred-­year periods in the church. The first three hundred years ­were years of persecution; the next three hundred years of flourishing; then another three hundred years of “declyning or backeslidyng” during which “the Church, al­ though in ambition & pride, it was much altered from the s­ imple sinceritie of the Primitiue tyme, yet in outward profession of doctrine and religion, it was somethyng tollerable, & had some face of a Church.” That period was followed by the time when Antichrist ruled in the church, some four hundred years ­until the time of Wyclif and Hus. Following that came the “reformation & purgyng” of the church, which had lasted some 280 years ­until Foxe’s time.39 For Foxe, the stirrings of Reformation began even before Luther. He con­ cluded, “For in t­hese fiue diuersities & alterations of tymes, I suppose the ­whole course of the Church may well be comprised.”

Conclusion One could throw up one’s hands and say that historical periods tell a good deal about the historian and not very much about the past. That would be an



How Early Church Historians Defined Periods in History 71

extreme reaction, though it is certainly a possibility to be considered. In gen­ eral, early modern religious historians showed an alarming tendency to look into the past and see their own reflections. When Heinrich Bullinger, the re­ former of Zu­rich, described the primitive church in his On the Origin of Error in 1539, the image that he conjured up looked remarkably similar to sixteenth-­ century reformed Zu­rich: absolute simplicity in worship, a focus on the preaching of the Word, and the minimum necessary rites.40 Conversely, when the talented and learned French Catholic Hebraist Gilbert Génébrard looked into ancient Judaism, he saw the reflection of late sixteenth-­century Catholi­ cism. He populated the past with sacrifices, sacraments, religious vessels and vestments, prayers for the dead, belief in purgatory, religious vows, and even the use of a language other than the vernacular for worship.41 One could mul­ tiply examples of this trait. At its most extreme, the search for clear markers of historical periods re­ flected a deeply felt need to see the hand-­and footprints of God all over ­human events. The mathematician and astrologer Helisaeus Roeslin, in his Tabella des Welt Spiegels of 1612, prepared for Emperor Matthias, linked the three Talmudic periods with the seven planets and a par­tic­u­lar set of rare plan­ etary conjunctions. His calculations led him to propose 1663 as the date for the end of the world.42 His desire, like Kepler’s in the Cosmographic Mystery, was to show that the apparently random disposition of the created order was, if one looked closely, not random at all. As one looks back at one’s forbears in the discipline of history, it is well to scrutinize very carefully the reasons that make us choose one system of historical periods over another. We may be as prone as our pre­de­ces­sors ­were to seek answers to our own questions in the past.

Chapter 4

Periodization and the Secular Ethan H. Shagan

The title of this essay, “Periodization and the Secular,” is actually a joke, but like most jokes by historians, it is not funny. The joke is that all periodization is by definition secular, b­ ecause the Latin word saeculum means a historical period. In Rome, a saeculum was originally any era beginning with an impor­ tant event, such as the founding of a city, and lasting for the lifetimes of t­ hose who remembered it, so it could also mean a generation. Gradually, the word acquired connotations of a period of maximal ­human lifespan, from which derives the French word siècle and the Italian secolo, in other words, a c­ entury. But saeculum could also still refer to an era of arbitrary length, hence it was available for Saint Augustine to appropriate when he divided revealed history into distinct eras, culminating in “hoc interim saeculo,” this ­middle age be­ tween the Incarnation of Christ and the Apocalypse, when the earthly city and the heavenly city are confused and comingled. That is to say, for Latin Christians the saeculum became not just an era within Christian history, but the era of Christian history—in some moods even the w ­ hole history of creation—­during which fallen man subsists in time and in the world. This saeculum ­will be completed only with the eschaton, when the world passes into saecula saeculorum, as Saint Jerome put it in the Vulgate, literally “centuries of centuries” but usually translated as “for ever and ever” or “world without end.”1 I begin with this ­little etymological anecdote ­because it suggests two ­things that w ­ ill be at the core of my analy­sis. First, our exercise of periodiza­ tion is often oddly oblivious to the habits of mind of the p ­ eople we study. The advent of cultural history, the study of how ­human beings have constructed and contested meaning through language, along with the advent of New His­



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toricist literary criticism, o­ ught to have awakened us to alternative ways of thinking about how to divide up time. We o­ ught to have a ­whole quiverful of innovative historical periods, or­ga­nized around inflection points when impor­ tant concepts and categories changed their meanings; instead, our periods cut through cultural history like a hot knife through butter, slicing through time without regard for a­ ctual cultural or epistemological circumstances. Sec­ ond, my anecdote suggests that one impor­tant way of periodizing Eu­ro­pean history, an elusive and slippery beast called “secularization,” might change rather dramatically if we w ­ ere to pay attention to the ways our subjects i­magined their world. The normal business of historians, in our sovereign act of periodizing the modern, is first to define what we mean by the secular, and then to go look for it. But if medieval Christians always already i­magined that they w ­ ere living in a secular time, a world so corrupted that religion could subsist ­there only as a pale shadow, then perhaps we are not asking the right questions. So the goal of my essay is, first, to offer a new way of periodizing the secu­ lar, and second, to make the broader point that t­hose of us attuned to the construction of meaning in the past need not accept traditional periodization. Instead, if we ask new questions of the past structured around historical sub­ jectivities, we w ­ ill find that our subjects themselves have a g­ reat deal to tell us about how their history should be or­ga­nized.

At the beginning of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor poses the question that ani­ mates his massive book: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”2 Taylor’s answer to this question is an argument about historical periodization: the new anthropocentrism of mo­ dernity, he argues, has been or­ga­nized around the need to supersede an irra­ tional deism that is understood by definition as a relic of an ­earlier age. The secular is thus always a claim about chronological displacement, ironically de­ pendent for its energy on the survival of the very t­ hing it tries to supplant. A secular age, for Taylor, is made pos­si­ble by its saturation with belief. Now, this is certainly very in­ter­est­ing. But rather than focusing on Taylor’s answer, I want to focus for a moment on his question. Taylor says, following Lucien Febvre and countless o­ thers, that it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500.3 But if we actually listen to early modern sources, we find something very dif­fer­ent: it was a theological commonplace that most

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­ eople did not believe in God, ­because belief in God was very hard. Some p knowledge of God is imprinted on all h ­ uman souls, theologians argued, but belief in God is fundamentally contrary to our fallen natures. Just to give a few examples: on the Catholic side, a French catechism from 1575 held that to believe in God we must be “transported in him, by love and affection, to be content with all that he commands . . . ​however unfavorable to our desires and our natu­ral corruption.” 4 Genuine belief requires the greedy to renounce their riches and the bawdy to renounce their lusts: difficult criteria indeed! On the Protestant side, Martin Luther wrote, “To believe that God exists seems to many to be so easy that they have ascribed this belief both to poets and to phi­los­o­phers. . . . ​But such h ­ uman faith is just like any other thought, art, wis­ dom, dream of man. For as soon as trial assails, all ­those ­things immediately topple down.”5 John Calvin wrote, “Whosoever he be that, quenching the fear of the heavenly judgment, doth carelessly follow his own affections, he de­ nieth that t­ here is a God.”6 And, among the so-­called radical reformers, Se­ bastian Franck wrote in his 1534 Paradoxa that “­there is not a single believer on earth.”7 If Charles Taylor says that in 1500 it was virtually impossible not to be­ lieve in God, but Sebastian Franck wrote in 1534 that t­ here is not a single be­ liever on earth, then something is obviously wrong: the category of belief, particularly believing in God, seems to have had dif­fer­ent meanings in the past, and to have fit differently into the intellectual landscape. And so, I want to suggest, we already have before us two starkly dif­fer­ent ways we might ap­ proach periodization and the secular. On the one hand, we can, like Charles Taylor and a thousand o­ thers, decide what belief is according to a priori mod­ ern conceptions, and then track the growth or decline of that category through history. On the other hand, we might study the conceptual categories of our subjects in order to construct a periodization of the secular that is not only about history but is in fact historical. Using the traditional approach, ordinary practice is to periodize the sec­ ular by marking a series of epistemic breaks from a normatively enchanted age of faith. The Re­nais­sance begins to value the ­human in new ways; the Ref­ ormation interiorizes religion; the Enlightenment offers philosophical mate­ rialism; the French Revolution sketches the blueprints for society without Chris­tian­ity. But one critical prob­lem with this story is that Christians have always been convinced that they w ­ ere living in the saeculum. It was they who in­ven­ted the concept, a­ fter all, not to refer to some distant twenty-­first c­ entury when their Christian civilization would collapse in the face of godlessness, but



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to refer to their own times. And herein lies the fundamental difficulty with the modern historiographical search for the time before the secular: Chris­ tian theology fundamentally denied that t­ here was, or could be, any such time. For Christians, religion must always subsist in a sinful world, and this pre­ sents a conundrum: how can the world be or­ga­nized according to a religion that is fundamentally incompatible with the world? ­There ­were, I would suggest pace Ernst Troeltsch, two answers, or more accurately two poles ­toward which answers tended.8 On the one hand, reli­ gion can attempt to rule the world, to permeate it, to imbue it with spiritual­ ity; but in d ­ oing so, religion itself inevitably becomes worldly and corrupt, part of the t­ hing from which it hopes to separate itself. On the other hand, religion can withdraw from the world into the private or the interior or the spiritual, to protect its own purity as far as pos­si­ble from corrupt influences; but to do so, religion must abrogate its responsibility and leave the world to its own devices. From a modern perspective, the second of ­these choices sig­ nals the “secular,” with the withdrawal of religion into private or separate spaces, whereas the first signals the opposite of the secular, the percolation of religion through the world that we imagine to be characteristic of the age of faith. But from within a Christian mentality, this modern perspective would have seemed absurd: neither was any more secular than the other, the secular was rather the condition in which they both occurred. Periodizing the secu­ lar thus would not be about finding a moment when the secular arose, but about tracking the changing relationship between ­these dif­fer­ent ways of nav­ igating the saeculum in their ceaseless pas de deux. So in this essay—­and it is very much an essai, in Montaigne’s sense of the term (“If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial”9)—­I want to experiment with this alternative way of periodizing the secular, performing some of the required tracking to see where it leads us. I am ­going to focus on ­England in par­tic­u ­lar, and for reasons that ­will become clear I think that ­England’s trajectory is peculiar, but I hope to stimulate discussion about what I think are broader Eu­ro­pean patterns. If we begin around 1300, we find a world where t­ hese two alternative ways of navigating the saeculum ­were interdependent—or, to put it in less rosy terms, locked in a stressful equilibrium—­each filling the gaps in the other. So, for instance, the Church itself was divided between the so-­called secular and reg­ ular clergy, t­ hose who lived within time and sought to mitigate the sins of a corrupt world, and ­those who sought as far as pos­si­ble to live outside of time.

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All the regulars renounced worldly corruptions such as private property, and nuns in par­tic­u­lar w ­ ere required in princi­ple (and not always voluntarily) to leave b­ ehind every­one and every­thing, entering a life of seclusion, which they called “­dying to the world.” Authority in late medieval society was also in princi­ple divided between lords temporal and lords spiritual: all w ­ ere Chris­ tian, but the first sort ruled in time and governed bodies, while the second sort ruled outside of time and governed souls. Of course, this notion of a sharp line between temporal and spiritual authority was a fantasy. The relationship and priority between Church and State, and the proper functions of each, was one of the abiding debates of the ­Middle Ages from the Investiture Con­ troversy onward. Whenever civil power was on the rise, the Church could retreat, at least locally and temporarily, from interventionism to a more purely spiritual role, but it could also fight back, claiming worldly primacy over secular powers. Th ­ ese are just two basic divisions, but t­ here w ­ ere many more: the kind of religion focused on the sacraments versus the kind focused on mystical ­union, for instance, or the ­battle between Carnival and Lent. For ­every Mystery Play, t­here was an Imitatio Christi; for e­ very bishop in a silk cope eating a sumptuous feast, ­there was an ascetic performing self-­harm and subsisting on a diet of the consecrated host. The incessant waves of reform that rolled over medieval Eu­rope can be read ­either as shifts in the balance between ­these two poles or as attempts to shift them. The Gregorian reforms pushed ­toward interventionism, making the world more Christian but in the pro­cess making Chris­tian­ity a lot more like the world. So did crusades, heresy hunts, and inquisitions. As the ­great German historian Thomas Brady has put it, “The Church’s dilemma arose from its success. The more deeply it penetrated the structures of Augustine’s ‘earthly city,’ the more thoroughly its freedom of action became ensnared in the complexities of local life.”10 Conversely, the rise of the mendicant ­orders pushed back t­ oward a vision of Chris­tian­ity incompatible with the world, as did, in a very dif­fer­ent way, the imperial vision of Dante Alighieri, who wrote in his De Monarchia that the Church is wholly spiritual and therefore forbid­ den from meddling with temporal ­things: “The power to confer authority on the realm of our mortality is in conflict with the nature of the Church; there­ fore it is not to be numbered among its powers.”11 But despite all this pushing and pulling, we can nonetheless recognize an overall regime of the secular in the l­ ater M ­ iddle Ages defined by an idealized division of l­abor. The answer to the fundamental dilemma—­how can the world be or­ga­nized according to a religion that is incompatible with the world?—­was that some Christian for­



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mations permeated the world at the risk of becoming corrupted, while other Christian formations separated from the world at the risk of becoming irrel­ evant. Whenever ­there was too much emphasis on one, a new reform pushed back t­oward the other. Overall, it was not a bad system for maintaining stability.

So, to make my first argument about periodization: If we look at ­England, when does this period, defined by a secular division of ­labor, come to an end? Not gradually, as we have been taught, with the slow development of Re­nais­ sance humanism, the slow smoldering of Lollardy, or the slow conversion of En­glish ­people to Protestantism. Instead, change came like a wave breaking over E ­ ngland between 1533 and 1540, or perhaps 1560 at the latest, not through any theological niceties or new ways of conceiving the ­human, but through a series of radical institutional disruptions. As an event in the saeculum, the En­ glish Reformation was an unpre­ce­dented exercise in comixture and adultera­ tion, leaving virtually no person or institution in a state of withdrawal from the world, no sphere of religion protected in its purity from the corruptions of time. In my new periodization of the secular, then, the real import of the En­glish Reformation, and what made it an epochal event, was that it placed Chris­tian­ity resolutely and unapologetically in the world. Of course, this trans­ formation was not universally effective; but it was normative and power­ful, part of a vast, public confessional proj­ect that effectively banned unauthor­ ized piety. Now, this revolution was not necessitated in any straightforward way by Reformation theology. If you read Martin Luther’s early tract On Secular Au­ thority, for instance, you find a vision of the elect radically separated from the world, in which—to simplify only slightly—­the Church exists for the godly and the State exists for the reprobate. The elect possess Christian liberty, they have no superiors on earth; to make laws for the godly requiring their good be­hav­ior is as absurd as to pass laws requiring apple trees to bear apples. At the same time, the reprobate have no place in the kingdom of God, hence civil power over them is given as a punishment to bridle their disorder, so that the small godly minority can wait in peace for the world to end.12 For another example, if we look to the so-­called radicals in the Reformation, we find groups whose very essence was the withdrawal of Chris­tian­ity from the world rather than its immersion in the world. The three characteristic doctrines of the rad­ ical Reformation w ­ ere believers’ baptism, community of goods, and a rigorous

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form of excommunication known as the ban, the very essence of what Troeltsch calls sect-­t ype rather than church-­t ype Chris­tian­ity, focused on in­ ward perfection and fellowship within the group, rejecting the notion that Chris­tian­ity could ever be coterminus with a fundamentally corrupt society.13 But the immediate effect of the state-­sponsored Reformation in E ­ ngland was the suppression or elimination of a wide range of institutions that had maintained forms of Chris­tian­ity outside the purview of the world. The mon­ asteries and convents w ­ ere the first to go: their inmates w ­ ere sent back into the world, bought off with pensions that the government dutifully paid to the ex-­religious for half a ­century. But it was not only the regulars, it was all the myriad expressions of Chris­tian­ity that ­were against rather than within the world. Henry VIII was the last En­glish monarch to creep to the cross on Good Friday. The hair shirt that Thomas More wore ­under his clothes to suppress his carnal urges would soon become an object of ridicule rather than re­spect. Holy relics lost their auras and w ­ ere forcibly reintegrated into space and time, often the victims of ruthless iconoclasm. At the same time, the Church itself, formerly an in­de­pen­dent jurisdic­ tion, could not now retreat into a merely spiritual function; instead, it became an appendage of civil government. The Ten Articles of 1536, for instance, em­ ployed Henry VIII’s royal “we” in an utterly novel language of lay domina­ tion: each article began with the phrase, “We ­will that all bishops and preachers ­shall instruct and teach our ­people, committed by us to their spiritual charge.”14 The clergy now had cure of En­glish souls only by virtue of the king’s grant, and as royal officers they w ­ ere to teach what the king commanded. The 1549 Act of Uniformity cemented this relationship when, in an unpre­ce­dented al­ chemy, it wrote the new Book of Common Prayer into law. According to the Act, ­every word and gesture in the liturgy acquired binding statutory author­ ity, hence religion itself became civil, the stuff of judges, juries, and assizes rather than excommunication and reconciliation. If this all sounds too general and schematic, let me epitomize the trans­ formation by briefly reading two influential texts by leading churchmen writ­ ten almost exactly a ­century apart. The first is the 1497 An Exhortacyon Made to Relygyous Systers in the Tyme of Theyr Consecracyon, colloquially known as the Spousage of a Virgin to Christ, by John Alcock, Bishop of Ely.15 The Spous­ age describes the wedding ceremony of a nun to Christ, stressing that entry into the convent is a spiritual parallel to carnal marriage, for while matrimony fills the earth with c­ hildren, virginity fills heaven. Whereas other w ­ omen bring



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forth ­children in pain, virgins bring forth ­children in joy. In order to achieve this blessed state of religious virginity, the religious s­ ister must be dissevered from the world, as Jesus Nazarenus sayeth himself, regnum meum non est in hoc mundo. But though your body be h ­ ere in this world corporally, your mind and your soul to be with Christ Jesus. And so take the world, in all t­ hings therein, and say with Saint Paul: the world is to me a pain, and I to the world, my joy is only in Christ crucified. So, s­ ister, your plea­sure and conversation must only be in the cross of Christ, that is penance, in fasting, prayer, and mortifica­ tion of your e­ nemy the flesh, and let it not have his w ­ ill. Keep you within your monastery and depart not therefrom. For right as a fish dieth that is without ­water, right so a man or ­woman of religion, be­ ing without their cloister, is dead in their souls.16 This text is ostensibly addressed to ­women entering the convent, and much of it is explic­itly gendered. In one very uncomfortable passage, for instance, we are told that the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34 was her own fault ­because “she would not keep her within, not close as she was commanded, but would go forth among young ­people and so was corrupt and ravished.”17 But t­ here is also much more to this text than a guide for newly professing nuns. When it was published in 1497 by Wynkyn de Worde, the Spousage was among the first vernacular En­glish religious books by a living author, and t­ here is simply no way that the small number of nuns entering religion would have been suffi­ cient to justify this novel commercial enterprise. Instead, it was aimed at a much wider readership, and the “religious s­ isters” of its title w ­ ere more than just an audience, they w ­ ere a meta­phor. Just as nuns become brides of Christ, so the Church itself is the bride of Christ, and the reformist Bishop Alcock, famed for his piety, was describing the appropriate relationship of the Church itself to the world. It was not merely nuns but the Church who must “hear of no worldly t­ hings, nor speak of no concupiscence, nor h ­ andle no contagious ­things, but only that s­ hall be to [Christ’s] plea­sure and ser­vice.”18 It was not merely nuns but the Church who “must be a custos, a keeper of all such ­things as this day ­shall be delivered unto you in the name of your spouse, and follow him therein.”19 And fi­nally, it was not merely nuns but the Church who must be a lumen, a light, and “ye must entirely keep and see your light go not out, but be burning in your soul and in your mind by the blessed Incarnation, passion,

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resurrection, and the most blessed life of our savior Christ Jesus, and that ye fall in none earthly sin, heresy, nor errors by any man’s teaching.”20 In sum, this vision of the separate calling of the nun was a synecdoche for the spiri­ tual separation of the Church from the world. This was not a radical vision—­A lcock himself was Lord Chancellor of ­England, hardly a poster child for the separation of Church and State—­but rather a commonplace under­ standing that Chris­tian­ity had to be distilled from the world even as it satu­ rated the world. My second text bookending the transformation, written a ­century l­ater, was the Treatise of Vocations, or Callings of Men, by the ­great Puritan theolo­ gian William Perkins, first delivered as lectures at Cambridge in the 1590s and then published posthumously in 1605. Perkins elaborated the Protestant doc­ trine that the clergy are not an alternative caste of so-­called religious but rather all men are religious; the worldly estate is in no way inferior, ­because all men are called by God to worldly offices. “A vocation or calling,” Perkins wrote, is a certain kind of life, ordained and imposed on man by God, for the common good . . . ​that is, a certain manner of living our lives in this world. For example, the life of a king is to spend his time in the governing of his subjects, and that is his calling; and the life of a sub­ ject is to live in obedience to the magistrate, and that is his calling. The state and condition of a minister is to lead his life in preaching of the gospel and word of God, and that is his calling. . . . ​In a word, that par­tic­u­lar and honest manner of conversation, whereunto ­every man is called and set apart, that is (I say) his calling.21 Perkins thus suggests a radical flattening of the distinction between spiritual and temporal: just as “in the camp, the general appointeth to e­ very man his place and standing. . . . ​Even so it is in h ­ uman socie­ties: God is the general, appointing to ­every man his par­tic­u­lar calling, and as it w ­ ere his standing. And in that calling he assigns unto him his par­tic­u­lar office, in per­for­mance whereof he is to live and die.”22 The doctrine of the calling is most famous, following Weber and Taw­ ney, for the way it sanctifies professional life, opening space for Christian cap­ italism.23 And indeed, Perkins condemned idleness and slothfulness, on the grounds that trades are divine callings, and tradesmen who rise early to do their business ­will be rewarded by God for their diligence. But nonetheless, Weber’s famous concept of “inner-­worldly asceticism” is a misnomer, b­ ecause



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as much as Perkins promotes self-­discipline, he rejects asceticism. This is not about preserving or achieving a rarefied religious state, and it is not about turn­ ing the world into a monastery; rather, it is about interventionism, about bringing religion out into the world. Thus, he claims that by the doctrine of the calling “hereby is overthrown the condition of monks and friars, who chal­ lenge to themselves that they live in a state of perfection, ­because they live apart from the socie­ties of men in fasting and prayer. But contrariwise, this monkish kind of living is damnable. For besides the general duties of fasting and prayer, which appertain to all Christians, ­every man must have a par­tic­ u­lar and personal calling, that he may be a good and profitable member of some society and body.”24 Trying to separate from the saeculum is denounced by Perkins as sinful pride: secularity is unavoidable, religion never approaches its otherworldly apex while subsisting in this world, hence we must live in the world and imbue it with what religion we can.

As this discussion of Perkins implies, I want to stress that within the frame­ work that I have established, which is not about the origins of the secular but about periodizing within a saeculum that was always already pre­sent, so-­called Anglicans and so-­called Puritans ­were largely on the same side. That is to say, while they had very dif­fer­ent views of the institutions involved in bringing religion to the world and the constitutional relationships between them, they generally converged on the interventionist side of the spectrum, imagining that the job of religion was to fill up and sanctify the saeculum rather than to flee from it. Puritans ­were guided in their interventionism by this instruction from Matthew’s gospel: “If thy b­ rother s­ hall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he s­ hall hear thee, thou hast gained thy ­brother. But if he ­will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses ­every word may be established. And if he s­ hall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican” (KJV Matt. 18:15–17). Following this logic, Puritans believed that they them­ selves, as the elect, w ­ ere obliged to act as inveterate busybodies, charged by God to admonish their neighbors for their sins. If admonition did not work to force contrition, the neighbor was to be shunned. But this shunning was ideally not just a private ­matter: a Church with proper discipline would ex­ communicate the unrepentant sinner, a­ fter which the sinner would be handed

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over to civil authorities for punishment. In a properly functioning polity, ac­ cording to Puritans, the Church was therefore responsible for public ethics, with the State as its strong right arm. This became particularly controversial when the godly claimed authority to excommunicate sinful monarchs, a cause célèbre first in Beza’s debates with Erastus, and then in Scotland ­under James VI, and then belatedly in Stuart ­England. And while it has been argued that ­after the crushing of the Presbyterian movement around 1590, En­glish Puri­ tans refocused their energies on piety and spiritualism instead of public pol­ icy, that certainly does not mean they ceased to be interventionist. Even when they temporarily calmed their po­liti­cal aspirations, they ­were not separatists, much less quietists. They merely sought to intervene in the social world more than in government, for instance, as we see in David Underdown’s now clas­ sic study of the city of Dorchester, Fire From Heaven.25 Conformist supporters of the Church of E ­ ngland had a very dif­fer­ent vi­ sion of interventionism in which Church and State w ­ ere two sides of the same coin, charged together with maintaining order. In this vision, the goal was a reasonable, decorous, and obedient Chris­tian­ity, a Chris­tian­ity of communal participation and public devotion rather than individual enthusiasm. Richard Hooker argued in Book VIII of his Lawes that the ecclesiastical polity was in no way distinct from the civil polity, rather they ­were the same body politic performing two dif­fer­ent functions. In a famous passage, he argued that ­there are many dif­fer­ent polities among men, and “church” is simply a title right­ fully given to any polity that has true religion. Thus, just as a triangle remains the same shape regardless of which of its sides functions as the base, Hooker wrote, so the civil and ecclesiastical polities are the same body given a dif­fer­ent name depending on what sort of laws it chooses to make.26 If Puritans and conformists ­were in agreement when it came to navigat­ ing the saeculum by intervening in the world, then the historical period inau­ gurated by the break with Rome did not end with the collapse of the Anglican Church-­State and the attendant revolution that overthrew Charles I. That is to say, the revolutionaries w ­ ere by and large just as committed as the regime they toppled to the notion that religion ­ought to be ascendant in the world, rather than separated from it. This position was not without some complexi­ ties and exceptions. ­There w ­ ere many Levellers and In­de­pen­dents who favored religious toleration, and some minority of them argued that religion must be protected from a fallen world. But this was a rare position in the 1640s and 1650s; most tolerationists argued instead that the truth would emerge victori­ ous in a f­ree market of religious ideas. Certainly it was not the position of a



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regime that experimented with ruling the country through an assembly of saints nominated by London’s gathered churches, and experimented with cap­ ital punishment for adultery. Even if the Cromwellian regime followed the radicalism of the early Luther to some degree, establishing a Church only to leave the saints ­free from its requirements, nonetheless this was a relentlessly interventionist regime, in which religion constantly acted on behalf of civil power, and vice versa.27 So it was not the Revolution, I would argue, but the failure and collapse of the Revolution that ushered in the new era in my periodization, when once again the withdrawal of religion from the world, rather than the intercession of religion in the world, became a serious and reputable path for En­glish Chris­ tians. I do not want to be naive about this: historians have written eloquently about the complex politics of religion in the Restoration era, and the disintegra­ tion of the consensus I have been describing was slow and painful.28 But none­ theless, I want to suggest that t­here was a significant difference between the politics of a Protestant polity, and the politics of protecting Protestantism from the polity, which emerged as a new obsession in the era of revolutionary defeat. Quakers w ­ ere near the heart of this turn. From the start they w ­ ere radi­ cally antiformalist, rejecting the notion that par­tic­u­lar times, places, words, or gestures could be sanctified. Sanctity was instead found in the light within, not in what they disparagingly called “God at a distance,” hence it was by turn­ ing inward rather than outward that they achieved the holiness they sought. And this holiness was breathtaking in its purity: stories abounded in the first de­cades of the Quaker movement of Friends giving birth without pain, g­ oing naked without shame, and even raising the dead, signs of their return to a prelapsarian perfection. Even ­after they had at least publicly abandoned this perfectionism and embraced life in the world, they nonetheless remained very dif­fer­ent from the e­ arlier Puritans. They rejected oath taking and participa­ tion in government, they embraced pacifism, and even their worldly lives ­were sanctified ­because, theologically speaking, the Quakers found within them­ selves a spark of divinity that could carry them outside of time. They w ­ ere the inner-­worldly ascetics that the Calvinists w ­ ere not. Another impor­tant novelty in the postrevolutionary de­cades was a new discourse of liberty of conscience that now ­really did stress the impervious­ ness of religion to the world and suggested that religion had to be an alto­ gether separate sphere. We rarely stop to consider how remarkable it was for En­glish ­people suddenly to acquire the conviction that religion was a private and internal m ­ atter. By what remarkable theological gymnastics could it be

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argued, for instance, that worship was purely a ­matter of inward conscience, when it was so clearly an action of the body in the world? To explain what I mean, consider Roger L’Estrange, the most eloquent En­glish opponent of toleration, who in 1663 was appointed ­England’s censor in chief. In his tract Toleration Discuss’ d, L’Estrange staged a conversation be­ tween the wise Conformity and the misguided Zeal and Scruple. When Conformity asks Zeal and Scruple the purpose of their religious protestations, Zeal responds, “Allow us but a freedom to worship God according to the rule of his own word, and that freedom s­ hall content us,” and Scruple elaborates, “In short, the ­thing we desire is liberty of conscience.” Conformity responds, in mock surprise, “Liberty of conscience? What mortal can pretend to take it from ye?” Zeal, in confusion, answers, “Does not the Act for Uniformity de­ bar us of it?” At which point Conformity springs the trap: “Not at all. Your actions indeed are ­limited, but your thoughts are ­free. What does this or that garment or gesture concern the conscience?” Zeal, still confused, asks what happens if “I believe it unlawful to worship thus or so.” To which Conformity responds: “At this rate, for ­ought that I know, ye may believe it unlawful to worship at all. . . . ​Liberty of conscience, according to my books, is a liberty of judging, not of acting. . . . ​Ye ask to think what ye w ­ ill, and ye take leave to do what ye ­will; so that the liberty you demand is rather ­matter of state than of religion. And to ask that ye may govern yourself by your own consciences, is the same t­ hing with asking to be no longer governed by the king’s laws.”29 Without meaning to sound like a bigot or a totalitarian, I want to stress that this is actually a very good argument, if you ­were raised in the regime of the saeculum ushered in by the En­glish Reformation. In this regime, religion belonged in the world. To suggest that the outward act of worship required withdrawal from the world rather than participation in it was utterly bizarre. The fact that it caught on so fast that thirty years ­later it could be taken for granted shows that this period of the secular was coming to an end. My final example, which I want to consider in more depth, is John Milton’s sublime rationalization of defeat, Paradise Regained, published in 1670.30 Milton, in effect, stages the very transition that I have described from an ideal of religion intervening in the corrupt world to an ideal of religion with­ drawing from the corrupt world. The poem begins with Jesus’s baptism. Satan watches, discovering that the Messiah has fi­nally appeared and is ready to end the reign of dev­ils as the “ancient powers of . . . ​this wide world” (1.44). Hence he leads Jesus into the wilderness to tempt him, which is the main action of the poem. But the temptation of Christ is paralleled by the temptation of



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Christ’s followers, who had been with him at the River Jordan when he was baptized, but who are now left ­behind for weeks while Jesus is off in the wilder­ ness. And when left ­behind, they grow restless: “Now missing him their joy so lately found / So lately found, and so abruptly gone / Began to doubt” (2.9–11). In par­tic­u­lar, their doubt takes the form of disappointment that their long-­awaited deliverance from Roman rule, and their long-­desired worldly as­ cendancy, which Christ’s coming was supposed to herald, had not arrived as expected. In other words, it looks a lot like the disappointment of Milton and the Puritans ­after 1660: Now, now for sure deliverance is at hand The kingdom ­shall to Israel be restored Thus we rejoiced, but soon our joy is turned Into perplexity and new amaze. For whither is he gone, what accident Hath rapt him from us? ­Will he now retire ­A fter appearance, and again prolong Our expectation? God of Israel Send thy messiah forth, the time is come: Behold the kings of the earth how they oppress Thy chosen. (2.35–45) The Christians in the poem want religion to intervene and purify the world. They want a revolution. But Jesus, in response to his own temptation, demonstrates the falsity of the premise that Christ can or ­will have a kingdom in this world. Satan tells Jesus, for instance, that he cannot achieve his “high designs” alone in the wil­ derness, poor and hungry, without followers: “Therefore, if at ­great t­hings thou wouldst arrive / Get riches first, get wealth, and trea­sure heap / Not difficult, if thou hearken to me” (2.416–18). Jesus replies, “With like aversion I reject / Riches and realms” (2.457–58). And h ­ ere Milton throws in a well-­ aimed jab at the libidinous rule of Charles II: He who reigns within himself, and rules Passions, desires, and fears, is more a king; Which e­ very wise and virtuous man attains: And who attains not, ill aspires to rule Cities of men, or headstrong multitudes. (2.466–72)

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In a more poignant example, Satan reminds Jesus that “Judaea now and all the promised land” has been reduced to a “province ­under Roman yoke,” and the ­temple is now a site of abominations (3.157–63). To Milton and his Puri­ tan readers, this is code for the abominations of the restored Church of ­England. So Satan tempts Jesus with his “duty to ­free / Thy country from her heathen servitude” (3.175–76). But again, Jesus’s response is that his kingdom is outside of time rather than within it. At the end of days, Jesus says, he ­will destroy all earthly monarchies, “and of my kingdom ­there ­shall be no end,” but that time is not yet (4.151). Fi­nally, Satan ends in exasperation: Quite at a loss, for all his darts w ­ ere spent Thus to our Savior with stern brow replied: Since neither wealth, nor honor, arms nor arts, Kingdom nor empire pleases thee . . . What dost thou in this world? The wilderness For thee is fittest place. (4.366–73) And to this comment, for once, Jesus does not respond. Ultimately, this is a poem about spiritualizing the self in a fallen world rather than trying to spir­ itualize the world itself. Christ has come to reinstall a paradise, the poem con­ cludes, “Where they ­shall dwell secure, when time ­shall be” (4.616). But time is not yet, and for now, Christ, like the defeated Puritans, “unobserved / Home to his ­mother’s ­house private returned” (4.638–39).

To conclude, we can ask: How does this new approach to periodization and the secular make ­things look dif­fer­ent? Well, besides the fact that I think it is more respectful of the m ­ ental worlds of our subjects, I also want to suggest that if we proj­ect it forward in time, it can help to expose some of the contra­ dictions within modern understandings of the secular. My most fundamen­ tal observation ­here is that Christians have always i­ magined themselves to be living in a secular age: that understanding is built into the fabric of Chris­ tian­ity itself. So when Charles Taylor says that the secular ironically depends on the presence of Chris­tian­ity as something it can claim to have superseded, he is not wrong, but he has failed to acknowledge that likewise Chris­tian­ity ironically depends on the presence of secularity as a predicament in which it is embedded. Th ­ ese two partners have danced together since Chris­tian­ity in­ ven­ted the secular, and they ­will continue to dance together ­until the trum­



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pets sound. That does not mean we should not periodize, but it does mean that instead of trying to figure out when the second partner arrived on the dance floor, we need to ask when they changed dances: ­either subtly from waltz to foxtrot, or more radically from foxtrot to mosh pit. I have argued ­here in par­tic­u­lar that the l­ater seventeenth c­ entury saw the most impor­tant transformation or inflection point within this periodiza­ tion, not b­ ecause of the rise of materialism or atheism, but ­because En­glish Protestants abandoned their century-­old proj­ect of embedding religion in the world, and instead began to experiment with separating religion from the world. From their perspective, of course, this was the very opposite of a “sec­ ular” proj­ect in the modern sense of the term; it tasted and smelled more like medieval monasticism in its aspirations, committed to restoring a purity that had been lost by admixture with the world. From this perspective, the w ­ hole industry of historical periodization, which imagines the early Enlightenment as the origin of the modern secular, has missed the fact that it is actually the origin of the modern regime of Chris­ tian­ity, no more or less committed than its pre­de­ces­sors to navigating the saeculum during the brief sojourn or exile of Chris­tian­ity on earth. The rise of atheism and materialism are part of that modern regime of Chris­tian­ity, not its opposite, ­because Chris­tian­ity is so capacious that it encompasses the ex­ istence of a corrupt and fundamentally irreligious world. This is the sublime and terrible beauty of Chris­tian­ity as a theological system: it is so closed that it admits of no outside, perfectly accounting for all its own failures within its theology. Thus, the modern regime of Chris­tian­ity does not make peace with the world; rather, it constructs spaces where Chris­tian­ity can genuinely flour­ ish by withdrawing from the world. In sum, I want to suggest that the periodization of the secular that we have inherited is an intrinsically secular periodization, ignoring the ways that Chris­tian­ity itself theorizes its own relationship to the fallen world. A peri­ odization that reflects the categories of our sources would instead force us to imagine that we are living now in an age that is no more or less secular than any other, but rather an age in which one vision of Chris­tian­ity had largely triumphed over its competitors. And this, I would suggest, poses no small prob­lem to Christian theorists like Charles Taylor who feel so much nostal­ gia for an era before the secular.

Chapter 5

Trans-­Reformation En­glish Literary History James Simpson

The excellent proj­ect of this volume is, in part, to unfold and scrutinize the presuppositions of our standard periodic bound­aries. That admirable proj­ect is, however, potentially vulnerable. Almost all the scholars enlisted to contrib­ ute to this volume work within a standard periodic frame, that of the early modern (1500–1688). If periodic revisionism necessarily involves changing the temporal frame of study, so the argument could run, then we need to look outside the standard bound­aries of a period if we are to see that given period afresh. I pre­sent the following essay, therefore, as a voice reporting from the late medieval/early modern margins of this debate, from work being conducted within what is being called “Trans-­Reformation Studies.” I aim to persuade my readers—­fellow cultural historians, and in par­tic­u­lar literary historians— of three ­things: (1) that we revise our understanding of what determines a “pe­ riod”; (2) that we redraw some standard periodic chronological boundary lines; and (3) that we stand ready to see our periods of the now distant past extending vitally into the pre­sent.

Revolutionary Historiography Each of the standard periodic divisions in En­glish literary studies derives from a historical convulsion. The fifth-­ century penetration of Anglo-­ Saxons into the British Isles a­ fter Roman imperial withdrawal; the Norman Conquest of 1066; the Act of Supremacy of 1534; Puritan settlement of New



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­ ngland from the 1620s; the Glorious Revolution of 1688; the American E Declaration of In­de­pen­dence in 1776; the French Revolution of 1789; the Reform Bill of 1832; the American Civil War of 1861–65; World War I of 1914–18; the end of World War II in 1945: each of t­hese “events” (often spanning several years) sets the almost ineluctable frame, and the terms, for Anglo-­A merican cultural history. Which kind of mighty convulsion is, however, the most decisive, and which most decisively sets the terms of cultural historiography? Wars, and es­ pecially wars of invasion, are of course crucial, since few phenomena can compete for f­ uture significance with the convulsive trauma of military inva­ sion. Wars that involve ethnic takeover (e.g., t­ hose starting in the fifth c­ entury and that of 1066 in Britain) are especially determinative, since new ruling classes, new languages, new laws, and new cultures are introduced, if not force­ fully imposed, with relative suddenness. And war, more than most historical phenomena, determines the macro shape of t­ hings u ­ ntil the balance of power shifts (e.g., as the status quo established in 1945 is palpably shifting at pre­sent). ­Because history is usually written by winners, the outcome of wars also obvi­ ously sets the terms of historiography in power­ful ways. Successful po­liti­cal revolutions also make a power­ful claim in the com­ petition for the most decisive convulsion, not least ­because the successful po­ liti­cal revolution does two t­ hings: it claims that the virus of the past has been completely neutralized; and it often persuades its beneficiaries, including cul­ tural historians, of the truth of this implausible claim. Revolutions produce revolutionary historiography that renders one born-­again historical period un­ intelligible to its pre­de­ces­sors. As Alexis de Tocqueville so astutely observed, “When g­ reat revolutions are successful, their ­causes cease to exist . . . ​the very fact of their success has made them incomprehensible.”1 War and po­liti­cal revolution, then, both make very strong claims for the events that most forcefully determine the shapes of cultural historiography. I confess, however, that I pose the issue as to which is the most convulsive and determinative kind of event for period formation in the manner of a trick ques­ tion. My own answer might surprise readers whose training has been in the Enlightenment acad­emy: in my view the deepest Eu­ro­pean convulsions are, up to the eigh­teenth ­century at any rate, ecclesiological (i.e., concerned with the definition of the Church as an institution). Even a­ fter the eigh­teenth ­century, one could argue (I would, but w ­ on’t ­here) that the most influential templates of the po­liti­cal revolutions are ecclesiological. Why should ecclesio­ logical revolutions make such a power­ful claim?

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Po­liti­c ally sustained, institutionalized religion affects, or comes to af­ fect, every­one. The stakes of a religious revolution are momentous, since it is a ­matter of salvation or damnation for ­every soul, learned and unlearned, old and young, female and male, of ­every social class and ­every religious affiliation. Religious revolutions transform each of the following: the stan­ dard ways in which h ­ umans or­ga­nize knowledge (e.g., history, politics, eco­ nomics, ethics, psy­ chol­ ogy); each of the ways in which socie­ ties are routinely or­ga­nized (e.g., international alignments, internal po­liti­c al organ­ ization, local distribution and owner­ship of land); and many, if not all, central ­human events and practices (e.g., birth, education, self-­analysis, work, marriage, autobiography, and image use, as well as seeking forgive­ ness, d ­ ying, figuring the relation between the community of the dead and the living, plus dozens more). Institutionalized Protestantism was by no means the only show in Brit­ ain in the Reformation centuries, but it was by far the most forceful and best-­ populated show, across the entire social spectrum. Above all, from the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity in 1558 (requiring all En­glish ­people to attend church weekly), to the Act of 1571 (requiring ministers to swear conformity with the Calvinist 39 Articles), to the Religion Act and Recusants Act of 1593 (specifying capital punishment as the ultimate penalty for ­those refusing to worship inside the Church of ­England),2 Protestant ecclesiology became a source of the following: national historiography;3 national identity;4 subjec­ tive identity of the most intimate kind;5 and intense national and intranational conflict.6 Ecclesiology—­both Catholic and Protestant—­a lso became in early modernity a frame for colonial invasion, vio­lence, and curation, producing in its wake the attendant historiography of colonial empires.7 Every­one who wished to participate in the En­glish body politic, or who wished to avoid ret­ ribution or persecution, was, one way or another, a “Protestant.” ­Those who defined themselves against that state church did so in ecclesiological terms. It is worth noting, ­behind the series of legislative acts mentioned above, that ec­ clesiology (unlike, say, issues surrounding secular lit­er­a­ture) very actively pro­ duced national legislation—­and that this legislation produced, and divided, nations.8 Of course all so-­called revolutions leave some segments of a given popu­ lation untouched and also leave many groups resistant, but ecclesiological rev­ olutions plausibly lay claim at least to greater width across, and greater depth into, a given population. The legislation that brings the ecclesiological revolu­



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tion into being certainly aims to cover the full gamut of social, po­liti­cal, and personal structures and practices listed above. Certainly in terms of media con­ sumption, for example, religion far outstrips secular lit­er­a­ture for book pro­ duction and sales in the Reformation centuries.9 Many more than could read also heard weekly sermons from the Book of Homilies. If we allow the claim, at least for the sake of argument, that ecclesiologi­ cal convulsions are, up to the eigh­teenth c­ entury at least, the most power­ful form of historical convulsion, then t­ here are two fundamental cultural revo­ lutions in the West: the change from polytheism to Chris­tian­ity in the Ro­ man Empire between, say, the first and the late fourth ­century;10 and the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first culminated in the adoption of Chris­tian­ity as the official religion of the empire in 380. Imagine the incredulity, and the appalling shock, of a second-­century Roman polytheist being told that Chris­tian­ity would be the official religion of the em­ pire, and that Mediterranean polytheism would be proscribed, by the late fourth c­ entury. Believers of all creeds, no less than atheists of our own time, would experience a similar incredulity, I suspect, on being told that Chris­ tian­ity would be banned in the United States by the year 2216. The claim I have just made about the primacy of religious revolutions for culture needs modification of all kinds: if, for example, “every­thing is po­liti­ cal” (as some of us w ­ ere taught to believe in the 1970s), then the religious revo­ lutions of the sixteenth c­ entury w ­ ere themselves the product of the po­liti­cal pressures of early modernity (i.e., this sectarian controversy may look like re­ ligion, but it is “­really” about politics). This must in fact be a plausible argu­ ment, since religion ­will almost certainly reflect the pressures and structures of its con­temporary po­liti­c al order, particularly in moments of revolution, when both ­orders are plastic. But once we stop reading sixteenth-­century ma­ terials through the lens of ideology critique, we recognize the im­mense and intense force of sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century religious conviction, a force that would, for example, produce the most violent period of Eu­ro­pean his­ ­ ill reflect the force tory before the twentieth c­ entury.11 The religious order w and structures of the po­liti­cal order; so too w ­ ill the po­liti­cal order reflect the force and structures of the ecclesiastical order. In fact, religion, in the e­ arlier stages of any religious revolution, tends to body forth the shapes of culture with much greater clarity than areas of culture with more powers of re­sis­tance to the new order (e.g., in E ­ ngland, Common Law).12 Before the messy need to shape a­ ctual institutions, revolutionary religious ecclesiology imagines that

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it has much greater liberty to define institutional structures. In En­glish eccle­ siology this is true, for example, of the period circa 1525–58. Even without the evidence of spectacular Eu­ro­pean religious vio­lence in the Reformation centuries, we need only listen for the con­temporary blasts of the suicide bombers in the M ­ iddle East, or attend, say, to American evangeli­ cal po­liti­cal influence, to know that religion is a profound mover. ­Those same bombs, in fact, impel us to go back into our own history for the last time we find bombs planted by religious zealots in the Christian faith tradition. Peri­ odization is not simply a m ­ atter of the shape of history itself, but also a m ­ atter of what we need from history when. As we attempt to understand con­ temporary ­Middle Eastern religious vio­lence, new periodic shapes emerge from our own religious history, and historical parallels are remembered. Peri­ ods are not set in stone; they emerge according to need. We might, then, modify the strongest form of my claim about the enor­ mous force of religious revolutions by arguing that religion and politics w ­ ill inevitably inflect each other. I expect nonetheless that few scholars w ­ ill, faced with the evidence of our own times, continue to promote the Enlightenment thesis that secularism w ­ ill inevitably become the dominant creed of the West.13 Neither ­will we be prepared to stumble much longer in the historical dark by Enlightenment-­derived, supercessionist historiography that simply dismisses the study of religion,14 and that fails to appreciate the fact that the concept “secularity” is itself derived from religious discourse (as Ethan Sha­ gan discusses in his contribution to this volume, Chapter 4).15 Without un­ derstanding religious cultures (regardless of ­whether or not we are believers), and especially the religious cultures of early modernity, we have no compass into the cultural history of what follows. Neither are we are able to under­ stand the ways in which religion resurfaces globally, as it has, vibrantly and violently, in the past three de­cades, including in formally secularist states.16 The study of secularism is, ­needless to say, of vital importance, but such study needs to grasp both the fact that secularity is a religious concept, and that “secular” and “religious” are not symmetrical categories: the religious is very much larger. And yet, and yet: u ­ ntil the early 1990s, the sixteenth-­century Reforma­ tion hardly figured in En­glish literary history. Th ­ ere has been, to be sure, a recent resurgence of interest in religion in both medieval studies and early modern studies. That resurgence has provoked a change of subject within early modern cultural historiography, from secular to religious materials; it has not



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so far affected, with some notable exceptions, a profound periodic transforma­ tion of En­glish early modern cultural history.17

The Missing Reformation Why had the de­cades before and ­after the Reformation of 1517 not figured in literary history? Why had the Reformation itself not figured in literary history? In the following section of this brief essay, I isolate three reasons, in ascending order of pressure: (1) the “no good lit­er­a­ture” argument; (2) the synchronic historicism argument; and (3) the Whig argument. I take them in turn.

The “No Good Lit­er­a­ture” Argument Even if church historians have never s­ topped studying the Reformation,18 lit­ erary historians have, u ­ ntil relatively recently, tended to stay at home in the fine h ­ ouses of ­great lit­er­a­ture, which are all situated well away from religious upheaval. Thus courses in late medieval En­glish lit­er­a­ture ­were r­ eally courses in Ricardian lit­er­a­ture (i.e., Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and the Gawain Poet, all of whom wrote principally in the reign of Richard II [1377–99]), without reference, u ­ ntil the late 1980s, to Lollardy. Naturally, such courses looked to Malory and the mystery plays of the l­ater fifteenth c­ entury, but the fifteenth ­century remained, as Thomas Warton put it already in 1774, for the most part a wasteland: ­after the spring of Chaucer, he says, we expect summer, but “win­ ter returns with redoubled horrors. . . . ​Most of the poets that immediately succeeded Chaucer, seem rather relapsing into barbarism, than availing them­ selves of ­those striking ornaments which his judgment and imagination had disclosed.”19 C. S. Lewis took that line further forward, with his sixteenth-­ century “Drab Age.”20 Medievalists ­were not by any means the only ones staying home in works of ­great lit­er­a­ture. Early modernists, or what ­were then called scholars of the Re­nais­sance, started lit­er­a­ture survey courses with More’s Utopia (1516); took some cognizance of Henrician secular Petrarchan lyric (and not, for the most part, the remarkable religious verse) by Wyatt and Surrey; and then raced for­ ward to their own home base in the 1580s, where Spenser and Marlowe ­were but the first of many g­ reat literary mansions leading to Milton. So the late

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medieval effectively s­topped in 1400, and the Re­nais­sance effectively began in 1580. All syllabi are determined by judgments as to what undergraduates should read in the l­ imited time available. The judgments embedded in such courses—­ both late medieval and early modern—­were by no means trivial ones: Chau­ cer and Shakespeare are indisputably ­great writers. But as long as literary pedagogy and scholarship remained within a New Critical optic, ­there was a profound prob­lem with the structure of such courses: the Reformation was left entirely out of account. Thus when I was an undergraduate in a Leavisite department in the early 1970s in Melbourne, we certainly did not read any lit­er­a­ture, except the poetry of Wyatt, written between 1470 and 1580. Never did undergraduate, or, perhaps more significantly, gradu­ate courses pause to ask why ­there was no “good lit­er­ a­ture” between 1515 and 1580. Never did we reflect on the culture of the revolu­ tionary moment, which (­whether the revolutionary moment of the 1520s or the 1780s in France) distrusts literary discourse. Revolutions distrust equivocal lan­ guage, preferring instead the demotic simplicities of literalism. That t­ here was “no good lit­er­a­ture” was, in En­glish literary history, taken to be a most unfor­ tunate fact of nature; never was the absence of g­ reat equivocal imaginative discourse (i.e., lit­er­a­ture) thought to be itself susceptible of historical investiga­ tion and understanding. Never did we pause to consider how the very existence of certain very public secular art forms, such as drama and image making, ­were existentially threatened by, and s­haped their survival in response to, destruc­ tively hostile currents of religious culture.21

The Synchronic Historicism Argument But, an ­imagined skeptic might interpose, in the 1970s Anglo-­American literary history did move out of a New Critical, and Leavisite, “lit­er­a­ture as lit­er­a­ture” optic. Literary history did start to consider a wide range of discursive forms be­ yond the strictly literary, and did start to understand the circulations of energy and power among t­hose cultural forms. To that skeptic I would reply thus: for all their fresh air and their im­mense fertility, New Historicism and the refreshed version of medieval studies that surged in the 1970s both maintained the funda­ mentally stay-­at-­chronological-­home habits of the prior dispensation.22 How so? The classical practice of philology and textual criticism has, from Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) on, always aimed to fix texts synchronically, to un­



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derstand texts wholly in their own terms, wholly in their own place and time, and wholly in their radical alterity.23 The cardinal sins of philology ­were and remain anachronism and presentism.24 The historicisms dominant since the late 1970s remained obedient to t­ hese tenets of classical philology. Like clas­ sical philology, and possibly for the same revolutionary reasons, resurgent me­ dieval studies and New Historicism both aimed to understand texts in their own, tightly bounded chronological context. ­These extraordinarily fertile movements ­ were wonderfully promiscuous in their discursive purview, but strictly determined to maintain their traditional chronological bound­aries. Lit­ erary historians of, say, late medieval ­England consulted laterally with historians of late medieval Eu­rope in other disciplines. They largely ceased, however, to converse with literary scholars working on ­later periods in their own discipline. Far from encouraging diachronic historicism, both medieval studies and especially New Historicism of the 1980s ­were instead driven in part by Fou­ cauldian, revolutionary historiographical persuasions, the premise of which is that history can be ­stopped and started afresh. For Foucault, historical pe­ riods ­were hermetically sealed, or, to change the meta­phor, divided by epis­ temic crevasses. Both medieval studies and New Historicism participated, then, in a larger proj­ect of denying the intelligibility of one period to another. Diachronic historicism sinned against the proscription of anachronism. So, coupled with the fact that New Historicist secularist attention was focused primarily on the circulations of po­liti­cal (not religious) power, the new dis­ pensation of the 1970s–2000 changed many ­things but left one t­ hing almost exactly as it was: the Reformation was left almost entirely out of account.25 Fred­ ric Jameson’s famous injunction “Always historicize!” in practice meant “Al­ ways historicize synchronically (and prob­ably, for the most part, with secular materials)!”

The Whig Argument In his elegant book, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), Herbert Butter­ field brilliantly descried a deep fault line in Anglo-­A merican historiography.26 By Butterfield’s account, Anglo-­A merican historiography routinely did two ­things: (1) it or­ga­nized itself around the Reformation, where all that preceded 1517 was, with greater or lesser emphases, coded as illiberal; and (2) every­thing (Protestant) that postdated 1517 led to the triumphs of British Liberty and con­ stitutionalism. Liberty, then, became the ­great heuristic code of British cultural

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history. ­There ­were many losers in the application of this ­great code. The entire (Catholic) medieval period was the biggest loser, but so too, in Butterfield’s view, was the richness and complexity of post-­Reformation history a loser: the Whig historian “likes to imagine religious liberty issuing beautifully out of Protestantism when in real­ity it emerges painfully and grudgingly out of some­ thing quite dif­fer­ent, out of the tragedy of the post-­Reformation world.”27 To be sure, ­there are many ways in which Butterfield’s historiographical diagnosis requires modification, but in my view he accurately characterized a then four-­hundred-­year agon in Anglo-­American cultural historiography. That agon continues, even though it is now five hundred years old, and even though it was secularized in the latter half of the twentieth c­ entury. The distinction be­ tween pre-­and post-­Reformation was, for sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Protestants, no less than a distinction between damnation and salvation. The concerns of twentieth-­century cultural historians may have been predominantly secularist, but the code of Heilsgeschichte survived—­salvation was now secular, but still depended on the sixteenth-­century repudiation of Catholicism. For, given the im­mense cultural investment of British and American cul­ ture in the success of the Protestant Reformation, the religious distinction be­ tween damnation and salvation had to be preserved and secularized in all the impor­tant ways.28 Thus narratives of the following are generated from the Ref­ ormation centuries: national and religious identity and freedom; the nation-­ state;29 individual liberties, including, above all, liberty of conscience;30 recovery of classical learning and the scholarship of ad fontes textual criticism;31 sophisticated historical consciousness;32 liberatory reading;33 truly po­liti­c al thought;34 rationality;35 the possibility of sophisticated, inward, individual self-­ consciousness (an especially power­ful narrative);36 and working-­class con­ sciousness.37 Each of t­hese narratives (and more) has been motivated and generated by positing a power­ful break—­the most generative break and deep­ est chasm in En­glish cultural history—­around 1520. ­Because the code had been secularized and ­because it took its cue more from 1688 than 1517, the early Reformation was left almost entirely out of explicit account.

Trans-­Reformation Studies In more recent British literary historiography, the practice of synchronic his­ toricism I am describing held sway for two or three de­cades between, say, 1971 (the publication of the En­glish translation of Michel Foucault’s The Order of



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­Things) and 2000 or so.38 What happened then? A variety of t­ hings, but, for the purposes of this volume I restrict myself to offering a sketch of a new schol­ arly formation (Trans-­Reformation Studies) that started in late medieval stud­ ies and was devoted to the practice of a diachronic historicism. From 2000 or so, late medievalists sought new frontiers that significantly changed the entire conception of late medieval, and, implicitly, of early early modern studies. As I said in the previous section, up to 1990 or so late medieval En­glish literary scholars ­were mostly corralled in three ­great de­cades of largely Ricard­ ian literary production (i.e., 1370–1400). Of course, the many areas of literary production I am about to mention had their own traditions of scholarship, but they w ­ ere not, in my view, connected by coherent historiographical nar­ ratives. In about 1990, that connected narrative began when M ­ iddle En­glish scholarship broke ­free from the Ricardian corral and moved tentatively for­ ward, all the way up to the end of the reign of Henry V in 1422 (e.g., study of—­and above all—­Lollardy,39 the Piers Plowman tradition,40 early Lydgate,41 Margery Kempe,42 and Hoccleve43). The next frontier was up to the death of Lydgate in the mid-­fifteenth c­ entury.44 The Wars of the Roses, already popu­ lated by Malorians and scholars of medieval cycle drama, was soon reached by greater numbers, with serious study of po­liti­cal and theological writing up to and including the civil wars (of “The Roses”) between 1455 and 1485.45 Schol­ ars then broached the ­great frontier, into the reign of Henry VII (1485–1509), including significant book-­historical study of printing in ­England, starting with Caxton in 1476.46 At about this time, however, the pace of this epic de­ velopment suddenly quickened: new vistas opened up when scholars started moving quickly across the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47) to Shakespeare and beyond. Most of this excellent scholarship was driven by synchronic, largely New Historicist persuasions, and so most of it moved carefully forward de­cade by de­cade. What accounts, however, for the sudden, hugely energetic lurch for­ ward that happened once the boundary of the Act of Supremacy of 1534 had been passed, a lurch that started in the early 1990s and has not yet s­ topped? In my view, crossing the periodic boundary of 1534 produced that new energy and rapidly quickened pace. For, as late medieval scholars moved into Reformation territory, they saw, in retrospect, the entire field of late medieval En­glish studies afresh. They saw, that is, that the very notion of the “medi­ eval” is itself a product of the Reformation moment, a periodic concept in­ ven­ted and demonized to legitimate the destructions of the new order. We suddenly realized that by using the term “medieval studies,” we ­were buying

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into a historiographical tradition hostile to the culture we ourselves studied.47 The concepts and the tools of historiography, not to speak of a par­tic­u­lar no­ tion of the past itself, are, we discovered, the product of revolutionary mo­ ments. And for En­glish cultural history, the cultural revolution of the 1530s had, among other revolutionary moments, been decisive in forming specific kinds of memory, and specific ways of pro­cessing memory. The ecclesiologi­ cal revolution of the 1530s and its seismic aftereffects in E ­ ngland, that is, had helped initiate not only the theme of “the ­Middle Ages” but also, more pro­ foundly perhaps, the synchronic methods whereby we studied ­these centuries. This is truer, perhaps, of E ­ ngland than of any other Eu­ro­pean nation or po­ liti­cal entity, since the break in ­England was not restricted to a given discur­ sive area, such as, say, politics or education. State-­driven as the cultural revolution was in ­England, si­mul­ta­neously po­liti­cal and ecclesiological (as ar­ gued above), it directly affected large tracts of the discursive landscape. Indeed, as medievalists entered early Reformation territory—­the Prom­ ised Land for the Whig tradition—­what we discovered was shocking. The Reformation’s absolutist, cruel, despair-­producing, humanity-­belittling ac­ count of salvation;48 its closely related account of an exclusivist Church;49 its stringent insistence on the inerrancy of Scripture;50 its destructive iconoclasm;51 the introduction of judicial torture in E ­ ngland;52 its po­liti­cal quietism, even in the face of tyranny:53 all ­these striking features of early Reformation culture—­ not to speak of the introduction of intra-­Christian religious war in early mod­ ern Europe54—­left medievalists feeling that early Eu­ro­pean modernity began with a shocking, not to say appalling, bang. All t­ hose shapes of culture, and many more (e.g., the revival of slavery; the invention of black magic and the corresponding persecution of “witches”; dreams of colonial domination; biblical literalism) w ­ ere e­ ither anathema or largely unknown to the mobile, decentered late medieval literary culture from which we had traveled as schol­ ars.55 Medievalists also discovered that many cultural forms routinely charac­ terized by liberal culture as specifically “medieval” (e.g., again, iconoclasm, slavery, persecution of “witches,” judicial torture in E ­ ngland, literalism) ­were in fact specific to early modern culture. We suddenly understood that liberal modernity tossed its embarrassing abject back into the l­ater ­Middle Ages. Challenging this meant not only to challenge the disabling assumptions of early modern literary studies but also to challenge the myopia of medieval studies.56 ­There w ­ ere many propulsions to the scholarly movement I am describing, not all of which ­were fueled by religious culture. The most decisive energies



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­ ere, however, driven by explicit attention to the Reformation moment, at the w heart of which stood new and contested forms of ecclesiology. Such a scholarly movement can fairly be called “Trans-­Reformation Studies.” It uses a word—­ “Reformation,” which was ubiquitous in the period itself (between 1517 and 1688, Early En­glish Books Online produces 74,810 hits for “reformation” in 13,183 rec­ords), even if the concept, and the word, was derived from medieval ecclesiology.57 If part of the mission of this volume is to consider periodization by working with terms and concepts indigenous to the period we are studying, the prevalence of the word “Reformation” sustains my argument, suggesting that if p ­ eople within the period understood themselves as, indeed, inhabiting a par­tic­u­lar historical period, they knew it not as “Re­nais­sance,” or “early mod­ ern,” or “postmedieval,” but as a time of the “Reformation.” What are the key milestones in this scholarly movement? Two seminal essays of 1990 and 1992 by, respectively, Lee Patterson and David Aers, got ­things g­ oing. Patterson argued that medieval studies should capitalize on its marginality to undo its marginality;58 Aers argued that that early modernists who claimed to be disrupting “conservative” narratives of selfhood ­were in fact cementing them with their unchallenged, unresearched caricatures of me­ dieval selfhood.59 Aers’s brilliant “whisper” very soon became a rallying cry. The publication in 1992 of the flagship volume of Reformation historical revisionism, Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars, opened possibilities for re­ describing the Reformation, even if Duffy’s M ­ iddle Ages w ­ ere decidedly not ­those of the literary historians: whereas Duffy stressed a timeless, traditional, utterly coherent late medieval culture, literary historians ­were beginning to write of a decentered, multiform, competitive set of late medieval cultural ju­ risdictions.60 The largest claim of that kind, which set the multiform jurisdictions in explicit contrast to the centralizations (both po­liti­cal and theological) of the first half of the sixteenth c­ entury, was perhaps my own Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002).61 Despite the fundamental differences between it and Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars, the books shared a strategy: whereas, to put it very crudely indeed, the Whig tradition worked by a correlation of the kind ­medieval “bad” and post-­Reformation “good,” b­ oth t­ hese large books clearly reveled in the fun of turning the story around so as to produce late medieval “good” and early modern “bad.” Duffy’s “bad,” to be sure, was a non-­Catholic bad, while Simpson’s “bad” was, by strong contrast, drawn from the very criteria that Whigs used about the late M ­ iddle Ages—­centralization and exclusivist authoritarianism. Both bads, however, produced big and energetic books.

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That confrontational stage of late medieval/early modern periodic dispute gave way to a much more synergetic effort in the ­later 2000s. Two volumes, each edited, significantly, by an early modernist and a late medievalist, en­ listed power­ful teams of scholars evenly divided between both scholarly for­ mations to write single essays that encompassed both fields. Thus David Matthews and Gordon McMullan produced Reading the Medieval in Early Modern ­England (2007),62 and Brian Cummings and I coedited Cultural Ref­ ormations: Medieval and Re­nais­sance in Literary History (2010).63 Magnificent new scholarship largely by early modernists on sixteenth-­century En­glish lit­ erary history, in the wake of John King’s extraordinary pioneering work,64 has also been resurgent.65 That synergetic effort is continuing, for example, by treating lit­er­a­ture as prophetic in vari­ous ways. The axiom of such historiography is that if a huge cultural phenomenon erupts, it w ­ ill not do so without, in retrospect, signs of the convulsion to come being vis­i­ble well before it occurs (just as it w ­ ill not dis­appear, but rather migrate to other sites, once it is repressed). Likewise, what had seemed like dif­fer­ent stories, one late medieval and the other early mod­ ern (e.g., the spiritual education of the laity from 1215, and the priesthood of all believers from 1517) turned out to be susceptible of a single narrative (in this case the raising of the bar for a spiritually educated laity across the entire period 1200–1550). The historiography of such narratives is necessarily of the longue durée, practicing a diachronic historicism. In its refusal to remain locked within the chronological protocols of synchronic historicism, it emphasizes seismic concepts such as pre-­tremor, aftershock, absence, reverberation, and resonance.66 It looks to narratives broken by standard cultural periodization, as much to the “not yet” of cultural history, as to the ever-­mobile fault line of the past.67 Such historiography can also understand dif­fer­ent, “queer” tempo­ ralities as operating si­mul­ta­neously but with differing durations, thereby po­ tentially opening the pre­sent up to dif­fer­ent pasts at any moment.68 Where ­will this scholarly development move now? The latest stage in the establishment of this new formation is work wholly devoted to early modern materials, but written by, and definitely from the perspective of, late medie­ valists. Thus, as one exemplary possibility, Sarah Beckwith’s Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (2011) reads Shakespeare through the optic of late medieval sacramental practice.69 What­ever turns the pro­cess takes, I feel sure of the following: (1) that we ­will not dissolve periodization, since, as Jameson rightly said, “We cannot not periodize.”70 We ­will, however, reshape periodic formations. When we do so, we would be well advised to take ecclesiology



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more centrally into account; (2) that we ­will not be replicating the five-­hundred-­ year agon of Whig historiography; (3) that we ­will stop seeing the ­Middle Ages as wholly “other”; and (4) that by a diachronic historicism we ­will come to understand ourselves as c­ hildren of our w ­ hole history, w ­ hether we like parts of that story or not. We are immanent to that history, part of history’s prob­ lem and therefore part of its solution. Brian Cummings and I originally planned to title our book From Lollardy to the Civil War. We did not quite make it that far, and so modified the title. The challenge remains open to shape and define this ecclesiological, Reformation period.

Chapter 6

Time and Place in Shakespeare’s Stratford-­upon-­Avon Kate Giles

The theme of “periodization” offers scholars an opportunity to reflect criti­ cally on the ideas that underpin academic structures, research specialties, and teaching programs across the humanities. But as the introduction to this vol­ ume outlines, it also invites us to think more creatively about engaging with concepts of temporality in the early modern period. Early models of periodiza­ tion, from Petrarch to Hegel to Marx, have continued to exert a profound influence across many disciplines.1 Although critiques of periodization have shown how ­these models tend to reinforce par­tic­u­lar kinds of teleological ap­ proaches to the past, replacing periodization with alternative concepts of tem­ porality has proved challenging.2 This essay seeks to explore the legacy of periodization for the discipline of archaeology, particularly in the United King­ dom. It argues that archaeology’s explic­itly stratigraphic methodology—­ which uncovers a building’s history by peeling away and interpreting its multiple historical layers—­resonates with new approaches among fellow hu­ manities scholars who offer alternative models of early modern chronology and temporality. Specifically, it pre­sents material culture as a palimpsest through which the material legacy of the past informs communities’ negotiation of the pre­sent, and thus, the construction of the ­future. The essay explores ­these is­ sues through the case study of a complex of medieval guild buildings in Stratford-­upon-­Avon with which William Shakespeare was closely associ­ ated throughout his life. The detailed stratigraphic analy­sis of t­ hese build­ ings helps us to understand the layers of medieval history that partially ­shaped the writer’s cultural imagination, feeding into con­temporary debates

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about sixteenth-­century concepts of time and temporality while also dem­ onstrating how archaeology can provide a meaningful contribution to wider debates about periodization across the humanities. Ultimately, a close exami­ nation of the layered temporalities of the guild buildings helps us to recog­ nize the palimpsest not just as a theoretical model of temporality, or as a technical mode of archaeological analy­sis, but as a part of the lived experience of inhabiting buildings with a complex, centuries-­long continuous accretion of history and meaning.

Periodization: Medieval and Postmedieval Archaeology Periodization has underpinned both the disciplinary and intellectual devel­ opment of historical archaeology in the United Kingdom, and it continues to provide an enduring framework for professional and museological approaches to the past. Traditionally, British archaeology was dominated by prehistory and Roman studies, and despite early antiquarian interest, it was only during the latter part of the twentieth c­ entury that archaeologists turned their atten­ tion to medieval and subsequently postmedieval archaeology as distinctive subdisciplines within the field. The Society for Medieval Archaeology was founded in 1957 to promote the study of the “Dark Ages and Medieval Stud­ ies.”3 While early discussions about the name of the Society and its journal concluded that the Re­nais­sance division of the historic pro­cess into ancient-­ medieval-­modern categories was already “obsolescent” in 1957, this division endured nonetheless.4 Although debates about periodization and the role of archaeology as the “handmaiden of history” dominated discussion of medi­ eval archaeology in the 1980s and 1990s, periodization did not feature strongly in recent reflections marking the Society’s fiftieth anniversary.5 The Society for Post-­Medieval Archaeology was founded in 1966, initially with the aim of promoting the archaeology of postmedieval to industrial society in Britain, Eu­rope, and ­those countries influenced by Eu­ro­pean colonialism, with a cut-­ off date around 1750, driven by the dominance of ceramic typologies as a means of establishing site chronologies.6 Periodization has been more of a concern for postmedieval archaeologists, who have gradually extended their geo­graph­ i­cal and chronological remits in line with trends in global historical archaeol­ ogy, to embrace the “con­temporary archaeology” of the twentieth c­ entury, up to the pre­sent day.7



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Two landmark conferences and publications in the 1990s and early 2000s sought to explore the intersections of period interests between medieval and postmedieval archaeologists. In 1996, the Age of Transition conference, held at the British Museum, sought to problematize the dividing line of circa 1500, bringing together scholars and professional archaeologists to frame a new agenda “more sensitive to longer-­term developments and material changes across time and space.”8 The published conference proceedings placed empha­ sis on the “compositional nature of transition” and the potential of archaeol­ ogy to “inform with original evidence the general and global trends such as the rise of capitalism, secularism, individualism, materialism and increasing social mobility.”9 Architecture and buildings dominated the volume, with pa­ pers considering Re­nais­ sance influences on palaces, courtier and gentry ­houses, as well as t­ hose of the “middling sort” and peasant buildings, where narratives of the “­great rebuilding” and capitalism ­were also extended to a con­ sideration of h ­ ouse­hold ceramics, textiles, and dress accessories. The Age of Transition is an in­ter­est­ing example of postmedieval archaeology’s attempt to legitimize and valorize its contribution to the discipline by addressing what Dan Hicks has described as “Questions That Count”: narratives such as the rise of capitalism, which are related to the origins of modernity. 10 This obser­ vation resonates with Margreta de Grazia’s analy­sis of how the “premium of the modern” has been harnessed by cultural history as a means of claiming disciplinary relevance and authority.11 Thus, although some papers within the volume that emerged from the Age of Transition conference railed against the “tyranny” of period constructs, the volume paradoxically revealed the endur­ ing legacy of well-­established models of periodization on the interpretation of the period as the “inaugural epoch of the modern.”12 The second major conference, hosted jointly by the Socie­ties for Medi­ eval and Post-­Medieval Archaeology in 2001, was a direct response to the per­ ceived absence of discussion of ideology and ritual practice from critical reflection in 1996. The Archaeology of the Reformation 1480–1580 conference sought explic­itly to revisit historical assumptions about the impact of the Ref­ ormation on the “rupture of the medieval order and the foundation of mod­ ern society.”13 Papers on ecclesiastical and monastic architecture, objects of public and private devotion, and charitable and commemorative practices problematized the dichotomies of established religious historiography and challenged an archaeology of the Reformation dominated by narratives of de­ struction and iconoclasm. Material culture, it was argued, provided a distinct

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form of evidence that Protestantism was neither a­ dopted nor rejected w ­ holesale, but rather negotiated through the survival, adaptation, and continuity of tra­ ditional objects and practices, as well as their destruction, transformation, or the creation of new ones. The construction of this more complex, but subtle and nuanced, account of the period had impor­tant consequences for the dis­ cipline. It demonstrated a wider realization that historical archaeologists did not have to ignore or subjugate the complexity of their data in order to focus on the ­grand narratives of modernity—­the “questions that count.” Rather, the distinctively stratigraphic and often necessarily interdisciplinary methods of archaeology encouraged an embracing of the “messiness” of data, unpacking anomalies and contradictions, to tell more complex and nuanced “stories that ­matter.”14

Buildings Archaeology, Building Biographies, and the Idea of the Palimpsest It is not surprising that buildings played such a prominent role in archaeo­ logical discussions of the period from 1400 to 1600, and in subsequent de­ bates about periodization. In E ­ ngland, they remain one of the most power­ful symbols and tangible traces of the early modern period. The survival of large numbers of well-­constructed h ­ ouses dating from this period attest to the in­ vestment in buildings across the social scale, accompanied by a richly histori­ cally documented and, in some cases, remarkably well-­preserved, ­house­hold material culture.15 Since its advent in the 1980s, the archaeology of buildings has sought to augment traditional art historical modes of analy­sis—­which tend to focus on single-­period examples of a type in which the idealized vision of a building is realized or preserved—­with a concern to unpick the more com­ plex stratigraphic sequences of buildings, including ­those of far more quotid­ ian structures.16 Over time, the capacity for the discipline of buildings archaeology to reveal and rec­ord the complex layers and phases of the history of buildings has been demonstrated with modern digital recording and mod­ eling techniques supported by tree-­ring dating and other specialist method­ ologies such as paint and wall­paper analy­sis. Interestingly, David Caldwell and Catriona Cooper have argued that the development of new digital techniques of recording and modeling are exciting precisely b­ ecause they offer new ways of presenting the architectural evidence of transition from the medieval to the early modern world.17



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Stratigraphic recording consists of analytically (and in some cases, liter­ ally) peeling back the ­later layers of a building to establish its primary phase of construction. In scholarly publications, this methodology then convention­ ally supports an inverted chronological narrative outlining the building’s cre­ ation, adaptation(s), and fi­nally, abandonment, destruction, or ruin.18 Where it is informed by a consideration of the changing cultural meanings of build­ ings, this can offer a compelling example of what is described as a “building biography,” drawing on the rich tradition of artifact biography pioneered by anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai and Janet Hoskins.19 An alternatively rich strand of “buildings biography,” particularly popu­lar in American his­ torical archaeology, takes a more “genealogical” approach, linking the stra­ tigraphy of buildings to the biographies of individual h ­ ouse­hold inhabitants.20 Over the last de­cade or so, material culture has been embraced with gusto by cultural and literary historians, partly due to the influence of works by Alfred Gell on the agency of objects and Bruno Latour on actor-­network the­ ory and the “entanglement” of objects.21 In the United Kingdom, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson have brought together medieval and early modern literary specialists, historians and archaeologists in a series of lively conferences and publications on the subject.22 The cultural biographies and agencies of objects explored in t­ hese works and o­ thers have opened up new possibilities of understanding objects as diverse as clothing, ceramics, portraits, and books as they move within and between dif­fer­ent cultural milieus in the period. A particularly fascinating and relevant example of this kind of study is Jonathan Gil Harris’s analy­sis of how early modern stage props moved from monastic vestries and guild workshops into the tiring-­room and play­house, bringing with them networks of social and cultural exchange.23 For Harris, the most useful framework for conceptualizing objects in time is the idea of the “palimpsest.”24 Examples of real palimpsests include medi­ eval Books of Hours, which, as Eamon Duffy richly demonstrates, provide evidence of the ways in which medieval objects’ meanings ­were overwritten and overlaid with biographical notations, everyday observations, and shifting religious sentiments in the sixteenth ­century.25 Harris shows how historical sources such as John Stow’s (or Stowe’s) 1598 Survey of London similarly pro­ vide a rec­ord of the material palimpsest of the sixteenth-­century city, record­ ing diverse cultures and times, particularly the traces of the Old Jewry still apparent in the Ludgate wall, to fracture the Protestant vision of London as the New Jerusalem.26 The palimpsest is richly resonant with early modern ideas of the multitemporal, evident in the lit­er­a­ture and culture of the sixteenth

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and seventeenth centuries, particularly in the work of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Replacing the concept of the “early modern” as a dia­ chronic movement from past to pre­sent, the palimpsest therefore offers Harris a polychronic temporal model characterized by the “untimely aggregation of ­matter, agents and historical traces.”27 A provocative reflection on the perception of objects, specifically artworks in the sixteenth ­century, has also been offered in Alexander Nagel and Chris­ topher Wood’s Anachronic Re­nais­sance.28 Nagel and Wood argue that although works of art are made by specific individuals at specific moments in time, they afford their viewers “plural” temporal relationships, pointing backward to an­ cestral or divine origins and other objects, but also forward, to their recep­ tion and reactivation by ­future audiences. In the Christian West throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, close attention was paid to the cultural meanings of art objects.29 In the Re­nais­sance, this appears to have developed into a par­tic­u­lar concern with the temporal instability of artworks, particu­ larly at moments of intervention and/or remaking. The term “anachronic” is used by Nagel and Wood to describe “the work of art when it is late, when it repeats, when it hesitates, when it remembers, but also when it proj­ects a ­future or an ideal,” in preference to the concept of the “anachronistic” or “untimely” object, which perpetuates historicist assumptions that a work of art has a “proper” location within a linear and diachronic concept of time.30 Harris’s interest in the palimpsest and the polychronic and Nagel and Wood’s “anachronic Re­nais­sance” bring us back to the theme of this volume: the periodization of the past, its relationship to medieval and early modern concepts of temporality, and the implications of both for our understanding and interpretation of sixteenth-­century culture. The need to problematize the place of the early modern in the history of time has been highlighted by most cultural historians working on e­ ither side of the “­great divide” between the medieval and the early modern. Lawrence Besserman’s masterly study of this issue shows how models of periodization are fundamentally linked to the his­ toriography of time.31 Besserman argues that although it is pos­si­ble to chart “the ideas of pro­gress, decline and renewal in history in a line from Petrarch, to Polydore Vergil, to Hegel, to Marx and beyond,” traditional medieval and biblical models of periodization continued to subtend ­these paradigms and inform twentieth-­century discussions of periodization, from Nietz­sche to Bloch and Collingwood.32 Assumptions that the sixteenth c­ entury witnessed a sudden shift from “traditional” concepts of medieval biblical and liturgical temporality to early



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modern Protestant or cap­i­tal­ist “clock time,” have been replaced by an under­ standing that such shifts ­were gradual, with ­earlier origins and ­later legacies of temporality blurring the period divisions identified in key works by Max Weber and Jacques Le Goff.33 Chris Humphrey, for example, has drawn at­ tention to the medieval origins of many of the temporal ideas, systems, and technologies associated with modernity.34 Karen Elaine Smyth’s close read­ ing of a range of literary texts, historical sources, and objects, including civic yearbooks and custumals, letters, ­legal books, and chronicles, horalogia, clocks, and astrolabes has revealed the coexistence of traditional liturgical and sea­ sonal concepts of cursus, alongside more linear and scientific concerns with temporal precision—­a complex, dynamic, and sophisticated awareness of time, and also of its uncertainty.35 One of the consequences of this shift in scholar­ ship away from the concept of a distinction between medieval and early mod­ ern concepts of temporality is an acknowl­edgment of the “multiplicity of social times,” the ways in which individuals might draw on competing con­ cepts of time, and thus behave differently, depending on the specific cultural and social groups and “occasions” in which they found themselves.36 Thus far, this essay has explored the ways in which periodization has in­ formed both the development of the discipline of postmedieval archaeology and the questions with which it has been concerned. Archaeology’s explic­itly stratigraphic methodology lends itself particularly well to the construction of dif­fer­ent and more complex kinds of story, in which change is understood to have been negotiated materially through the palimpsest of buildings, objects, and social practices. In order to explore this potential, the paper now turns to the case study of the Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon (Warwickshire).

The Guild Buildings of Stratford-­upon-­Avon The Guildhall in Stratford-­upon-­Avon is a classic example of a premodern pub­ lic building. Stratford-­upon-­Avon was established comparatively late in the ­Middle Ages, by John de Coutances, Bishop of Worcester, half a mile from the center of the original settlement and the parish church of Holy Trinity.37 Although the town continued to be governed by the manor court throughout the ­Middle Ages, two major institutions emerged during the thirteenth and ­fourteenth centuries which exerted a profound influence over the town’s spir­ itual and cultural life. First, in 1269, Godfrey Giffard, Bishop of Worcester, granted a charter to Robert de Stratford and the brethren and s­isters of the

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Guild of the Holy Cross, granting them permission to build a hospital and chapel in the town.38 Second, in 1331, a College of Priests was established in Holy Trinity parish church, by John de Stratford, l­ater Archbishop of Can­ terbury.39 The early Guild Chapel and its associated buildings, including a Rood Hall and infirmary and alms­houses, w ­ ere constructed at the corner of Church Street (originally known as Corn Street) and Chapel Lane, which was known as Walkers Street or Dead Lane u ­ ntil the late fifteenth c­ entury. The site was significant, situated on the edge of the built-up area of the town and opposite a market area that from circa 1275 to 1608 was demarcated by the cross known to contemporaries as the White Cross.40 During the fifteenth ­century, the guild expanded, thanks to a charter of Henry IV dated June 8, 1403, and a further charter of 1429, which confirmed the refoundation of a guild dedi­ cated to the Holy Cross, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Saint John the Baptist. This formalized the association of the original fraternity with two smaller guilds formerly based in the parish church that w ­ ere dedicated to the Virgin and to Saint John.41 The guild expanded in the fifteenth c­ entury, attracting craftsmen, mer­ chants, and local gentry to its membership, and amassing a property “portfo­ lio” of forty-­one tenements, eight cottages, five shops, two burgages, seven barns, two crofts, two gardens, and other “lands.”42 This expansion was re­ flected in a major program of building, including the construction of a two-­ story, timber-­framed Guildhall, referred to as “new” in the accounts of 1417/18; a date confirmed by a recent archaeological survey and tree-­ring dating (Fig­ ure 2).43 The Guildhall is one of the finest examples of its type. It contained an upper feasting hall, which incorporated an upper dais end, where mem­ bers of the guild elite ­were seated, wall benches, and a lower ser­vice end, con­ taining a buttery and pantry. The hall was used for meetings and the annual feast, held in Easter week to “promote brotherly love and drive out evil speak­ ing.”44 At ground-­floor level, the Guildhall accommodated chaplains’ parlors and a small chapel that was consecrated in 1425/26.45 The chapel consisted of a low platform or dais set against the east wall, lit from the east by a small win­dow blocked only two years ­after construction, in 14272/8, when a schoolroom and first-­floor chamber w ­ ere built up against 46 it. ­Behind the altar, a reredos (a painted screen, sometimes of wood or ala­ baster, placed on the wall ­behind the altar) was painted directly onto the timber-­framed partition wall, featuring the Trinity flanked by the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, and Saint John the Baptist (Figure 3).

Figure 2. ​The exterior of the Stratford-­upon-­Avon Guildhall. Photo­graph by Kate Giles.

Figure 3. ​The remains of the Stratford Guildhall chapel’s reredos. Photo­graph by Kate Giles.

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Abutting the Guildhall to the east was the two-­story South Wing. At ground-­floor level this accommodated a “Cowntyn­house” used as separate meeting place by the master, proctors, and aldermen of the guild.47 The verti­ cal studs of the partition wall separating the Guildhall Chapel from the Count­ ing House ­were painted red and decorated with stenciled religious motifs and monograms, and stylized roses. At first-­floor level the South Wing contained a chamber, accessed from the Guildhall via a short corridor in the hall. Further buildings in the complex included one of the earliest purpose-­ built, timber-­framed school­houses in the country, dating to 1427/28, and now identified as the “infill ­house” on Church Street (Figure 4).48 In 1567/68 it was described as a tenement “some time imployed to a schole h ­ ouse” and as “a ­house in Church Street, commonly called the old school with chamber over.”49 The two-­story, two-­wing Pedagogue’s House to the east of the Guildhall con­ tained a hall, parlor, and oratory for the guild’s almsfolk and was part of a plan to construct a courtyard complex of alms­houses outlined in the 1502/3 ­will of a former master of the guild, Thomas Hannys.50 Current archaeologi­ cal work is attempting to establish w ­ hether the current row of alms­houses that abut the early school­house reflect the partial realization of Hannys’s ambitious scheme. The final building in the medieval guild complex is the Guild Chapel (Figure 5). The chancel of the chapel preserves traces of its thirteenth-­century precursor, but the building is largely the result of two major schemes of re­ construction. The chancel appears to have been reconstructed by the guild from 1449/50 onward and was (re)consecrated in 1452/53.51 The reconstruction of the nave appears to have been largely the work of one of the guild’s most successful masters, Hugh Clopton (1440–96). Clopton was the younger son of the Clopton ­family, whose manor lay just outside the town. He was ap­ prenticed to the London mercer John Roo in 1444 and ­rose through the ranks of the London Mercers’ Com­pany, serving as alderman, sheriff, and fi­nally, Lord Mayor of London in 1491/92.52 Clopton had been admitted to the Guild of the Holy Cross in Stratford-­upon-­Avon in 1469/70, and throughout his life he maintained a loyalty to his hometown. Recent excavations have shed new light on Hugh Clopton’s “grete ­house,” located directly opposite the Guild Chapel.53 The ­house may have been con­ structed circa 1483 and may have been known as “New Place” thereafter. It was an impressive building, accessed from Chapel Street through a central gateway flanked by shop units. A courtyard separated this range from a range to the south fronting onto Chapel Lane. This ­house contained ground-­floor

Figure 4. ​The Stratford Guildhall school­house on Church Street. Photo­graph by Kate Giles.

Figure 5. ​The medieval Guild Chapel in Stratford-­upon-­Avon. Photo­graph by Kate Giles.

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ser­vice rooms including a kitchen and brew­house, with a ­great chamber and other chambers above, and an open hall range, r­ unning north to south, b­ ehind which was a further courtyard and ancillary buildings. New Place remained one of the town’s most prominent h ­ ouses throughout the period and its ac­ quisition by William Shakespeare in 1597 was, as Edmondson has argued, both “socially and culturally audacious.”54 Hugh Clopton’s w ­ ill of 1496 left substantial bequests for the construc­ tion of a stone bridge across the River Avon, the parish church of Holy Trin­ ity, and the rebuilding of the Guild Chapel (including roofing, glazing “and all other fornysshmentes thereunto necessary”).55 It seems highly likely that, in dialogue with the guild, Clopton influenced the creation of one of the most in­ter­est­ing and well-­documented decorative schemes of wall painting in the period.56 Although only fragments of the scheme survive t­ oday, their appear­ ance can be reconstructed from a series of antiquarian rec­ords of the nine­ teenth c­ entury, including Thomas Fisher’s lithographs of 1804, E. W. Tristram’s watercolors made in 1929, and Wilfrid Puddephat’s paintings and photo­graphs of 1955–58 (Figure 6).57 The chancel contained scenes from the Legend of the Holy Cross (which may have been part of an ­earlier decorative scheme dating to the mid-­fi fteenth c­ entury). Over the chancel arch was a Doom, or Last Judgment, painting. On the north wall of the nave was a remarkable visual repre­sen­ta­tion of Lydgate’s poem, “The Dance of Death.” This appears to be a conscious reference to the image of the Dance of Death painted around the “­pardon cloister” of Old Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which was part of the pro­ cessional route of the mayoral elections.58 Opposite the Dance of Death on the south wall w ­ ere scenes from the Life of Adam. At the west end of the cha­ pel ­were images of Saint Thomas à Becket and Saint George, together with the Whore of Babylon and a unique repre­sen­ta­tion of the poem “Erthe upon Erthe.”59 The overall message of the scheme was one of memento mori, a re­ minder of the fragility of life, inevitable judgment to come, and, by exten­ sion, of the impor­tant role played by guilds such as the Holy Cross in their spiritual support for the community of the dead.60 Stratford-­upon-­Avon’s Guildhall is a reminder of the emergence, from the thirteenth c­ entury onward, of self-­conscious urban mercantile and craft elites seeking to govern the towns of late medieval ­England from new forms of pub­ lic building, such as guild and town halls.61 By the end of the fifteenth ­century, the Guild of the Holy Cross had become Stratford-­upon-­Avon’s semi­ official governing body.62 The Reformation therefore posed a considerable threat to this civic autonomy, as religious guilds such as the Holy Cross w ­ ere



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Figure 6. ​A virtual reconstruction of the interior of the medieval Guild Chapel in Stratford-­upon-­Avon. Photo­graph by Kate Giles.

dissolved ­under the terms of Edward VI’s Chantries Act of 1547. The manor of Stratford-­upon-­Avon passed first into the hands of John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and then reverted to the Crown.63 In February 1553, Stratford’s citi­ zens successfully petitioned for a license of incorporation, keen to regain both guild and college lands, and a charter of incorporation was granted the following June.64 The new Corporation was characterized by remarkable con­ tinuity of personnel and by po­liti­cal conservatism. Nine of the newly appointed aldermen had previously held office as proctor, alderman, or master of the guild, and a further two w ­ ere sons or grand­sons of past guild aldermen or mas­ 65 ters. Spiritually, ­these ­were men of both traditional and more reformist per­ suasions. Like many towns, Stratford-­upon-­Avon gradually moved ­toward conformity with the Elizabethan settlement a­ fter 1559, and by the 1560s, to a more firmly established Protestant persuasion. What role did material culture play in negotiating and influencing the transition from the medieval to the early modern world in Stratford-­upon-­ Avon? In its first “Book of ­Orders,” the Corporation ordered monthly “halls”

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to be held in the council chamber, “to commen & consoult to gether of thyn­ ges nessesary & to redress thos thynges that s­ hall forten to be enormyd [i.e., abnormal] and out of ordor.” 66 The architectural appropriation of a former guildhall as the headquarters of a newly formed corporation was a pattern common to many provincial towns in the period, and Tittler has noted how the term “The Hall” became shorthand for the locus of new configurations of civic power.67 ­There was considerable continuity in the use of the hall for meet­ ings, and its previous functions also made it well-­suited to adaptation as a per­for­mance space for the traveling companies of players who visited and per­ formed in it during the latter part of the sixteenth ­century.68 From the mid1560s onward, the grammar school moved out of the former infill ­house and prob­ably into the lower end of the Guildhall, where the young William Shake­ speare was educated and in which he prob­ably watched, and possibly acted in, his first plays. Spatial continuity was also afforded through the use of the Guild’s former Counting House as the new Council Chamber, which was whitewashed, paneled, and furnished with new benches and the bailiff’s foot­ stool in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Objects also spoke of this appropriation of the old by the new. The Guild’s fifteenth-­century mace, bearing the insignia of the Royal Arms of E ­ ngland, was adapted by the new Corporation to meet its ceremonial needs.69 While the Guild’s more overtly religious spaces must have changed more dramatically, they, too, preserved a palimpsest of old and new. A new Court of Rec­ord replaced the former Guild chaplains’ parlors and chapel on the ground floor of the Guildhall. It seems likely that the Guildhall chapel rere­ dos and the overtly Marian symbols that decorated the walls of the lower Guildhall ­were whitewashed in the late 1540s and into the 1550s.70 However, recent analy­sis suggests that it was not ­until the ­later sixteenth or early seven­ teenth c­ entury that the timbers of the south and east walls of the former Guild Chapel w ­ ere repainted with an entirely new decorative scheme of alternating vertical stripes of red and yellow ochre.71 It is therefore pos­si­ble that ­simple coats of whitewash or alternative coverings, such as cloths or hangings, ­were used initially to cover t­ hese images. Other images in the Guildhall certainly survived. In the early sixteenth ­century the first-­floor chamber of the South Wing was decorated with an elab­ orate scheme of Tudor roses in the west gable wall, and with painted replica textile hangings, consisting of a continuous valance of shield-­shaped designs at the top of the wall, below which ­were alternating vertical bands of red and black, with a pattern of foliate and branchlike motifs that may be a reference



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Figure 7. ​The remains of the ragged-­staff design on a wall in the Guildhall’s South Wing, Stratford-­upon-­Avon. Photo­graph by Kate Giles.

to the “ragged staff” used by the Earls of Warwick as part of their heraldry (Figures 7 and 8). Th ­ ese symbols ­were direct references to the guild’s medi­ eval aristocratic affinities and thus it seems less likely that they would have been targeted by iconoclasts. This chamber may have had multiple functions in the late sixteenth ­century. In the 1570s and 1580s ­there are numerous refer­ ences to an armory or “harness” chamber, and in 1579/80 William Evans was paid for sorting and hanging up the armor, including the “George armour,” which may well have been the costume of Saint George, worn in a pageant involving a fire-­breathing dragon and subsequently appropriated as part of the civic armor.72 The fact that this chamber may also have been used as a tiring-­ room by the players adds further layers of meaning to t­ hese objects and reso­ nates closely with Harris’s analy­sis of the recycling of religious objects as props on the early modern stage.73 The Guild Chapel poses more complex questions about levels of survival and continuity. It has traditionally been assumed that in 1547 the chapel would have been subjected by Edward VI’s commissioners to the same levels of

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Figure 8. ​A reconstruction of the ragged-­staff design on a wall in the Guildhall’s South Wing, Stratford-­upon-­Avon. Reproduced by kind permission of the Perry Lithgow Partnership.

scrutiny as the parish church, resulting in the hasty whitewashing of any controversial images on the walls or in the stained glass. However, Robert Bearman has argued that during the last four years of Edward VI’s reign the chapel had effectively become a “redundant building.” In 1553 it was rather dismissively described as “all that former chapel,” and it is pos­si­ble that the newly formed Corporation initially focused its financial and bureaucratic en­ ergy on adapting the Guildhall, u ­ ntil the po­liti­cal and religious settlements of the ­later sixteenth ­century w ­ ere established and they turned their attention to the Guild Chapel.74 Is it pos­si­ble that during the mid-­sixteenth c­ entury, the chapel door was locked and the paintings quietly forgotten about? While some of the images, especially t­hose of the Holy Cross and the saints, w ­ ere clearly controversial and w ­ ere likely to have received an initial coat of white­ wash, o­ thers, such as the Doom and painted Rood, may have escaped early iconoclasm. It was not u ­ ntil 1563/64 that the chamberlain, John Shakespeare, recorded two shillings paid for “defasyng ymages in ye chapel” and only in 1564/65 that a further two shillings for “takynge doune ye rood loft in ye Chapell.”75 Other paintings, such as the Dance of Death, may have survived



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even l­ater. Stow’s 1576 annotated edition of John Leland’s Itinerary rec­ords: “About the body of this chaple was curiously paynted the Daunce of Death commonly called the Daunce of Powles, becawse the same as sometime t­ here paynted abowte the cloysters on the north-­west syd of Powles churches, pulled downe by the Duke of Somerset, tempore Edward 6.”76 We do not know ­whether Stow actually saw the Dance of Death or was simply told about it. However, more experimental work is needed to understand exactly how ef­ fective a coat of whitewash might be when applied to medieval wall paintings in an environment such as the chapel. The tendency for images to reemerge and require further whitewashing is apparent in parish rec­ ords across ­England in this period, and it is pos­si­ble that even if some of the images in the chapel received an initial coat in the 1540s, they reemerged in outline and even detail in the redundant chapel over time.77 Religious images clearly sur­ vived in the glass of the Guild Chapel well into the sixteenth c­ entury. In 1571, a glazier was paid twenty-­three shillings eight pence to break the win­dows of the chapel, which presumably still contained images considered idolatrous, and replace them with plain glass.78 Understandably, the survival of suppos­ edly “Catholic” images in the Guild Chapel has attracted considerable atten­ tion from scholars keen to understand the religious affiliations of the Shakespeare ­family.79 However, the picture now emerging is of a fiscally—­ and possibly ideologically—­ cautious and conservative Corporation that avoided extensive expenditure on the chapel ­until the late 1560s, when a more Protestant ethos led to its use as a preaching venue and to the actions autho­ rized by John Shakespeare. New seats w ­ ere installed in 1564/65 and again in 1588/89. The bell was repaired and rehung in 1582, and further whitewashing and repairs to the win­dows w ­ ere also made in this de­cade.80 Nevertheless, it is impossible not to speculate about how the survival of ­these paintings, ­either physically, or in the memory of John Shakespeare and his neighbors, may have influenced the imagination of the young writer. Recent scholarship has emphasized the legacy of medieval Romance lit­er­a­ture and the oral tradition in shaping the literary imagination of the young William Shakespeare.81 This area of scholarship and debate seems to open up further potential for dialogue across the disciplines and period divisions of archaeology and liter­ ary history. Another and perhaps more surprising survival into the early seventeenth ­century may have been the depiction of the Legend of the Holy Cross in the chancel. From 1562 onward, the Corporation’s accounts rec­ord the receipt of rents from “chambers in the chapel.” A partition wall, separating the chancel

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from the rest of the chapel, appears to have been constructed and it survived ­until its removal in 1641. It created a series of “chapel chambers,” which ­were let to vari­ous tenants throughout the late sixteenth and into the early seven­ teenth centuries. In 1635 it was said of the vicar, the Reverend Thomas Wil­ son, “that he hath profaned the Chapple by sufferinge his c­ hildren to playe at bale and other sports therein, and his servauntes to hange clothes to drye in it and his pigges and poultrie to lye and feed in it, and also his dogge to lye in it, and the pictures therein to be defaced, and the windowes broken.”82 At some point in the very late sixteenth or early seventeenth ­century a new grisaille architectural scheme was applied to the walls. It consisted of a series of regu­ larly spaced rounded columns with shallow square pedestals connected by horizontal ribs of molding with the spaces in between painted in a crude imi­ tation of marbling. This must fi­nally have removed any traces of the medieval scheme from view. The picture, then, of Stratford-­upon-­Avon during the mid-­to late six­ teenth ­century is a complex one. The palimpsests of buildings such as the Guildhall preserved controversial traces of Stratford’s religious past. However, it also preserved the town’s civic and corporate history. The preservation, ap­ propriation, and conversion of ­these buildings from the 1550s onward speaks to us of a generation navigating large-­scale social, cultural, and po­liti­cal tran­ sitions in the pre­sent by drawing on the familiar ele­ments of the past. The Guildhall and chapel resonated with the memory of urban solidarity as well as the personal patronage of key figures in the town’s history such as Hugh Clopton. It was not just the newly established Corporation that drew effec­ tively on this palimpsest. Edmondson has shown how the acquisition and re­ building of New Place in 1597 enabled William Shakespeare to establish himself and his ­house­hold so effectively through association with Clopton and one of the town’s most prominent medieval dwellings.83 In his analy­sis of Stow’s Survey of London, Harris argues that Stow’s desire to rec­ord the “trivial objects of civic history, in all their dynamic, palimpsest-­ like complexity” was driven by an antiquarian concern about iconoclasm’s era­ sure of the memory of not just Catholic heritage but also Jewish and pagan remains.84 Stow’s generation was perhaps more acutely aware than any preced­ ing it of how communities negotiated religious volatility and shifting certain­ ties by using ele­ments of the “known” past to create a new frame of reference for an “unknown” f­uture.85 Stow’s comments about the Dance of Death in Stratford-­upon-­Avon must therefore be understood as part of this proj­ect: a critique of iconoclastic destruction and a desire to recover forgotten histories,



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wherever he encountered them. The idea of the palimpsest therefore provides us a power­ful tool for rethinking the periodization of the early modern. Rather than a diachronic narrative of the transition from past to pre­sent, the palimp­ sest offers a polychronic model of the past, allowing us to understand the “un­ timely aggregation of ­matter, agents and historical traces,” the “pleating” and “folding” of time that again seems to characterize the work of con­temporary writers such as Shakespeare.86 Archaeology’s distinctively stratigraphic meth­ odology enables us to get closer to the lived experience of inhabiting such lay­ ered spaces and thus to better understand con­temporary models of historicity.

Conclusion This essay has explored the ways in which the legacy of periodization has con­ tinued to frame the disciplinary and intellectual frameworks of medieval and postmedieval archaeology in the United Kingdom. It suggested that the explic­ itly stratigraphic approach of buildings archaeology informs interpretations of t­ hese spaces that resonate closely with con­temporary concepts of early mod­ ern chronology. Rather than a s­ imple narrative of “transition” that reinforces the division of the medieval and postmedieval world, the idea of the palimp­ sest opens up new forms of interpretation that acknowledge the polychronic and anachronic qualities of material culture in the sixteenth c­ entury. This is particularly power­f ul in a place like Stratford-­upon-­Avon, where buildings such as the Guildhall, Chapel, and New Place connected William Shakespeare with a medieval cultural inheritance—­a cultural memory of a world that shared many similarities with, but was, in other ways, radically dif­fer­ent from his own, and one that suffused his imagination and writing. Finding com­ mon approaches to periodization not only informs critical reflection on the temporal models that continue to frame our research but, hopefully, also take us closer to the models that had resonance and meaning for the inhabitants of the material, cultural, and ideological landscapes of the sixteenth ­century.

Chapter 7

Much Ado About Ruffs Laundry Time in Feminist Counter-­A rchives Natasha Korda We now turn, before quitting the sixteenth ­century, to that most portentous of all fabrications . . . ​Queen Elizabeth’s ruff. . . . ​Queen Elizabeth wore hers higher and stiffer than any one in Eu­rope. —­Fanny Bury Palliser, A History of Lace (1865)

The Ruff’s “Rise and Pro­gress”: Elizabethan Period Time and Reification ­ ere is perhaps no cultural icon more readily associated with the Elizabe­ Th than period than the starched linen ruff. As a symbol of the “rise and pro­ gress” of the “Golden Age of Elizabeth,” the ruff would seem to epitomize the way in which period categories may be anchored in ­things, and thereby reified and commodified for popu­lar consumption.1 “If anything puts ‘period’ in a period drama,” Hannah Greig has argued, “it is surely material culture,” which is used “to establish precisely where in the past the drama is set.”2 The ruff looms large indeed in Elizabethan-­period drama on both stage and screen, from Bette Davis in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) (Figure 9) and The Virgin Queen (1955) to Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth (1998) and Eliza­ beth: The Golden Age (2007). The trickle-­down effect of the ruff’s iconicity is further evident in the Elizabethan Queen Barbie doll featured in Mattel’s “The ­Great Eras Collection,” who sports a magnificent, miniaturized ruff as a quick-­ and-­ready period marker, neatly packaged in tangible material form.3 Mate­



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Figure 9. ​Bette Davis as Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), directed by Michael Curtiz, costume by Orry-­Kelly.

rial culture, and, in par­tic­u­lar, what Greig terms “period-­precise objects,” lend apparent solidity and stability to period taxonomies, conferring on them an apparently concise, orderly precision akin to that of the ruff itself. Fashion his­ torians and bloggers have gone so far as to create detailed chronologies or timelines of ruffs, mapping with minute exactitude—or at least decadal accuracy—­the changing fashions in starched neckwear over time (Figure 10).4 Puncturing this illusion of the Elizabethan period as stable, enduring, and anchored in the ­thing itself, however, is the fact that remarkably few ­actual ruffs have survived, due to the exquisite delicacy, fragility, and transience of the materials out of which they w ­ ere made. Th ­ ose that have lasted are often dingy, stained, and deflated (Figure 11), a far cry from the ruffs depicted in portraits, whose pristine, finished form has been fixed for all time. The tenu­ ous fragility of ruffs in everyday life was frequently commented on in their own time, as, for example, in Philip Stubbes’s The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), which emphasizes their flimsiness: They have ­great and monsterous ruffes, made ­either of Cambrick, hol­ land, lawn or els of some other the finest cloth that can be got for money, whereof some be a quarter of a yard deep, yea some more, very few lesse. . . . ​But if Aeolus with his blasts, or Neptune with his stormes, chaunce to hit uppon the crasie bark of their brused ruffes,

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Figure 10. ​Timeline of ruffs, 1590s–1620s. Courtesy of Bianca Esposito, “The Closet Historian,” http://­theclosethistorian​.­blogspot​.­com.

then they goe flip flap in the winde like rags flying abroad, and lye upon their shoulders like the dishcloute of a slutte. . . . ​The one arch or piller wherby [t]his kingdome of g­ reat ruffes is underpropped is a certaine kinde of liquide ­matter which they call Starch, wherin the dev­ill hath willed them to wash and dive his ruffes wel, which when they be dry wil then stand stiffe and inflexible about their necks.5 Stubbes facetiously deploys the language of royal history (kingdoms and ships of state) and architecture (arches and pillars) to deride the “kingdome of ­great ruffes” for being erected on a shaky foundation of “liquide m ­ atter,” which is liable at any moment to dissolve into the ocean of starch used to prop it up. Under­lying the pristine grandeur of its finished form, the ruff is no better than



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Figure 11. ​Ruff made of three layers of linen, each layer trimmed with bobbin lace, 1620s. Dia­meter: 40cm. Courtesy of the Royal Armoury (Livrustkammaren), Stockholm. Inventory number: 33076.

the “dishcloute of a slutte.” Stubbes’s image of a dirty dishrag further reminds us that the ­labor of washing, bleaching, and starching ruffs by which this il­ lusion is maintained is ­women’s work. ­Behind the scenes of staged history, the ruff in its rumpled, unfinished state recalls the arduous ­labors of laundresses necessary to produce and repro­ duce its fleeting and fragile fixity, illusory solidity, and surpassing (yet always-­ already-­passing) whiteness. Insofar as ruffs had to be relaundered e­ very time they w ­ ere worn, t­ hese l­abors belonged to ephemeral, everyday time, which is to say the temporality of recurrence, rather than to reified period time. The recurrent ­labor congealed in ruffs recalls cyclical time, the peri-­of periodicity (“period” deriving from peri, around + hodos, way, path), rather than the lin­ earity and timelines of periodization. Periods punctuate the infinitude of time, interrupting time’s passage or ongoingness and thereby giving it a defined

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end, as does the mark of punctuation we know as the period, which “Indicat[es] that the preceding statement is final, absolute, or without quali­ fication: and that is all t­ here is to say about it, that is the sum of it, t­ here is no more to be said. . . . ​Full stop.”6 Periodicity, by contrast, is defined by daily rhythms, monthly (lunar) or seasonal cycles, and the bodily humors and (gen­ dered) flux they w ­ ere thought to govern . . . ​which brings us to laundry time.

Laundry Time and Periodicity Now of the lovely Laundresse, whose cleane trade, Is th’onely cause that Linnen’s cleanely made: Her living is on two extremes relying, Shee’s ever wetting, or shee’s ever drying. As all men dye to live, and live to dye, So doth shee dry to wash, and wash to drye. She runnes like Luna in her circled spheare, In a perpetuall motion shee doth steare. Her course in compasse round and endlesse still, Much like a ­horse that ­labours in a mill. . . . From washing further in her course she marches, She wrings, she folds, she pleits, she smoothes, she starches, She stiffens, poakes, and sets and dryes againe, And foldes: thus end of paine begins her paine. Round like a whirligigge or lenten Top. . . . —­John Taylor, “The Praise of Cleane Linnen” (1624)7 Endless are the entries in the G[rea]t W[ardrobe] Acc[ounts] for washing, starching, and mending. The court laundress can have had no sinecure. —­Fanny Bury Palliser, A History of Lace (1865)8

How might we write the history of laundry time? If the history of the ruff’s magisterial “rise and fall” as a fashion trend has been told and retold, its less auspicious rises and falls in daily life—­and the “endlesse,” recurrent work of washing, wringing, drying, bleaching, smoothing, starching, setting folds, mending, and so forth, required to maintain the trend—­have largely been lost to history. If history is defined by periods, does periodicity also have a his­ tory? Or is the ­labor time of maintenance work confined to an ever-­recurring



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now (maintenant = now), a “whirligigge” of time or eternal recurrence of the same? To construe laundry time in this way would be to position it outside of historical time, and to read its cyclicality or seasonality as belonging to the domain of nature, rather than culture. Yet the rhythms of periodicity, includ­ ing t­ hose of everyday life and l­ abor, and even of seasonality, clearly do change over time in accordance with cultural, po­liti­c al, economic, ecological, and technological change. Historians of laundry work, few though they be, have sought to account for a subject long deemed lost to or unworthy of History, or to be transhis­ torical, which is to say ahistorical, but have had l­ittle to say about the period­ icity of laundry time and the challenge it poses to traditional historiographical methods. The rhythms of recurrence remain elusive, graspable only through the ephemeral traces they leave b­ ehind in traditional historiographical sources, or insofar as they may be aligned with traditional historiographical methods and concepts, such as periodization. Thus, for example, Pamela Sambrook maintains that the periodicity of laundry time in early modern ­England might be daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly depending on wealth, status, and geo­ graph­i­cal or ecological conditions, and that, in general, “­there was an inverse relationship between frequency of washing and wealth”—­that is, the more lin­ ens t­ here w ­ ere in one’s chests and cupboards, the less often laundry work had to be done. She focuses on the g­ reat h ­ ouses of the elite, in which laundry was done quarterly, or as infrequently as once a year (thereby taking the more fa­ miliar form of a historicizable “event”), and attempts to track how this changed in dif­fer­ent periods. Thus, we learn that by the end of the sixteenth ­century some elite ­house­holds began laundering more regularly, employing seasonal workers called “washmaids” for heavy washing of bed and t­ able lin­ ens, and “landrymaids” as personal servants to wash, starch, and iron small ­ ouses ­were items such as ruffs.9 The vast quantities of linen in such g­ reat h kept track of from year to year in h ­ ouse­hold inventories (a traditional form of historiographical evidence), as well as in less familiar, more ephemeral ways evidenced by artifacts of material culture such as laundry boards and tally sticks (very few of which survive), used to track washing sent out to profes­ sional laundresses and “whitsters.”10 Written inventories also kept track of the maintenance and repair of ­house­hold linens, as well as the wear and tear of maintenance work itself on the tools and technologies of laundering.11 Other kinds of written sources, such as how-to manuals, describe how the stains produced by bodily flux ­were managed through laundering techniques, and may be used to track changes in such techniques over time with the rise

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and fall of new fabrics and fashion trends. Leonard Mascall’s A Profitable Booke Declaring Dyvers Approoved Remedies, to Take Out Spottes and Staines, in Silkes, Velvets, Linnnen [sic] and Woollen Clothes (1583), translated from the Dutch, was clearly in high demand during the period of the ruff’s ascendency in E ­ ngland, as the book went through subsequent editions in 1588, 1596, and 1605. It contains numerous receipts and instructions on topics such as “Howe to bucke linen clothes, and to scoure oute all spottes of greace.”12 The aim of such instruction, of course, is to remove all traces of bodily flux, and to make the methods of d ­ oing so appear easy, rather than laborious or monotonous. More­ over, how-to manuals tend to focus on the ingredients of r­ecipes (for “sope,” “lye,” “perfume,” “dye,” e­ tc.) and on the material qualities of dif­fer­ent fabrics (such as silk, linen, velvet), rather than on the phenomenological experience of laundry work and laundry time. The history of periodicity as captured by the sources and methods of traditional historiography is thus in many ways the history of its erasure. Where e­ lse might we look for traces of what remains lost in histories of laundry and laundering that rely on traditional historiographical sources and methods, namely, the periodicity or recurrence of laundry time? And how do we read the traces of laundry time when we find them? Faint traces of period­ icity are registered in Mascall’s stain-­removal manual in the repetitiveness and redundancy of the receipts themselves, registered by the frequent use of words like “another” and “again” (e.g., “Another good way to take forth spots of greace,” “Another good way to make cleane spottes of greace,” “To make . . . ​ silks which be staynde, to come to their first colour againe”), which evoke the ongoingness of laundry work, the stubbornness of stains, and trial and error involved in removing them.13 To capture a sense of the lived experience of laun­ dry time, however, would require that we spend time in the archive with sources focused on methods, rather than materials, on the pro­cesses rather than the products of laundering, such as Gervase Markham’s lengthy descrip­ tion of the pro­cess of bucking or bleaching linen: First to fetch out the spottes, you s­hall lay it in luke warme w ­ ater, and let it lie so three or foure daies, each day shifting it once, and wringing it out, and laying it in another ­water of the same nature; then carry it to a well or brooke, and t­ here rinse it, till you see that nothing commeth from it, but pure cleane ­water . . . ​which done take a bucking tub, & cover the bottome thereof with very fine Ashen ashes . . . ​lay them on ­those ashes; then cover . . . ​with ashes againe . . . ​



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then poure into all through the uppermost cloth so much warme ­water, till the tub can receive no more; and so let it stand al night: the next morning you s­hall set a ­kettle of cleane w ­ ater on the fire; and when it is warme, you s­ hall pull out the spigget of the bucking tubbe, and let the ­water therein runne into another cleane vessell, and as the bucking tubbe wasteth, so you ­shall fill it up againe with the warme w ­ ater on the fire . . . ​which is called, the driving of a Buck. . . . ​ All which being done you ­shall . . . ​with your hands as hot as you can suffer . . . ​­labor the [linen cloth or clothing], ashes, and lie a pretty while together; then carry it to a well, river, or other cleane scouring ­water, and ­there rinse it as cleane as may be from the ashes . . . ​and then . . . ​spread it upon the grasse, and stake it downe at the uttermost length and breadth, and as fast as it dries w ­ ater it againe, but take heed you wet it not too much, for feare you milde[w] or rot it, neither cast ­water upon it till you see it in manner drie, and be sure weekely to turne it first on one side, & then on the other, and at the end of the first weeke you ­shall buck it as before in Lie and Ashes: againe then rinse it, spread it, and ­water it as before; then if you see it whites apace, you need not to give it any more bucks with the ashes and the cloth mixt together: but then a ­couple of cleane bucks . . . ​the next fortnight following; and then being whitened enough, drie up the cloath . . . ​the best season for the same whiten­ ing being in Aprill and May.14 The monotony of Markham’s workaday, pragmatic prose reproduces the rhythms of recurrence through the alternating intensity of active, imperative verbs (such as “fetch,” “carry,” “rinse,” “poure,” “fill,” “stake,” “spread,” “cast”) and the tedium of passive ones (such as “let it lie,” “let it stand,” “let the ­water therein runne”), and by repetitive, rhythmic phrases like “first on the one side, & then on the other.” The ongoingness of laundry time is once again conveyed by words like “again” and “another,” as well as by the use of pre­sent participles (“shifting,” “wringing,” “laying,” “driving,” “scouring”), and by the quotidian language of routinized time (“three or foure daies,” “each day,” “al night,” “next morning,” “weekely,” “at the end of the first weeke,” “the next fortnight”) as well as seasonal time (“Aprill and May”), and indeterminate time spent waiting (“till you see that,” “when it is warme,” “a pretty while,” “till you see it . . . ​drie”). Yet the experience of reading Markham’s marking of laundry time is quite dif­fer­ent from that of laundry time itself, for holding a book in one’s hands is,

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phenomenally speaking, quite dif­fer­ent from carry­ing a buckbasket full of lye-­ soaked laundry to a conduit, washing, wringing, and batting it, laying it out to dry, and so forth. The passage offers only faint traces of the felt experience of laundry time, and all but elides the body of the laboring laundress herself. We hear of “warme w ­ ater,” which initially sounds pleasant, but are l­ ater given a glimpse of pain when it is heated “as hot as you can suffer.” The sting of lye on skin goes unmentioned, as does the sensory experience of what “the driv­ ing of a Buck” feels like. The only word used to describe the manual l­abor of laundering is “­labor” itself (“­labor . . . ​a pretty while together”). Nothing is said about the affective state of the laundress (apart from her purported “feare” of mildew and rot) or about the mentalité produced by maintenance work, the work of maintaining or making and remaking the everyday. It is this “endlesse” cycle that John Taylor foregrounds in his praise of clean linen. The “lovely Laundresse” lauded in Taylor’s mock-­encomium is the aesthetic object, rather than the subject/narrator or addressee of his poem: we have moved from the second-­person imperatives of the how-to manuals (“you must,” “you s­ hall”) to the third-­person pre­sent indicative (“shee’s”), and from the domain of prosaic profit (as in Mascall’s “A Profitable Booke . . .”) to that of poetic plea­sure. Taylor beautifully renders the repetitiveness (“She wrings, she folds, she pleits, she smoothes, she starches . . .”), recurrence (“[she] dries againe”), and cyclicality (“So doth she dry to wash, and wash to drye”; “end of paine begins her paine”) of laundry time, but his virtuosic elaboration of laundry time over some 384 lines of verse is primarily concerned with demon­ strating his own poetic technique and rhetorical copia. His variations on a theme render the monotony of laundry time delightful to readers, who ad­ mire the poet’s ingenuity, not the laundress’s endless round. Her body is once again rendered invisible, substituted meta­phor­ically with that of a laboring ­horse. In describing her occupation as a “cleane trade,” Taylor likewise elides the dirt, filth, and stench that w ­ ere integral to its materials and methods (stale urine and animal feces ­were common ingredients used in laundering linens).15 Meanwhile, visual renderings of the pro­cesses of laundering and starch­ ing offer rare glimpses of laundresses at work, but have difficulty depicting the ongoing recurrence of laundry time, eliding its tedium by showing the varied tasks of laundering taking place si­mul­ta­neously, rather than serially. In Salomon Trismosin’s alchemical treatise, Splendor Solis (1582), laundering is rendered in idealized terms as an allegory for “alchemical purification through distillation, sublimation, and heat”16 (Figure 12). Framed by vari­ous

Figure 12. ​Salomon Trismosin, Splendor Solis, 1582. British Library. Harley MS 3469, fol. 32v.

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Figure 13. ​Pieter van der Borcht, The Laundry, ca. 1562. Engraving of female monkeys starching linen ruffs. Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

flora and fauna, the image emphasizes the natu­ral ele­ments of fire and ­water, and the whiteness of the “purified” linens, but gives l­ittle sense of the sweat, soil, toil, and stench of laundering, apart from the cauldron steeping an un­ known substance in the lower left of the foreground, whose dark color and smoke are suggestive of the smelly substances used in bucking. The unbon­ neted w ­ oman who stands closest to the fire has several hairs out of place, per­ haps suggesting the heat of the w ­ ater in which her hands are submerged, and the sweat of her own exertions. Another visual rendering of laundry time, Pieter van der Borcht’s satire of starchwomen, depicts them as “monkeys” ap­ ing the latest fashion of ruff making, although ­here in an indoor setting, since starching, known as “dry laundry,” was done inside (Figure 13). As in the previ­ ous image, the “perpetuall motion” of laundering is caught as if in a freeze frame, its successive tasks broken down into discrete stages that are depicted si­mul­ta­neously, occluding the tedium of endured ongoingness.



Much Ado About Ruffs 135

Laundry Time in the Archive: The “Washing-­Bill Method of Research” Once upon a time washing bills and memorandum books ­were below the “dignity of history.” Now we esteem them far above acts of parliament or diplomatic memoranda. —­H. G. Wells, The Shape of ­Things to Come (1933)17

Given the limitations of traditional documentary and visual sources of evi­ dence, where might we search for laundry time in the archive? To pose the question in this way is to overlook what is hiding in plain sight, namely, the fact that archive time and laundry time are in many re­spects one and the same: routinized, cyclical, repetitive, and, in the case of scholars, typically sea­ sonal. For this reason, archival l­abor has often been compared to female drudgery, and to laundry work in par­t ic­u ­lar.18 This familiar trope emerged in the mid-­nineteenth c­entury, when allusions to the “washing-bills of ­great men” began to appear with surprising and increasing frequency as shorthand for archival-­labor-­as-­housework or busywork, and for forms of evidence deemed to be beneath the “dignity of the history.”19 According to positivist historian Frederic Harrison (1831–1923), author of The Meaning of History (1862) and The New Calendar of ­Great Men (1892), the modern histo­ rian distinguished himself from the “mere antiquary” by concerning himself not with the “flotsam and jetsam” of local history or the “interminable trivi­ alities” of the domestic sphere—­which only served to “degrade History”—­ but rather with the “­great deeds” of “Man in the Past.”20 Harrison deployed references to laundry work repeatedly in his effort to differentiate modern History from its antiquarian past and to define the disciplinary path of its scientific f­uture. In his view, the empirical methods of the social sciences, with their valorization of primary sources and quantitative methods, repre­ sented the discipline’s best hope and greatest threat, for in opening the field to ever wider and more diverse forms of evidence, they threatened to dilute its proper focus by inundating its g­ reat men in “heap[s] of dirty linen.”21 The historian who sullied his hands with demeaning forms of archival ­labor, and trivial forms of evidence such as “washing-­bills,” he warned, threatened to “unman” both himself and his discipline.22 Although Harrison acceded that “all manuscript authorities of the small­ est value should be accurately deciphered, copied, and edited,” such archival

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drudgery was in his view “quite distinct from the work of the historian proper” and better left to female paleographers, referred to as “raw girls,” who might “devote years of their lives to deciphering the washing accounts of a medieval convent.”23 In this way, archival ­labor came to be associated with female drudg­ ery, and with the incessant ­labor and monotony of laundry time in par­tic­u­ lar. The gendered division of scholarly ­labor Harrison describes emerged with the professionalization of History as an academic discipline, as female schol­ ars who w ­ ere unable to obtain university posts became paleographers, research assistants, editors, archivists, and librarians.24 ­These antiquarian “handmaid­ ens” of History w ­ ere tasked with providing the “raw” materials used by male historians to construct their monuments to ­great men.25 The “washing-­bills of g­ reat men” would become a favored trope of liter­ ary historians and Shakespeare scholars as well, as when Sir Leslie Stephen, founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, complained in 1877 of scholars “gaping for ­every scrap of knowledge about the petty details” of ­great men’s lives, including even their “washing-­bills.” He reserved par­tic­u­lar scorn for ­those who would search out “similar information about Shake­ speare.”26 In the view of Stephen and his contemporaries, the desire to “know all about [Shakespeare’s] washing-­bills” marked a critical turn “downward ­towards trifle,” rather than “upwards to the ideal,” a reduction of the sublimely poetic to the ridiculously prosaic.27 By the early twentieth ­century, the trope had become so familiar as shorthand that one Shakespeare critic simply re­ ferred to “the washing-­bill method of research.”28 The satirical use of the laundry-­bill trope arose in response to studies such as Hubert Hall’s Society in the Elizabethan Age (1886), which included extensive appendices of primary documents, such as inventories and rec­ords of ­house­hold expenditures, includ­ ing washing-­bills.29 Although female editors and archivists of the period, such as Mary Bate­ son (1865–1906) and Lucy Toulman Smith (1838–1911), often worked within traditional historiographical paradigms, focusing on state papers and po­liti­ cal institutions, ­others began to interrogate what was excluded by such archives and disciplinary methods. Influenced by the emergence of first-­wave feminism in the 1870s, they put their archival training to work on unconventional sources and produced pioneering studies of w ­ omen’s social, cultural, and economic history. Departing from e­ arlier efforts in the field of w ­ omen’s history, which emulated the “­great men” model by chronicling the public lives of exceptional “­women worthies,” they documented the lives of ordinary ­women.30 This first



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Figure 14. ​“The Ubiquitous Laundry List.” Appeal by Lucy Maynard Salmon and her class in “Historical Materials” to “Collect Laundry Lists” for her archive (December 1925). Courtesy of Vassar College Archives and Special Collections. LMS 54.1.

generation of feminist historiographers w ­ ere particularly interested in the ev­ eryday, material conditions that differentially s­ haped ­women’s lives.31 Exemplary in this regard was Lucy Maynard Salmon (1853–1927), founder of the History Department at Vassar College in 1887, who drew on a wide range of ephemeral sources to chronicle the temporality and history of every­ day life. Salmon was especially fond of laundry lists, arguing that they are “closely and continuously connected with everyday life,” and therefore reflect “custom and change in social conditions . . . ​with a detail and rapidity with which other sources seldom do” (Figure 14).32 Salmon viewed history as ever-­ present and continually unfolding—an ongoing series of every-­days—­and was always seeking new forms of evidence that might capture this ongoingness in

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the historical past and pre­sent. Laundry lists w ­ ere in her view not antiquarian relics of a bygone past, but rather profoundly modern, in the sense of being of the moment, “current,” “pre­sent,” reflecting “the most up-­to-­date ideas, tech­ niques, or equipment.”33 The material pro­cesses of laundering—­its gendered division of ­labor, location inside or outside the home, transformation by la­ bor-­and time-­saving technologies—­were neither inconsequential nor beneath the “dignity of history,” as they shed light on ­labor patterns, the distribution of wealth, technological change, shifting norms of hygiene, and so forth.34 In seeking to remove the stigma attached to laundry lists and other ephemeral forms of evidence, including artifacts of material culture (such as “the ­family Christmas tree,” the “garbage can,” and the “laundry line and pulley”), Salmon anticipated the current “material turn” in the social sciences and humanities. In so ­doing, she aimed not only to legitimate such forms of evidence as proper objects of historical analy­sis but also to advocate for social change in the pre­ sent. Salmon encouraged her students and colleagues to create their own het­ erodox archives, arising from the pressing po­liti­cal concerns in their daily lives, and thereby to shape the f­uture contours of the archived past.35 In this re­ gard, her work was profoundly forward-­looking and anti-­antiquarian. Another first-­wave proponent of feminist “counter-­archives”36 was none other than Leslie Stephen’s own d ­ aughter, V ­ irginia Woolf, who throughout her life defied the dictates of Victorian historiography epitomized by her ­father.37 Like Salmon, Woolf challenged the notion that “the lives of ­great men only should be recorded,” arguing that “the ­humble as well as the illustrious” are part of history, and that what is deemed small or g­ reat is a m ­ atter of per­ spective.38 She praised the efforts of feminist scholars to illuminate the “unlit corridors of history” by incorporating the “lives of the obscure,” including ­those of w ­ omen and “queer p ­ eople living out-­of-­the-­way lives,”39 and sought to awaken feminist consciousness of the poetic and imaginative potential of archives, suggesting that they could “produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and yet keep also the peculiar virtue that belongs to fact—­its suggestive real­ity, its own proper creativeness.”40 Woolf ’s “preoccupation with the ordinary,” as Lorraine Sim has argued, emerged from her interest in everyday t­hings and everyday time, construed as the temporality of repetition, recurrence, and modernity, a preoccupation that recurs throughout her work.41 In Woolf ’s creative exploration of counter-­a rchives as portals to a re­ imagined past, she repeatedly returned to the “Re­nais­sance” and the “Eliza­ bethan period” as constructs of Victorian historiography—­perhaps nowhere



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more so than in her daring, gender-­and genre-­bending experiment in time travel, Orlando: A Biography (1928). Feminist scholars have analyzed the ways in which the novel takes aim at the patriarchal hallmarks of Victorian histo­ riography, periodized in accordance with the deeds of “­great men” (or in the case of Elizabeth, an exceptional “­woman worthy”).42 ­Little attention has been paid, however, to the role played by the ruff in her reimagining of Shakespeare, who makes several cameo appearances in the novel, not in its limelight as epoch-­defining Bard, but as an unnamed figure in its margins or shadows, where he is initially described as “a rather fat, shabby man, whose ruff was a thought dirty.”43 Woolf effectively deflates and decenters literary history’s deified Bard by sullying his iconic ruff. When the unnamed figure ­later reap­ pears, conjured in Orlando’s consciousness by Memory (described as a “seamstress, and a capricious one at that,” who “runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither,” and “lightly stitche[s] together” the “rag bag of odds and ends within us . . . ​by a single thread”), his ruff is not merely dirty, but has been further demoted to a “grease-­stained ruffle.”44 At the nov­ el’s end, the figure is once more recollected as the man “with a dirty ruff on.”45 The recurrence of Shakespeare’s dirty, grease-­stained ruff in Orlando’s mem­ ory is likened to the ongoing (feminized) ­labor of stitching and restitching, making and remaking the past in the pre­sent. The unlaundered ruff thus reappears throughout the novel as an emblem not of reified period time, but of recursive, everyday periodicity. Orlando’s thoughts repeatedly return to the cyclical temporality of recurrence during his own time-­travels, as in the following meditation on time midway through the novel: Day a­ fter day, week ­after week, month ­after month, year ­after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw—­but prob­ably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how ­every tree and plant in the neighborhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night succeeds day and day night; how ­there is first a storm and then fine weather; how ­things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a ­little dust and a few cobwebs which one old ­woman can sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which one cannot help feeling, might have been reached more quickly by the ­simple statement that ‘Time passed’

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(­here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing what­ever happened.46 The punctuation or bracketing of time (into discrete, measureable “periods”) is h ­ ere eschewed in f­ avor of the longue durée of a sentence that enacts the tem­ porality of recurrence, while taking the time to acknowledge the unseen “old ­woman” who sweeps up the neglected cobwebs of history. Period time is mocked throughout the novel, particularly as proponed by Orlando’s foil, Nick Greene, the hack poet and would-be literary historian, who sums up his own “period” by pontificating, “The g­ reat age of lit­er­a­ture is past . . . ​the Elizabe­ than age was inferior in ­every re­spect . . . ​we must make the best of it, cherish the past and honor t­hose writers . . . ​who take antiquity for their model.” Greene, as nostalgic promulgator of period time, is forever backward-­looking, finding glory (“La Gloire,” or Glawr as he pronounces it) in the bygone past.47 It is not by accident that Woolf attributes the trope of “Shakespeare’s laundry bills” promulgated by her ­father to Greene, who claims that Shakespeare’s “po­ etry was scribbled down on the backs of washing-­bills” (information that produces the opposite of its desired effect, for we are told that this revelation of the ordinary “roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight”).48 His imag­ ination haunted by Shakespeare’s dirty ruff, Orlando is delighted at the rec­ ognition that poetry may be stitched together from the everyday “underlinen” of history. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf went on to develop a countervail­ ing feminist methodology for the study of literary history, again insisting that Shakespeare’s plays are inextricably intertwined with the material conditions in which they w ­ ere produced. Literary texts, she famously argued, “are not spun in mid-­air by incorporeal creatures,” but “are attached to grossly mate­ rial ­things.”49 Like Salmon, she encouraged female scholars to search imagi­ natively in archives (such as “parish registers and account books”) for remnants—­including washing-­bills!—of the material conditions that led to Shakespeare’s flourishing and to the silencing of his ­sisters.50 ­Later the same year she went still further, urging, “Anyone who should seek among ­those old papers, who should turn history wrong side out and so construct a faithful picture of the daily life of the ordinary ­woman in Shakespeare’s time, . . . ​ would not only write a book of astonishing interest, but would furnish the critic with a weapon which he [sic] now lacks.”51 In her last, posthumously published novel, Between the Acts (1941), Woolf would use this weapon yet again to lampoon period time, and again to de­



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flate the iconicity of the ruff, in the hilarious historical pageant staged within it, titled “Scenes from En­glish History.”52 Each brief “scene” depicts a period (e.g., “Early Britons; Plantagenets; Tudors; Stuarts—­she ticked them off, but prob­ably she had forgotten a reign or two”53), presenting the history of “Merry ­England” out of everyday odds and ends (“Cardboard crowns, swords made of silver paper, turbans that ­were sixpenny dishcloths”).54 Yet the pageant’s lin­ ear unfolding of canned period history is repeatedly interrupted by everyday events taking place in the pre­sent (noise, changes in weather, the comings and ­goings and chatter of the crowd, their narrated thoughts, and so forth) ­until the ­grand entrance of Queen Elizabeth, played by “Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco” in the village shop, who is proclaimed to embody “the age in person.”55 She wears “a vast ruff” (undoubtedly stitched together out of the “sixpenny dishcloths,” as “her cape,” apparently “made of cloth of silver,” is “in fact [made of] swabs used to scour saucepans”) and sings a ditty enumer­ ating all the clichés of “the Golden Age of Elizabeth,” as the audience roars with laughter and sings along “with an abandonment which, if vulgar, was a ­great help to the Elizabethan age. For the ruff had become unpinned.”56 At this point, a pageant-­within-­the-­pageant is staged for “­great Eliza,” which sends up in miniature the utter “confusion of the plot” (“­Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing,”57 we are told). The confusion is indeed such that Eliza expires on the spot, and the audience joins hands and “dance[s] round the ma­ jestic figure of the Elizabethan age personified by Mrs. Clark, licensed to sell tobacco, on her soap box.”58 It is this frenzied “round,” rather than the linear plot of the pageant, that steals the first act (“It d ­ idn’t m ­ atter what the words ­were . . . ​Round and round they whirled”), at the end of which Eliza Clark descends triumphantly from her soapbox and “the Elizabethan age passed from the scene,” her unpinned ruff flapping in the wind.59 If much ado has been made about ruffs in feminist counter-­archives, it is thus with the aim of acknowledging, attending to, and creatively reimagin­ ing the laundry time that has gone into their fashioning and refashioning, as well as into the fashioning and refashioning of history. For history, as Raphael Samuel argues in Theatres of Memory: Past and Pre­sent in Con­temporary Cul­ ture (1994), “is not the prerogative of the historian,” but rather “is the work of a thousand dif­fer­ent hands.”60 ­These laboring hands include the “raw” hands of Frederic Harrison’s female paleographers, “deciphering the washing accounts of a medieval convent”; ­those of female archivists and editors like Mary Bate­ son and Lucy Toulman Smith; ­those of first-­wave feminist scholars like Lucy Maynard Salmon and her Vassar College students collecting laundry lists,

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and in so ­doing reinventing what counts as historical evidence and as an “ar­ chive”; and even the tobacco-­stained hands of ­Virginia Woolf’s imaginary Eliza Clark, perpetually readjusting her ruff made of dishrags for a pageant-­ within-­a-­pageant of “the Elizabethan age” in which the participants m ­ atter more than the plot; and the many diminutive hands at play with Elizabethan Queen Barbie, putting her ruff to new uses in re­imagined histories yet to come. By better imagining and attending to the counter-­a rchives in which “Clio’s under-­laborers” are at work (and play),61 I want to suggest, we may begin to reimagine history’s ongoing recurrences in ways that enable us to glimpse what lies beyond our pre­sent moment, ­whether we imagine it to be tragedy or farce.

Chapter 8

The Period Concept and Seventeenth-­Century Poetry Gordon Teskey

Chronology When we are not thinking too hard about it, we consider the past, the h ­ uman past, to be a straight chronological line on which events come one ­after an­ other or, from our point of view looking back, one ­behind another. This is so ­whether we mean brief and convulsive historical events, such as ­battles, or very long events, such as the agricultural revolution or, yet again, ­those events that result in works of art made by creators—­artists, poets, and musicians. They obediently line up one a­ fter another for our inspection. It is con­ve­nient for them to do so. For the least controversial truth about the study of the culture of the past is that chronology is the condition of the possibility of understand­ ing. That is where we have to start—­simplistic, abstract, and conjectural as the chronology may be—so far as obtaining an adequate notion of the cul­ tural past is concerned. Yet we know that while the arrow of time flies straight, historical and cul­ tural events are more like threads entangled with one another. Seen, as it ­were, from a distance, the entanglements are all tending in one direction, with some threads extending farther than o­ thers. But from close up many events are happening at the same time or at overlapping times and vibrating, reso­ nating with one another. ­Under close inspection the tangled relations among artists and among creative events prove more significant than linear sequence. Laying events out on a line of succession tends to disentangle ­those threads, and so to represent them as more autonomous than they are. Yet at

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the most basic level, it is impossible to learn about events without arranging them sequentially, since their temporality is a vital part of their truth. We learn that the Anglo-­Spanish War comes before the Thirty Years War before the En­glish Civil War before the Anglo-­Dutch Wars, the first of ­these coming ­under C ­ romwell’s regime, in 1652–54, the second and third in the reign of Charles II, 1665–67 and 1672–74. We learn Chaucer before Spenser before Donne before Milton before Dryden before Pope before Words­worth, and so on. We learn this temporal order to events before investigating causal or even casual—­which is to say, collaterally entangling—­resonant relations among them. With this contrast between sequentiality and entanglement we have be­ gun to think about what the “period” concept may mean.1 Consider, for example, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare in the four years before Marlowe’s death in 1593, or Edmund Spenser and John Donne in the seven years before Spenser’s death, early in 1599. Standard his­ tories learned by undergraduate students show the second author in each pair learning from the first and moving on, or moving elsewhere. But on closer inspection what is of interest are the resonances, not the succession. In the case of Spenser and Donne, t­ hese poets have come to represent in the literary histories two distinct periods: the Elizabethan period and its successor, the seventeenth ­century. But the ­careers of Spenser and Donne overlap, as we saw, for at least seven years, the one at the height of his powers, the other one ris­ ing. They are deeply entangled with each other, even if Donne’s entanglement is greater, violently reacting—­when we consider his Spenserian Metempsycho­ sis. The Progresse of the Soule, dated 1601, no lesser adverb than “violently” ­will do—­against Spenser’s predominating aureate style.2 But t­ here is entanglement, or resonance, the other way as well. Can we understand the disillusioned, oc­ casionally strident tone of the Spenser of the ­later books of The Faerie Queene, and of The Cantos of Mutabilitie, apart from the sharper, satirical resonances of the 1590s, of which Donne was one of the chief voices? Creative productions are peculiar among chronological events in the past ­because we preserve the original event of any work of art into subsequent times, so that the artwork has a start date, let us say, its publication, but no definite conclusion. Teaching is a part of this “re-­eventualizing.” As historians, we may study the Piedmontese massacre of the Valdensian “heretics” in their remote mountain villages as an objective event in the past, taking place in 1652; we do not feel we are repeating that event by teaching it. Historical events re­ main inert objects set at a distance in time. They are existentially inaccessible



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to us, even if an inspiring author and teacher makes history, as we say, come alive. But Milton’s poem on that historical event, “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaugh­ tered saints,” is a creative event—­perhaps the first antigenocide poem in Europe—­that we strive to keep happening with as much of its original force as we can, and also with as much force as we can add. It is accessible and pre­ sent in a way that history is not and never can be. The poem’s original force is originative as well. Even outside the scene of instruction, the poem as an orig­ inative event can spring to life from the page, as when this par­tic­u­lar poem was read by the very young Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village, trolling through his friends’ library, finding Milton and reading him aloud.3 This happening louder is what makes a poem prophetic. It is as if the artwork aspires on its own to be, as Milton said of the poems he expected to write, “so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.”4 A ­great poem gets louder with time. This peculiar repetitiveness of works of art makes their chronology espe­ cially impor­tant, b­ ecause they are always overtaking one another in educa­ tion, and also b­ ecause they seem to strive continually, if only in fragments, to happen inside other works of art that come l­ater in time, an eerie phenome­ non we normalize with words like influence and allusion. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a lesson in this repetitive be­hav­ior, channeling a g­ reat many e­ arlier works, including Spenser’s Epithalamion and the late Latin poem, Pervigilium Veneris: “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song!” “Quando fiam uti chel­ idon [when s­hall I be as the sparrow]!”5 Consider each phrase as if it ­were spoken by a poem and not by the represented speaker, the usual imaginary mask or prosôpon. Give the speaker’s mask to the poem instead: “Let me, Epi­ thalamion, keep singing, always continuing on to my end.” “Let me, Pervi­ gilium Veneris, have a new spring, like the sparrow, so that I may cease being ­silent (ut tacere desinam) and be looked on with f­ avor by Apollo.”6 ­A fter a first airing, works of art strive to be heard once more, and once more, and always once more, with the insistency we hear in the opening lines of “Lycidas.” Most of them fail and are never heard of again, or they are heard only seldom, brusquely inspected by experts or committed to notes by harried gradu­ate stu­ dents facing their examinations in a month’s time. If we listen intently we can just hear the poems and musical scores—in En­glish poetry of the seventeenth ­century, the Poly-Olbions, the Britannia’s Pastorals, and the Purple Islands—­ resonating from the climate-­controlled vaults and offsite facilities of our librar­ ies, and from the pages of old anthologies and discarded survey-­ course

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syllabuses, t­hose exercises in seeing lit­er­a­ture on a straight line. The Waste Land lays bare what is happening u ­ nder the surface in almost all art almost all the time, an underwhelming resonance, a continual drone. Out of this low-­level rumble some few works contrive, by their exceptional quality, by temporary ­favor, or merely by accident, to break out in ­later works, as we have just heard in The Waste Land. But they reappear as well in scholarly edi­ tions, in textbooks, and in classrooms, and even, like that sparrow, in mo­ ments of recitation aloud (ut tacere desinam).

Sphere One of the most durable concepts in the modern study and teaching of cul­ tural objects is that of the “period,” with what­ever specifying adjective one chooses to add: the Early Tudor period, the Elizabethan period, the Early Modern period, the period of the Enlightenment, the Romantic period, and so on. When the word itself is absent, as with “the Seventeenth ­Century,” or that old classic, Basil Willey’s The Seventeenth C ­ entury Background, the con­ cept of the period underlies ­these noun modifiers. “Background” is itself a reso­ nant concept. A background can be acoustic as well, like the bass line in ­music. It confers on the figures before us a subtle homogeneity, which they draw from the same “environment,” a term we now use instead of “back­ ground” b­ ecause “environment” suggests a common three-­dimensional space instead of the two-­dimensional structure of figure and ground. The concept of “period”—­going around in a circle—­puts such homogeneity and three-­ dimensionality into time. Wherever the mind roves within a period it seems continually to return to where it began, as with circles described on the inner surface of a sphere. The literal meaning of “period” is of course a span of lin­ ear time, as is implied by phrases such as “fifteenth-­century prose.” But this temporal designation is usually accompanied by some implicit location as well, and by containment. Containment, we ­shall see, as much as entanglement and resonance, is central to the concept of “period” b­ ecause what­ever is contained belongs to an environment. Speaking traditionally about the Renaissance—or the Early Modern pe­ riod as it is also called, thus increasing its size, its orbit, and without inserting the elaborate qualifications that may be thought necessary for a professional audience—­one might describe the period as follows. I write it as if I ­were d ­ oing so for an encyclopedia:



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The period of the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance extends from Petrarch in Italy to Milton in ­England or, more broadly, from the f­ourteenth ­century in Italy—­what Italians call the “trecento”—to the ­later sev­ enteenth ­century in ­England and northern Eu­rope, a cultural phe­ nomenon moving gradually from the south to the north. The period is characterized by a self-­conscious favoring of pagan classical authors and styles, by religious controversy brought on by the Reformation, by the rise of modern experimental science, and by the emergence of modern states, each of ­these f­ actors coming into play as the phenom­ enon moves north. Musicians, authors, architects, and artists of this period differ from one another, of course, and t­ hese differences are impor­tant, indeed vital, even as the artists influence and learn from one another. But at the same time ­those common cultural f­ actors cre­ ate an environment in which t­here are under­lying resonances be­ tween, say, a Roman Catholic humanist poet like Politian, writing at the end of the fifteenth ­century, and the militant Protestant John Milton, writing more than a ­century and a half ­later; and on the other side between Politian and Petrarch, a ­century before. We therefore have a long span of three centuries forming the period of the Re­nais­ sance, from the death of Petrarch in 1374 to that of Milton in 1674. But this stretch of time is not open at ­either end: it is porously con­ tained. Even distant resonances across the w ­ hole dia­meter of this en­ closure are, so to speak, more audible than t­ hose between figures in much closer proximity if one of them is on the outside. Consider, for example, Petrarch and Guido Cavalcanti, who died in 1300, four years before Petrarch was born, or between Milton and his younger col­ league and immediate successor John Dryden, who died in 1700, twenty-­six years ­after Milton. Note how difficult it is—­not impossible, but difficult—to look outside such a temporal-­spatial sphere, and how resonant every­thing is inside it, even when separated by three centuries. Again, we might speak of the Romantic period tout court, but we mean, and our hearers understand us to mean, a certain style and feeling in the arts of the countries of Eu­rope, and to a lesser extent of their colonies, beginning in the ­middle of the eigh­teenth ­century and ending sometime before the sec­ ond half of the nineteenth ­century, although branches of it—­for example, the theory of the symbol—­extend up to World War I. If we speak of Romanticism

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we ­will not be speaking of poetry or art produced at that time in other parts of the world by other cultures, in Japan or Gabon, even if ­those arts, as some­ times occurred and would more increasingly occur, influenced Romantic art­ ists and their successors. It is still more obvious that it makes no sense to speak of Elizabethan or Jacobean or Caroline or Restoration poetry outside ­England and beyond the En­glish language. Th ­ ese period terms are explic­itly connected with a place, ­because all uses of the term “period” imply a general place as well as an approximate span of time. The very looseness of the term—­ its maddening imprecision to t­hose who perhaps care too much for excep­ tions, for the repre­sen­ta­tional accuracy of our conventional tools—is useful for gathering many dif­fer­ent works of art together, works having sufficient circumstantial likeness to make them worth appreciating in the analytical frames of art history, literary history, m ­ usic history, and so on. We could not publish journals, or­ga­nize conferences, or select what books to read and what papers to attend, without periods. We could not do research without periods. And of course we could not—at least ­until recently—­organize a curriculum without periods. Periods make research pos­si­ble. But they make teaching pos­si­ble, too. Consider the example of the author who has the strongest claim to be the first historian of art, writing two and a half centuries before Thomas Warton’s pioneering History of En­glish Poetry (1774–81). Giorgio Vasari stretched out his ­great history of Italian Re­nais­sance art, Le vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pit­ tori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Florence, 1550, ex­ panded 1568), along a line extending from Giotto to Masaccio to Michelangelo, with the two, approximately century-­long lines between the floruit dates of each painter descending like catenary arcs and rising again to the heights of original achievement. The key phrase in Vasari’s title is piú eccellenti, “most excellent.” For him, the most excellent artists are sent by God; like prophets, they are stimulated by divine inspiration. Each artist of genius sheds miracu­ lous influence on ­those that follow, ­until the force of his example diminishes so much that another intervention is needed. For Vasari, who was himself a monumental painter—he painted the inside of Brunelleschi’s dome—to come ­later in time, ­after a ­great genius, is an increasing disadvantage. For him—­ and in this his presuppositions are very far from our own—­art always declines in quality ­until a new miracle of genius arrives, a rebirth of the spirit of the old one, as Giotto was reborn in Masaccio and both of them again in Michel­ angelo, constituting the three ages of the “re­nais­sance” of ­these arts: “la rinas­ cita di queste arti.”7



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Strange as Vasari’s thinking about the history of art may seem to us, it suggests something quite modern, which is the concept of the “period,” a word Vasari did not use, although it is a ­thing we can reasonably thank him for. It is true that Vasari also promoted an “ages of man” model for the three stages of Italian Re­nais­sance art. This was not so naive as it might seem, given his almost exclusive concern with the technical prob­lems of lifelike repre­sen­ta­tion. Be­ neath this model of pro­gress from childhood to adolescence and maturity ­there is the subtler and more fundamental concept of the period, a temporal span in which a more or less stable conjuncture of styles is in play. T ­ oday, ­those styles are named ­after centuries: the trecento, or ­fourteenth c­ entury, dominated by the gothic but infused by the new, humanist spirit of Giotto; the quattrocento, or fifteenth ­century: dominated by the scientific humanist styles of Masaccio, Uccello, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, and Brunelleschi; and the cinquecento, or sixteenth ­century, which surpassed scientific correctness and was dominated by the genius of the “divine” Michelangelo. In short, the “period” is in part a historical concept, a ­mental and meth­ odological frame that partakes of what it enframes. Like any such frame, its designative power is fuzzy at the edges, even for its most dedicated users. The least critical enthusiast for the term “Re­nais­sance” ­will not deny ­there is a con­ siderable amount of the ­Middle Ages in Petrarch and Giotto, and perhaps even in Erasmus and Skelton, and that t­ here is a considerable amount of the Enlightenment in Marvell, Milton, Boileau, and Charles Le Brun. That is ­because the “period” is also a cultural concept. It is thus entan­ gled with another difficult term—­“style”—as has already been suggested with the example of Romanticism. We may speak in the visual arts of mannerist or baroque style, and in poetry of Elizabethan, Jacobean, or metaphysical styles, in addition to styles connected with authors, such as neo-­Spenserianism and Marinismo in the seventeenth c­ entury, or the Byronic personal style in the nineteenth c­ entury. Except when it is being deliberately parodied and put in ­mental quotation marks—as with James Joyce’s use in Ulysses of the suc­ cession of En­glish prose styles to describe the development of the fetus in the womb—­a style is pos­si­ble only in certain periods and is often the mark of a period, as with the baroque. In the past, students ­were examined on their abil­ ity to date and locate poems, musical compositions, and works of art based on their style. Most ­people with even small experience—­teen­agers taking such tests—­can listen to a piece of ­music and quickly date the ­century in which it was composed. The same is of course true with works of art and architecture, and with poems.

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A period, therefore, has to do with works of art, with man-­made aesthetic objects—­poems, paintings, musical compositions, buildings, even candlesticks and salt cellars—­which during some par­tic­u ­lar span of time and within a shifting geo­graph­i­cal frame are made for aesthetic delight and personal ex­ pression, and exhibit, if not a unity of style, then at least a ­family resemblance between vari­ous styles. Th ­ ese resonating styles create a b­ ubble in time, one in which chronology is not extirpated but is instead drawn around into a con­ taining sphere. The mind revolves, as it w ­ ere, in a g­ reat cir­cuit around the crystalline enclosure of the period in which its interest is fixed, looking out­ ward now and then to antecedent and subsequent developments, the before and the a­ fter, but mostly listening to the resonances inside the sphere.

Resonance The word “period” means “a way or course that leads around in a circle,” peri + odos, as when we speak of the periodicity of the moon or of the reproduc­ tive cycle. By reviving this root meta­phor in the etymology of the word and then putting its circularity in three dimensions as a sphere, we develop some­ thing quite dif­fer­ent from the linear span of time we commonly suppose “pe­ riod” denotes. The new model has something to do with circular motion around the inner surface of this sphere. What is circular motion? From antiq­ uity to the Elizabethan age, and into the seventeenth ­century, circular motion around the inner surface of a sphere was exemplified by the movement of the heavenly bodies above the sphere of the moon.8 It was an image of perfection set above us in the heavens. The Milky Way still inspired spiritual reverence for the Creator in Henry Vaughan’s “The World,” from Silex Scintillans (1650), at the midpoint of the seventeenth ­century. The poem opens with the following lines: I saw Eternity the other night Like a ­great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years Driv’n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d, In which the world And all her train w ­ ere hurl’d.9



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The difference from a linear notion of period is that Vaughan’s vision of a per­ fect circle of light transcends the vis­i­ble universe, even the heavenly spheres. In medieval and early Re­nais­sance cosmology, the crystalline spheres turned by angels to make heavenly ­music ­were an image of the perfection of the material world at the Creation. One could look up from the earth at night and see, if not eternity, then its threshold in the heavenly motions. (The ef­ fects of the Fall ­were felt only beneath the sphere of the moon, the sublunary realm.) But in Vaughan’s time, in the age of the new science, or “new phi­ losophy” as Donne called it, the heavenly bodies have degenerated to mechan­ ics: they are an engine driving time onward, or a “plain watch,” as Vaughan calls it in “The Evening-­Watch.”10 One response to this mechanization of the cosmos was to revert to the mystical. At the conclusion of Vaughan’s “The World,” the circle of light, emblem of eternity, is revealed to be the wedding ring the Son ­will place on the fin­ger of his bride, the Church. This is the bride of the twenty-­second chapter of Revelation who comes down from God out of heaven for her marriage with the Lamb. In the imagery of the church she is the Heavenly Jerusalem made up of all who are “written in the Lamb’s book of life” (Revelation 21:27), and only them. The exclusion is dramatically re­ vealed when the poet exhorts ­those fools who live in the world and for it—­ who “live in grots, and caves, and hate the day” (line 51)—to rise up to the heavens and “tread the Sun” (line 55). Some few persons do, soaring up into the “Ring”: “Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, / And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the Ring, / But most would use no wing” (lines 46–48). The poet is generously concerned about t­ hose who use no wing: “O fools (said I,) thus to prefer dark night / Before all light” (lines 49–50). It turns out, how­ ever, that this concern is misplaced: “But as I did their madness so discusse / One whisper’d thus, / This Ring the Bride-­groome did for none provide / But for his bride.” Due to the effects of astronomy ­after Galileo and Kepler, discoverer of elliptical orbits, the idea of the circle as perfection had to be removed alto­ gether from the physical world and put by Vaughan among the mysteries of Revelation. The poetic locus classicus for this change is the lines from Don­ ne’s first Anniversary, An Anatomie of the World (1611), the year of the King James Bible and, more to the point, of The Tempest, in which play, despite all its magic, and in contrast with the ­great recognition scene of Pericles (1607/8), ­there is no reference to the harmony of the spheres or to stellar influence. The occasion of Donne’s two Anniversaries, the second being Of the Progresse of

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the Soule (1612), was the death of the fourteen-­year-­old heiress Elizabeth Drury, in 1610. The conceit of ­these poems is that Elizabeth Drury was the soul of the world and when she left the world it began to decay, as a body does when the soul departs. Elizabeth’s death is the cause of the, to Donne, morbidly skeptical “new philosophy,” as it is of decay on the earth and of the earth, which has crumbled to its “Atomies,” provoking men to look for new worlds: And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Ele­ment of fire is quite put out; The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit Can well direct him where to looke for it. And freely men confesse that this world’s spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seeke so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies. ’Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation . . . This is the worlds condition now.11 The dream of leaving this earth for a better one is if anything stronger ­today, as the crumbling of our world goes on, in the excrementitious anthropocene. For the ancients, however, and still in the Re­nais­sance, the circular motion of the heavenly bodies indicated a perfection that is still within our sight, if not within our reach. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Caelo, the planets and stars neither come into being (genesis) nor decline with age into a less perfect state by decay (phthora). For poets of the sixteenth c­ entury this tradition gave figurative language a metaphysical guarantee of its truth. Such language drew its power from an imaginary connection to the movements of the heavenly bodies above the sphere of the moon, the harmonia and koinônia (commonness) of all ­things resonating together. (Baudelaire’s ­great and mysterious sonnet, “Correspon­ dances,” does not by any means harmonize with this tradition; but it requires that we know it.) This resonance is true even of mutable ­things beneath the sphere of the moon b­ ecause, from a Christian Neoplatonic perspective, one most forcefully expressed in Pico della Mirandola’s Heptaplus, their correspon­ dences with t­ hings above the sphere of the moon is a guarantee of their be­ coming perfect again, perfect in the etymological sense of being fully completed. They may all be subject to decay, but in their fates they are always “returning



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to themselves.” That is how Spenser’s Nature expresses it when she pronounces her mysterious judgment near the end of the Cantos of Mutabilitie: I well consider all that ye have sayd, And find that all ­things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselves at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate: Then over them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne over change, and doe their states maintaine.12 According to the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, “dilate” means “to expand, to am­ plify, to enlarge,” to widen out (latus, “wide”) in dif­fer­ent directions,13 and such expansion goes out from a center.14 In Spenser’s g­ reat stanza, time itself has been spatialized as expansion and as circular motion: all t­ hings move in a circle from their “first estates”: in this return, or remeatio, they come “at length” to their first and pristine “estates,” without having suffered more than an ap­ parent loss of being.15 Decay is mere appearance. Such a view could hardly be more dif­fer­ent from what we saw of Donne’s, which was published in 1611, two years ­after the publication of the Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609). The governing idea for Spenser’s poem is cosmic order and a case at law over ­whether this order or disorder has a better claim. In An Anatomie of the World, the governing model is that of an anatomy lecture on a cadaver as a symbol of the world. The cadaver continues to decay as the poem goes on so that the rising smell at last forces the poet to stop, as real anatomy lectures in Donne’s time ceased on the third or fourth day ­after death, ­because the smell was overpowering. As Donne says, this is the world’s condition now: the one-­direction downslope of decay. Another kind of circular motion was found, however, by William Har­ vey in 1628. It likewise had to do with the body, but with the body living, and in par­tic­u­lar with the circulation of the blood. The connection between ve­ nous and arterial blood had been sought since antiquity, but it was Harvey’s leap of imagination to see all the blood circulating through both states, im­ pelled by the mechanical pumping of the heart. That this princi­ple was being

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widely sought is indicated in Donne’s second Anniversary of 1612, Of the Pro­ gresse of the Soule, sixteen years before Harvey:    Have not all soules thought For many ages, that our body’s wrought Of Ayre, and Fire, and other Ele­ments? . . . Know’st thou but how the stone doth enter in The bladders cave, and never breake the skinne? Know’st thou how blood, which to the heart doth flow, Doth from one ventricle to th’other goe? And for the putrid stuffe, which thou dost spit, Know’st thou how thy lungs have attracted it?16 The circulation of the blood is wondrous, but it is not metaphysical, being sub­ ject to change and decay, and to residual “putrid stuff” in the lungs. The cir­ culation is mechanical, like the machinery of the spheres in Vaughan. Donne’s broad point in t­hese lines, and in the second Anniversary generally, is that the microcosm of the body is in no better condition than the macrocosm vis­ i­ble in the heavenly motions, the subject of the first Anniversary. This older, medieval doctrine of the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm is called up by reference to the theory of bodily humors, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile or choler, and blood, which correspond with the ele­ments making up the world: w ­ ater, earth, fire, and air. The theory, now fully discredited, as Donne indicates, is replaced by new and disconcerting mysteries: Where does spittle come from? How do kidney stones form? What drives the blood between the chambers of the heart? The theory of harmony and general analogy retains some poetic appeal for Donne just by its being in a state of decay, as if decay itself had an aesthetic appeal in that ample graveyard where theories go to die. Such an archaeology of knowledge, in par­tic­u ­lar the theory of the macrocosm-­microcosm analogy, is perhaps what lies b­ ehind the passage in which Donne imagines Elizabeth Drury’s soul bursting from her body—­like a bullet from an exploding, rusty gun—­and flying up through the discred­ ited spheres, as the spinal chord (the “pith,” as he calls it) passes through the vertebrae: But ere she can consider how she went, At once is at, and through the Firmament. And as ­these starres ­were but so many beads



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Strung on one string, speed undistinguish’d leads Her through ­those Spheares, as through the beads, a string, Whose quick succession makes it still one ­thing: As doth the pith, which, left our bodies slacke, Strings fast the l­ittle bones of necke, and backe; So by the Soule doth death string Heaven and Earth.17 A curious feature of the Anniversaries—it is one of the ­things that makes them so challenging to read—is the tendency of figures such as the pithy spinal cord ­here to be insubordinate to what they refer to, threatening to take on a life of their own. This casual reference to the ­little bones of the neck and the back is a sudden insurgency of meta­phor, an eruption of the microcosm-­macrocosm analogy. We seem for a moment to catch sight of a h ­ uman skeleton, projected against the night sky, like Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of death, her jaw­ bone agape to swallow the stars.

Decay I have argued that in the seventeenth ­century, belief in the correspondences was shattered and with that belief what we may call the metaphysical guaran­ tee of figurative language, its cosmic gold standard. By a “guarantee” is meant the faith that all poetic figuration—­every unjustified trope or “turning,” ­every arbitrary carry­ing across, or “meta­phor,” e­ very scheme or pattern based on nothing more than the exploitation of random but inevitable redundancies of sound in the mechanics of speech, e­ very extravagant conceit and lavishly mythopoeic or enameled scene—is in correspondence with this larger, cos­ mic system of correspondences. At the heart of this belief is that poetic figu­ ration resonates with the universe itself, as crystal glasses resonate with one another when one is struck. Not surprisingly, poets often looked back with longing to such a vision of the world. But as we saw with Vaughan, they in­ evitably betray what they would restrore. One of the finest of Spenser’s Amoretti, the sonnet sequence published in 1595, is a dialogue between the poet and his lady, in which he has been repeat­ edly writing her name in the sand on the seashore: One day I wrote her name upon the strand, but came the waves and washed it away:

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agayn I wrote it with a second hand, but came the tyde, and made my paynes his prey.18 That this writing of the lady’s name is a figure for the repetitive work of writing sonnets—­there are eighty-­nine Amoretti—is confirmed when the lady says that his efforts to immortalize “a mortall ­thing” are of no longer duration than the very body, the foundation of her beauty, that he is trying to raise up to the skies: Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay, a mortall ­thing so to immortalize, for I my selve s­ hall lyke to this decay, and eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.19 What is the “this”? Literally, the demonstrative pronoun indicates the empti­ ness she points to, the place on the sand where her name was effaced by the wave. Figuratively—­but the difference between literal and figurative is in ­these lines as much effaced as a name in the sand—­the lady is pointing to the very poem we are reading, which is refuting her claim even as she makes it. The poet’s answer, however, goes beyond the claim for a merely literary immortal­ ity such as Shakespeare guarantees in black ink. The poet claims his verse ­will eternize the lady’s “virtues rare” by writing her name, not in a book but in the heavens. Nor w ­ ill he eternalize her physical beauty; he w ­ ill eternalize her vir­ tues. Her virtues are, as it w ­ ere, the lady’s Pythagorean essence freed of her body, the part of her that resonates with the spheres and is seen among the stars, although not yet as Donne’s skeletal goddess. Even so, Spenser’s imagi­ nation is never far from the abyss, and so the f­ uture ages he imagines are not populated with readers. Instead, they are a last age, when all ­will have died, when ­there is no one left to read anything. Spenser’s writing w ­ ill survive in the heavens only, in the place of metaphysical perfection above the sphere of the moon. Up ­t here, love ­will enjoy in­de­pen­dent being and freedom from change, although only in writing: Not so, (quod I) let baser ­things devize to dy in dust, but you s­ hall live by fame: my verse your virtues rare s­ hall eternize, and in the hevens wryte your glorious name. Where whenas death ­shall all the world subdew, our love ­shall live, and l­ater life renew.20



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As late as 1627, Michael Drayton addressed a poem to Henry Reynolds reaf­ firming the idea that poetry has the foundation of its being in the superlunary realm of the heavenly bodies. This is the same Henry Reynolds who would compose Mythomystes (1632), the last of the allegorical accounts of poetry on this metaphysical foundation. Recalling the poets of the last age, Drayton celebrates Marlowe for his “brave translunary t­ hings,” and for poetic expressions so “clear” we can see through them to the heavens above the sphere of the moon: Neat Marlowe bathed in the Thespian springs Had in him ­those brave translunary ­things, That the first Poets had, his raptures w ­ ere, All ayre, and fire, which made his verses cleere, For that fine madnes still he did retaine Which rightly should possesse a Poets braine.21 Brave translunary ­things may be out of fashion now, in the 1620s, when only low t­ hings, such as satire and cool conceits, are praised. But the fine madness drawn from the upper regions of air and fire (the empyrean) rightly should possess a poet’s brain. With the collapse of the metaphysical system, poets began to imagine al­ ternatives. For Donne, in “The Sunne Rising,” it was the assertive ego, the affective equivalent of the Cartesian cogito: “Nothing ­else is.”22 For Herbert, in “The Win­dows” as elsewhere, it is Christ, but a Christ removed from the universe he created, unpolluted by the Neoplatonic antecedents of the Log­os of the Gospel According to John. Almost at random, anything can be selected as an object of meditation on God, from the pro­cess of annealing glass to the cement around the tiles on the church floor to a s­ imple pulley used on a farm.23 ­Women poets who now begin to appear—­from Aemilia Lanier (1569–1645) to Katherine Philips (1632–64), Margaret Cavendish (1623–73), and Lucy Hutchinson (1620–81)—­grapple more directly with the world, as if the silence of the heavens allowed them at last to be heard. They address gender relations especially, but also politics and, in the case of Cavendish and Hutchinson, the new, materialist philosophy. They address it for itself and not merely for its rhetorical usefulness as an instance of the decay of the world.24 As for Ben Jonson, the operating system under­lying poetry and making it pos­si­ble is society, the organic society most famously viewed in “To Pens­ hurst,” but also in “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” with its long list of physical and obviously temporary, mutable ­things—­mutable ­because they are about

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to be eaten and enjoyed. Through them we recognize the social cosmos of ru­ ral ­England, in which food is collected for t­ ables in London: Yet ­shall you have, to rectifie your palate, An olive, capers, or some better salad Ushering the mutton; with a short-­legg’d hen, If we can get her, full of eggs, and then Lemons, and wine for sauce; to ­these, a cony Is not to be despaired of, for our money; And though fowl now be scarce, yet ­there are clerks, The sky not falling, think we may have larks.       . . . ​How so’er, my man ­Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus, Livy, or of some better book to us. Of which ­we’ll speak our minds, amidst our meat.25 Nor is it just the food that is consumed: the olives and the mutton, the hen with her eggs, the lemons and wine for a sauce, the rabbit and the larks. Books become part of this occasion as well, and of its temporal conditions. Virgil, Tacitus, and Livy are pre­sent in physical books, read aloud—­and louder than at first—by Jonson’s man. The thoughts of the discussants are stimulated by food and drink: they w ­ ill speak their minds amid their meat. Literary immor­ tality is no longer metaphysical. It is something stored up, like salt for the ­table, that place where our social bodies are most real, bodies taking in food and speaking their minds through the same aperture. But in the background of ­every social occasion is what the pleasures of the ­table and of conversation exist to conceal: death. In our time, therefore, the ­great, sociable answer to Jonson’s invitation, the letter that is sent back to him in reply three and a half centuries l­ater, is Philip Larkin’s “Vers de Société.” H ­ ere are its first and last stanzas: My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps You’ d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend. Day comes to an end. The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed. And so Dear Warlock-­Williams: I’m afraid—



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. . . Only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for com­pany, And sitting by a lamp more often brings Not peace, but other t­ hings. Beyond the light stand failure and remorse Whispering Dear Warlock-­Williams: Why, of course—­26 I said that society is all that is left for Jonson as an under­lying guarantee for poetry, its support and operating system. But Larkin’s poem suggests what so­ ciety covers over, in addition to death. It is consciousness itself—­not the ego, as in Donne, but consciousness floating freely in the self and beyond the self, where failure and remorse might whisper to us. With that consideration—­the possibility of a free-­floating conscious­ ness—we come to Andrew Marvell, whose mind seems to float out of himself as easily as does that gorgeous bird in “The Garden,” waving in its wings the vari­ous light and gazing out on other worlds and other seas.27 ­Here is the fi­ nal stanza of Upon Appleton House: But now the salmon-­fishers moist Their leathern boats begin to hoist; And, like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes. How tortoise-­like, but not so slow, ­These rational amphibii go! Let’s in: for the dark hemi­sphere Does now like one of them appear.28 That companionable “Let’s in” comes as a surprise. We have not felt quite so intimate with the poet before, nor have we felt, as he does, the chill of the eve­ning, in sympathy with ­those salmon fishers in their wet clothes hurrying home before catching cold. They are portaging their black, leather boats—­“canoes” as Marvell calls them, using the new word—­a nd the sight of their rapidly moving legs u ­ nder the dark shells calls up a train of images in swift succession. Figures of the antipodeans seen on maps, with their huge feet over their heads to shield them from the sun, tortoises moving

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with unnatural speed, amphibious creatures endowed with reason, and the overhanging, black hemi­sphere of night descending upon us like one of ­t hose canoes. So thoughts and associations erupt, scatter and coalesce with­ out rule. The poet is thoroughly enjoying this resonant chaos, as the dark hemi­sphere falls. Let’s in.

Chapter 9

Love Poetry and Periodization Julianne Werlin

The individual life is among the most per­sis­tent units of periodization. In mon­ archies, regnal dating usually concludes with deaths and so aligns, at least at one edge, with the life cycle; in traditional socie­ties, power­ful families under­ stand their historical trajectory via genealogy; modern media confers names and distinctive characteristics on each succeeding generation; and virtually every­one uses the course of his or her own life as a kind of personal yardstick to mea­sure the passage of time. Most ­people, too, have expectations about the basic, biological course of that life, from development to reproduction to death—­even if such expectations are often bound to be disappointed. In short, the ­human life provides a template that organizes personal experience and sub­ tends history. Yet the life cycle itself, while subject to biological limits, is far from perfectly stable across historical periods: rates of birth, death, and mi­ gration fluctuate with social, po­liti­c al, and economic events. Demography, which first emerged within Eu­rope as a subject of research in the seventeenth ­ hole sum ­century, tracks such changes in the aggregate.1 But practically the w of culture responds to them in one way or another. As I w ­ ill suggest in what follows, even a genre as apparently timeless as love poetry reflects variations in demographic trends affecting the life cycle. In fact, in its focus on personal experience, it gives us a distinctive point of access to demographic pressures. For poetry helps to reveal not only what it felt like to live within a given pe­ riod, but what it felt like to be a par­tic­u­lar kind of period—to have certain life expectations, characterized by a distinctive rhythm of maturity and ag­ ing, reproduction and mortality. For scholars of early modernity, this intimate form of historical temporality can serve as a point of contact between the smaller arcs of private experience and the wider trajectories of social change.

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The bulk of what is now studied as En­glish Re­nais­sance lyric—­spanning across Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, the Cavaliers, and Milton’s youthful lyr­ics—­was written at or near the beginning of a period of popula­ tion stagnation. A ­ fter uneven growth in the centuries following the Black Death (1346–53), over the course of the sixteenth ­century the population of ­England expanded rapidly from ­under 3 million to approximately 4 million.2 In the seventeenth c­ entury, this period of expansion came to a halt, as growth first slowed, then leveled off in the second half of the c­ entury.3 ­England was comparatively lucky. On average, the population of Eu­rope held steady be­ tween 1600 and 1650, from approximately 111 million to 112 million, but this total included many regions that experienced decline; in Italy, for example, the population shrunk from approximately 13.5 million to 11.7 million between 1600 and 1650.4 ­These figures, which reflect the toll of scarcity, disease, and war, are grim but not surprising. Pre­industrial, agrarian populations are char­ acterized by periodic expansions and contractions, and although the precise mechanisms that drive ­these cycles are much debated, the reoccurrence of in­ tervals of devastatingly high mortality, sometimes in tandem with low fertil­ ity, are not.5 Looking backward ­toward the Eu­ro­pean past, then, it is tempting to in­ terpret the seventeenth c­ entury’s population stagnation or decline merely as a new phase of a familiar cycle.6 If so, however, it was the last one. Social and economic changes beginning in the seventeenth c­ entury prepared the way for economic growth, enabling the Eu­ro­pean population explosion that would be­ gin in E ­ ngland at the end of the eigh­teenth c­ entury with the Industrial Revo­ lution, and continue through the nineteenth.7 Early modernity, then, seems to represent the first tentative steps ­toward a new era rather than the conclud­ ing phase of an old. In demography as in so much e­ lse, the seventeenth c­ entury truly merits its characterization as a transitional age. To ­people living through this transition, of course, neither the past nor the ­future of the En­glish population was apparent. Nor, for that m ­ atter, was its pre­sent, at least u ­ ntil the groundbreaking statistical estimates of Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth c­ entury.8 Yet the numerous pro­cesses that ­shaped population, from urbanization to prices to occupational structure to inheritance, ­were not just perceptible: they ­were among the most obvious and the most contentious features of con­temporary society. None of them had a more direct connection to population and none was the subject of more dis­ cussion than marriage. The formation of new families is an event with impor­ tant demographic implications in any culture; for that reason, it is also typically



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the focus of intense scrutiny and comment. In seventeenth-­century E ­ ngland, a society with a relatively low rate of illegitimate births, the timing and rate of marriage w ­ ere crucial for the expansion or contraction of the population, and both w ­ ere influenced and reshaped by emerging social norms. Beginning in the 1960s, historians of the ­family sought to connect the rate and timing of early modern marriage in order to arrive at a broad and synthetic narrative of social change and the transition to modernity. In ­doing so, they raised fundamental questions for the interpretation of the domestic sphere: Did an increasing emphasis on the nuclear f­ amily, to the exclusion of wider kin groups, contribute to the rise of what Lawrence Stone called “affec­ tive individualism?”9 Did greater scope for individual choice in marriage heighten the importance attached to domestic love? And did the fall in the average age at first marriage and the concurrent rise in illegitimate births ­toward the end of the eigh­teenth ­century represent a release of erotic energy— or simply a redirection of it?10 Though answers to such questions remained contested, merely posing them represented a power­ful insight. It showed that cultural and demographic categories ­were interconnected, suggesting that the meaning of early modern marriage could not be understood fully without ex­ amining the blunt and apparently unrevealing mea­sures of its timing and rate. The reverse was, of course, equally true; the incidence of marriage de­ pended on what the institution was taken to mean. Population history and cultural change met in this intimate event within the individual life. The popularity of demographically informed ­family history flowed and then ebbed, without ever ­really reaching the field of poetics. Yet few forms responded more directly or insistently to the early modern erotic climate than lyric verse. As a sixteen-­year-­old George Herbert precociously complained, “Doth poetry / Wear Venus livery? Only serve her turn?”11 Poetry’s dedication to Venus brought it into contact, and into conflict, with the social mores and demographic patterns of its era. In what follows, I w ­ ill suggest that the values of medieval and Petrarchan love poetry ­were predicated on a specific pattern of marriage; as that subtly altered, so did the form and content of erotic lyric. ­Here as elsewhere, timing was every­thing: the age at which ­people tended to marry was both a mea­sure and force of cultural change. ­Needless to say, the timing of marriage was always a response to other f­actors; any given person might choose to marry at a par­tic­u­lar moment for a range of reasons, from personal inclination to imperatives s­ haped by religious, l­egal, and economic variables. Yet by considering the average age and rate of marriage directly, by bringing this crucial aspect of the background of erotic and matrimonial

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culture into the foreground, it is pos­si­ble to perceive how individuals’ life expectations varied in response to the fluctuations of wider historical and demographic change. Love poetry is obviously connected to the erotic life cycle. And it is also, I ­will show, deeply imbricated with the wider fluctuations of demography. For this reason, it gives modern readers access to an experience of a kind of periodization that both underlies and drives larger and more ab­ stract historical narratives.

Marriage Aside from migration, two f­ actors govern population growth or decline: rates of birth and death. Writing at the end of the sixteenth ­century, the Italian po­liti­cal theorist Giovanni Botero grasped this princi­ple. For Botero, popula­ tion was determined by the balance of two opposed forces: the “generative” ability of p ­ eople and the “nutritive” ability of socie­ties. In his judgment, death could fluctuate, but reproduction was a constant: the rate of procreation is transhistorical, remaining steady across eras. It leads population to rise steadily ­until it is inevitably checked by starvation when total numbers exceed what can be sustained within a given area.12 The life cycle was not a fixed period, but variation only occurred at its terminal point. More than two hundred years ­later, Thomas Malthus’s initial assessment was not at first substantially dif­fer­ ent: population w ­ ill tend to increase, he argued, u ­ ntil it exceeds the carry­ing capacity of the land, leading to mortality crises, which again reduce it. Mal­ thus called this the positive check, and its unforgiving logic shapes the bleak moral calculus of his work. In revising his Essay on the Princi­ple of Population for a second edition in 1803, however, he gave an increased (though still infe­ rior) role to another method of stabilizing population. Growth could also be slowed or reversed by restricting procreation: this was the preventative check. For Malthus, it was tantamount to limiting or delaying marriage; from his cultural vantage point, he did not see ­either procreation outside of marriage or birth control within it as significant variables—­a ssumptions that have proved to be more or less accurate for the seventeenth ­century.13 What the Mal­ thusian idea of the preventative check proposed, then, was that the timing of two events within the ­human life cycle could shape population: marriage and death. Rather surprisingly, ­toward the end of the twentieth ­century, Malthus’s preventative check moved to the center of historical research. The findings of



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the Cambridge group for the history of population, detailed in E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s The Population History of ­England, provided new infor­ mation for scholars of En­glish demography. In presenting their research, Wrig­ ley and Schofield offered an attractively bold explanation for population change built around the role of the preventative check. Marriage, rather than death, was at the core of demographic change: it was “the hinge on which the ­ ere expected to have demographic system turned.”14 ­Because En­glish ­couples w the resources to form new h ­ ouse­holds in order to marry, many would be un­ able to do so in times of scarcity, leading to a fall in the marriage rate. Such changes in nuptiality, Wrigley and Schofield argued, ­were responsible for pop­ ulation stagnation in the seventeenth c­ entury and its growth in the eigh­ ­ ngland, teenth ­century.15 Since the publication of The Population History of E the “preventative check” has been a major subject of research and debate. Some scholars have eagerly sought to extend Wrigley and Schofield’s model beyond ­England to premodern Eu­ro­pean socie­ties in general, arguing that marriage rates tended to respond to conditions of scarcity more sensitively than death rates.16 ­Others have been more skeptical: could so tidy a causal model ­really capture the chaos of variables that ­shaped population?17 One ­thing, however, has remained clear: even if premodern marriage rates did not drive popula­ tion change single-­handedly, they ­were a crucial ­factor. Debates about mar­ riage w ­ ere not a mere adjunct to the history of growth and economic development, but an impor­tant part of the picture. Larger stories of social change had to take the conditions of wedlock into account. For scholars of early modern northwest Eu­rope, ­there was an additional reason for paying par­tic­u­lar attention to the demography of marriage: the pat­ tern of marriage in this region was one of the key features that seemed to differentiate it not only from the eastern half of the continent, but from the rest of the globe. As John Hajnal argued, from at least the sixteenth ­century on, much of northwestern Eu­rope seemed to be characterized by a uniquely high average age at first marriage and, for a pre­industrial, agrarian society, a high percentage of p ­ eople who never married. Whereas universal teenage mar­ riage for ­women was the norm across pre­industrial socie­ties—­for example, in ancient Rome—in E ­ ngland, the Low Countries, parts of France, Italy, and Germany, and much of Scandinavia, both men and w ­ omen tended to delay marriage ­until their twenties; men and ­women tended to be close in age at their first marriage; and a significant number never married at all.18 Seventeenth-­century E ­ ngland represented the most extreme manifestation of this already unusual system. For w ­ omen, the average age at first marriage

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was twenty-­five to twenty-­six; for men, it was twenty-­seven to twenty-­ ­ eople did not eight.19 At the same time, an extremely large proportion of p wed. For most of the sixteenth ­century, the proportion of the unwed hovered around 5 ­percent; however, for the cohort who came of age in the 1590s, it ­rose steeply: by 1600, the share of p ­ eople coming of age who would never marry had risen to the astonishingly high rate of almost 25 ­percent, where it would hold for most of the ­century. This distinctively “low pressure” demo­ graphic system stands in contrast to the “high pressure” systems typical of pre­ industrial socie­ties with a lower age at marriage, with correspondingly higher birthrates, combined with higher death rates. A “low pressure” system may have helped to enable a higher standard of living, perhaps facilitating economic development.20 ­There can be no question that this feature of life was deeply intertwined with the culture’s mores and norms, and however complexly, that it s­haped the expectations and desires of the men and w ­ omen of the seven­ teenth ­century. Marriage, a crucial component of adulthood, was desired by most, yet the high rate of p ­ eople who never married in the seventeenth c­ entury meant that it always had to be regarded as a “privilege rather than a right.”21 This fact, combined with the late average age of marriage, opened a long win­ dow of uncertainty. Many young men and ­women must have spent their twen­ ties, and perhaps ­later de­cades, wondering w ­ hether they would be able to marry at all. As I w ­ ill suggest below, ­there is no reason to suppose that poets ­were not among them. The timing of marriage was closely connected to social and economic norms. Young ­people in ­England typically left their ­family homes in order to work for o­ thers while accumulating resources to form their own h ­ ouse­holds. While contributing to delays in marriage, this practice also opened the pos­ sibility of a degree of autonomy in choosing spouses. For the most part, his­ torians have depicted a system in which common ­people could have a surprising amount of freedom in choosing marriage partners throughout the early mod­ ern period, although this freedom extended unevenly, especially for ­women.22 Already in 1582, one writer could suggest that “the office of ­Free choise, is the roote or foundation of Marriage.”23 For the aristocracy, however, the situation was dif­fer­ent. Their matches typically remained alliances carefully arranged by parents. This was at once a cause and a consequence of the fact that they w ­ ere on a dif­fer­ent demographic cycle. The peerage married younger than commoners, with a median age at first marriage of about twenty for ­women and twenty-­four to twenty-­five for men (a tendency with a subtle but unmistakable consequence for population24).



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Although young ­people occasionally defied authority, they did so at the risk of severe strictures. In the highest ranks of society, then, f­ ree choice still played an inferior role in contracting marriages. Even ­there, however, it has been ar­ gued that ­things ­were shifting in the direction of growing autonomy. Choice was beginning to play a larger role than it had in previous centuries.25 But on what princi­ples w ­ ere individuals to choose? Economic and social advantages no doubt continued to be impor­tant f­ actors, then as now. N ­ eedless to say, theological and ­legal categories also exerted a shaping influence on the conditions of marriage, though in the contentious environment of post-­ Reformation Eu­rope, they w ­ ere themselves subject to b­ itter conflict, debate, 26 and revision. At the same time, less material but no less impor­tant ­factors came into consideration. Advice on marriage understood as a moral and emo­ tional relationship was plentiful, as sermons and conduct guides illustrate clearly.27 Such works emphasized compatibility based on virtuous be­hav­ior; desire based on attraction was not recommended as a consideration, and in fact was often positively discouraged. Yet erotic passion nevertheless provided a power­ful princi­ple of choice for many. In ­later centuries, falling in love would come to seem like the ideal prelude to entering into matrimony; in the seven­ teenth c­ entury, erotic passion was only one consideration among o­ thers in choosing a partner, and as classical lit­er­a­ture amply illustrates, it was far from a new one.28 But ­there was a growing cultural sense of its importance and de­ sirability, at least in part for reasons connected to the structure and timing of marriage itself. In no other context could erotic passion develop as so power­ ful a desideratum for choosing spouses as in a society in which late marriage and a broad scope for individual choice created an opening for romantic court­ ship to lead to marriage. Increasingly, an extended phase of erotic passion was becoming integrated, at least in theory, into the life cycle itself. Conversely, passionate love was becoming more tightly linked to a decisive moment within the period of the life. This emotional periodization had profound consequences for literary his­ tory. In the seventeenth ­century, an ever greater number of literary texts cen­ tered on courtship and the contracting of marriages. Comedies thrived in the theater, and a new style of prose romance, focusing on love rather than heroic action, had just come into fashion.29 To a much greater degree than in any preceding era, marriage plots ­were becoming a key subject of lit­er­a­ture, lay­ ing the foundations on which the domestic fiction of the eigh­teenth c­ entury, and indeed of our own age, would build. Of the many preoccupations that emerge in such texts, none was as per­sis­tent as love. As George Puttenham

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remarked, “Love is of all other humane affections the . . . ​most generall to all ­ ill suggest, however, in other sortes and ages of men and ­women.”30 As I w genres the effect was considerably more ambivalent.

Poetry Shifts in the institution of marriage could not fail to be felt across the ­whole range of culture. In poetry, the effect was particularly pronounced, for eroti­ cism was the one truly indispensable subject of secular verse. Who writes “in meeter, at least in the ­mother tung, but to expresse the affections caused by ­women?” asks Cesare Gonzaga in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, and many early modern En­glish poets shared his view.31 Verse was deeply embedded within the erotic system. It was not merely a general repository of erotic senti­ ments, but a form of communication and persuasion that might, in the right circumstances, follow or even shape the course of a real attachment. Sonnets themselves could serve as love tokens; posies—­simple mottoes or poems of a few lines—­were engraved on rings, or embroidered on handkerchiefs and gloves.32 Though poetry was only one component of erotic practice among many, its links with the culture of love nevertheless ensured that it was re­ sponsive to changes within it. As I ­will show in what follows, shifting fea­ tures of the erotic and demographic landscape had profound consequences for Elizabethan and early Stuart love lyric. At the same time, lyric reveals how a select few experienced changes in what was by any mea­sure one of the land­ marks of h ­ uman life, marriage. Much of the love poetry written in or around courts and aristocratic ­house­holds in the late sixteenth c­ entury drew on a style of literary eroticism derived from two strands: medieval verse and the more recent influence of Pe­ trarchan lyric on En­glish poetry. The ideals and conventions conveyed by ­these traditions ­were far from uniform, but they did share some common ten­ dencies. On the w ­ hole, both presented an idea of love as heterosexual, aristo­ cratic, and adulterous.33 The celebrated mistresses of erotic lyric ­were generally married—­but not to the poet. ­W hether they ­were consummated or remained chaste, the courtships elaborately depicted in verse therefore led away from the domestic sphere, not, as in both ­earlier and ­later forms of romance, ­toward it. N ­ eedless to say, t­ here had always been tensions within t­ hese traditions; genres of verse that w ­ ere not merely tolerant of, but w ­ ere actually predicated upon extramarital passions could be counted on to incur opposition from some



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quarters. Nevertheless, the appeal of this paradigm was both power­ful and undeniable, even in the late sixteenth ­century. The conditions of aristocratic marriage help to provide a context both for the per­sis­tence of older erotic ideals and their gradual transformation. Mar­ riages arranged for youthful partners by their families offered no obvious open­ ing for the subtle forms of courtship and seduction at the core of aristocratic love poetry. Nor could an arranged match serve as an obvious thematic basis for the freely chosen and noninstrumental passion idealized in erotic verse. In such circumstances, then, it was no surprise that love lyric should be di­ rected ­toward potential mistresses, rather than potential wives. This tendency is illustrated in what was perhaps the most influential late Elizabethan se­ quence, Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Sidney’s sequence shares many of the values of conventional Petrarchan verse. Stella is beautiful and unyield­ ing. Astrophil’s passion is destined to remain unsatisfied. But unlike Petrarch’s Laura and many of her l­ater counter­parts, she is not indifferent to his advances. In her very denial of Astrophil’s attempt at seduction, Stella expresses her own passion: Trust me, while I thee deny, In my self the smart I try; Tyrant honour doth thus use thee; Stella’s self might not refuse thee.34 “Tyrant honour,” the prohibition of sex outside of marriage, is the only im­ pediment to fulfillment. By depicting Stella’s marriage as the sole obstacle to Astrophil and Stella’s sexual consummation, Sidney posed the contest between love and marriage as the central motif of the sonnet sequence: in his lines, the two ­were neither convergent nor even complementary, but sharply at odds. Sidney’s sequence is a carefully constructed fiction, composed along conven­ tional lines. Yet in this case, the convention corresponded, however loosely, to life. The ­woman generally thought to be ­behind Stella, Penelope Rich née Devereux, was married at the age of eigh­teen, apparently with considerable reluctance. In such circumstances, it is not particularly surprising that romance should follow rather than anticipate marriage. Even as Sidney wrote, however, erotic literary conventions w ­ ere u ­ nder pressure. From the start, Elizabethan poets revealed a deep ambivalence about Petrarchan tropes in the course of adopting them; ­t here was a ­bitter vein of irony r­ unning through En­glish love poetry.35 No doubt many f­ actors

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contributed to poets’ attitudes.36 But one of the deepest and most enduring challenges to older princi­ples lay in a new pattern and ideology of marriage, which made it increasingly difficult to treat adulterous love as something to be valorized. This shift had an analogue in demographic trends. Among the nobility, marriages began to take place slightly ­later, with very early marriages becoming less common; whereas between 1540 and 1599, 21 ­percent of peers and their heirs had been married by the age of seventeen, between 1600 and 1659, only 12 ­percent w ­ ere.37 While most aristocratic marriages did not hinge on courtship in any case, when individuals married by the age of seventeen, ­there was not likely to be an interval in which it could occur. L ­ ater marriage was, therefore, at least one prerequisite for the emergence of courtship as a ­factor in marital choice. This shift in patterns corresponded to changing ex­ pectations and values. Walter Raleigh, for example, urges his son to exercise patience in marrying: “Thy best time ­ will be ­ towards thirty, for . . . ​ the younger times are unfit, eyther to chuse or to govern a Wife and ­family.”38 Raleigh hardly represents a typical member of the En­glish elite. Yet his ad­ vice, which was widely read, was in keeping with con­temporary perceptions. At the same time, many writers ­were members of considerably less exalted families than Sidney and typically held dif­fer­ent attitudes and expectations ­toward marriage, as ­toward so much ­else. While ­there is as yet no systematic prosopography of early modern poets, it is well-­k nown that many, from Dan­ iel and Donne to Cowley and Milton, wrote verse from perspectives ­shaped by their upbringing as the ­children of artisans and citizens. The tradition of erotic lyric could, of course, be drawn on by ­people from a variety of back­ grounds; all sorts of writers made use of its symbolic inventory and its emo­ tional repertoire. But it could also be adapted to reflect a dif­fer­ent life experience. Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence, the Amoretti, shows what this could look like in practice. Drawing on his own experience, Spenser showed how the erotic claims of marital courtship could be reconciled with the tradition of Petrarchan love poetry. The Amoretti was written for Elizabeth Boyle, the ­woman who would become his second wife, and concludes with an epithala­ mium in cele­bration of their marriage. This was not an arranged match; at least on Spenser’s part, neither was it a particularly youthful one: he was a wid­ ower of forty-­t wo when he married Elizabeth, who may have been as young as eigh­teen.39 Perhaps in part as a result, he seems to have lacked neither the opportunity nor autonomy to engage in an extended period of courtship, re­ flected in his sonnet sequence. Indeed, he himself connects t­ hese two aspects



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of his courtship, his relatively advanced age and the time he has spent woo­ ing, in Sonnet LX: So since the winged God his planet cleare began in me to move, one yeare is spent: the which doth longer unto me appeare, then al t­ hose fourty which my life outwent.40 The relationship between eroticism and marriage in the Amoretti is not, of course, merely the product of Spenser’s personal circumstances. Rather, it re­ flects the converging pressure of two forces: an increasingly power­ful concep­ tion of marriage as the necessary terminus ad quem of passionate love within the culture at large, and the dif­fer­ent attitude ­toward marriage characteristic of members of Spenser’s social background. Though most of Spenser’s con­ temporaries did not follow his example, ­there are hints that the erotic, as well as religious and moral, claims of marriage w ­ ere becoming increasingly diffi­ cult to ignore. “A man may be in love, and not marry; and yet wise,” Giles Fletcher writes in the amusing address to the reader that precedes his rather conventional sonnet cycle, Licia, “but he cannot marry and not be in love, but be a mere fool.”41 When the marriage rate plummeted in the 1590s, it reinforced existing tendencies. For dif­fer­ent reasons, some of the very richest and many of the very poorest had to reckon with serious obstacles to wedlock.42 The climate of eroticism could not fail to be affected by developments that left nearly a quar­ ter of men and ­women permanently single. The prob­lem seems to have been readily apparent at the time, for the lit­er­a­ture of the period is full of complaints about the difficulty of making a match in a newly competitive marriage mar­ ket. As a result, most p ­ eople would have had several years of single life as adults, with a relatively high degree of uncertainty as to ­whether marriage would oc­ cur. This is, of course, no less true of poets than anyone ­else. Much of the love poetry of the seventeenth ­century was written in precisely this interval of uncertainty. It is striking to observe how many of the most prominent love poets of the seventeenth ­century, including Herrick, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, and Randolph, never married. Milton, with three marriages, was a demo­ graphic outlier, whose preoccupation with the nuptial state would shape his verse (and prose) deeply. Yet even in his case, a large percentage of his lyric poems ­were written before his comparatively late first marriage, at the age of thirty-­five.

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One of Herrick’s best-­known poems helps to illustrate the connection be­ tween nuptiality and shifting erotic values. “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” is generally read as a seventeenth-­century take on the carpe diem theme, a lyric about pursuing erotic opportunity in the face of inevitable death. In a way, of course, it is. But it is a poem very dif­fer­ent from its classical pre­ de­ces­sors in the genre, and that difference reveals a ­great deal about the chang­ ing context of seventeenth-­century eroticism and matrimony. Herrick begins conventionally enough: Gather ye Rose-­buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying; And this same flower that smiles to day, To morrow w ­ ill be d ­ ying. Approaching death makes life, and erotic fulfillment, urgent. So far, so ordi­ nary. The poem’s conclusion, however, is more surprising: Then be not coy, but use your time; And while ye may, go marry: For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry.43 Herrick’s point in the final stanza is fundamentally dif­fer­ent from the idea expressed in the first: the virgins are not being urged to make the most of the fleeting passage of life, but of the brief win­dow of nubility. The threat that one might “forever tarry” has ­little to do with death; in some re­spects, it is inimical to it. Spinsterhood, not mortality, is the looming danger. The carpe diem theme was popu­lar with Roman poets, and its revival owes much to the rediscovery of figures such as Catullus. But no Roman poet would have ex­ pressed the idea motivating Herrick’s poem, for the ­simple reason that virtu­ ally no Roman w ­ omen failed to marry.44 The En­glish ste­reo­type of the “spinster”—­a word that became a ­legal designation for unmarried ­women in the seventeenth ­century—­did not exist.45 The idea that finding a spouse could be a ­matter of some urgency for ­women as well as men, and that it might re­ quire some individual effort or initiative on the part of the potential bride, simply would not have arisen in most pre­industrial socie­ties. In a society in which nearly a quarter of men and w ­ omen would remain single, however, the relevance of Herrick’s warning would have been clear. In this context, the shift



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of erotic emphasis from illicit sexual consummation to marriage also makes eminent sense. Like Spenser’s Amoretti, Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” represents the adaptation of a style of eroticism closely linked with adul­ tery to a new cultural and demographic context. In d ­ oing so, both works re­ flect the climate of elite eroticism at their historical moment. In the Caroline era, as in the Elizabethan, love was indispensable to the aesthetic of the court. Almost ­every poet writing secular poetry in the 1620s, 1630s, and 1640s had to address the “prob­lem” of love in one way or another. In many re­spects, the varied methods by which they did so echo the strategies vis­i­ble in the poetry of the 1590s, yet it was clear that adulterous love, as distinct from mere desire, had lost much of its power as a genuine rival to nuptial eroticism. Platonic love, the stylized erotic aesthetic cultivated in the French court of Charles and Henrietta Maria, attempted to reconcile the old tradition of courtly eroticism to marital love by synthesizing ideals of order and freedom, chastity and sen­ suality, marital and adulterous love. The confusion of this assortment of ele­ ments, and the very mixed reception granted to Platonic love, is an indication of the increasing difficulty of maintaining any form of idealized eroticism that did not explic­itly and entirely culminate in marriage. Integrating marriage into the conceptual repertoire of love lyric was one solution to the prob­lem. Th ­ ere was another answer, however, that proved to be at least as impor­tant: the adoption of the anti-­idealistic eroticism charac­ teristic of libertine verse. The prominence of libertine verse within the Caro­ line court may seem like a sign that the bonds of marriage ­were weakening within certain circles, or at least ­under serious attack. Certainly many con­ temporaries interpreted events in this way. In fact, however, the situation was precisely the reverse. The rise of libertine poetry in the 1630s may well be the single best testament to the increasing power of marriage within the erotic system. For it was only by writing in a vein of casual eroticism, detached from the serious associations of Petrarchan love, that poets could resolve the sharp­ ening contradiction between adulterous love and marriage. They did so, how­ ever, at a high cost—by denying extramarital sexuality the status of true love, and by extension, the poetic and intellectual legacy of fin amour. Poets ­were aware that they ­were working within what was in many ways a diminished field. A. J. Smith observes, “If the young bloods and rakes now take over love poetry this is no mere modish annexation but a mark of what love has come to mean, and perhaps even a portent of what life no longer means.”46 For many contemporaries, although such poems made ample use of the word “love,” they

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had already ceased to be love poems; rather, they w ­ ere, in the words of the poet William Habington, merely “loose coppies of lust happily exprest.”47 At the same time, a few poets toyed with a dif­fer­ent but complementary response: the disgusted rejection of sexual acts. The poems of the 1630s on the theme “against fruition” participated in libertine tropes in an unusual man­ ner, by arguing against sex. It was Ben Jonson, translating an anonymous Latin fragment wrongly supposed to have been written by Petronius, who touched off the subgenre.48 Jonson’s translation stayed close to the original, which ar­ gued that erotic play is superior to consummation, since “­doing, a filthy plea­ sure is and short,” whereas to “together closely lie, and kisse” w ­ ill allow the lovers to keep “endlesse Holy-­day,” prolonging their sensuous plea­sure in­def­ initely.49 But John Suckling, who wrote the most influential treatment of the theme, gave it a dif­fer­ent inflection. In his poem “Against Fruition,” t­ here is something distasteful not just in consummation, but in all sexual real­ity, which wakes the lover “rudely from sweet dreams.”50 A libertine defense of chastity is paradoxical, but like most paradoxes, it had an internal logic: the same de­ motion of extramarital sexual love that made it pos­si­ble to treat it as a source of casual plea­sure also made it easy to turn aside in disgust. ­There was, of course, a condition within which sex was explic­itly encour­ aged, at least for the purposes of procreation, and the implicit link between marital sexuality and procreation helps to suggest exactly what Suckling is op­ posing and why. “The World is of a vast extent we see, / And must be peo­ pled,” Suckling writes, before proposing, however, that “since t­ here are enough / Born to the drudgery, what need we plough?”51 Is a relationship to marriage implied by a focus on reproduction part of what makes it off-­limits for Suck­ ling’s eroticism? Edmund Waller, in a poem written in response to Suckling’s “Against Fruition,” suggests that marriage may well enter into the equation: his defense of sexuality includes imagining the kisses of a “happy Paire” whose “joyes just Hymen warrants all the night,” as well as the satisfaction of pro­ ducing heirs.52 What the poetry of Suckling and his contemporaries reveals, then, is how deeply the place of love had shifted in response to a new under­ standing and a new set of cultural expectations about the role marriage would play within individual lives. Suckling’s mood and tone, his irony and his dis­ gust, are not incidental to this story; rather, they help to reveal what it was like to experience the trailing effects of cultural and demographic history. By the Restoration, the contest between marital and extramarital passion was all but resolved—or had at least reached a kind of truce. The two no lon­ ger appeared to be rival forms of love, but rather incommensurable experi­



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ences, with dif­fer­ent emotions and practices attached. In a poem like John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” the central con­ ceit could even turn on their opposition. Complaining about impotence in the arms of his beloved, Rochester addresses his penis in order to ask why it is “So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?” Despite his ability to perform with “all he meets,” “when g­ reat Love the onset does command, / Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand.”53 Rochester’s poem reads like a parody of the cult of Platonic love—or an even more distant Elizabethan Petrarchism. Yet it is clear that much has changed. Unsatisfied desire is still the central mo­ tif of poetry, but now it is love itself that forestalls consummation, not virtue, fate, female indifference, or any of the other conventional obstacles.

Conclusion For Rochester, love excludes extramarital sexuality. Though idiosyncratic in many re­spects, Rochester’s verse points t­ oward an emerging sensibility. By the end of the seventeenth c­ entury, the medieval and Re­nais­sance ideals of love that received some of their most power­ful expressions in lyric and with which lyric was in turn closely associated ­were no longer ­viable. Though love would certainly not dis­appear from poetry, a­ fter the late seventeenth c­ entury, the two would never again be as closely identified as they had been in e­ arlier periods. Fragments of the tradition of erotic lyric ­were appropriated across genres—­ drama, printed commonplace books, and even epic, in that work of nuptial ­ ere not themselves lyric; in eroticism, Paradise Lost.54 Such works used but w some cases, they owed as much to their opposition to the tradition of courtly love poetry as to their appropriation of it. Instead, they pointed the way ­toward the new literary norm: the relationship between marriage or courtship and the novel. It is no coincidence that in the landmark novel of the eigh­teenth ­century, Cla­ris­sa, Samuel Richardson named the figure who leads the hero­ ine away from marriage, Lovelace, ­after a lyric poet. Much of the most impor­tant love lyric in ­England was written in the brief but extraordinarily rich interval between Sidney and the Cavaliers. It was com­ posed during an interval of demographic stagnation, in which E ­ ngland’s marriage rate was, for a pre­industrial society, exceptionally (or perhaps uniquely) low, and as I have tried to show in this essay, much of it can be un­ derstood as an extended response to the pressures and values associated with that tendency. The Re­nais­sance love lyric can seem to stand outside of time,

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inhabiting a repetitive world with few incidents and fewer actors. This pose is, of course, deceptive, and numerous studies have sought to reveal the his­ torical logic ­behind poets’ choices by situating their work within the contours of a given period. That is to say, for the most part, historicizing poetry has meant placing it within preexisting forms of periodization, many of them taken from po­liti­cal or economic history. Such an approach can be highly il­ luminating. But in considering the assumptions of love poetry together with the cultural real­ity of early modern demographics, by treating its native themes of love and marriage as both historically and aesthetically central, a dif­fer­ent form of periodization emerges. As a result the tendencies of the genre itself, from its imaginative strategies to its ultimate supersession, help to reveal deep features of the period’s population history ignored by many accounts. In a way, it is not surprising that love poetry should provide a win­dow onto the social history of the era. The rhythms of lives are a fundamental form of periodiza­ tion, and few t­ hings or­ga­nize the life more profoundly than the intimate rit­ uals governing reproduction. Love lyric is both a response to the life cycle and one of our richest resources for reflecting on its form.

Chapter 10

Shakespeare, Period Douglas Bruster

What does it mean for a writer and his works—in this case, William Shakespeare and his plays and poems—to stand in for the past? Not just an era or slice of time, but the past itself? What prob­lems could this cause as the work of memory gradually shifts its burden to the eloquence of a single pen, especially as words from that pen increasingly lose their resonance, meaning, and familiarity? We have grown used to historicizing Shakespeare and his works, to think­ ing about Shakespeare and the past. But developments in our own time have made it pos­si­ble, even likely, for some readers to equate Shakespeare with the past, as the figure who represents that ­great gulf of time in which printed words became the very currency of civilization. Professional historians can tell us, sometimes to the day and hour, the details of history: how, when, and where individuals fit into the expansive framework of socie­ties that have gone be­ fore. They rightly remind us of the insignificance of single persons—­even ­those of genius—­within the past’s larger canvas. In this regard, a writer born in ru­ ral ­England in 1564 and d ­ ying t­here fifty-­two years l­ater amounts to very ­little. The rhythm of good and bad harvests, population figures, the develop­ ment of print culture, religious wars, the rise of science, voyages of explora­ tion and conquest: all of ­these take pre­ce­dence in a portrait of the centuries before us. ­W hether called “Elizabethan” or “Re­nais­sance” or “early modern,” the period is larger than any person, and thus has a regard but not need for a single man’s life. Yet to this rational understanding of the past a cultural one must be added, for our sense of history is never as detailed as history itself. Instead, it coalesces around an increasingly diminishing set of actors and scenes: this figure comes to represent in miniature a hundred, thousand, then million who cannot be named; that event stands in for a host of actions and

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incidents that w ­ ill never be acknowledged b­ ecause the historical rec­ord does not allow them to be recovered. In much this way, Shakespeare’s success has seen him and his works ac­ crue responsibility for representing what has gone before us. For many speak­ ers of En­glish, he stands not merely for Elizabethan or Re­nais­sance or early modern culture, but for the culture of a verbal world. By “culture” ­here we could understand the machinery of education and entertainment that pro­ duces, almost as by-­products, value, meaning, and direction. To separate ed­ ucation and entertainment is not entirely warranted: For the past to speak to us, it now needs to offer something we want to hear. ­These messages compete in a busy marketplace of distraction, with consumers able to pick and choose from a menu of attractions tailored increasingly to, as well as by, their desires. The fortuitous spread of the En­glish language via capitalism and global ex­ change means that “Shakespeare” is broadly defined as the spokesman of an English-­speaking past, and, by extension, as the surrogate of the West’s heri­ tage. He is, inter alia, tutor, herald, poet, and priest. Shakespeare thought so much and so deeply about time that his works are a good resource for conceptualizing the ways we currently think about and through time—­including his current status as historical figure. One of his re­ current meta­phors, in fact, serves to anticipate his position as spokesman for the verbal past. Close to his imagination, early on, was the idea of verse as a means of perpetuating a beloved. This is nowhere clearer than in Sonnet 55, which imagines “sluttish time” as a force of destruction as well as forgetting: Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes s­ hall outlive this pow’rful rhyme, But you s­ hall shine more bright in ­these contents Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time. When wasteful war s­ hall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire s­ hall burn The living rec­ord of your memory. ’Gainst death and all-­oblivious enmity ­Shall you pace forth; your praise s­ hall still find room, Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.1



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The actions in and implied by this sonnet are key to our understanding of how Shakespeare himself conceived of time’s operation via the verbal. Shake­ speare looks not to the renewal of an amorphous “love,” but rather the be­ loved “pac[ing] forth” in and through the sonnet’s pentameter. We may be tempted to imagine a mechanical analogy for this line, for through it the son­ net seems to offer itself as a kind of wind-up toy that, on each reading, sends the beloved pacing forth for our appreciation. Thus we could conceive a figu­ rine emerging from a cuckoo clock, or model on a catwalk pacing across the paper each and e­ very time the words of the sonnet are read or heard. But the poem’s central image is grounded much closer to home. For in asking us to imagine a pacing lover—­a figment of the reader’s imagination—­ who is si­mul­ta­neously embodied and purely verbal, it draws on the notion of an actor moving on the stage. To recall Macbeth’s “petty pace” of time is to remember “a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more” (5.5.24–26). As Macbeth’s solilo­ quy suggests, Shakespeare’s imagination mea­sured the time of per­for­mance in the early modern theater by the strutting pace of his actor’s feet. How better to understand the brevity of existence? But the eternizing topos of the sonnet asks us to acknowledge an endurance, in print, not granted to the physical body of the actor—or, as in Macbeth, monarch. Poetic feet are like footsteps chalked or painted on a floor; the words pressed into them—­“You live in this”—­resurrect and empower the “walking shadow” of the beloved as the lyric is enacted. Not surprisingly, then, did what we could call the poetic séance become a favorite way for Shakespeare to represent the power of art, and, by exten­ sion, both its endurance over time and its ability to embody time itself. When we recall the potency of art in Shakespeare, we perhaps think most often of decidedly metatheatrical moments in which an aristocratic speaker anticipates a ­future reenactment of the pre­sent. Macbeth’s bleak defeatism in his “To-­ morrow, and to-­morrow, and to-­morrow” soliloquy is one such instance. But alongside it we have such instances as Cassius and Brutus’s ­imagined ­future in Julius Caesar: CASSIUS.  How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown! BRUTUS.  How many times s­ hall Caesar bleed in sport, That now on Pompey’s basis lies along No worthier than the dust! (3.1.111–16)

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Similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen shifts her fear from the image of her and Iras’s physical bodies being paraded through the streets of Rome to their falling into repre­sen­ta­tion itself: CLEOPATRA.  Nay, ’tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers Ballad ’s out a’ tune. The quick comedians Extemporally ­will stage us, and pre­sent Our Alexandrian revels: Antony ­Shall be brought drunken forth, and I ­shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’ th’ posture of a whore. (5.2.214–21)

­ ere the word “Extemporally” (217) denotes the sudden and improvised, H but we could take the proximity of Cleopatra’s “quick” (216)—­that is, lively, as in “the quick and the dead”—to sketch out a scenario not unlike Sonnet 55’s lively pacing. The “quick comedians” pre­sent scenes already past, and, like the assassins of Julius Caesar, may do so endlessly as long as t­ here is a Rome. What makes t­ hese imaginative clusters particularly relevant for thinking about Shakespeare and periodicity is not their aristocratic subjects (Julius Cae­ sar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra) but rather the magus b­ ehind their words. For however much Cleopatra’s scenario credits repertorial improvisation, Shake­ speare comes back again and again to the notion that the artist resurrects ghosts, that history itself is a pageant of spirits reanimated by a playwright figure. Shakespeare populates his plays and poems with ghosts prodded into view by the magical command of fantasy itself. H ­ ere we could acknowledge the way his plays are thick with spirits, from the pageant of wronged souls in Richard III through Banquo’s haunting ghost in Macbeth. But alongside t­ hese spectacular instantiations of the spirit world come meta­phors of graves lying ready, even e­ ager, to be opened by a commanding figure. If Julius Caesar pre­ pares us for Caesar’s ghost by describing such ominous portents as “gliding ghosts” who “did shriek and squeal about the streets” when “graves have yawn’d and yielded up their dead” (1.3.63; 2.2.24, 18), it is two ostensibly lighter plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, that insist we see the necro­ mantic theme as more than a trope of revenge tragedy. In Midsummer, Puck portrays the fairy actors as accomplices of the spirit world:



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PUCK.  Now it is the time of night That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the church-­way paths to glide. And we fairies, that do run By the t­ riple Hecat’s team From the presence of the sun, Following darkness like a dream . . . ​(5.1.379–86)

The implication of this power­ful rhyme is that the daytime world of h ­ uman life is paralleled by a dream world of spirits, a world known to humanity only to the extent we accidentally encounter ghosts a­ fter dark, or remember our dreams. If Shakespeare himself has become a synecdoche for the past, his works again and again depict his own world as haunted by spirits who bring the past into the pre­sent. In the daytime this world of shadows and spirits is called “theater,” and the meta­phor would emerge at the heart of Shakespeare’s conception of his art and its relation to time. The haunting and metatheatrical description of theatrical writing in The Tempest is perhaps Shakespeare’s ars poetica: PROSPERO.  You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort, As if you ­were dismay’d; be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. Th ­ ese our actors (As I foretold you) w ­ ere all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air, And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-­capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn ­temples, the ­great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, s­ hall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded Leave not a rack ­behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our l­ittle life Is rounded with a sleep. (4.1.146–58)

But Prospero’s portrait of the institution of theater—­including the punning reference to his own playhouse—is qualified, shortly ­after this, by a turn to the reanimation trope we have seen before:

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PROSPERO.  Graves at my command Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. But this rough magic I ­here abjure; and when I have requir’d Some heavenly ­music (which even now I do) To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fadoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book. (5.1.48–57)

Ghosts in ­earlier Shakespeare are produced by the murderer’s blade; ­here they are brought into existence by the artist’s staff—­a close double for Shakespeare’s pen, as “book,” the final word in this passage, underscores. What t­ hese passages suggest is a centripetal movement to time and repre­ sen­ta­tion in Shakespeare. That is, Shakespeare not only conceives art theatri­ cally (an unsurprising move for a playwright, actor, and sharer), but he often imagines the legacy of art in terms of a séance. To spokesperson, tutor, her­ ald, poet, and priest, then, we w ­ ill want to add necromancer, for Prospero’s descriptions establish the space of theater as a dreamlike legacy populated by the spirits that the conjurer’s staff f­rees with its most potent art. That Pros­ pero imagines his own end—­“­Every third thought s­hall be my grave” (5.1.312)—in the place where his “sleepers” reside, puts us in mind of the re­ lentless end of time itself. If artists acquire the status of mages while they live, eventually they ­will dwindle and die, and so too their fame ­after them. Even the statues erected to poets, as Sonnet 55 reminds us, w ­ ill eventually be over­ turned. Shakespeare’s own status t­ oday betrays just such a welter of paradox. As he comes to stand in for a host of t­hings past—­for cultural value, for high-­ register repre­sen­ta­tion, philosophical eloquence, and literacy itself—­the ­things of the past that have coalesced around his life and works are themselves in­ creasingly subject to what Sonnet 55 calls “sluttish time.” The modifier h ­ ere asks us to think of Time not as a balding man, grim reaper, or devouring mouth, but rather as a servant who neglects to clean the stones of civilization, leaving them unswept and thus smeared with the detritus of life. Such mate­ rial is now part of the stone but also obscures it. This is the same princi­ple, of course, that sees cities gradually rise above the ruins and rubble of ­earlier struc­ tures. If Shakespeare’s “sluttish time” is the patron of archaeology, then, it is



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also the reason that any cultural product stands as memorial to its own obso­ lescence. Time obscures with as well as despite its attentive efforts. That Shake­ speare ­imagined his own end not only in The Tempest but also in the philosophy of time offered by Sonnet 55 is monument to his own works’ un­ derstanding of monuments themselves. We began by asking what it might mean for a writer and his works to stand in for the past—­not just an era or slice of time, but the past itself. The question is more than rhetorical, for over the past fifty years Shakespeare has facilitated and then absorbed interest in his contemporaries. This is a large claim to make, obviously, so perhaps some personal anecdotes could lend it textured if not clinching support. My own undergraduate education began in the 1980s, in a course called “Shakespeare’s Dramatic Contempo­ raries,” which was essentially a syllabus of plays from Marlowe through Middleton. The only Shakespeare in the course was in its title. It was taught by a professor who had written on Jonson, and in a university that had ­earlier sponsored, through its press, the Regents Re­nais­sance Drama series. ­These are the pale blue and pale gray paperbacks that one encounters mainly in any used bookstores that still exist. They testify to a now barely imagin­ able market for undergraduate textbooks in what was called, at the time, En­glish Re­nais­sance Drama. It is fair to say “barely imaginable” b­ ecause the series includes playwrights and titles that would appear t­ oday only on gradu­ ate syllabi, if ­there. For example, in addition to the standard canon of non-­ Shakespearean plays, Marlowe through Shirley, in this series one found, among other titles, Chapman’s The ­Widow’s Tears, Marston’s The Fawn, Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc, the anonymous First Part of Hieronymo, and even Lope de Vega’s The Knight of Olmedo (El caballero de Olmedo) in facing-­page translation. As this publishing series attests, the mid-­to late 1960s had wit­ nessed a proliferation of interest in (and scholarly possibilities regarding) non-­Shakespearean writers and texts. Two de­cades l­ater, the very title of the course I took—as the professor related while teaching it—­was a way of drawing students to material that no longer compelled them. With the edu­ cation boom on the downturn, Shakespeare was the royal road to filling a classroom’s seats. The late 1980s did l­ittle to diminish Shakespeare’s sway in the acad­emy or culture generally. As for the former, this was the era in which a generation of En­glish professors, many of whom had themselves been taught by scholars of a conservative orientation (think textual editing, literary biography, and literary

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history) expressed in their criticism the social and po­liti­cal interests and ener­ gies that had characterized Anglo-­A merican culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist and then materialist scholarship soon dominated the critical land­ scape, with exciting new ways of asking questions—­and providing answers—­ about texts from this period. Even the way the period was described saw a transformation, as the label “early modern” joined both “Elizabethan” and “Re­nais­sance” with increasing frequency from the late 1980s. However level­ ing a move that may have seemed at the time, Shakespeare seemed always at the center of ­things. From Coppélia Kahn’s Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981) and Lisa Jardine’s Still Harping on ­Daughters: ­Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983) through Louis Montrose’s essay “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Cul­ ture: Gender, Power, Form” (1986), landmark critical works concerning lit­er­ a­ture of the era turned to Shakespeare for their representative examples.2 The end of the 1980s and the 1990s also saw the return of Shakespeare as a Hollywood favorite, beginning with Kenneth Branagh’s blockbuster pro­ duction of Henry V (1989). Branagh’s film, a star turn about a prince becom­ ing a star king, was followed by Mel Gibson’s Hamlet (1990), Peter Greenway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), and Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) as well as his own production of Hamlet (1996). That same year, 1996, Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard presented a larger perspective on Shakespearean per­for­ mance, as did, in a dif­fer­ent way, Shakespeare in Love in 1998. Grossing over $100 million on a bud­get estimated at a quarter of that figure, Shakespeare in Love would go on to garner seven Acad­emy Awards (Best Picture, Actress, Sup­ porting Actress, Original Screenplay, Costume Design, Production Design, Original ­Music or Score) and be nominated for six more. Only a year e­ arlier, in 1997, the de­cade’s resurrection of Shakespeare on film was matched by the completion of the Globe Play­house on London’s Bankside. Long a dream of the American producer Sam Wannamaker, the Globe opened its doors to ­eager audiences comprised of students, tourists, and play lovers from all nations. The new Globe can be said to have helped revitalize the per­for­mance of Shake­ speare in the United Kingdom and, without exaggeration, in many other coun­ tries as well. By the year 2000, then, the success of both Shakespeare in Love and the new Globe Play­house spoke to the prominence of the Bard in Anglo-­ American culture and the world audience that this culture had captured. Yet this very success masked a trade-­off of sorts. The more Shakespeare ­rose in popularity, the more he and his works began to stand in for other writ­ ers, works, and aspects of the past. What had once been a fairly detailed syl­



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labus of the past increasingly came to feature one writer, and one writer’s books. To recollect Louis Montrose’s groundbreaking essay of 1986 on the “shaping fantasies” of Elizabethan culture is to remember how exciting it was to see a perceptive reader, and engaging writer, explore what seemed to be the ­whole of Elizabethan culture through the prism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Similarly, to attend a per­for­mance at the Globe Play­house, or to watch Shake­ speare in Love, was to feel that the past was being presented, in however enter­ taining and selective a fashion, through Shakespeare’s life and words. Perhaps lost in such attention, however, was what was being lost by and through such attention itself: the parts of Elizabethan culture that sat outside the repre­sen­ ta­tional abilities, interests, and purview of Shakespeare (or, indeed, of Queen Elizabeth herself); the ineluctable but real divergences between per­for­mances in the modern Globe and its forebear; the even more improbable fictions of a sweet but unbelievable Hollywood film. It is in this way that, during the 1980s and 1990s, and for a large number of readers, playgoers, and movie audiences, Shakespeare became the past. As the twenty-­first ­century opened, many scholars must have i­magined that Shakespeare would serve as the anchor for cultural value, and for the study and appreciation of our literary past. To extend the spectral meta­phor invoked in his own works, the past became not many ghosts raised from their graves, but a single one. Like the specter of Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet, or Banquo, by 2000 Shakespeare came to dominate the pageant of history. The next two de­cades brought some clear signs of this consolidation, and of Shakespeare’s uncanny hold over historical memory. In the late spring of 2012, for example, the Globe to Globe festival in London saw 37 productions of Shakespeare’s plays in 37 dif­fer­ent languages, and with multiple modes of staging and per­for­mance. ­Later, Globe productions went on the road to 197 countries. The logistics of this massive undertaking, tethered to the 2012 Olym­ pic Games in London and the 2016 quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, testified to the inordinate signifying power of Shakespeare. For the world, he had become a figure not only of the En­glish language, and En­glish culture, but of the heritage of the En­glish literary and theatrical past as well. Other developments during this period showed the rise in Shakespeare’s stock. In the academic world, vari­ous of the traditional literary periods began to lose their unity and collapse ­toward a period increasingly defined by its cen­ tral author, William Shakespeare. We can see this unmistakably in the rela­ tion of medieval En­glish literary studies to Shakespeare. To be fair from the start: medievalists have always had, and felt, the burden of commanding more

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than just medieval En­glish lit­er­a­ture and the ­middle En­glish language. Thus it is no surprise to encounter an eminent Chaucerian like Helen Cooper tak­ ing as a range of commentary what we could call the long ­Middle Ages, from the ­fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Her 1977 monograph Pas­ toral: Mediaeval into Re­nais­sance was an example of this reach, and was joined by her 2004 study The En­glish Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare.3 Such centuries-­spanning studies of genre can now be seen as harbingers of a larger movement in medi­ eval studies, one dedicated to reclaiming materials from the fifteenth ­century, including the writings of Lydgate and Hoccleve. In the scholarly mind, the 1400s had stood as a terra incognita between Chaucer and Wyatt. Medieval­ ists of the 1980s and 1990s sought to describe and understand the shape of lit­er­a­ture during this period, thus bridging a relatively understudied and thus dimly understood era. ­Under one explanation, then, the leaning forward into the Re­nais­sance by En­glish medievalists was the result of a larger desire to understand the legacy of the age of Chaucer as it unfolded over time and af­ fected lit­er­a­ture of subsequent de­cades. But other ­factors advanced Shakespeare as a particularly attractive land­ mark by which medievalists might set their bearings. During and a­ fter the 1980s, the success of Stephen Greenblatt, and of the New Historicism associ­ ated with Greenblatt’s work, established Shakespeare as a figure to reckon with, as well as be reckoned with. If the 1980s felt insufferably Shakespeare-­centric to medievalists—­scholars who soon grew tired of hearing about the birth of subjectivity on the boards of the Elizabethan stage—­they found revenge of sorts in a 1992 essay by David Aers. The title of Aers’s essay is an uncomfort­ able one for scholars of early modern lit­er­a­ture, particularly Shakespeareans: “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Crit­ ics Writing the ‘History of the Subject.’ ”4 For Aers’s “whisper” is like some­ thing you hear in a dark alley, and not necessarily pleasant. As the scare quotes around “History of the Subject” imply, Aers found a lot to be skeptical of in the New Historicism’s telescoped view of history. Too often, early modern scholars had taken the “modern” part of that period label literally, walling themselves off from the ­earlier sixteenth ­century, much less the fifteenth, ­fourteenth, and so on. Too frequently, Shakespeareans made claims about Shakespeare that assumed ­things began with Shakespeare. Aers was right to whisper in their ears, then, although the essay—­especially seen in hindsight—­ may have sprung as much from professional rivalry as from the desire that a rival period receive its due.



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So much became apparent in the de­c ade that ensued. As Shakespeare swallowed more and more of the cultural and critical air—­evident in the suc­ cess of the New Historicism, on one hand, and in the Bard’s filmic re­nais­ sance, on the other—­medievalists increasingly sought to leverage Shakespearean content into their own works. The conclusion to David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity, published in 1997, is a good example.5 ­There Wallace caps a deeply his­ toricized treatment of fourteenth-­century E ­ ngland as represented in and by Chaucer’s works with a conclusion that takes us to Shakespeare’s Boar’s Head tavern in the Henry IV plays, to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, fi­nally, to The Two Noble Kinsmen. Wallace’s aim in this conclusion is ostensibly to trace continuities and divergences between the two eras, but beneath his rhe­toric seems to lie a carnivalesque goal: tendering the suggestion that Shakespeare’s age marked the end of a resonant era (that of “associational forms”) rather than the birth of something special. In some ways, then, Chaucerian Polity is the obverse of Greenblatt’s Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning (1980), and can even be seen as a self-­conscious response to the early modernists who had not only not read their Chaucer, but did not feel guilty about this.6 During the 1990s, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars had advanced a second alternate template for understanding the sixteenth c­ entury.7 Instead of the Reformation forming a sharp break between the medieval and the early modern, it was now held to be a repressive development that disguised enor­ mous continuities between the Catholic past and Elizabethan pre­sent. In the wake of Duffy’s argument, and following Wallace’s example, a number of scholars and publications sought to erase the old boundary lines between Shakespeare and his medieval past. We could notice this in such collections as Reading the Medieval in Early Modern E ­ ngland (2007), edited by Gordon McMullan and David Matthews; Shakespeare and the M ­ iddle Ages: Essays on the Per­for­mance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings (2009), edited by Martha Driver and Sid Ray; and Shakespeare and the M ­ iddle Ages (2010), edited by Curtis Perry and John Watkins.8 All t­ hese collections ask us to think across the traditional period division between medieval and Re­nais­sance, even ignoring it altogether. Such long-­distance imagining is also part of Helen Cooper’s monograph Shakespeare and the Medieval World (2010); Sarah Beckwith’s Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (2011); and William Kuskin’s Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity (2013).9 Distinguished medievalists, the authors of ­t hese latter three books all turn their attention to what could be called ­either the long ­Middle Ages or the long Re­nais­sance; significantly, each involves Shakespeare in ­doing so.

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If Shakespeare has proved to have a large gravitational pull on medieval studies—­threatening, in some ways, to swallow up his literary forebears—he may also be performing the same for lit­er­a­ture that came a­ fter him. For pos­ si­ble evidence of this, we could look to the success of an exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Titled “­Will & Jane,” this extremely popu­lar exhibit ran from August through November 2016, and paired Shakespeare and Jane Aus­ ten as a way of exploring ­these two authors’ rich afterlives. Of par­tic­u­lar in­ terest was the development of their celebrity identity, the way each became, over time, larger than the sum of their respective writings. An article on the exhibit in the New York Times was titled “Lit’s Dynamic Duo, ­Will and Jane, Shared Path to Pop Stardom.”10 The parallel lives motif was made explicit in an exhibit program: “Two writers, acclaimed for their works, have soared in public recognition, transforming into cultural superheroes. The pro­cess of fan­ dom leaves a trail of material objects—­from the sublime to the ridicu­lous. Literary celebrity, from its 18th-­century beginnings, is as much about relics and souvenirs as about books and plays. Explore how ­today’s Cult of Jane re­ sembles the first exuberant wave of ‘Bardolatry’ (coined from ‘the Bard’ and ‘idolatry’) in ­Will & Jane.”11 If medievalists moved to reclaim Shakespeare as the end of an era, this description gathers Shakespeare into a beginning. H ­ ere periodization centers on the 1700s and its sponsorship of an apparently emerg­ ing veneration of authorship, veneration accompanied by the more modern and familiar commodities of recognition and fandom. From Jane Austen to Austin, Texas: Shakespeare is all around me as I write this essay. B ­ ecause I am an En­glish professor who works on Shakespeare, it is not surprising that I would notice traces of his presence in my surroundings. But even controlling for that, it is hard not to be impressed by his success. Each fall the Actors from the London Stage do a week in residence at the Uni­ versity of Texas, teaching in classrooms during the day and performing at night; in the spring, actors from the American Shakespeare Center visit cam­ pus as well. Th ­ ese per­for­mances are rarely the first Shakespeare that under­ graduates have seen: by the time many students from the area themselves reach campus, they have been exposed to Shakespeare’s works from a very young age. For in and around Austin, Texas, the Shakespeare at Winedale program does outreach at area schools, and also runs a residential summer camp for young ­people in addition to its flagship program for undergraduate students. The Winedale program itself was started in 1970—­the same year, coinciden­ tally, that Shakespeare first appeared on the £20 note and at approximately the same time that Sam Wannamaker began planning for the Globe Play­



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house. Undergraduates who participate in the Shakespeare at Winedale pro­ gram live in residence at the Round Top theatrical complex, studying, rehearsing, and performing in at least three plays ­every summer. As preface to the Winedale class, students at the university can participate in the Spirit of Shakespeare group, which each year studies and performs a selected Shake­ speare play. In addition to ­these groups, a number of institutions and organ­ izations in the greater Austin area are devoted to Shakespeare’s plays. I write this paragraph within walking distance of the Elizabethan-­style Curtain The­ ater on Lake Travis, where a repertory named the Baron’s Men recently per­ formed As You Like It. In addition to productions t­ here, playgoers in the area routinely see Shakespeare performed in our large public park ­every summer, and have the privilege of attending regular per­for­mances of the plays staged by the theater com­pany Austin Shakespeare. By all appearances, then, Shakespeare is a success story, and poised to con­ tinue representing the past in a monumental way. The details in the preced­ ing paragraph are hardly unique to me or my city: other academics, actors, directors, and members of the general public could doubtless point to a dozen similar experiences that testify to the Bard’s seeming omnipresence in culture. As has been offered ­earlier in this essay, Shakespeare’s success has rendered him the representative of a period larger than the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even larger than the so-­called early modern, Re­nais­ sance, or Elizabethan eras. On one side Chaucer, on the other Austen: he increasingly serves as a center of what has become the “Shakespearean pe­ riod.” Like one of the ghosts from his own plays, he can stand in for the past itself—­history understood as an undifferentiated time of words, rank, and prestige. What could be, or perhaps go, wrong with this state of ­things? A danger of such success is that it places a ­great deal of capital in one account. And ­there are indeed signs that, as a representative of historical literary culture, Shake­ speare is beginning to lose his value. This runs ­counter to much of what has just been explored ­here: the rise, since at least 1970—­some would say since Garrick’s Jubilee in 1769—of Shakespeare as a central figure of the En­glish past, and as a representative of verbal culture generally. In a global context, we have seen the further rise of Shakespeare as a figure of En­glishness itself. In the acad­emy, in the cinema, in countless editions, in numerous festivals and theaters—in all ­these locations, Shakespeare appears to have consolidated other writers and writings, becoming a de facto envoy of words themselves. Where, then, are the cracks in his façade?

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We might look to the classroom. P ­ eople who teach sometimes are asked ­ hether students have changed over time. I used to answer negatively, as one w year’s students seemed largely the same as the next year’s. Yes, ­there was al­ ways the colleague or member of the general public ­eager to hear or tell a story of a decline in skills. But by and large, reading and writing w ­ ere what they had long been at the college level: some students w ­ ere exceptional, some less so, but the majority could do the homework assigned. Occasionally, and some­ times more often than that, one encountered students who ­were well-­read and had a historical framework through which they could contextualize their reading. Narratives of a decline in standards, therefore, seemed ­little more than nostalgia for a past that never was. But ­toward the end of the first de­cade of the 2000s, students began to show a restlessness with their reading, and with the written word generally that I had not remembered seeing before. Writing essays seemed more difficult to them, with frequent complaints about the amount and difficulty of reading—­with syllabi that had never produced such responses before. Reading itself seemed increasingly onerous. And as the years went on, it seemed impossible to separate this development from the digital revolution that had changed our students’ lives in ­every other way. In short, screen culture supplanted the page, and pictures usurped words. At least partly as a result of the digital era, attention spans had diminished, students’ memo­ ries became less solid, and their pasts less full of books. Reading had ceded ground to watching. In the classroom, this surfaced most noticeably in relation to historical texts, which seemed to pre­sent students new difficulty. Th ­ ose from the early modern era struck many student readers as impossibly unclear, their vocabu­ lary, grammar, and rhetorical devices a ­triple challenge to the understanding. This showed up, in students’ textbooks, in the rise of the No Fear Shakespeare series, with its facing-­page translation of Shakespeare’s language into modern En­glish serving as a kind of life preserver to the student who needs “the kind of En­glish ­people actually speak ­today”—­the way the series’ website describes it.12 ­Were this phenomenon ­limited to a textbook series in one instructor’s classroom, the impulse t­ oward translation might seem unworthy of special at­ tention. But translating Shakespeare into modern En­glish became a hot-­ button issue when, in 2015, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced a proj­ect called “Play On!” This undertaking involved commissioning three dozen playwrights to translate thirty-­nine plays of Shakespeare into modern En­glish. Not every­one was excited about the exercise, however, and a number of Shakespeareans weighed in with concerns over the endeavor. James Shap­



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iro, for example, penned a persuasive op-ed in the New York Times that ar­ gued the prob­lem was less any obscurity in Shakespeare’s words than theatrical companies declining to engage with and understand challenging language.13 Yet, however plausible Shapiro’s argument, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s decision to begin translating Shakespeare marked a cultural shift of sorts. In revealing a lack of confidence in the very author that had originally provided, and long sustained, the festival’s reason for being, the “Play On!” program manifested a rupture. Since 1935, Shakespeare’s works had been the vital heart of their program. Eighty years l­ater, in 2015, the festival confessed that some­ thing was dif­fer­ent. Shapiro was right to say that nothing had changed about Shakespeare; what had changed was the institution’s belief that its perform­ ers and audiences w ­ ere fully up to his writings. At the same time that this issue of translation ­rose to the surface, criti­ cism of Shakespeare from an unexpected quarter—­conservative po­liti­c al commentators—­began to percolate through my local news. In April 2011, for example, the Texas Tribune published an opinion piece by Ronald Trowbridge, a se­nior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank. Trowbridge took the opportunity to criticize research in the humani­ ties, claiming that from 1980 to 2006, ­there ­were 21,674 articles published on Shakespeare; he asked, in a question that seemed to provide its own answer, “Do we need the 21,675th?”14 Now, ­these figures happened to be wrong, for, as the late James Harner pointed out in a witty comment on the column, Trow­ bridge underestimated the number of articles by several thousand. But this accounting error did not diminish the piece’s point: for some politicians, a pile of Shakespeare articles appears to be a poor investment for taxpayers. ­Wouldn’t we be better off if academics ­stopped ­doing research like this and turned all their energy to teaching? If this argument seemed like an oddity at the time, the quirk of someone looking for an easy target, it would be fol­ lowed by ­others in its vein. In fact, Dan Patrick, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, turned to Shakespeare as a prime example of wasteful expenditures within the higher education system. In an interview with the Texas Tribune on September 24, 2016, Patrick used Shakespeare to illustrate his case for cut­ ting back on spending: “You just c­ an’t have every­thing you want, and say you know what, w ­ e’ll just pay for it. . . . ​I ­don’t want to pay an En­glish professor with research dollars, and give them half a semester off, to write a book about the love life of William Shakespeare that no one cares about and no one is ­going to read.”15 Like his fellow conservative before him, Patrick saw Shake­ speare as a perfect meta­phor of the frivolous. To him, Shakespeare’s love life

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was incredibly dull. He apparently did not recall that Shakespeare in Love had made millions for its investors with its bouncy story of “the love life of Wil­ liam Shakespeare.” The movie’s two tag­lines? “A Comedy About the Greatest Love Story Almost Never Told” and “Love Is the Only Inspiration.”16 Most impor­tant to this politician in the moment, however, was defining “research dollars” as something inappropriate for the humanities, and conveying a nar­ rative of fiscal prudence in the face of t­ hose who would squander money on esoteric and unpop­u­lar ­causes. Two t­hings about ­these conservative complaints ask for comment. The first is the fact that Shakespeare—­and not Chaucer, Austen, Mozart, or T. S. Eliot—­has become the figure through which they channel skepticism about the elite. W ­ hether a punching bag, straw man, or scapegoat, Shakespeare stands in for the petty and inconsequential. From sacred cow to sacrificial lamb, he has been demoted by certain factions on the right. So much was pre­ dictable, perhaps, in the narrative this essay tells of Shakespeare’s consolida­ tion of other writers, texts, and eras: he is the pacing ghost who represents the world that has been before us. The second aspect to notice about ­these con­ servative complaints, therefore, involves the declining status of that world. It is remarkable, in many ways, that t­ hese critics use Shakespeare as a figure of ridicule. For only twenty-­five years ­earlier, during the culture wars of the early 1990s in the United States, conservatives had commonly invoked Shakespeare as a bastion of received value, decrying his apparent disappearance from cur­ ricula and syllabi in higher education. By the 2010s, however, he has appar­ ently lost his totemic aura with a new breed of conservatives—­those enamored of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathe­matics), of that which can be most clearly monetized, and of the f­ uture rather than the past. It perhaps goes without saying that ­these assumptions of value may be ques­ tioned, even refuted. But what seems unmistakable ­here is that the commen­ tators feel it to be common sense that Shakespeare is insubstantial. As a spirit, he is a hoax—­something to see through rather than revere. Words, words, words: in an age dedicated to glowing pictures and the ­future, a wordsmith based in and thick with the past is an easy if unexpected target for ­those who wish to position themselves against an older economy, and within what they see to be an emerging one. To be made ­great again, the pre­sent and the ­future need to forget the way in which preceding generations connected with the past. Together with responses to the difficult complexity of Shakespeare’s language, t­ hese conservative indictments signal declining confidence in his works’ usefulness. That loss of confidence is why the Shake­



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speare period may be coming to an end almost as soon as it began. That is, although “Shakespeare” is an attractive idea on which to base an era—­the era of the verbal—­his works are based in precisely the medium that the visual so coyly and so thoroughly obviates. Time does not clean the way we want it to; it smears what we would have spotless. In this case, image making has over­ whelmed the attraction of words. It is an overstatement to say that Shakespeare is a sufficient figure of the past. But he has certainly absorbed much of it, as far as the popu­lar imagination goes. The danger with that absorption is that, when words themselves—­his métier—­become uninteresting or difficult, what he stands for ­will by association be more easily dismissed, as it has been gath­ ered con­ve­niently ­under his name and the identity provided by his works. If Shakespeare has been the beneficiary of his admirers, who have invested in him for centuries now, the dividends paid by his plays and poems are issued in a currency that finds itself increasingly devalued by the screens of the digi­ tal economy. So while we have seen Shakespeare become a period unto him­ self, with many classes and institutions focusing on Shakespeare, period, we may be seeing his writings coming to the end of their own line.

Chapter 11

Periodic Shakespeare Julia Reinhard Lupton

“A Revelation” In Lynda Barry’s 2016 cartoon, “How to Look at Art,” a pair of untutored mu­ seumgoers discover the power of painting through the tiny miracle of their own curious and loving gestures (Figure 15). Their epiphany takes place in time and also between times. Dialogic through and through, the cartoon breaks up the impulse ­toward pure mirroring by populating the frames with divergent species: Dog Mama and Bird Baby meet Madonna of the Sunflower and Squiggle Jesus. Neither the adult nor the child leads the pro­cess of discovery; instead, their cocreated quest yields “a revelation” that requires no caption. Shakespearean drama hosts such epiphanies whenever theater makers, au­ diences, and readers allow their interactions and associations to become keys to meaning. I think of such effects as periodic, which I propose as an alterna­ tive to periodization. Lee Patterson defines periodization as “a sequence that insisted upon discontinuity, ascribed to each period its own special quality, and then or­ga­nized them into a teleological pattern culminating in itself.”1 “Periodic,” on the other hand, means to occur at intervals. Shakespeare is pe­ riodic insofar as his works act as cultural movers and sensitive receptors in diverse times and locations, thanks to the resilient and fecund translatability of the dramas and to the po­liti­cal, economic, and technological forces that support t­ hose reappearances. The plays themselves transmit signals from e­ arlier moments of artistic intensity, scrambling ancient, medieval, Re­nais­sance, and modern worlds via changing media platforms. Hamlet is not a period-­bound document from 1603, but a periodic swirl of Biblical, classical, and Roman­ tic commandments (“Remember me”) traced on a wax tablet of technical

Figure 15. ​“How to Look at Art” by Lynda Barry. Copyright @ 2016 by Lynda Barry. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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possibilities and design solutions. In describing Shakespeare as periodic rather than belonging to a period, I conceive of periodization not as something we do to the past (that is, break it up into epochs), but rather as an ongoing pro­cess of responsiveness to shifting interpretive, social, and per­for­mance conditions. Periodic Shakespeare involves the temporal and somatic tuning and attun­ ement of artists and audiences as well as teachers and students who seek affini­ ties between play worlds and their worlds. In his critique of contextualization in Shakespeare studies, Michael Bristol calls attention to the tempo of art across time, which embraces the “much larger time scheme constituted by the long-­term iteration of the composition by dif­fer­ent performers in differ­ ing social settings.”2 When directors choose to set a play in a dif­fer­ent period (Fascist Italy or Edwardian ­England), or draw on a new cultural context or per­ for­ mance tradition (Bollywood or Beijing Opera), they are sounding Shakespeare for shared sensibilities and parallel traumas. This recalibration also happens across the course of a lifetime: early experiences with Shakespeare and the multidimensional materials he worked with (holiday and hospitality, song and dance, game and sport, folktale and liturgy) leave an initial impres­ sion that ­later artistic exposures, life events, reading or viewing communities, technological advances, and po­liti­cal moods variously deepen and disturb, erase and retrace. Lynda Barry’s ­mother / teacher / docent was once a toddler / puppy / freshman, and she arouses her own muscle memory as she hoists the buoyant chick into the g­ reat O of her arms. So far, this may sound like a familiar account of tradition and intertex­ tuality leavened with some per­for­mance and adaptation theory and a whiff of object relations. More is at stake in Periodic Shakespeare, however, than the modes of imitatio and emulatio that preserve and refresh classic works of art across time. In a manner that seems close to unique in the history of Western art (classical tragedy is one instance; the Beatles may be another), the plays of Shakespeare lend themselves to renewal: this ability to be adapted and re­ freshed is one of Shakespearean drama’s signature “virtues” or affordances. Moreover, renewal is the essence of virtue, understood as the creative and re­ sponsive testing of ­human capacity, ­whether in scenes of trial and temptation, in the exercise of significant speech in response to witnesses and interlocu­ tors, or in the search for connection, conciliation, and repair ­after betrayal, misprision, and loss. In a brilliant essay on ethical comportments of care in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Jeffrey Dolven cites Charles Taylor on the moral space of narrative, which is fraught with the directionality of intention, w ­ ill, and desire in a landscape striated by value.3 Dolven, reading Spenser, emphasizes



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virtue as quest narrative, whereas my focus on Shakespeare highlights virtue as dramatic per­for­mance. What Dolven and I share is our sense that criticism needs to reengage with the “moral space” of lit­er­a­ture: not just the themes or messages of works of art, but their fundamental being as efforts at orientation and evaluation in relation to shifting goals and values. Insofar as virtue in the Aristotelian and Ciceronian tradition is bound up with per­for­mance, virtue can be construed as inherently dramatic, involv­ ing both actions and audiences. Virtue is ready-­to-­hand as a dynamic resource for the periodic enterprises of literary education and theatrical work. Both hu­ manistic inquiry and the art of acting are concerned with exercising and ap­ praising diverse capacities in the ­here and now of their per­for­mance.4 In both settings, this formative work transmits inherited pathways and constraints while participating in the contingency and promise of new action. In such a landscape, adaptation concerns both art (the transformation of works across time) and life: the set of comportments and environmental conditions that allow persons, species, and communities to survive and flourish, or dwindle and perish. What kinds of orienting skills and capacities does Periodic Shake­ speare build, such as hope, courage, judgment, care, hospitality, resilience, patience, trust, and re­spect? Th ­ ese virtues affirm the dignity of personhood and the renewability of the world, outlooks that belong fundamentally to drama as an iterative art of evolving personae. To what extent are t­ hese vir­ tues evaluated and rethought in the action of the plays, w ­ hether through the drama of their disastrous undoing (vice) or the irony of their unintended con­ sequences (folly)? And how can we as scholars and educators more intention­ ally comprehend and cultivate the virtue-work of Shakespearean drama in a manner that courts deliberative creativity and joyful thought rather than e­ ither easy moralism or unreflective relativism? Th ­ ese are the questions that Periodic Shakespeare periodically poses.

Courage Although periodicity is manifest throughout the canon, from the medieval­ ized classicism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Twelfth Night’s essays on nativity and epiphany, Shakespeare’s romances model the plays’ resonant re­ newability with unusual intensity and insight, thanks to their own layered and multivalent world building within virtue ecologies awash with questions of care, forgiveness, and rebirth. The Winter’s Tale announces time and timeliness as

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well as fiction and transmission in its title, and goes on to transpose dif­fer­ent epochs (Hellenistic and Re­nais­sance) and confessional dispensations (Catho­ lic and Protestant, Old and New Testaments, classical and Christian human­ isms) in a manner that creates unexpected spaces for temporal reflection. Sounding Shakespeare’s most mythopoetic play for its temporal signatures, the periodic critic casts her baited line into a deep pool laced by the fallen flowers of classical myth and the flotsam of theological shipwreck. Twisted up in ­these historic materials are ­later efforts at meaning-­making, such as Lou­ ise Glück’s vocalizations of Demeter in her 2006 lyric sequence Averno, or the modern filmic and novelistic winters’ tales gathered by Sarah Beckwith in her “book of second chances” proj­ect, or the cosmic translation of a child’s death and a broken marriage into traces of eternity in Ted Chiang’s story and Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival.5 Electing ­these more distant interlocutors as part­ ners in the Shakespearean proj­ect expands our sense of the romance impulse and its special periodicity of associative inclusion. The Winter’s Tale, like Averno and Arrival, is about the architecture of time: how the spaces of memory and habitation are built to last out of tran­ sient materials, such as seasonal flowers, days that differ in length, meals pre­ sented in a distinct order, and works of poiesis that endure. Like Averno and Arrival, The Winter’s Tale is also about life spans whose finitude is both ac­ knowledged and overcome by acts of courage, witnessing, and recollection. The statue scene at the very end of The Winter’s Tale corrects and comments on ­earlier catastrophes while also incorporating the intractable losses, adven­ turous decisions, and new forms of knowing wrought by ­those happenings into the social arrangements and memorial practices that lead into the world beyond the play’s action. In a beautiful essay on the roots of the statue scene in ­children’s games, Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski uses cognitive science to show how resurrection in the play takes place on a plane of interactive and improvisational embodiment that precedes and infuses dogma, not unlike Lynda Barry’s art cartoon.6 In scene ­after scene, the play’s virtue-work inheres in its artistic renovations and aesthetic theorizing. The pastoral dialogue on hybrid flowers, for example, is at once an essay on genius versus discipline in the arts; a debate about social class and intermarriage; and an allusion to Saint Paul’s periodizing figure of wild Gentiles grafted into the cultivated stock of Israel (4.4.79–110).7 Moreover, ­these issues unfold as conversation and debate among speech partners who are unequal in status, age, and gender. The hos­ pitable exchange renders philosophy as drama and drama as ecol­ogy, an un­ even landscape of affordances for action. H ­ ere and elsewhere, the virtues of



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The Winter’s Tale are si­mul­ta­neously artistic and ethical, and Shakespeare’s ability to graft t­hose concerns into a memorable dramaturgy lends the play its periodic character, its capacity for renewal. The compelling figure of Hermione confronts us with a tangled knot of inherited materials and periodic rhythms. As an incarnation of Demeter, Hermione harkens from some of the most ancient layers of Greek religion, the object of mystery cults and votive offerings that associate her worship with agricultural dearth and plenty and with h ­ uman fertility and healing.8 ­These ritual origins lend the play some of its thaumaturgical aura, the sense that what we are undergoing is more than a story, that the play’s Greekness is more pagan-­daemonic than classical-­aesthetic. And that aura is heightened before it is dissipated: Hermione’s words and gestures channel Demeter into the ma­ ter dolorosa of Catholic cult contested in the Reformation, casting Leontes as a ­bitter Luther or Calvin jealously circumscribing her works of mercy.9 Herm­ ione is a quintessentially “Re­nais­sance” figure: she dies and is reborn, in and through art; she draws classical myth into modern Christian and humanist frames; and her participation in fables of recollection and reanimation antici­ pate her periodic return in ­later creative responses. Yet Hermione is not simply a classical myth or a Christian allegory. She is also a speaking being whose hesitant attitude t­ oward the risks of conversa­ tion mark out a distinctively dramatic track of the play’s periodicity. One vir­ tue at stake ­here is courage, defined by Hannah Arendt as “a willingness to act or speak at all, to insert oneself into the world and begin a story of one’s own. And this courage is not necessarily or even primarily related to a will­ ingness to suffer the consequences; courage and even boldness are already pre­ sent in leaving one’s private hiding place and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing oneself.”10 Whereas elsewhere Arendt associates courage with the formal Greek polis,11 ­here she rezones the space of politics to include ­those ­women, slaves, and barbarians who ­were left out of Greek public life: Anti­ gone comes to mind as the most archetypal and periodically renewed classical drama of female courage, exercised in the transitional space between oikos and polis. Susan Bickford and Holloway Sparks cite Arendt in their attempts to philosophize an account of courage worthy of feminism. Such a courage ac­ commodates the dissensual as well as the patriotic, includes care for living be­ ings alongside commitment to the social body, and convenes its actors in a broad and varied but also exposed and vulnerable public sphere.12 The Winter’s Tale hosts an Antigonus, but his wife Paulina comes closest to channeling Antigone in her willingness to confront the tyrant Leontes. The

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play also probes the conditions of speech for its winter queen, whose courage is less forthright and legible, more tentative and u ­ nder siege, than that of Pau­ lina. Hermione’s sexual virtue is not an issue for most readers, while her vir­ tues as a speaker and actor are more in pro­cess and less stamped by ideology, and hence of greater ethical and artistic interest. In all of her major appear­ ances, Hermione appears as a ­woman temperamentally reserved with re­spect to speech, yet capable of real eloquence when occasion requires it. Leontes’s first words to Hermione call attention to her taciturnity: “Tongue-­tied, our queen? Speak you” (1.2.28). When she acquiesces to her husband’s request, she first speaks to Polixenes through her husband, and only gradually turns to her guest, eventually warming up to her task. This is not yet courage: Hermione may sense real risk in the situation, but she is more docile than brave in agree­ ing to play her husband’s dangerous game. Hermione’s reticence reappears in a very dif­fer­ent key in the intimate scene that opens Act 2, when Hermione withdraws to her rooms with her son and her ­women ­after a trying after­noon. Thankful to be out of the public eye, her first action is to entrust Mamillius to the care of her ladies in waiting: “Take the boy to you; he so trou­bles me / ’Tis past enduring” (2.1.1–2). L ­ ater in the scene, when Leontes snatches the boy from her side, he brutally declares, “I am glad you did not nurse him” (2.1.56). In calling the boy “Mamillius,” meaning “­little breast,” Shakespeare at once evokes the ­union of ­mother and infant in the act of breast-­feeding and recalls the rhythm of attachment, withdrawal, and substitution that infuses that ­union with its own periodicity. The breast comes and goes, and eventually it just goes, replaced by teddy bears, storytelling, and philosophy, and already distributed among thumbs, pacifiers, and a blur of caregivers long before weaning is complete. Object-­ relations theorist D. W. Winnicott would call the room occupied by Herm­ ione and her ladies a “holding environment,” a safe zone where the child learns to turn absence and anxiety into game and story through the uneven atten­ tions of a “good enough ­mother.”13 In this remarkable sketch of ­women at work with a child at play, Shakespeare tunes into the ebb and flow of daily life as its vari­ous actors move in and out of visibility and speech, and in and around loss and substitution, in a fragile yet adaptive virtue ecol­ogy held to­ gether by bonds of trust, ser­vice, and care. When Leontes enters, winter incarnate and jealousy inchoate, he is forc­ ibly making Hermione public again a­ fter her brief withdrawal into this richly populated and ­gently pulsing holding environment. “You, my lords / Look on her, mark her well,” he shouts, placing her u ­ nder the shocked gaze of his



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attendants (2.1.64–65). Stricken, Hermione warns “how ­will this grieve you, / When you s­ hall come to clearer knowledge, / That you have thus published me” (2.1.96–98). To be published is to have one’s person made public, a situa­ tion generally avoided by this tongue-­tied queen. On trial, Hermione once again speaks reluctantly, and only at her husband’s bidding. Yet now she more fully exercises courage in Arendt’s sense. Whereas Leontes’s court action bru­ tally displays her to the public eye, her dignified and deliberate response repos­ sesses that action in order to expose and disclose herself, in Arendt’s terms. Her speeches to the court at once affirm her moral dignity u ­ nder duress, force the king to reveal himself as a tyrant, and rebuke the courtiers for their silence. Courage as the virtue of self-­disclosure bears a complex relationship to the periodicity of theater as an art of appearance and withdrawal. Hermione hates the spectacle of the courtroom, which Leontes wields as a weapon against her. Her public speech, however, allows her to take control of that zone by supplementing sheer visibility with audition and acknowl­edgment. She is thus able to transform the flattening horror of being seen into the empowering gift of being recognized. Hermione is deliberate and strategic in drawing attention to the presence of witnesses, first calling upon “powers divine” to “Behold our ­human actions” and then comparing the scene to one “devised / And played to take spectators” (3.2.24–34). Nourished by the “holding environment” of the ­women’s quarters, Hermione uses her speech and comportment to trans­ form the courtroom into a “beholding environment” of public witness and testimony. Participating in the periodicity of drama, she has become Antigone to Leontes’s Creon in the new Greece of Shakespeare’s Hellenistic Sicily. “Your actions are my ‘dreams,’ ” Leontes had told Hermione (3.2.79). This division of gesture and speech within and between characters was vividly dra­ matized in the 2017 Shizuoka Performing Arts Center’s production directed by Satoshi Miyagi in Japan. Miyagi deployed his “two actors in one role” method, in which one actor speaks while another actor moves, a modernist and Noh-­inspired technique that brilliantly captures the in­de­pen­dence of thought, gesture, word, and affect by allowing t­ hese tracks to separate, cross, and mingle. As dramaturge Ted Morahashi explains, “The audience hears the physical drive within the speech, and senses the linguistically complex logic in the movement, being overwhelmed by the sparking traffic between the two dif­fer­ent yet intricately connected theatre media.”14 In adapting The Winter’s Tale in a new per­for­mance idiom and performing it in Japa­nese, the produc­ tion participates in the play’s periodic renewal and renders up the play’s own theatrical resources for fresh analy­sis and affective response.

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Hermione responds to the death of Mamillius by departing to the place where dreams are made, the rich loam of imagination, myth, and memory whose fecund darkness participates in winter’s slow work. She does not with­ draw, however, to a place devoid of hope or courage. Where, then, does Herm­ ione go? On the level of the dramatic action, she lives in Paulina’s “removed ­house” (5.2.105), tended twice a day by her hostess, servant, and friend. While Leontes suffers the “storm perpetual” (3.2.210–12) of penance, Hermione’s win­ ter of hidden hibernation is gestational and creative rather than purgative or punitive. Hermione retreats to a mausoleum, a bedroom, a hospital, an ar­ chive, an operating system, and a seed bank: a palace of periodicity. Across the ­great arc of the play, Hermione repeatedly travels between public rooms (­great hall, courtroom, gallery) and regions of privacy and privation (her cham­ bers, the prison, Paulina’s h ­ ouse), culminating in the statue niche, at once refuge and discovery space. Courage comes from coeur (heart): the periodic emergence out of latency into action describes the heartbeat of drama as an art of expectancy and disclosure. Hermione’s alternation between visibility and hiddenness echoes the entrances and exits that constitute the rhythm of per­ for­mance and the shuttling between symbolic resources and narrative action that constitute the rhythm of poetic composing. In the statue scene, the queen is once more “tongue-­tied”: in this case, frozen on her pedestal and hidden ­behind a curtain. Now it is not Leontes but Paulina who asks her to appear before com­pany: ’Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away. Bequeath to Death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you. (5.3.99–103) Paulina’s speech is composed of as many as nine distinct commands, each lit­ erally en-­couraging Hermione to become public once again. The perfect iambs of the first line map the heartbeat of blank verse onto the coeur of cor­ age, bidding emphasis to take shape against recess. The sequence of requests cues Hermione to move slowly, communicating the sense of a gradual thaw­ ing. Although she holds his hand and embraces him, she never speaks to Leontes, a fact remarked upon by Camillo: “If she pertain to life, let her speak too!” (5.3.114). When she does speak, again at repeated prompting, it is to bless Perdita, not forgive her husband, as if the limpid liquefaction of blessing w ­ ill



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help prime the pump of forgiveness’s slower and more b­ itter w ­ aters. Perhaps her voice is initially hoarse or faint, since she, like Dante’s Virgil, is speaking ­after a long silence (“chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco” [Inferno 1.1.63]), a preg­ nant silence composed from the latencies of tradition, where actions subside into dreams.15 Mobile, self-­creative, charged with the mystery of h ­ uman agency and con­ sciousness, this anti-­Galatea chooses to reenter the space of the living, evinc­ ing what theologian Paul Tillich called “the courage to be”: “the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of ­those ele­ments of his existence which conflict with his essential self-­a ffirmation.”16 ­Under certain circum­ stances, silence can become a form of speech and action, an active expression of intent and affect that shakes up a situation and yields new directions for its denizens. Is her silence h ­ ere an expression of her wordless forgiveness, as W. H. Auden felt it to be?17 Or is her silence in fact a form of courage, a self-­disclosing and self-­a ffirming holding back of the forgiveness that every­one expects from her? In Miyagi’s production, in keeping with his “two actors in one role” method, Hermione’s blessing is spoken by one actor while another manages her movements; ­after the blessing of Perdita, the ­silent actor returns to the statue niche, as if the ­whole gallery scene had unfolded among the living char­ acters, overseen by the image of a dead m ­ other whose presence remains vir­ tual. Miyagi’s staging makes tangible what is implicit in Shakespeare’s play text: a complex disjunction between words, gestures, and silences that leave open the question of when and how forgiveness w ­ ill be completed. Embrac­ ing Leontes but withholding her speech, the tongue-­tied queen brings just a ­little winter with her: not the blustering Leontine winter of jealousy, however, but the warm Hermionine winter of hope.

Hope In Public Th ­ ings: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig refashions hope as a po­liti­cal virtue through her reading of Jonathan Lear, D. W. Winnicott, and Hannah Arendt. Hope becomes a princi­ple for communal regeneration, Honig argues, when “thick courage”—­honorable deeds fully supported by a living culture—­has been “thinned,” “unembedded, in a way of life now lost yet not so unmoored as to be meaningless.”18 Honig’s example, drawn from Jona­ than Lear’s Radical Hope, are the Crow Indians, who w ­ ere able to invent new “repertoires of resilience” in the face of the destruction of their way of life.19

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Radical hope is required when a traditional virtue ecol­ogy has been deprived of the transitional objects, routines, and stories formerly used to manage change for persons and communities.20 Whereas the norms, risks, and rewards of “thick courage” are self-­evident (one might die in b­ attle but be remembered as a hero), “thin courage” has become separated from inherited gender norms and stable protocols of recognition. “Thin courage” is often open to a greater range of social actors, but always demands to be defined and defended while promising l­ittle in return. Arendt’s courage to speak is already a form of thin courage, since its association with ­human appearing and the transience of words indicates the exile of post-­heroic courage into a highly contingent zone of values in formation. Hope, Honig argues, is what allows the actor who has lost every­ thing to commit herself to the ­limited dividends of this newly thinned courage. In the trial scene, Hermione exercises thin courage by defending and man­ ifesting her personhood in the flattened space of tyranny. Bereft of her ­children, she exercises radical hope in practicing her own “repertoire of resil­ ience” in her period of hibernation. In her final blessing of Perdita, Hermione asserts her own role in her survival: “Thou shalt hear that I . . . ​have preserved / Myself to see the issue” (5.3.126, 128–29). Actively keeping herself alive, it is as if the hopeful energy of her pensive concealment had not only sustained Hermione, but had also helped Perdita grow and prosper across the sea. Herm­ ione shares something with the outlook of a birth m ­ other who has both willed and accepted her separation from her child, yet donates m ­ ental time to imagining a distant life unfolding in an alien ­house­hold. Such active dream­ ing requires a rich symbolic matrix, a living set of narrative patterns drawn from lit­er­a­ture or liturgy (Moses in his basket,21 Jesus in his manger) as well as the local histories of survival and succor that subsist in h ­ ouse­holds and com­ munities in distress. Such a resource can belong to no single period since it is built, transmitted, and reactivated over time, times, and times of life, as a the­ saurus of transmissible and transformable story types and virtue-possibilities. Following the initiative of Sarah Beckwith, I suggested e­ arlier that the periodic approach to winters’ tales can and should embrace a broader spec­ trum of recurrences than t­ hose normally accounted for in source and adapta­ tion studies. Take, for example, science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and its adaptation as the 2016 film Arrival. The alien heptapods, brief visitors to Earth, do not live in linear time; instead ­these wheel-­like crea­ tures experience all moments si­mul­ta­neously. Their written language, dubbed Heptapod B, is composed out of single meandering strokes that contribute their tracery to multiple clauses: “The writing looked like fanciful praying



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mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escher­ esque lattice.”22 When the linguist Louise Banks learns how to write Hepta­ pod B, she finds herself moving between linear time and the heptapods’ chronic architecture, a double consciousness expressed in the story’s alternation be­ tween past-­tense narration and a present-­and future-­tense letter written to her ­daughter. This ­daughter is both not yet born and already dead: combin­ ing the Perdita of hope with the Mamillius of mourning, the child’s birth must be willed into being by a m ­ other who knows that she ­will lose her. Arrival, however, is not a tragedy but a romance, in the Shakespearean tradition, since even Louise’s anticipated divorce from her child’s ­father becomes a necessary part of the latticework that their lives w ­ ill have traced together. Far from trying to avert the losses to come, Louise w ­ ill “preserve herself to see the issue,” that is, lend her own imaginative and intellectual powers to help the f­ uture arrive. Groping for an analogy, Louise compares Heptapod B to “notations for ­music and dance,”23 and she turns to speech act theory to explain how she can both freely perform an action in the pre­sent and fulfill a script whose di­ rection she already knows. The Winter’s Tale reflects a similar dynamic: newly delivering the old tale of Demeter and Persephone, Shakespeare allows his story and its archetypes to predict and retrace each other, while also making sure that his own f­ ree adaptation of t­ hese materials remains ripe with surprise and possibility. This is also the challenge of actors, who must perform the same role ­every night, “devised / And played to take spectators,” as if it ­were new and fresh and real. The periodicity of lit­er­a­ture reflected in the composition and transmission of The Winter’s Tale traces a figure in which works of art must remain pre­sent to each other in the manner of a library or a gallery with­ out losing their urgency, imminence, and distinction, their sense of arrival. That urgency, I would argue, comes not from cleverness or costumes, but from the courage of a new reckoning. In a g­ reat per­for­mance or significant interpretation of a major work of art, e­ very choice and gesture shimmers with a sense of purposiveness, in a way that makes us consider our own actions and responses as part of a larger web of stories (the “Story of Your Life,” in Chiang’s Arendtian title; the “Winter’s Tale” in Shakespeare’s). Louise learns to contrast the causal explanations favored by scientists on this planet with the teleological perspective of the heptapods: “The physical attributes that the hep­ tapods found intuitive, like ‘action’ . . . ​­were meaningful only over a period of time. And ­these ­were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events . . . ​ one needed knowledge of the effects before the c­ auses could be initiated.”24 Teleology is anathema in most con­temporary criticism, as in Lee Patterson’s

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critique of periodization as “a teleological pattern” culminating in the pre­sent. Jeff Dolven, on the other hand, citing Charles Taylor, expresses an openness to teleology when he places the pro­cess of “finding or losing our orientation in moral space” at the heart of literary experience. Moral space is telos-­hungry, even when the goals themselves are undergoing sea changes.25 This aching de­ sire for direction and orientation resonates in Viola’s first line in Twelfth Night, “What country, friends, is this?” (1.2.1), but we can also find it in more unexpected offshoots of the romance proj­ect, such as the hit musical drama Fun Home. “I want to know what’s true, / Dig deep into who / And what / And why / And when / U ­ ntil now gives way to then,” sing Bruce and Alison, a latter-­day Pericles and Marina off the coast of their own island of Lesbos. The original graphic novel by Alison Bechdel was subtitled “A ­Family Tragi­ comic,” indicating her story’s participation in the romance tradition. Travel­ ing among multiple time frames, exploiting the power of adaptation in art and life, and discovering courage and hope out of conditions that might easily breed despair, this story of a lesbian d ­ aughter’s rebirth and her closeted f­ ather’s suicide participates in the community-­renewing periodicity of romance.26

Postsecularism and the F ­ uture of the Humanities While courage is a classical virtue stemming from the age of heroes, hope is one of Saint Paul’s three theological virtues, along with faith and charity. Cur­ rent writings on postsecularism emphasize hope as a virtue in need of renova­ tion.27 Postsecularism is associated with the ­later writings of Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, as well as with thinkers who challenge the identification of modernity with secularity from the alternative positions of postcolonial­ ism (Talal Asad) and feminism and ecol­ogy (Rosi Braidotti).28 Postsecular­ ism grasps the syncretic and universalizing yet fundamentally mixed character of the religious impulses gathered up in The Winter’s Tale. Equally postsecu­ lar is the play’s active use of mystery and won­der, recalling the self-­conscious media effects of Counter-­Reformation art and architecture. Among the most ritually compelling and aesthetically stagy of Shakespeare’s plays, The Winter’s Tale enacts theater’s originary weaning from sacred play through the worm­ wood of rationalism and the reconstitution of that relationship in forms of speech and embodiment that continue to draw on a holy repertoire. Postsec­ ularism helps account for the momentum in the romances t­oward redemp­ tion and forgiveness within a “thinned” and volatile virtue ecol­ogy that



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chooses to leave the work of repair unfinished so that audiences can pursue that work in their own h ­ ouse­holds and communities. Postsecularism describes the romances’ openness to the created world in its seasonal rhythms, their at­ titude of hope with re­spect to the possibilities of ­human history, and their pre-­and postconfessional relation to the law and communal norms that stresses translation, adaptation, and plurality. Efforts to determine Shakespeare’s beliefs (Anglican, Catholic, or Eras­ mian?) remain fundamentally periodizing insofar as they aim to secure Shake­ speare in a par­tic­u­lar moment defined by the Re­nais­sance, the Reformation, and the secularizing tendencies that emerged as skeptical responses to them. In new work, Anthony Oliveira calls this moment “Baroque,” a period term that supplements Re­nais­sance self-­fashioning with worlds and worlding, and answers Protestant Reformation with the Catholic Counter-­Reformation.29 The foundational image of baroque aesthetics is the spiral, with its gyration into unknown geographies and ­futures controlled by no single consciousness, yielding multiple perspectives along its twisting, aspiring line. Oliveira iden­ tifies the baroque with postsecularism, insofar as the spiral traverses and transmits multiple moments within a single work or artistic path. All of Shakespeare’s works might be said to be postsecular insofar as they configure scriptural, confessional, and humanist memories and impulses in a dynamic and future-­flowing manner. The romances, however, are also postsecular with re­spect to the more starkly existential efforts of the ­great tragedies. The ro­ mances occupy postsecularism not as necessity (the immanent frames of Mac­ beth and Lear) but as choice, as landscapes rendered newly hospitable to the phenomenology of miracle, won­der, and mystery within an affirmed theatri­ cal humanism. Postsecularism also describes the ecumenical and messianic mood of the romances; in Thomas Betteridge’s formulation, Shakespeare’s late plays construe a “a pre-­confessional world in which liturgical words, the lan­ guage of faith, united rather than divided Christians,” and are thus “post-­ confessional” in their attempt to lay down a new path among traditional, Reformed, and humanist envisionings of ­human capacity.30 I submit that post­ secularism can help capture Shakespeare’s entertainment of multiple religious epochs in an artistic medium—­public theater—­that both borrowed from sa­ cred lit­er­a­ture and liturgy and was run as a secular institution. Postsecular­ ism speaks to the sense expressed by many scholars that Shakespeare felt implicated in the bloody controversies of his day but also strived to both keep his distance from and make his peace with them. Above all, Shake­ speare’s dramatic poetry offers a living framework for analyzing, evaluating,

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and performing the postsecular predicament in which we find ourselves t­ oday, in which religion refuses to remain corralled within the closet of conscience to which liberalism has attempted to consign it. This work of reflective engage­ ment with the spiritual burden (both weight and refrain) of Shakespearean drama can happen in classrooms and theaters; in nontraditional settings, such as prisons, shelters, or ­houses of worship; and in scenes of life rendered sud­ denly pellucid by their coincidence with a Shakespearean prob­lem or image.

In an era of decreasing En­glish majors, fewer faculty lines, and a compression of traditional historical periods, we might ask what the new form of intellec­ tual and literary history ­will look like. Another question, however, also lies before our vocation: what approaches to Shakespeare beyond history and his­ toricism might enliven and unify literary study? Periodic Shakespeare asks art­ ists and audiences to consider their own sense of historical location and dislocation, to mark the ages of man as they reread Shakespeare over the course of a lifetime, and to participate in the cocreative work of judgment, memory, and imagination. What Dolven and Taylor call “the moral space” of lit­er­a­ ture is a zone fraught with affordances for the exercise of judgment and the imaginative testing of pos­si­ble paths ­toward a good life capable of manifold construals. To survive and flourish in a world riddled by in­equality, deception, distrust, cynicism, false choices, and a vanis­hing commons, modern communi­ ties need more than ever the resources of art to help imagine worlds, examine values, reset goals, practice re­spect, seek truth, and welcome strangers. Art is humanity’s greatest database: our source for once and ­future storytelling and ethical way-­finding. Databases, however, require upkeep as technological and economic advances and shifting po­liti­cal and economic priorities outpace the texts and languages entrusted to them. We need art, but art also needs us. Periodization is a form of conservation, as all history is. But conservation devoid of hope or courage ­will not protect the arts from predation, neglect, censorship, and abandonment. We renew art and art renews us whenever we lift each other up in postures of mutual dependence, conversation, and care in order to better understand the dilemmas before us. Shakespeare scholars cannot accept as the sole task of our work the historicization of texts within periods bracketed by dates and defined by a ­limited set of coherences. In­ stead, we need to incorporate into our critical, pedagogical, and public prac­ tices a broader appreciation of Shakespeare’s virtues as the plays pulse across epochs and media and through the lives of individuals and communities.

Chapter 12

John Dryden and Restoration Time Writing the Self Within Time, Through Time, Beyond Time Steven N. Zwicker

“The Age of Dryden”: by the late eigh­teenth ­century its first formulation could be heard, often in relation to Shakespeare, sometimes in the com­pany of Waller and Cowley; by the late nineteenth ­century—­for good or ill—­the Restora­ tion came firmly into Dryden’s possession.1 Then the formula begins to ap­ pear regularly in the first de­cades of the twentieth ­century, alas as a somewhat deadening epithet. Closer to our own time ­we’ve wanted to get rid of the idea, first ­because we ­don’t want an age to belong to a hegemon, we’d like it spread out more evenly, we’d like some unexpected t­ hings to turn up, and (more se­ riously) b­ ecause w ­ e’ve grown suspicious of ages altogether, suspicious of the idea that cultural time should take its name from a reigning monarch—­ political or literary. What­ever the Restoration seemed to be for ­those looking back, from within it was surely experienced in less certain terms and in less determined ways. Dryden himself would have been surprised to learn that the contentious world of late seventeenth-­century letters belonged to him—­not that he lacked an appreciation of his own gifts, but rather ­because that liter­ ary world was so deeply, so hopelessly contested. Of course “ages” are a con­ ve­nience, but they are also an evasion of the contradictions of cultural and po­liti­cal time, of social and economic time, and they are a denial of the idea that literary time might be understood, might be experienced, not as a chro­ nology with clear borders but as a more continuous arc—­continuous with where it might have come from, perhaps with where it might be g­ oing.

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And where did the Restoration—if it w ­ ere “The Age of Dryden”—­come from, and where was it g­ oing? The first question is easy enough to answer as po­liti­cal history. The Restoration came from the failure of the Protectorate re­ gime of Richard ­Cromwell, Tumbledown Dick as he, retrospectively, came to be known.2 As he tumbled down, Charles Stuart boarded the newly renamed ship the Royal Charles—it had been launched as the Naseby in 1655—­and sailed from a long exile in vari­ous Eu­ro­pean capitals onto the British thrones. But where did Restoration lit­er­a­ture come from, or rather, where did the idea of a distinctive literary culture belonging to 1660 and the de­cades beyond come from? And who w ­ ere the writers of this new literary regime? If the aim had been to set apart from the recent past a newly restored world of “Armes and Arts,” then what are we to do with t­hose writers who had not been in exile with their king; indeed, who had been busy writing on behalf of or accom­ modating to Cromwellian rule?3 That was surely true of the soon-­to-be laure­ ate, John Dryden, but it was also true of Edmund Waller, of Abraham Cowley, of Thomas Hobbes, and true as well of John Locke, who in the 1650s cele­ brated the “godly civility” of the Cromwellian regime,4 contributed verse to the anthology cele­brations of the Restoration and the marriage of Charles II, became secretary to the Whig grandee, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, and emerged as the Restoration’s most profound advocate of con­ tract theory—in all, a c­ areer of striking turns and counterturns. And what of Andrew Marvell, quin­tes­sen­tial Restoration satirist but, ­earlier, elegist of Francis Villiers (son of the first Duke of Buckingham), in­ imitable poet of garden retirement, master ventriloquist of po­liti­cal loyalism ­under Oliver ­Cromwell, scourge of court corruption ­under Charles II but as well a kind of apologist for that king, perhaps even allied with him in the strug­gles over liberty of tender consciences in the 1670s? Th ­ ese writers and many ­others lived through the turmoil of mid-­century, and that experience— of the Civil Wars, of Republic and Protectorate, of the return of monarchical rule—­shaped their understanding of civic authority and of aesthetics, what­ ever their overt and changing declarations of po­liti­c al allegiance may have been. That t­here is no Restoration without the Interregnum is a po­liti­cal tru­ ism, but it is also an under­lying though perhaps not fully recognized truth of Restoration literary culture. The 1640s and 1650s w ­ ere the occluded center of the 1660s and the years beyond. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was the masterstroke of the Restoration, erasing the Interregnum, banishing its mem­ ory, outlawing the names and terms of distinction that might identify the



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fellow travelers, even many of the malefactors, of the Cromwellian regime, and at the same time make ­those memories indelible. The past was denied, yet its memory was annually produced, provoked by Church of ­England ser­ mons delivered on January  30, and by the hundreds of pieces of print—­ broadsides, ballads, gospel treatises, sermons, and tracts—­that reminded readers of the Blessed Martyr and of the crimes of rebellion and regicide. What was one to do, forget or remember? Of course the answer was yes, and both. Did 1660 emerge suddenly from the tumults and experiments of the 1650s, or was it rather more continuous with the past? Was 1660 the first or the elev­ enth year of Charles II’s reign? And the troubled uncertainty of the status and meaning of the Interregnum provoked other questions about realms and ­orders of time: was one living in sacred or secular time, in a prophetic or providen­ tial order, within an eschatological scheme or in a materialist world, in close proximity to the latter days or in the long cycles of history? Th ­ ere had been a boom in apocalyptic thinking in the mid-1650s—­perhaps ­there would be again as the year 1666 approached—­but much of the frenetic predicting of the lat­ ter days had subsided even by the time of Oliver C ­ romwell’s death. It surely had been pos­si­ble in 1655 to imagine time at the brink of redemption—­A ndrew Marvell thought on that possibility—­but by the end of the summer of 1658, the latter days no longer seemed close at hand, still less so as Richard C ­ romwell’s rule stretched into the new year. Marvell had cast Oliver Cromwell’s demise in the shadow of a deeply responsive natu­ral world and u ­ nder the watchful eye of a providential order, but even he could muster neither prophecy nor providence for the Cromwellian succession. First came the ­father, then the son: “He threats no deluge, yet foretells a showre.”5 Is ­there a weaker verb in the lexicon of prophecy than “foretells”? And though it may seem some distance between calculating the date of the Second Coming and fixing the turning points of literary epochs, understanding the ways in which time was experienced by ­those writing in and through—­that is, imagining—­ its ­orders and schemes might help us to calibrate cultural epochs, however deeply or not t­ hose living through the shifting schemes of time w ­ ere aware of their movement.

“And Now ’Tis Time . . .” So we might begin by asking how Dryden i­magined time should be figured late in the summer of 1658? And when, we might also ask, does the opening

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of Heroique Stanzas, Dryden’s poem on Oliver C ­ romwell’s death, take place: “And now ’tis time; for their Officious haste, / Who would before have born him to the sky, / Like ­eager Romans ere all Rites w ­ ere past / Did let too soon the sacred Ea­gle fly.”6 The opening line conveys a sense of immediacy, but perhaps it also reflects a touch of embarrassment over the poem’s lateness to the commemorative scene. The Lord Protector died September 3, 1658, his funeral rites ­were performed on November 23, but Heroique Stanzas did not appear ­until the spring of 1659. On January  20, 1659, Henry Herringman entered “a booke called Three poems to the happy memory of the most renowned Oliver, late Lord Protector of this Comonwealth, by Mr Marvell Mr Driden, Mr Sprat” in the Stationers’ Register; the pamphlet included Heroique Stan­ zas and was to have included Andrew Marvell’s elegy on C ­ romwell, but when it reached print both Herringman and Marvell had dis­appeared from the volume.7 And if the line that opens Heroique Stanzas does not register the awkward­ ness of the poem’s late appearance, perhaps it asserts a strategic difference between haste and timeliness—­earlier verse had rushed ­Cromwell into a Ro­ man afterlife; Dryden’s verse appearing now is just on time. The pre­sent tense into which the poem delivers its commemorative lines is stripped of the prom­ ise of election, even of just rewards, let alone apotheosis or transfiguration. And h ­ ere is the yet more puzzling conclusion of Heroique Stanzas: His Ashes in a peacefull Urne ­shall rest, His Name a ­great example stands to show How strangely high endeavours may be blest, Where Piety and valour joyntly goe.8 At its close, Dryden anchors his poem in a quizzical, paradoxical pre­sent tense: does “strangely” modify “high” or “blest”? In ­either case, the poem simply drifts ­toward its conclusion. The question at C ­ romwell’s death was no longer if the g­ reat day had come, but, simply, what was next? And if com­ parison with the vestal Tarpeia is not unsettling enough—­“Till he, pres’d down by his own weighty name, / Did, like the Vestall, ­under spoyles decease”9—­what are we to make of urn burial at the poem’s close? Yes, the lines circle back to the Roman analogy at the opening of Heroique Stanzas, but funeral rites for this soldier of the Lord of Hosts would hardly have in­ cluded cremation.10



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As importantly, the opening quatrain of Heroique Stanzas announces the secular realm in which the ­whole of the elegy is to unfold. ­There is nothing in Heroique Stanzas of redemptive history, nothing of the providential order of time that marks the elegy that Andrew Marvell wrote but did not publish in print during his lifetime. If the life celebrated by Heroique Stanzas took place ­under the aegis of a higher power, it was Roman fortuna rather than sacred history. Nor is it only the Roman analogy at the opening of the poem, or the comparison with Pompey, or with Alexander, or with the vestal Tarpeia; it is rather that the entirety of Heroique Stanzas has a secular and materialist cast. The elegy cools off the apocalyptic temper, the apocalyptic temporality of the 1650s. The now of the first line, the pre­sent tense of the last line, the account of C ­ romwell as warrior prince subduing the continent: the poem is cast wholly within a secular order strangely predictive of ­those dark Roman shadows that would cross the ending of another of Dryden’s elegies, the wonderful verse that he wrote for John Oldham’s Remains, “Once more, hail and farewel; fare­ wel, thou young, / But ah too short, Marcellus of our Tongue; / Thy Brows with Ivy, and with Laurels bound; / But Fate and gloomy Night encompass thee around.”11 No redemption, no futurity, but a mere conjuring up of the past—­ that is what the Roman analogy has on offer. Was it an ending or a beginning? When Oliver C ­ romwell died on September  3, one of the pressing questions surely had been: in what order of time would they now live, ­those who had sur­ vived a regime carry­ing the promise of a new imaginary, a new order of time? At the end of Heroique Stanzas ­there are no predictions, no prophecies. We are back to square one, firmly—or, rather, quizzically—in the pre­sent tense of the poem’s openings. How strangely indeed high endeavors may be blest. But we should not press secularization too far. Perhaps this poem marks a kind of threshold experience in the calculation of histories and chronolo­ gies, and perhaps we can read Heroique Stanzas as predicting a literary cul­ ture that would put prophecy aside, that had tired of the apocalypse: “We have been so long together bad En­glishmen.”12 ­These words too, from Dryden’s An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, point to a scheme of time secular and sequential, a chronology of literary ages and styles: “­There is scarce an Humour, a Charac­ ter, or any kind of Plot, which they have not us’d. All comes sullied or wasted to us: and ­were they to entertain this Age, they could not make so plenteous treatments out of such decay’d Fortunes.”13 Yet alongside this conjuring up of a knowing and ironic age, we find some recuperation of prophetic time in Dryden’s poem on the event of the Restoration itself: “And now times whiter

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Series is begun,” the “now” of Astræa Redux recalls, perhaps rethinks, that other assertion of the pre­sent tense, of time and timeliness, “And now ’tis time; for their Officious haste.”14

“In Pious Times . . .” Of course Dryden had found a way of recapturing the prophetic ­future for the poems that he wrote on the return of Charles II. Two de­cades l­ater he would have a deeper, more complex encounter with sacred history, for in the early 1680s he would bathe that history in ironies that no one, Dryden included, would have predicted in 1660. Back then he had urged the king’s marriage on behalf of a nation waiting rapturously for the “souls of Kings unborn”—­the seal of lineal descent.15 It did not quite work out that way, and when Dryden returned to the prob­lem of unborn kings in 1681, he did so neither in the pre­ sent tense of Heroique Stanzas nor in the soft language of restoration and re­ newal, but with a deeply ironic recasting of En­glish politics as sacred history. When are we? That question seemed impor­tant to ask at the opening of Heroique Stanzas, no less so for the opening of Absalom and Achitophel. When does this poem take place? We know that Absalom and Achitophel was written over the summer months of 1681 and put to sale by the m ­ iddle of ­ eople picking up Dryden’s poem that November that November,16 but few p would have thought of their own days as “pious times”—­rather the opposite, to judge by the verses written on the king’s whores and his whoring.17 Exclu­ sion had been defeated by the autumn of 1681, but the prob­lem of monarchi­ cal succession had not been resolved. Charles II had illegitimate heirs, but no child of his marriage with Catherine of Braganza had been brought to term. Absalom and Achitophel begins not in the London of the early 1680s but in a distant land and in a patriarchal age of natu­ral piety, of plenitude and polygamy. When w ­ ere t­ hose pious times? When was polygamy made a sin in Scripture? David took wives and concubines; Solomon’s wives num­ bered seven hundred, his concubines three hundred, but who’s counting? And by the time we are this far into the poem, con­temporary readers would certainly have discerned another set of characters and actions lurking be­ neath the biblical surface. The poem may well have been about King David, but it was not only about the biblical king, his wife, and wayward son, the wicked politician Achitophel, and the band of loyal followers; it was also of course about Charles II, his wife and his concubines, his wayward son, the



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Whig operatives in Parliament and in the City of London, and the band of Charles II’s loyal followers. That said, no one reading the poem in 1681 would have simply discarded the husk of sacred time, once the identity of that history had been discerned, for the game was to discern not only con­temporary figures and events but also the resonance between past and pre­sent, the character of the analogy, both simili­ tudes and differences, as Dryden ­shaped his lines in the interest of plea­sure and puzzlement and perhaps a touch of blasphemy. The mood is expansive and flex­ ible, the syntax wonderfully elastic, allowing the long breath of the first sentence to stretch out over a number of lines in which syntax and argument together fashion a sense of plenitude and plea­sure, a sense as well of time as attenuation. This is not to deny that the poem wishes to fix the de­cades of Charles II’s rule within the frame of sacred history, but rather to ask, what sort of sacred history, and to won­der about the degree to which irony compromises sanctity and to notice as well that this sacred history promises neither incarnation nor redemp­ tion. Perhaps the notes sounded by the narrator at the conclusion of King David’s speech produce some such effect, though for Dr. Johnson, they conjured up not so much po­liti­cal redemption as the figure of the knight of enchanted lore blow­ ing his horn: “Once more the Godlike David was Restor’d.”18 Once more, indeed! Time moves in cycles, by analogy, in parallel fash­ ion. The point of this allegory was to discover not only the con­temporary ap­ plications of sacred history but the meaning of analogy itself: recuperation and recovery, yes, but also, and more simply, repetition and recurrence, the template of one history layered with surprising ease over another. And recov­ ery of the past within the pre­sent is an argument about time itself: “Hence­ forth a Series of new time began, / The mighty Years in long Pro­cession ran: / Once more the Godlike David was Restor’d, / And willing Nations knew their Lawfull Lord.”19 The closing lines of the poem seem to acknowledge that we have been h ­ ere already, the adverbs—­“once,” “more”—­a weary sign of that recognition. In the wan spirit of this gesture, we can hear a kind of wishful­ ness, a wistfulness about prophecy. But wishing it ­were so is also an ac­cep­ tance that it is not quite so.

“In the Ripeness of Time . . .” We might be surprised to discover that phrase “in the ripeness of time,” and the similar phrase “in pro­cess of time,” anywhere among the caustic words

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and impatient rhythms of the Preface that Dryden wrote for Religio Laici (1682), the poet’s embrace of the Anglican confession. Yet a short way into his argument, the phrases appear in close proximity to one another.20 Of course Dryden makes a show of careful assessment at the beginning of the Preface, weighing and balancing arguments and issues. The clock is ticking faintly and Dryden is taking his time, standing at an oblique ­angle to what he w ­ ill even­ tually reveal as his stinging critique of Roman Catholics and Dissenters. But as he approaches questions addressing the possibility of salvation for heathens—­ salvation prior to the revelation that took place in “so small a spot of ground as that of Palæstine”—he muses on the unlikeliness and unfairness of a scheme of redemption that reserves salvation for t­ hose who by accident of history and geography could have heard the name of Jesus Christ at the Incarnation.21 It is not that the Messiah’s birth is not mentioned, or that the Incarnation or Christ’s suffering on mankind’s behalf is wholly absent from this profession of faith, but what is striking about the passages that mention t­hese events, and in the most fleeting manner, is the way that Dryden has removed so much of what we might think of as the passions from the Passion, from ­these refer­ ences to the divine. Indeed Christ’s name is wholly missing from this poem about mercy, salvation, and eternity. And why should the devil, Dryden jokes in the Preface to Religio Laici, have had the first choice among t­hose souls and only then, a­ fter waiting his turn, does God get to choose? The tone is wonderfully light, touchingly ironic, but the prob­lem seems serious enough, at least in the setting of a confession of faith and especially in the context of Charles II’s efforts to achieve religious toleration. For the salvation of heathen souls serves as a kind of stalking h ­ orse, an argument against the intolerance of the Preface to the Athanasian Creed, and more espe­ cially against the intolerance of the High Church party that had firmly opposed Charles II’s moves on behalf of liberty of tender conscience. And fi­nally, the salvation of heathens serves as a way for Dryden to broach the issue of ­those ­things necessary for salvation; they turn out to be but “ few, and plain.”22 The prob­lem of the fate of heathen souls allowed Dryden to interpret the pro­cess of salvation not as a scheme punctuated by the drama—­the sudden intervention—of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but as a slow unveiling of the tenets of divine truth across the millennia. Having chal­ lenged the notion that all ­those who lived before the Incarnation or beyond the hearing of the Gospel should be consigned to Hell, Dryden offers an al­ ternative scheme—­t hat what the sons of Noah learned of revealed religion “might continue for some Ages in the w ­ hole Posterity,” that the princi­ples of



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natu­ral worship w ­ ere “faint remnants or d ­ ying flames of reveal’d Religion,” that the heathen phi­los­o­phers wrote in a kind of “Twilight of Revelation.”23 What­ever its theological merit, Dryden’s discussion of heathen souls allowed him to unfold a vision of redemption that stretches infinitely across time, a vision that denies the apocalyptic moment, that softens the bound­aries of sal­ vation, and celebrates the simplicity of Gospel truths. Dryden makes a show of plotting the origins of his layman’s profession in a reading of Richard Simon’s Critical History of the Old Testament, but the intricate m ­ atter of the textual transmission of the Scriptures—­and the equally vexing prob­lem of the oral transmission of Gospel truths—is dismissed as ir­ relevant to salvation.24 The Scriptures may not be everywhere f­ree from cor­ ruption, but they are sufficient and clear and entire “In all t­ hings needfull to be ­ ere denying the efficacy of salvation known.”25 It is not exactly as if Dryden w history, but rather that his entire argument is premised on a very dif­fer­ent—­a slower, more attenuated, infinitely more extensive—­u nderstanding of the schemes within which the Gospel truths are revealed to mankind. So refash­ ioning redemptive time allowed Dryden to advocate personal charity even while arguing on behalf of the king’s policy of liberty of tender consciences and then, climactically, discovering that private disputes and obscure points, indeed points of some spiritual force and distinction, o­ ught to give way to the embrace of civic religion. On the one hand ­there is the poem’s slow unveiling of that history across time, a kind of stretching out of salvation history that seems nearly to erase the drama of the Incarnation, the Passion, and the Res­ urrection of Jesus Christ. And on the other hand, this virtuoso of impatience reclaims the rhythms and satiric point of civic argument as he reviews the po­ liticized motives and monetized aims of papists, sectaries, and separatists in a mood at once anti-­apocalyptic and anti-­authoritarian, not so very distant from the very un-­apocalyptic mood of Heroique Stanzas or from the teasing sense of Old Testament time and typologies in Absalom and Achitophel. Are we near­ ing that place at the end of Dryden’s ­career when he would muse on the dis­ appointments altogether of times past and ­future, kissing time farewell as he glimpses a temporality beyond the schemes of history?

“Time to Begin a New” “Thy Wars brought nothing about; / Thy Lovers w ­ ere all untrue, / ’Tis well an Old Age is out, / And time to begin a New.”26 So Dryden wrote near the end of

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his life, near the end of “his” age, and in a wearily anti-­apocalyptic mood. It is not just that he had lost the laureateship, or that the Stuarts and, in par­tic­ u­lar, his royal patron—­for what­ever they and he w ­ ere worth—­had been put to flight, or that the former laureate was forced back to the stage to earn a living, or that revolutions and restorations had produced such a medley of dis­ appointments. We can also feel the waning experience of time itself in the verses that Dryden wrote for a per­for­mance of Fletcher’s play The Pilgrim, both the circles and cycles of time and its unspooling.27 And not only in t­ hese last verses: the sense of time unspooling also suffused the beautiful prose that Dryden wrote in his last year, the Preface to that anthology of translations that he called Fables. ­There, sentences wander, not aimlessly, but digressively, and ­there, digression itself has been elevated to a princi­ple of composition, to an aesthetic, and also to a way of coping with, if not the end of time, then the end of his own time. Perhaps Dryden was imagining that he could slow time with digression, slow its disappointments with the fantasy of literary eternity in the dream of the sociable companionship of poets that he proffers in the Preface to Fables: We have our Lineal Descents and Clans, as well as other Families: Spencer more than once insinuates, that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus’d into his Body; and that he was begotten by him Two hun­ dred years a­ fter his Decease. Milton has acknowleg’d to me, that Spencer was his Original; and many besides my self have heard our famous Waller own, that he deriv’d the Harmony of his Numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloign, which was turn’d into En­glish by Mr. Fairfaix. But to return: . . . ​In the mean time, to follow the Thrid of my Discourse.28 Of course Dryden had long indulged a leisurely manner in his prose writing. He had, early on, written the most perfectly s­haped of compositions in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667); despite his endorsement t­ here of the cornu­ copia and disorder of En­glish dramatic forms, the Essay itself displays the for­ mal perfection of classical theater. And other pieces of Dryden’s prose display the balance and counterpoint of the Essay. But when he wrote the Preface to Fables (1700), he was hearing and making a dif­fer­ent kind of m ­ usic, not coun­ terpoint but extenuation. And the digressive, improvisatory moods and moves of the Preface anticipate the mixtures and indirection of the verse col­ lection itself: “The Nature of a Preface is rambling; never wholly out of the



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Way, nor in it.”29 So it was with Fables, neither wholly out of the way nor in it, where neither chronology nor theme organizes the w ­ hole, that wandering train of translations and original verse: Chaucer standing at the front and re­ curring through the collection; Ovid discovered next to Homer; two of Dryden’s own poems—­meditations on mortality fashioned as verse tributes—­ appearing early in the volume; a tale from Boccaccio appearing at the end, and then at the close an imitation of Chaucer where Dryden praises the iso­ late figure of the good parson—­a lone, “He needs no Foyl: But shines by his own proper Light.”30 Fables has long puzzled students of this poet—­what princi­ple of se­lection, what sort of order might be at work in this anthology? To that question, though we have been reluctant to listen, Dryden has given an answer at the opening of his Preface: Tis with a Poet, as with a Man who designs to build, and is very ex­ act, as he supposes, in casting up the Cost beforehand: But, gener­ ally speaking, he is mistaken in his Account, and reckons short of the Expence he first intended: He alters his Mind as the Work pro­ ceeds, and w ­ ill have this or that Con­ve­nience more, of which he had not thought when he began. So has it hapned to me; I have built a House, where I intended but a Lodge: Yet with better Success than a certain Nobleman, who beginning with a Dog-­kennel, never liv’d to finish the Palace he had contriv’d.31 The dream is of a permanent abode, a sheltering space, a community of poets sharing the language that Dryden has provided for them. He allows us to hear intimations of a structure that perhaps lasts through time, perhaps beyond time; but this is a fantasy and the poet knows that. He has fashioned neither a sacred structure nor a civic order, but merely in the end and at the end an aesthetic, an order of language, ­imagined with ­those touches of irony and self-­ irony that so distinguish his work, “very exact, as he supposes.” Dryden has built himself a ­house where he intended but a lodge, adjusting ­things as he went along: an a­ ctual description of the method of composition of Fables we might suppose, but something more as well. The poet claims neither priestly robes nor prophetic election; he is making no argument on behalf of crown or state, claiming no vocation beyond language itself, merely carry­ing poets of antiquity and foreign tongues and older idioms into his own language and linguistic order. And he claimed not only ancient poets and ­those writing in

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foreign tongues as his own but contemporaries and near contemporaries as well, t­ hose who wrote close to his own time and in his own language. Dryden had no master plan for constructing this h ­ ouse of language, but he seems to have intuited, to have understood, that any efforts to claim time as his own would be defeated. The only stop to time—­fragile though it might be—­was the ­house of lan­ guage: “I carry not out the Trea­sure of the Nation, which is never to return: but what I bring from Italy, I spend in ­England: ­Here it remains, and ­here it circulates; for if the Coyn be good, it w ­ ill pass from one hand to another. I Trade both with the Living and the Dead, for the enrichment of our Native Language.”32 So Dryden wrote in the Dedication of his translation of the Aeneid; he understood what was on offer to a poet heralding neither the end of time nor the beginning of a new day. Ovid and Homer and Boccaccio enabled Dryden to reaffirm his En­glish identity, but what beyond the socia­ ble imaginary of letters remained? The poet urged that he had always been “studious to promote the Honour of my Native Country,”33 but we might ask what it meant to withdraw from the claims of politics and salvation and to write merely on behalf of language and letters. It’s not just that Dryden had abandoned po­liti­cal time and salvation history to shelter in a safer sphere, that he had exchanged the urgent rhythms of the state—to say nothing of the consequences of eternity—­for poetics. We might also think that he had given up on notions of redemption altogether—in the end ­there would be no re­ deeming of time, ­there would be only language.

“The Age of Dryden” “The Age of Dryden”: he would have liked that, and he had, a­ fter all, come rather close to the claim when he wrote in the 1670s of the triumph of his conception and practice of heroic drama, “­W hether Heroique verse o­ ught to be admitted into serious Playes, is not now to be disputed: ’tis already in pos­ session of the Stage.”34 His verse reigned supreme in the theater, and he was busy fabricating the idioms of his age. Dryden had begun his c­ areer by locat­ ing himself and his writing conspicuously within time, signaling a sense of both timing and timeliness. Forty-­one years l­ater he stepped out of time. The wonderful mirroring is adventitious (“And now ’tis time” . . . ​“and time to be­ gin a New”) but Dryden’s late writing bespeaks an awareness of where he had come from and where he had come to, not only that he might once have



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claimed the age as his own—­whatever his contemporaries thought of that idea, and many w ­ ere not friendly to the claim—­but that he was also living within the disappointments of time, and that he was ­running out of time. “The Age of Dryden”: he would have smiled ruefully at the phrase, what­ever the poets celebrating his memory in Luctus Britannici would assert about the eternity of verse and of the staying power of this poet’s name.35 We have heard recently of “Milton in the Long Restoration,” an eloquent case about the presence of that beleaguered poet in the Restoration and long ­after, when the laureate of the En­glish revolution would assert his own dom­ inance over the literary imagination of l­ater ages.36 Is ­there a case to be made for Dryden living dominantly not only in the contentious de­cades of the late seventeenth c­ entury but long a­ fter, in and through an age that we might well call “the long Restoration”? The case is uncertain, not simply ­because of the changing taste and the politics and economics of the literary canon, but also ­because ­those repeated commonplaces—­the age of reason, the growth of skep­ ticism, the pro­gress of secularization and modernization, the triumph of Au­ gustan poetics—­seem now to carry less descriptive value for the Restoration itself or predictive force for an age we might think of as “the long Restora­ tion” than once they did, and not only b­ ecause of what we have learned about the continuity of the confessional state or the per­sis­tence of dissenting spiri­ tualities. The calendar of salvation history had indeed been recalculated by the end of the seventeenth c­ entury, and apocalyptic temporalities banished to the sidelines, but the notion that the triumph of Restoration letters can best be heard in the mockery of mock epics or that the heroic couplet determined a sense of temporality for a­ fter ages seems too narrow a way of figuring e­ ither the aesthetics of the Restoration or the meaning of Dryden’s presence—­heroic or ironic and attenuating—in the literary and social culture of his own time and ­after. Dryden the anthologist was a presence in the last de­cades of the seven­ teenth ­century and beyond, but that is hardly what we have in mind by “The Age of Dryden.” And how does “The Age of Dryden” make sense of the Roman Catholic writing—­the clouded temporalities and the darkened futurity of The Hind and the Panther? Or of the former laureate subsumed in the voices of antiquity—­the late phase of Dryden’s ­career almost wholly given over to the ventriloquism of translation? What of the inimitable prose, the beautiful iro­ nies and self-­deprecations of his essays throughout the ­career—­where can ­these be heard in a­ fter ages? Wonderful as the prose of cousin Swift may be, it owes very ­little to that relative whom he mocked so mercilessly in The ­Battle

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of the Books. And the origins of the novel—­that much debated, much con­ tested piece of literary history—­are they anywhere to be found in the many volumes of Dryden’s works? And what of the proj­ect of translation, begun in the apprentice work of allusion and quotation in Annus Mirabilis and carried to a triumphant conclusion in The Works of Virgil? Pope’s Homer owes a debt to The Works of Virgil, but we might won­der if the debt is not to be discerned more in the entrepreneurship of Jacob Tonson’s scheme of subscription pub­ lication than in the aesthetics of Dryden’s translation.37 Are we at risk of occluding change or denying Dryden’s characteristic pres­ ence altogether as we spin out the complexities and contradictions of this age, or the contradictions of this c­ areer and of the years in which it unfolded? Th ­ ere is of course no question of Dryden’s presence in the de­cades between the re­ turn of monarchy and the end of the ­century: his busy agency, his presence as provocateur and as victim of polemical assault in the lists of literary controversy—­there is ample testimony to that. Hugh Macdonald’s John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (1939) devotes nearly as much space to his superbly documented section of “Drydeniana” as to de­ scriptive bibliography—­could this have been the case for any other author of the period?38 Dryden’s presence in t­ hose de­cades is thick and palpable, often funny, no doubt humiliating—in the giving and the taking—at the time, but we might won­der if even this deeply documentable presence quite adds up to “The Age of Dryden,” or, rather, if this sense of literary dominance o­ ught not itself to be balanced against the more attenuated experience of epoch and age within the writings of the poet himself, the external counterpointed against the internal experience of time? He was skeptical, we might think too full of cool appraisal as he launched that c­ areer, turning away from the apocalyptic thinking of the 1650s, and skeptical in the turns and counterturns of the masque that he wrote for Fletcher’s Pilgrim as he left the stage. But does the desacralization of time or the rule of irony define the w ­ hole of an age that supposedly began in 1660 and came to an end in . . . ? And on whose behalf or on behalf of what ideas do we want a period des­ ignation for t­hese years? ­Those returning from exile in 1660 wanted to de­ nominate a new age, though of course they also wanted to deny newness. And when the c­ entury turned, or when William III died and a Stuart came again to the throne, or when that rule ended in 1714, ­there ­were calls for a new reg­ ister of time. Yet for all its con­ve­nience and po­liti­cal value, then and now, for all the economies of its shorthand designations, is ­there—­beyond polemics and convenience—­something to be gained from the notion of literary peri­



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ods, of this literary period, this “Age of Dryden”? To write a cultural history of the de­cades between one revolution and another, between the 1640s and the 1680s, we might want some notion of the motifs that bind the de­cades to one another, a notion perhaps best taken from outside, from above, rather than from in the midst. But if we turn our inquiry in another direction, asking not ­after the descriptive or predictive power of such period designations but what it might have felt like to live within the flow of its time, within its velocities and reversals and disappointments, its gathering force or unspooling inevita­ bility, to listen, that is, to t­ hose tempos and temporalities from within the texts of this poet, we might gather a dif­fer­ent and I think more nuanced sense of a literary age, of this literary age, this short or long Restoration, this “Age of Dryden.” Yes, the enterprise is clear—­how ­else would editions of Dryden run to so many volumes—­four volumes in Malone’s edition of Dryden’s prose in 1800; eigh­teen volumes of The Works in the g­ reat nineteenth-­century edition by Walter Scott; twenty volumes in the instance of the California Dryden.39 And the ambition, the w ­ ill to write, the w ­ ill to appear, must have been pro­ found not simply to survive but to excel in the ways that Dryden so obviously did. But we must also allow the ser­viceability, and not simply ser­viceability but the willingness to shift course, to shuffle patrons, to accept f­ avor but not to return it in kind, to change when the wind blew in a new direction—or an old. And we must not forget ­either the sharpness or the aggressions of the sati­ rist and controversialist—to be sure, typical of his “age”—­but similarly we should remember his steadily attenuating sense of epoch, and as well the ways in which he revealed his sense of time unwinding as the end of the ­century approached, and the end not only of the c­ entury but of his own time. He wrote that it was well an old age is out and time to begin a new, but he knew as he wrote t­hose lines that it would no longer be his age—if he ever believed in that idea; “a new” would be quite without his pen.

Chapter 13

Did the En­glish Seventeenth C ­ entury ­Really End at 1660? Subaltern Perspectives on the Continuing Impact of the En­glish Civil Wars Mihoko Suzuki

As literary scholars, we have become more reflective concerning the method­ ologies with which we study lit­er­a­ture. Most saliently, we explic­itly consider a literary text’s relationship to its historical contexts and the use of theoretical frameworks for literary analy­sis. At the same time, as we have called into ques­ tion assumptions about the literary canon, we have also begun to reexamine the chronological framework that governs our study and demarcates our pro­ fessional work. The questioning of canon and chronology need not be discrete conversations. In fact, the expansion of the seventeenth-­century literary canon to include more texts by ­women and popu­lar authors, I ­will argue, prompts us to reconsider the historiographical positioning of the Restoration as an event experienced as a major cultural watershed. The pervasive assumption that ­people who lived through the restoration of the monarchy experienced it as a dramatic po­liti­cal reversal that caused the population to somehow forget the En­glish Civil Wars and the Commonwealth—as Charles II’s Act of Oblivion commanded—­has led to the creation of the “Restoration” as its own histori­ cal category. However, the writings of subaltern men and w ­ omen suggest that the Restoration was understood as less of an epoch-­defining event than we have presumed, and that the impact of the En­glish Civil Wars continued to resonate well ­after 1660.



Did the En­glish Seventeenth ­Century ­Really End at 1660? 231

­Those of us specializing in seventeenth-­century En­glish lit­er­a­ture have contended with an inherited periodization that ­couples the last four de­cades of the c­ entury, a­ fter the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, with the early eigh­ teenth ­century. This periodization has been and remains stubbornly institu­ tionalized, as is illustrated by recent discussions about restructuring the Modern Language Association (MLA). In the MLA Divisions—­now renamed Forums—­that or­ga­nize sessions for the annual conference, the Restoration had long been coupled with the early eigh­teenth ­century, leaving the Divi­ sion on Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture with only the first sixty years of the ­century. Given the need to make room for new and emerging fields of scholarship, such as the Global South and Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities, in 2014 the MLA established a Working Group on the Revision of Divisions and Discussion Groups to rethink established designations, which had last been examined in 1972. The Working Group suggested combining En­glish Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture Excluding Shakespeare and Seventeenth-­ Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture into the newly created Early Modern En­glish Lit­ er­a­ture. Similarly, the Working Group proposed a reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the two eighteenth-­century En­glish lit­er­a­ture Divisions (Restoration and Early Eigh­ teenth ­Century; ­L ater Eigh­teenth ­Century) as one Forum, the Long Eigh­ teenth ­Century. Significantly, neither of t­hese proposals won the assent of members of the existing Divisions, indicating the tenacity of ­these frameworks of periodization. The proposal for the Long Eigh­teenth ­Century in par­tic­u­lar attracted a wide range of overwhelmingly and even passionately negative re­ actions from eighteenth-­century scholars: one of the recurring responses was that the Restoration (typically dated from 1660 to roughly 1690) would some­ how be “dissolved,” “lost,” or “orphaned” if it ­were included, as would seem sensible on the face of it, with the seventeenth ­century. As a result of ­these numerous (and vociferous) objections, the Restoration still remains grouped with the early eigh­teenth c­ entury, exemplifying the per­sis­tence of traditional periodization even in the face of emergent new approaches. I hope in this essay to provide a commentary on this tenaciously institu­ tionalized periodization and to offer a rationale for considering the Restora­ tion together with the mid-­century En­glish Civil Wars, Revolution—­the execution of Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy—­and Common­ wealth that preceded it, rather than separating the two by considering it as a prelude to the eigh­teenth ­century. This line of thinking must negotiate the idea of historical rupture as a rationale for the defining of discrete periods. In

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a lead article among a cluster in the 2012 PMLA titled “The Long and the Short: Prob­lems in Periodization,” German historian David Blackbourn ac­ knowledges that “periodization has been a form of contestation.”1 He goes on to argue that “the idea of the long ­century has explanatory power ­because it makes sophisticated claims for the unity of a given period. . . . ​Or it provides the means of questioning ruptures and continuities.”2 In Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of En­glish Studies, Ted Under­ wood argues that periodization in literary studies has traditionally been based on the notion of historical discontinuity and contrast, accompanied by an as­ sumption that the concept of historical continuity is by definition regressive, ­because it has usually been associated with aristocratic genealogy and tradi­ tion.3 He suggests, however, that “fantasies” about discontinuity and contrast have recently witnessed waning prestige. According to Underwood, “Literary studies’ long reliance on a rhe­toric of contrast has in fact left the discipline with blind spots that scholars are now f­ ree to address.”4 Agreeing with Black­ bourn on the importance of the po­liti­cal in periodization, I suggest that his and Underwood’s calling attention to the scholarly emphasis on rupture, dis­ continuity, and contrast applies to the widely accepted assumption that the Restoration of Charles II marks a decisive break from the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth. I w ­ ill argue for the “unity” of the seventeenth c­ entury by demonstrating the continuities between the Restoration and the En­glish Civil Wars—­the “blind spot” that needs to be addressed. Ultimately, I w ­ ill show that the emphasis on a discontinuous history rubs against the ways ­people who lived through the time period experienced it, as evidenced by their own writ­ ings. As Katie Trumpener states in the final article of the PMLA cluster on periodization, it is impor­tant to heed “individual subjective clocks” and “a ­human mea­sure­ment of time [that] supersed[es] more abstract notions of pe­ riod,” in order to “capture something of the confused, even frightened, sense of contingency with which every­one experiences the pre­sent.”5

An Analogous Prob­lem: Re­nais­sance and Reformation Before I turn to this question of the place of the Restoration in En­glish liter­ ary studies, I would like to suggest that a parallel dichotomy between discon­ tinuity and continuity has been addressed in the periodization of the Re­nais­sance and Reformation in Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture and history. The very in­ fluential distinction, established by the nineteenth-­century Swiss historian



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Jacob Burckhardt—in which the Re­nais­sance of the texts and culture of clas­ sical antiquity necessarily presupposed a death of the medieval “Dark Ages”—­ was challenged in 1927 by the medieval historian Charles Homer Haskins, who first identified the Re­nais­sance of the twelfth ­century in France, as the period during which education, in par­tic­u­lar, the study of classical languages, was promoted.6 Antonio Gramsci, like Haskins, called attention to an e­ arlier, twelfth-­ century Re­nais­sance: “Latin culture flourished in the schools of France in the twelfth ­century with a magnificent growth of grammatical and rhetorical stud­ ies.”7 More significant for my investigation of notions of continuity and dis­ continuity in periodization, Gramsci critiqued Burckhardt for his assertion that a decisive break occurred between a religious M ­ iddle Ages and a secular Re­nais­sance: “The attitude [­toward religion] of [Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati] was much the same as the medieval scholars.”8 In addition, he sug­ gests that if the Re­nais­sance ­were to be considered a “restoration”—of clas­ sical antiquity—­“ like e­ very restoration, it assimilated and developed” what it had superseded.9 Perhaps most fundamentally, Gramsci challenged Burckhardt’s claim of universalism—­that the Re­nais­sance discovered “man” or that it formed the foundation of the “modern mind”—by demystifying the Re­nais­sance as be­ ing dominated by cultural elites whose concerns w ­ ere alien to what he calls the “­people nation” (popolo-­nazione).10 Based on an understanding of the ide­ ological valence of languages, Gramsci’s Re­nais­sance, then, represents a con­ flict between the antibourgeois reaction of Latinity (in the papacy, for example) and the bourgeois inflection of the vernacular, rather than the serene trium­ phalism of Burckhardt’s Re­nais­sance.11 By contrast with the prevailing view of the Re­nais­sance as progressive, Gramsci argues that in Italy, it was “a reac­ tionary prelude” to the Counter-­Reformation and the oppression of the ­people (though he acknowledges that elsewhere in Eu­rope, the Reformation—­which he understands to have been a reaction against the Renaissance—­led to a more progressive outcome).12 Gramsci’s reflections on the Re­nais­sance are useful for my own analy­sis in a number of ways: not only his emphasis on continuity over discontinuity but also his insight that the l­ater period (the Italian Re­nais­sance in his case; the En­glish Restoration in mine) “assimilates and develops” ele­ments of the preceding period (the M ­ iddle Ages in his case; the En­glish Civil Wars in mine). Moreover, Gramsci’s focus on the conflict between the elite and the popu­lar in his analy­sis of the Re­nais­sance informs my understanding of the contest

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between courtly and subaltern forms of writing in the period ­after 1660 as well as of Restoration lit­er­a­ture as primarily arising from the court of Charles II. Gramsci’s notion of the Reformation as a reaction against the Re­nais­sance is not the prevailing historical understanding of the Reformation. For, by con­ trast with the Re­nais­sance, which radiated from Italy to other Eu­ro­pean countries and cultures, the Protestant Reformation, dated to Luther’s posting of his ninety-­five ­theses in 1517, centers on Germany, with its effects spread­ ing from ­there to other Northern Eu­ro­pean states. ­Because of its challenge to the hegemony of the Catholic papacy and its popu­lar origins among the Ger­ man peasantry, the Reformation as a period category does not carry the elite inflection that the Re­nais­sance does—in accord with Gramsci’s understand­ ing of the Reformation as more progressive than the Re­nais­sance. Just as Gramsci argued for a continuity between the M ­ iddle Ages and the Re­nais­ sance, so Steven Ozment, in his Age of Reform, 1250–1550, emphasizes the in­ tellectual and religious continuity in Germany between the ­later ­Middle Ages and the Reformation; such an understanding revises the idea of the Reforma­ tion as a decisive break, a revision that has now largely been accepted by schol­ ars of the early Reformation.13 The dissatisfaction with the term “Re­nais­sance,” which implies a focus on high culture, or the term “Reformation,” which centers on religion, arose when other aspects of the period, such as popu­lar culture and w ­ omen’s lit­er­ a­ture, became objects of study. In a now classic essay, “Did ­Women Have a Re­nais­sance?” historian Joan Kelly, for one, argued that w ­ omen’s status saw a falling-­off from the ­Middle Ages to the period that followed—­hardly the glo­ rious awakening suggested by the word “Re­nais­sance.”14 ­Those literary schol­ ars who started to feel that the Re­nais­sance was not adequately or accurately framing their scholarship began to turn to the apparently more neutral—­ because apparently merely temporally descriptive—­term “early modern,” which was already being used by historians to designate a much longer pe­ riod, from the Protestant Reformation to the French Revolution in 1798 or even, for some historians, to the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth c­ entury. Aligned with this idea of the longue durée, the remit of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies—­established as an alternative to Re­nais­sance Quarterly (which covers the period 1350–1700)—­includes in­ terdisciplinary scholarship on the late fifteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Yet the apparent solution of “early modern” as a value-­neutral term soon proved troubling as well. Pushing back on the hegemony of the early mod­



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ern, the French medieval historian Jacques Le Goff, in his Must We Divide History into Periods?, has provocatively proposed an equally lengthy M ­ iddle Ages “that extends from late antiquity (between the third and the seventh ­century) to the m ­ iddle of the eigh­teenth c­ entury,” arguing for a conception of history as “a unified, continuous ­whole” rather than one that is broken up . . . ​into segments of greater or lesser length.”15 At the 2016 conference of the MLA, in a session cosponsored by the Forums on French Medieval Lan­ guage and Lit­er­a­ture and Sixteenth ­Century Lit­er­a­ture called “It’s 1500: Are We Modern Yet?,” the panelists claimed that in France, Napoleon is consid­ ered “modern”—an understanding of periodization that explains the basis of Le Goff’s apparently provocative thesis. The “yet” in the session’s subtitle in­ dicates the teleological implications of the term “early modern,” which sug­ gests an emphasis on ­those features that are considered impor­tant ­because their development characterizes and anticipates the “modern” era: the beginning of mercantilism and capitalism or experimental science during this period earns it the designation “early modern.” To return to the question of continuity and discontinuity, Le Goff’s long ­Middle Ages is an example of stressing continuity over discontinuity, so that “periods are long and typically marked by significant, though not epochal change.”16 An impor­tant corollary of his proposed periodization is the displace­ ment of the Re­nais­sance from the position of cultural primacy it has histori­ cally enjoyed by simply incorporating it into the long M ­ iddle Ages. Similarly, in Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, En­glish medievalist Kathleen Davis has shown that the constructed distinction between the ­Middle Ages and the Re­nais­sance depends on an equally constructed distinction between the dyad sacred-­ medieval-­feudal and secular-­modern-­capitalist (or demo­cratic).17 Like Davis, James Simpson acknowledges that period bound­a ries are “historically pro­ duced” and “historically contingent”; he nevertheless confirms the shift from “medieval to early modern,” though he reverses the historical privileging of the Re­nais­sance over the “Dark Ages.” He therefore values the medieval “flour­ ishing of literary forms in a wide variety of dialects across the ­whole of ­England,” while in the Re­nais­sance, or the Reformation, he finds the intro­ duction of printing to have resulted in a “narrowing of metrical and linguis­ tic possibility for En­glish writing.”18 Thus Simpson, like Le Goff, effects through his periodization a transvaluation of the traditional hierarchical re­ lationship between the ­Middle Ages and the Re­nais­sance. Stressing continu­ ity rather than discontinuity between the En­glish Civil Wars and the

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Commonwealth on the one hand and the Restoration on the other, and ac­ knowledging the constructed nature of such historical bound­aries, could also lead to challenging the primacy of Restoration lit­er­a­ture over that of the In­ terregnum “winter.”

The En­glish Restoration and the Meiji Restoration This idea of discontinuity and contrast as the basis of periodization is not unique to the West, and a comparison with Japa­nese historiography is also instructive. In The Edo Period: Early Modern and Modern in Japa­nese History, Masahide Bitô acknowledges that ­there was “a major disjuncture” between what he and his colleagues consider the early modern and e­ arlier periods, though he also maintains that ­there is a “continuity that can be discerned be­ tween the new ‘early modern’ state system and the late medieval forms of popu­lar social organ­ization that have been held to be characterized by ‘free­ dom’ and ‘autonomy.’ ”19 In the book’s introduction, “The Periodization of Japa­nese History,” he affirms the “difficulty of demarcating the line between ancient and medieval periods” and characterizes the “change” as a “gradual” one.20 Moreover, he points out the continuity between the Edo period and the Meiji Restoration: The substance of the po­liti­cal power of the warrior class and the court nobility was not overturned. It remained, taking dif­fer­ent forms, at the center of Meiji government. . . . ​Feudal authority survived intact . . . ​­those occupying positions of power remained the same . . . ​ in terms of social class, nothing was altered . . . ​the Restoration did not totally transform ­either the upper echelons of society or the bot­ tom of the social ladder, and what did not change was of substantial import. . . . ​Thus while the Meiji Restoration is usually seen as a clear demarcator between what went before (early modern) and what came ­after (modern), . . . ​in ­actual fact ­there was substantial continuity be­ tween the early modern and modern.21 Bitô’s challenge to the ac­cep­tance of discontinuity between t­ hese historical eras enables his innovative reconception of t­hese “periods” in Japa­nese ­h istory.



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The “Restoration,” as it is simply called in En­glish po­liti­cal and literary history, has been considered as decisive a break in ­England as the Meiji Res­ toration was in Japan. Although neither scholars of the En­glish Restoration nor scholars of the Meiji Restoration would consider the two Restorations to be comparable period designations—­despite scholarship on the parallels be­ tween early modern Edo and London as well as early modern En­glish and Japa­nese theater—­I suggest that both Restorations serve to mark a watershed divide in periodization. Just as scholars of the Meiji Restoration have already done, I w ­ ill call attention to the stakes of reconceptualizing discontinuity as continuity in revisiting the periodization of the En­glish Restoration that has insistently been separated from the period that immediately precedes it, the En­glish Civil Wars and Commonwealth of 1642–59. In what follows, I take up Underwood’s invitation—­a nd follow Bitô’s comparative example from Japa­nese historiography—to challenge the largely accepted assumption that the Restoration of Charles II marks a decisive break from the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, and to address the continuities across the 1660 divide.

Periodization, Narrative, Ideology As Fredric Jameson has stated, “Individual period formulations always secretly imply or proj­ect narratives or ‘stories’—­narrative representations—of the his­ torical sequence in which such individual periods take their place and from which they derive their significance.”22 And, of course, dif­fer­ent narratives or “stories” are told about the same historical period. It is also impor­tant to rec­ ognize that the acts of inclusion and exclusion that any division into periods authorizes also imply narratives that carry ideological significance. As Mar­ shall Brown suggests, “Beginning the eigh­teenth ­century in 1660 represents an assertion and an evaluation.”23 By arguing that the seventeenth ­century includes the Restoration as well as the mid-­century Civil Wars and Common­ wealth that preceded it, I am making an alternative assertion and evaluation. From my perspective as a scholar of the “long seventeenth ­century” (or, more accurately, a one-­hundred-­year-­long seventeenth c­ entury), I suggest that grouping the Restoration with the eigh­teenth ­century in fact works to isolate the En­glish Civil Wars by denying their significant and lasting effects and con­ sequences. Indeed, such a division—­effectively a truncation—of the seven­ teenth ­century at 1660 accords with the view of the “revisionist” historians

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that the En­glish Revolution was a rebellion arising from local and contingent ­causes with no po­liti­cal or ideological bases, a rebellion that was quickly cor­ rected by the Restoration.24 The idea that the Revolution had no coherent ide­ ology has a corollary assumption among literary historians, that t­ here was an absence of literary culture during the Interregnum “winter,” the period be­ tween the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the ascension of his son Charles II to the throne in 1660. This implied absence posits (again, analogously to the po­liti­cal situation) that the Restoration of the monarch marked a corre­ sponding Restoration (indeed, a “Re­nais­sance”) of literary culture.25 Of course, if nothing of literary value or interest was produced during the Interregnum, ­there is no need to concern ourselves with the influence of the Interregnum on the literary production of the Restoration. Yet t­ here is a contradiction in the assumption among some eighteenth-­century scholars who regard the Rev­ olution as trivial (a “rebellion”), but at the same time marking the beginning of their period with the Restoration—­that is, the end of the Revolution. In­ deed, ­there is good reason that, in the structure of the MLA, French Divi­ sions have corresponded—­and the Forums still correspond—to centuries;26 unlike ­England’s Revolution, the Fronde, the French mid-­century civil war, was of much shorter duration, was unsuccessful (­because the nobility failed to wrest control of the state from the monarchy), and was not experienced as a rupture to the same degree. If the En­glish Revolution and Civil Wars w ­ ere similarly inconsequential, then the En­glish divisions could also logically fol­ low the divisions by centuries, rather than insisting on a break at 1660. Separating the Revolution of 1642–49 from the invasion and change of monarchs of 1688–89 also follows a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal tradition. Throughout the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke sought to frame the “Glorious” Revolution that established a constitutional monarchy as the model of nonviolent, moderate change, a pattern from which, he warned, the French had already deviated. But to make this argument he had to down­ play, indeed almost ignore, the extraordinary example the En­glish themselves had set of putting on trial and executing their king and establishing a com­ monwealth and a republic. Forty years before the so-­called Glorious Revolu­ tion in 1688–89 (when the Catholic monarch James II fled to France and was declared to have abdicated, leaving the En­glish throne to his Protestant ­daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William), the En­glish had followed the same path of revolutionary vio­lence on which the French w ­ ere setting out. Moreover, the fact of that experience and the fear of repeating it contributed significantly, along with a timorous king who would not pursue his right to



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the throne, to the En­glish avoidance of a second civil war. But to excise the events of 1688–89 from ­those of 1642–49—in essence, to redefine a coup as a revolution and to ignore an ­actual revolution—is to engage in an act of will­ ful historical amnesia. By contrast with Burke, the French historian François Guizot argued for the continuity between the En­glish Revolution and the Glorious Revolution. In Why Was the En­glish Revolution Successful? A Discourse on the History of the En­glish Revolution (1850), which was translated and published in ­England the same year by William Hazlitt (the son of the literary critic), Guizot maintains that the En­glish Revolution “succeeded” in the form of the constitutional monarchy established in 1688. While condemning the “military tyranny” and “revolutionary vio­lence” of Oliver C ­ romwell, he affirms the lasting “­great re­ sults . . . ​[that] survived the revolution”: the ascendancy of parliament, which led to the demise of absolute monarchy and to “the intimate ­union and mu­ tual control of the crown and parliament”; the shift in the balance in power between the House of Lords and the House of Commons, so that the latter became “preponderant in parliament”; and “the complete and decisive domi­ nation of protestantism in E ­ ngland.”27 Accordingly, Guizot criticizes Claren­ don for having “deceived himself” in “mistak[ing] the meaning of the ­great events he had witnessed”: “He considered and treated what had passed between 1640 and 1660 as a revolt, a­ fter the suppression of which t­ here was nothing to do but to re-­establish order and the laws; not as a revolution, which precipi­ tating En­glish society into mournful frenzies, had launched it on new paths.”28 This characterization of Clarendon’s position—­that the Revolution was a “re­ volt” that was quickly made right—­strikingly anticipates the claim of twentieth-­century revisionists who also minimized the import and impact of the En­glish Revolution. Guizot, who served as prime minister for the July Monarchy of Louis-­Philippe, was repudiated by the Revolution of 1848; even so, h ­ ere and in his writings concerning the French Revolution, he argues for the lasting effect of revolutions—­and the continuity between revolutions and what follows—in that the task of postrevolutionary governments is to insti­ tutionalize the po­liti­cal and social gains made by revolutions.29

Rethinking the Restoration A number of influential historians have problematized the previously accepted dates that demarcate historical periods, and especially the use of 1660 as a

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historical marker. In an essay aptly titled “The Enclosure of En­glish Social History,” Keith Wrightson has observed “an urgent need to break through, or at least loosen, the constraints of received periodization.” He further called for a “rejection of conventional terminal dates in order to pursue par­tic­u­lar prob­lems over spans of time appropriate to the tracing of significant social change.”30 Lawrence Stone has also remarked on the “widespread public par­ ticipation in significant intellectual debate on e­ very front” during the years 1590 to 1690, explaining this phenomenon by what he calls “the educational revolution” between 1560 and 1640 and the resulting high rate of literacy even among the poor.31 The notable po­liti­cal activism of the House of Commons leading up to and during the En­glish Revolution, as well as during the post-­ Restoration Exclusion Crisis, can therefore be explained by the educational accomplishment of its members. In ­England’s Trou­bles, Jonathan Scott explic­ itly argues against the “historiographical dividing line of 1660” and for a continuity from 1588 to 1689, from the Spanish Armada to the Glorious Rev­ olution, which gives the seventeenth c­ entury its due.32 Scott has also stated that the dividing line arises from the “preoccupation of Restoration histori­ ography with what may be called the shape of the f­ uture.” He argues, on the contrary, that the “historical real­ity” is the “preoccupation, indeed obsession, of the Restoration period with its past.”33 Literary historians bring a dif­fer­ent set of concerns to the issue, and to the construction of “Restoration lit­er­a­ture” as presenting its own distinctive literary historical period. Most scholars working on lit­er­a­ture of the Civil War and Commonwealth recognize the fallacy of understanding this as a time of creative “winter,” the notion that the Interregum witnessed a dearth of tex­ tual output that anchors the period construction I outlined above. The use of the term “Restoration” as a period marker makes sense only if the focus is on court lit­er­a­ture or on the theater, both of which w ­ ere, indeed, restored. But ­there w ­ ere many other kinds of textual production, such as oppositional po­ liti­cal writing, that carried over from early to l­ater seventeenth-­century liter­ ary culture. Even among plays, t­here w ­ ere many Restoration printings and revivals of po­liti­cal drama from the ­earlier seventeenth ­century, such as Beau­ mont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, composed in the wake of the Parlia­ ment of 1610, published in 1641 on the eve of the Civil War, and again in 1650, the year a­ fter Charles’s execution. This play was revived during the Restora­ tion when Charles II was threatened by antimonarchical sentiments and the specter of his ­father’s execution, and was also being excoriated for his mis­ tresses’ po­liti­cal influence—­and again in 1686, during James II’s reign. The



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Maid’s Tragedy thus held continuing significance for the En­glish nation, en­ abling debate concerning the relationship between monarch and subjects.34 The enduring currency of this text across the c­ entury belies the idea of the Restoration as initiating a new literary culture that broke decisively from the past. If we turn our attention to the production of oppositional po­liti­cal lit­er­ a­ture—in manuscript and print—we find a textual culture that originated dur­ ing the En­glish Civil Wars but persisted well into the Restoration. A ­ fter 1660, much oppositional writing went “under­ground” in the form of satiric and scurrilous poems against Charles II that circulated in manuscript, ­later collected in the Poems on Affairs of State. Far from viewing 1660 as a new po­ liti­cal period, such po­liti­cal satires expressed historic continuity: for example, “A Dialogue Between the Two Horses” concludes, “They that conquer’d the ­father w ­ on’t be slaves to the son,” threatening rebellion by referring to the ex­ ecution of Charles I. Tim Harris has also emphasized the links between the opposition to the restored monarchy and the En­glish Civil Wars.35 The peti­ tions published during the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81)—in which Parliament sought to exclude the Catholic James from succeeding his b­ rother Charles II, who lacked a legitimate heir—­also mark an ever-­present awareness of the spec­ ter of the Civil Wars and the threat of another: a return of “forty-­one,” refer­ ring to 1641 as the beginning of the Civil Wars.36 Considering the Restoration’s po­liti­cal writing together with that of the mid-­century enables us to under­ stand the ways in which John Locke wrote his Second Treatise on Government (1689) during the Exclusion Crisis, presenting a po­liti­cal theory closely linked to that of the Levellers, whose po­liti­cal pamphlets, such as An Agreement of the ­People (1647–49), ­were published in the context of the En­glish Revolution.37 Fi­nally, Algernon Sidney—­executed for treason in 1683 partly based on his manuscript of the Discourses Concerning Government (published in 1698)—­has long been considered a proto-­Enlightenment figure who influenced Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Yet recent scholarship emphasizes the lasting im­ portance of the En­glish Revolution and radical Protestantism on Sidney’s po­ liti­cal thought and his commitment to republican princi­ples.38 Even if we w ­ ere to focus on major, canonical authors, separating the seventeenth ­century from the Restoration divides the ­earlier and ­later ­careers of Milton, Marvell, and Dryden. Milton wrote his prose tracts during the En­glish Civil Wars, but his epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained ­were published ­after the Restoration. The Restoration separates Marvell’s poetry, such as Upon Appleton House, written in 1651, from his satiric prose, such as

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the Rehearsal Transpros’ d (1672–73), as well as Dryden’s writings praising the Lord Protector C ­ romwell from his panegyrics of the monarchs Charles and James. Such a division renders the ­careers of all ­these figures fractured and incoherent.

­Women’s Civil­War Writings A ­ fter 1660 and the Case of Anne Halkett Yet another impor­tant continuity between the years of the En­glish Civil Wars and the Restoration can be seen in ­women’s post-1660 writing concerning the Civil Wars, both in print and in manuscript; in fact, ­women’s Civil War writ­ ings display significant affinities with the post-­Restoration oppositional writ­ ings by male subalterns that I have already discussed. Analy­sis of ­these writings by w ­ omen is precluded or short-­circuited by cutting off their years of compo­ sition or publication from the Civil War years in which they are rooted.39 ­W hether or not ­women had a Re­nais­sance, the En­glish Civil Wars cer­ tainly gave a notable impetus to the publication of their writings. Patricia Crawford has shown that the number of w ­ omen’s printed writings skyrock­ eted in the 1640s and 1650s; she has also established that their number did not decline significantly during the Restoration.40 Many of Margaret Caven­ dish’s writings during and about the Civil Wars ­were published ­after the Res­ toration, including her Life of . . . ​William Cavendishe . . . ​Duke of Newcastle (1667), addressed to Charles II and emphasizing her husband William’s loy­ alty to Charles I as his foremost general; this work became an impor­tant source for ­later military historians of the En­glish Civil Wars. Katherine Philips’s po­ etry and translations of Pierre Corneille’s plays that explic­itly and implicitly refer to the En­glish Civil Wars ­were published between 1663 and 1667.41 Mary Carleton, a Canterbury fiddler’s ­daughter who notoriously styled herself a “German Princess,” published in 1663 The Life of Madame Mary Carleton, a memoir that she dedicated to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Charles I’s nephew and a prominent royalist general during the Civil Wars.42 Po­liti­cal writings by Quaker ­women such as Margaret Fell and Joan Whitrow find their ante­ cedents in sectarian w ­ omen’s writings during the Civil Wars.43 The petitions of Elinor James to Parliament, Charles II, James II, and even William refer back to the Civil War w ­ omen’s petitions to Parliament.44 Indeed, I have ar­ gued that during the Exclusion Crisis of 1680–81, Elizabeth Cellier in Malice



Did the En­glish Seventeenth ­Century ­Really End at 1660? 243

Defeated (1680) not only alluded to the title of Leveller John Lilburne’s Malice Detected (1653), but she also deployed the form and rhe­toric of his writings to indict the En­glish state’s use of torture in its prisons.45 As I have already mentioned, ­women’s works that remained in manuscript comprise an impor­tant group of t­ hese Civil War writings. Perhaps the best-­ known example is Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of Col­o­nel Hutchinson. In the 1660s Hutchinson wrote her memoirs concerning her husband’s Civil War ­career as a parliamentarian; this work remained in manuscript u ­ ntil the nine­ teenth ­century, when Julius Hutchinson, a descendant, published it. In a key incident in this memoir, Hutchinson seeks to exonerate her husband from the charge that he renounced his republicanism, by claiming that she forged a let­ ter recanting his signing of the death warrant for Charles I, for which he would have been executed by the Restoration government.46 A lesser known but exemplary post-1660 work concerning po­liti­cal events of the En­glish Civil Wars is the manuscript memoirs and meditations of Anne Halkett (1623–99); she composed her memoirs between 1677 and 1678, and wrote her meditations from the 1650s to the 1690s.47 While scholars have largely focused on her involvement with the royalist agent Col­o­nel Bampfield, or the dramatic incident of her assisting James, Duke of York, escape from prison by disguising him as a girl, I call attention to other moments in the memoir that register Halkett’s involvement in the Civil War and its politics. Halkett describes her experience of “serving many poore wounded soldiers,” giving a graphic account of the wounds she witnessed: “One was a man whose head was cutt so that the [ ] was very visibly seen and the ­water came bubling up. . . . ​ The other was a youth aboutt 16 that had beene run through the body with a tuke [tuck, i.e., rapier]. Itt went in u ­ nder his right shoulder and came outt 48 ­under his left breast.” Charles, the Prince of Wales, thanked her for ­these ser­vices and “was pleased to give order for sending fivety pieces to mee.” 49 Halkett goes on to describe at length her positive reception by Charles and her defense to him of her b­ rother W ­ ill, who was banished b­ ecause he was ac­ cused of taking part in the plot to have James rather than Charles crowned in Scotland.50 Also notable is her account of her exchange with Col­o­nel Over­ ton where she spiritedly disagrees with the prominent parliamentarian army officer who joined C ­ romwell’s 1650 campaign in Scotland and ­later became governor of Perth and Aberdeen, saying, “If you can shew mee in all the Holy Scripture a warrant for murdering your lawfull King and banishing his pos­ terity, I ­will then say all you have done is well and w ­ ill bee of your opinion.

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Butt as I am sure that cannott be done, so I must condemne that horrid act and what ever is done in prosecution of itts vindication.”51 To Overton’s cita­ tion of the “prophesy of Daniell” that “foretold the distruction of monarky,” Halkett opposes her open prediction that “you ­will find ever[y] reason to change what ever governmentt you try till you come to beg of the King to come home and governe again,” which leads Overton in turn to rejoin, “If this should come to pase, I w ­ ill say you are a prophetese.”52 Of course, from the vantage point from which she writes, her po­liti­cal analy­sis, which Over­ ton calls prophecy, does prove to be correct. Even in writing about events a­ fter the Restoration, Halkett’s manuscripts from 1660 contain two entries that discuss “the report of new trou­bles” and “the late change of publicke affaires.”53 The first begins with the memorable statement, “I am nott very old; yet I have seene such changes as t­hose that hath lived hundreds of yeares hath nott seene the like,”54 indicating her sense of the importance of recording the tumults and upheavals of her time. The report of “new trou­bles,” the threat of another war, leads her to fear “hus­ bands . . . ​k illed and wives vanished before t­here eyes and c­hildren tossed upon speares” as examples of the “cruelty of soldiers” and “all the bloud that hath beene shed.”55 ­Here Halkett’s language evokes an “on the ground” ac­ count of the Civil War, in which she provides a graphic and vivid narrative of how civil war breaks apart the ­family and the domestic unit.56 Thus even this post-­Restoration entry is inflected by the experience of the Civil War, and the threat of another, recalling “A Dialogue Between the Two Horses” or the pam­ phlet that similarly evoked the threat of “forty-­one.” The second entry goes even further and provides a po­liti­cal analy­sis of the Civil War. For example, she juxtaposes two images of the monarch: one of David as a “man of bloud,” and the other of the king as “a nursing f­ather to the Church & blessed example of piety, temperance & justice.”57 Her cele­ bration of the restoration of the monarchy, in par­tic­u­lar its peaceful accom­ plishment, contrasts starkly with the epithet “man of blood,” which was given to Charles I first by the In­de­pen­dents and then by the New Model Army to justify his trial and execution. Halkett’s statement that the king is deputed by God to “heare the cry of the poore & needy” clearly promotes the second view of the monarch as a “nursing ­father” (a term that James I had used about him­ self, despite his claims to absolutism).58 While Halkett may be critical of Charles I ­because he failed to “heare the cry of the poore & needy,” and thereby called upon himself the rebellion of his subjects, she appears to be more sym­ pathetic concerning the plight of his exiled son. For she stresses how the three



Did the En­glish Seventeenth ­Century ­Really End at 1660? 245

kingdoms “hath suffred such loss such iniurys & affronts of all sorts as our ­ eople and of King hath done,”59 giving equal weight to the suffering of the p Charles II as victims of the Civil War. This entry complicates the prevailing characterization of Halkett as a Royalist, for her implicit critique of Charles I for his failure to act as a “nursing ­father” to his subjects indicates an under­ standing of sovereignty inflected by gender that c­ ounters Stuart absolutism. Two entries among her meditations from late 1690 also mark Halkett’s continuing assimilation of examples of Civil War ­women in her writing. The first invokes a biblical passage of prophecy, closely hewing to the practice of ­women writers during the Civil Wars. The second, which indicts the state’s use of torture, concludes with a devastating passage from Habakkuk on which Anna Trapnel had e­ arlier based one of her works. In the first entry, from November, Halkett describes a dream she had of a scene of ­battle—­“Soldiers shooting”—­followed by a prophecy of healing from Isaiah: “And if itt relates to Monarchicall Gouernment. The Lord make the Son happier then the ­Father hath beene That hee may build vp the old wast places and raise vp the foundation of many generations that hee may be called the repaerer of the breach the restorer of paths to dwell in.”60 Halkett’s hope that the son, James Francis Edward, the “Old Pretender,” ­will be “hap­ pier” than the f­ather, James II, recapitulates her e­ arlier hope that Charles II would be a “nursing ­father,” unlike Charles I, the “man of blood.” In the con­ clusion of this meditation, in which she refers to Joseph’s account of his dream to Jacob—­“the Lord give me understanding in all ­things”—­Halkett casts herself as a prophetic dreamer and harks back to the example of Civil War ­women who also styled themselves as female prophets: Anna Trapnel, Mary Cary, Eleanor Davies, Elizabeth Poole, and Margaret Fell, among ­ ere and ­others.61 In keeping with her intense focus on prophets and prophecy h elsewhere in her writings—­including in her e­ arlier account of her “prophecy” to Overton—­Halkett’s discussion of the holy and good ­women of the Bible that concludes this large manuscript indicates her par­tic­u­lar interest in female prophets: Sarah, Miriam, Hannah, Deborah, and Huldah, five of the seven featured in the Old Testament.62 ­These ­were the figures on whom Civil War ­women based their spiritual authority to write and publish on po­liti­cal ­matters. In the second entry, from December, Halkett, like Cellier, describes tor­ ture in graphic and vivid terms: the victim is placed on “the racke to make him confese what hee knew of ye King’s affaires wch ­after so Long a time could nott be vsefull for them to know.”63 He is further tortured by means of “Thume­ kens” (i.e., thumbkins, which compressed the thumb); his leg was placed in a

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boot whereby nine wedges ­were driven in, and the wedges w ­ ere given four strokes. She continues, “But itt is to bee feared (for the vio­lence & iniquity that is among vs) the stones ­shall cry outt of the wall and the beame outt of ye timber s­ hall answear itt[, w]oe to him that buildeth a Towne with blood & stablisheth a City by iniquity.”64 ­Here she powerfully cites Habakkuk 2:11, and in addition echoes the radical sectarian Anna Trapnel’s Cry of a Stone (1654) to express her moral objection to torture. Thus Halkett is exemplary of the w ­ omen whose Civil War writings ex­ tended well beyond the time frame of the En­glish Civil Wars. Although a Roy­ alist and Anglican, Halkett’s post-1660 writings are nevertheless inflected by the examples of Civil War ­women prophets, who wrote in opposition to the pre–­Civil War po­liti­c al and religious order. Accordingly, ­t hese writings by Halkett are oppositional to the po­liti­cal order of the Restoration in hoping for the accession of the Old Pretender and in indicting the state’s use of tor­ ture. Placing Halkett’s writings in the context of t­ hose of her pre­de­ces­sors opens up the expansive category of “­women’s Civil War writings” in post-­ Restoration ­England.

Conclusion I hope my analy­sis has shown that taking a Gramscian perspective on the idea of the Restoration underscores the continuity rather than the discontinuity between the ­earlier and ­later parts of the seventeenth ­century, and the impor­ tance of attending to subaltern voices that have largely been neglected in des­ ignating the Restoration as a decisive break from the period of the En­glish Civil Wars and Commonwealth. During this period, continuity is the hall­ mark of po­liti­cal, subaltern, and oppositional writing, especially by w ­ omen, including writings that w ­ ere circulated in manuscript. Rather than focusing solely on court lit­er­a­ture, as ­earlier literary historians have done, emphasizing nonelite literary production would track more closely how the majority of the ­people living during the Restoration expressed their historical awareness—­not as simply experiencing a new beginning (and a rupture from the preceding period) in the Restoration of the monarchy, but as living very much in the shadow of the En­glish Civil Wars and Revolution. Following Gramsci’s ex­ ample in his analy­sis of the Re­nais­sance, then, I hope to have uncovered the po­liti­cal perspective that has constructed and defended one major (and still largely accepted) period division in En­glish literary history. I wish to suggest,



Did the En­glish Seventeenth ­Century ­Really End at 1660? 247

instead, an alternative narrative, one that reveals the continuity of the long (or actually one-­hundred-­year-­long) seventeenth c­ entury by shifting our at­ tention to hitherto neglected or less canonical—­because less “literary,” less fa­ miliar, or less prestigious—­genres and modes, such as po­liti­cal satire, memoir, and religious meditation. Such a shift enables a new perspective on the estab­ lished view of literary history and periodization.

Chapter 14

Space Travel Spatiality and/or Temporality in the Study of Periodization Heather Dubrow

Making Space for Space We have long recognized that the b­ attle of Agincourt in Shakespeare’s Henry V stages conflicts among what Barbara Johnson memorably termed “conflict­ ing forces of signification.”1 The phrase aptly draws attention to the many ver­ sions of repre­sen­ta­tion and misrepre­sen­ta­tion in the play, ranging from its opening contradictory appeal to “a Muse of fire” (Prologue, 1) to the repeated evocations of kingship as a simulacrum of itself (“I ­will keep my state, / Be like a king” [1.2.273–74]) and to the tellingly reflexive prophecy that the story of the conflict at Agincourt ­will be recounted “with advantages” (4.3.50).2 Be­ latedly informed that he has won the historic encounter, Henry returns to such issues of repre­sen­ta­tion when he declares, “Then call we this the field of Agincourt, / Fought on the day of Crispin Crispianus” (4.7.90–91). Much as he appropriates the Catholic holiday for his own secular ends, so too he ap­ propriates the c­ astle, its field, and the multiple meanings inherent in the word “field,” thus associating the iconic encounter with not only time but also space and with the conjunction of the two. Similarly, this essay argues, periodiza­ tion involves not only temporality but also spatiality. In examining the significance of not only time but also space in peri­ odization, we find a variety of relationships between the temporal and the spatial. Sometimes, we ­will see, they are as closely connected as Donne’s twin

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compasses. But elsewhere their relationship impels us to recalibrate the com­ passes with which we guide ourselves through debates about periodization. If spatialities sometimes overlap or even merge with time—as in Henry’s nam­ ing the field, appropriate if also appropriative—­sometimes space and time demand instead to be recognized separately, not least b­ ecause other­wise we risk continuing unduly to privilege the temporal dimensions of periods over their spatial siblings. ­Here and now are dif­fer­ent in many ways.3 ­Those differ­ ences are valuable epistemologically: distinguishing temporal and spatial ap­ proaches to periods can provide an alternative to the temptation that afflicts exclusively temporal schema, the desire to plot previous developments as primarily or merely as precursors of what­ever interests a given critic. On the one hand, the emphasis on temporal periods renders history as precursor for a critic’s own area of specialization, w ­ hether discussing the development of capitalism or a par­tic­u­lar literary form. On the other hand, a distinct but no less troubling risk of teleology is to ignore or treat only glancingly develop­ ments chronologically distant from—­and not conforming neatly to—­the pat­ tern the scholar is positing; for instance, the influential and sometimes fruitful theory of lyricization developed by V ­ irginia Jackson and Yopie Prins suffers from inadequate attention to poetry in centuries preceding the nine­ teenth ­century.4 Attending to spatiality when constructing historical periods crystallizes the ways the spatial functioned as historical marker for t­ hose living in six­ teenth-­and seventeenth-­century E ­ ngland. Space was central not only to Henry V but also to so many practices in early modern E ­ ngland, notably t­ hose involving issues of power and authority, as we glimpsed above in King Hen­ ry’s response to the ­battle of Agincourt. Always thought-­provoking but often neglected by critics, the rituals surrounding the transfer of monarchical power in early modern E ­ ngland demonstrate cognate interactions between time and space. On the surface, monarchical succession might appear a clear-­cut in­ stance of linear temporality characterizing a familiar marker in periodization, the change from one reign to the next. Yet ­behind the statement, “The king is dead. Long live the king,” lie the ambiguities about that transfer of power traced by Joanna S. Cook, ambiguities extending far beyond what we have long known about “the king’s two bodies.” As Cook has incisively shown, in the period following the death of a king, kingship was vested in several places: the body of the dead king (treated in some sense as still alive by being offered food), the effigy of him on his coffin, and his successor. Such practices, she argues, gesture ­toward the idea that the first monarch is not truly, definitively



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dead ­until he is in a dif­fer­ent space: his grave. Thus the temporal progression of kings is linked to a spatial event whose absence can impede that progres­ sion and whose realization enables it.5 In addition to the linked spatial and temporal in the context of monarchy, other texts draw attention to both con­ nections and distinctions between time and space in a nationalistic proj­ect. In par­tic­u­lar, Spenser’s Epithalamion fashions both a self and an En­glish co­ lonial identity in Ireland through a complex interaction between temporality—­which is variously registered in the poet’s allusions to twenty-­ four hours, his emphasis on a single day, and his final prayer for his posterity—­ and spatiality. The latter assumes prominence repeatedly as we encounter place names that direct attention to land to which he lays claim both within the poem and in his disputes with Lord Roche. (Similarly, through his refer­ ence to Saint Barnabas’s Day, Spenser is, as Judith Owens has observed, en­ listing a Catholic holiday for his own ends, much as Henry V did with Saint Crispin’s Day.6) The centrality of space not only in Henry V but also in so many practices in early modern ­England, notably ­those involving issues of power and author­ ity, further encourages us to address its significance in periodization. For in­ stance, at a historical moment when gender is often represented in spatial terms, ­whether explic­itly or implicitly, the reformed emphasis on the h ­ ouse and home as a site of worship redefines the ­family and increases the signifi­ cance of ­women. Might not the complexities of patriarchy, which many schol­ ars believe cannot be reduced to a ­simple equation of king, husband, ­father, and so forth, be glossed by noting the implication that a husband who is a king within the four walls of his ­house does not necessarily have that role out­ side it? As the example of f­amily worship may suggest, space was evidently germane to many debates about doctrinal issues, including ecclesiology. The widespread though contested con­temporary belief that a valid marriage could occur outside a church also used spatiality to intensify not only the power but also the authority of the laity; conversely, the debates about the position of the altar and where celebrants should face involved contestations among and between laity, parish priests, and what would tellingly be labeled their supe­ riors. All this is not to say, of course, that spatiality did not carry a similar force in many eras besides the early modern, but, as this sampling of exam­ ples suggests, space assumed some distinctive resonances t­ here. To what studies should we turn, then, in assessing t­hose resonances? Scholarly approaches to space and place differ widely among themselves, as one might anticipate given that the disciplines participating in t­ hese discussions

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include anthropology, linguistics, geography, gender studies, and literary and cultural studies. The vari­ous methodologies brought to bear encompass phe­ nomenology (which is especially influential in many quarters), materialism, and queer theory, among ­others. Some of the differences resulting from this range of disciplines and methodologies may, at the risk of baldness, be crys­ tallized by contrasting two influential approaches: Yi-­Fu Tuan’s ahistorical and transnational emphasis on patterns that emphasize freedom and potenti­ ality, a perspective that prob­ably neither he nor his opponents would hesi­ tate to label as humanistic; and Michel de Certeau’s analyses of forms of power that, though amenable to certain generalizations, take radically dif­fer­ ent forms in dif­fer­ent cultures and physical environments.7 In addition to this fundamental contrast of the ahistorical and the culturally specific, within space theory certain critics have contrasted space as the unbounded, un­regu­la­ted, and prior category, and place as its regulated and delimited successor. If some scholars view t­hese categories of space and place as distinct, many have ar­ gued instead that the two uneasily coexist, not least ­because ­there is never a pure and unbounded space.8 ­W hether or not critics adhere to any of the established contrasts between space and place, many emphasize distinctions among types of space. The spa­ tial distinctions in Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space have proven espe­ cially influential. Lefebvre posits three categories: spatial practice: “production and reproduction . . . ​spatial sets characteristic of each social formation”; repre­ sen­ta­tions of space: “knowledge . . . ​signs . . . ​codes,” the conceptualized world of scientists and planners; and repre­sen­ta­tional space: “complex symbolisms . . . ​ clandestine . . . ​art.”9 The emphasis on repre­sen­ta­tions of space in systems like Lefebvre’s further directs our attention to astute studies of linguistics, which show how language can both represent preexisting spatialities and create ­others; the work of the anthropologist William F. Hanks, as well as other stud­ ies of deictic pairings like ­here/there, are especially illuminating.10 As even this brief summary of space theory implies, the recurrent questions in all ­these studies are the triad very relevant to periodization, which is fundamentally about imposing conceptual bound­aries: Who or what controls space? Through what means? And to what ends? As we w ­ ill see, exploring such issues not only illuminates under­lying assumptions and practices of periodization but, con­ versely, sometimes demonstrates fault lines in certain approaches to spatiality itself. ­Because lively debates on both periodization and space theory currently flourish in so many disciplines, this is an apt moment to discuss the putative



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conjunction between ­those two subjects. As this volume demonstrates, the jury is still out on many issues about models of periodization, and our current de­ bates can be vigorous, vari­ous, and occasionally too vicious. New approaches to the periodization of En­glish lit­er­a­ture are legion—­the many attacks on 1660 as a firm break, or the wider application of the label “Stuart,” to name just a c­ ouple. At one extreme, we find attacks on periodization in any form: periodization’s “near-­total dominance,” according to Eric Hayot, “amounts to a collective failure of imagination and ­will on the part of the literary pro­ fession.”11 Other critics champion periodization, ­whether in terms of rein­ terpreted and renamed categories or as a determined restoration of  older ones.  Witness the revisionist revival of the term “Re­nais­sance,” which had been cast into the dustbins of historiography during the past few de­cades; influenced by models of professional pro­gress or their more aggressively Oe­ dipal analogues (the Zeuses of our professional worlds seldom establish their dad’s birthday as National Chronos Day), students of professional changes are regrettably prone to neglect one engine of professional change, that is, the ten­ dency of what goes around to come around. Hence Richard Strier’s trenchant though not unique defense of the category “Re­nais­sance” (and qualified sup­ port for its often-­discredited proponent, Jacob Burckhardt) is especially wel­ come, even if one takes issue with some of the particulars.12 Such scholarly disagreements about the utility of “Re­nais­sance” exemplify the long-­standing but still pressing debates that stand to be advanced by introducing spatiality as a concept that can help us think through some of the vexed theoretical prob­ lems with dividing history in periods. Versions of spatiality are thus no less relevant to the workings of our pro­ fession t­ oday than to the social organ­ization of early modern E ­ ngland. Con­ flicting models of periodization generate tensions not least ­because they generate strug­gles for academic territory, often realized as spatial in the most literal senses. Witness the controversies surrounding the Modern Language Association’s recent redefinition and re­distribution of areas of study, which involved adding Executive Committees and sessions for some cultures and lit­ er­a­tures that had previously been conflated (such as Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican), and conflating some that had previously been separated (such as twentieth-­century En­glish lit­er­a­ture and its Anglophone siblings). Such changes had immediate repercussions for space and time in the already congested days of the conference, and in repre­sen­ta­tion of bodies like the Delegate Assembly. Space in its most literal senses is also at issue when con­ cepts of periodization shape the number of pages allotted to vari­ous periods

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or subdivisions of them in an iconic anthology like the Norton series. Simi­ larly, introducing subdivisions of the medieval period(s)—­not only the widely acknowledged distinction between Anglo-­Saxon culture and that of the ­Middle Ages but also a separation of ­earlier and ­later texts written during the latter period—­can raise questions about the number of gradu­ate courses and faculty appointments allocated to par­tic­u­lar fields and subfields. The year in which this book appears, 2019, is also an apt time to draw parallels between spatiality and periodization ­because two prominent critical approaches—­that is, material studies, especially in relation to the material text, and the new formalism—­stand to illuminate and extend t­ hose parallels. Thus the ornate printed borders that encase individual poems within an early mod­ ern collection at once define the texts as distinct spaces and, ­because the borders recur much as a refrain would do, establish parallels between t­hose spaces. The implications of ­these distinctions and parallels are, however, atemporal or even anti-­temporal. In contrast, the catchword—­that is, the word from the succeeding page that the printer placed in the bottom right margin of the previous sheet to facilitate the correct arrangement of pages—­ effectively tropes anticipation of what is to come and its prefigurement in ­earlier events, and in so d ­ oing visualizes both rupture and continuity. Hence the spatial arrangement of a single page draws attention to the temporal pro­ gression of the entire volume and alerts us to the dovetailing of space and time discussed below. For de­cades, a commitment to materiality was seen as representing a pro­ fessional trajectory from shadowy and shady types of humanistic inquiry to the truth of social and economic formations. The former approach was dis­ carded, even demonized, in many circles and the latter embraced. Professional shifts in the past few de­cades, including the development of the new formal­ isms, have bridged the humanistic and the social/economic. Similarly, formal textual devices can help us to interpret both the distinctive potentialities of a spatial approach to periodization and the situations in which the spatial can be combined with the more traditional temporal ­angles. Might not stanzas—­ the etymology of the word is of course “room”—­express spatially how a pe­ riod label attempts to contain but at the same time builds temporal anticipation of what ­will come next? Refrains configure similar patterns: they may con­ tain both by marking the conclusion of a stanza and in some cases participat­ ing in the ostensibly containing form of a couplet, and they encourage anticipation of their iteration, especially in cases where the succeeding refrains may involve some semantic change.13



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Although parallels like t­ hese encourage investigations into the spatial di­ mensions of periodization, despite and ­because of the fact that it is on the surface the most temporal of practices, some might question w ­ hether we are simply pasting dif­fer­ent terminology, typically functioning figuratively or an­ alogically, on what we already know. My essay rebuts that charge in the sec­ tion titled “Boundary Disputes” below, demonstrating that even—or especially—in the instances where space is a figure for schemata of periodiza­ tion, it can provide new insight into familiar questions. Tropes turn, as ety­ mology reminds us, and, similarly, meta­ phor moves from one place to another. But, as we ­will now also see, this is not to say that spatialized ap­ proaches to periodization are without risks.

Va­ri­e­ties of Spatialities Space is directly and immediately implicated in periodization ­because histori­ cal shifts sometimes described as characteristic of ­England as a w ­ hole often take dif­fer­ent forms in dif­fer­ent regions and domains. Some issues I raised twenty-­five years ago remain germane. In 1994, responding in Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) to an article on the term “early mod­ ern” written by Frances Dolan, I observed: The designation [early modern] is rooted in part in an emphasis on protocapitalism, but ­England’s economy in the sixteenth and seven­ teenth centuries might also be described as late feudal in at least some senses of that contested concept. In par­tic­u­lar, regional variations, an issue that students of lit­er­a­ture too often slight, complicate such analyses, with London and large towns like Bristol and Norfolk closer to a mercantile economy, while older agrarian patterns—as well as less centralized government, a related phenomenon—­were alive and well elsewhere.14 Now I would want both to endorse that point and to qualify and extend it in two ways. First, although subsequent sections of my argument included other examples of regional variations, I regrettably omitted one impor­tant distinc­ tion whose effects ­were manifest in practices ranging from economic status to architectural developments: in some areas of E ­ ngland the substitution of gavelkind (which mandated the distribution of a decedent’s property among

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all male heirs) for primogeniture affected every­thing from economic to archi­ tectural patterns, the latter influenced by younger sons’ ability to erect sub­ stantial h ­ ouses with their inheritance rather than simply being denied owner­ship of a f­ amily mansion.15 This distribution of assets thus narrowed, if not erased, the gap in wealth and other markers of status among the sons of a ­family, with the dwellings of its younger members outward and vis­i­ble signs of that change. And second, recent work in the field supplements my previous observa­ tions about the economic consequences of regional distinctions for periodiza­ tion. Witness, in par­tic­u­lar, parallel cognate assertions about the religious shifts that arguably define the centuries in question more than any other single characteristic. One of the most distinguished students of t­hose changes, Patrick Collinson, has insisted on distinguishing the impact of reli­ gious changes in London from their effects, or lack thereof, elsewhere.16 The recent reexamination of the survival and even supremacy of Catholicism of­ ten focuses on both distinguished families and determined priests in the north of ­England.17 And given that the leaders of ­those families frequently traveled to London or even spent a substantial part of the year t­here, what types of cross-­fertilization further blur the regional variations that compli­ cate models of periodization based on religious changes? In short, in studying religion, like economics, the label “early modern” proves problematical. Thus many e­ arlier analyses of periodization need to be not rejected but inflected in terms of the professional domains we inhabit t­ oday, a point to which this es­ say ­will return. Thus far I have focused on how geo­graph­i­cal areas beyond and often larger than London delimit or deflect the cultural generalizations that often substan­ tiate historical categorization. In par­tic­u­lar, the creation of po­liti­cal my­thol­ ogy and assertion of po­liti­cal power through spectacles like pro­cessions was widely discussed in the heyday of New Historicism and remains a widespread if less often cited assumption t­ oday. The reign of Elizabeth in par­tic­u­lar is of­ ten located within schemata of periodization as an era where public displays both celebrated and assisted in creating monarchical power. But David Scott Kastan has established the variability and unpredictability of what p ­ eople wit­ 18 As twenty-­ fi rst c ­ entury cognoscenti of spec­ nessed during t­ hese pageants. tacles like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York would agree, surely space in its many manifestations (does one live close enough to the route to brave crowds in order to attend? how vis­i­ble is the ceremony and its ico­



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nography if one is in the back of the crowd?) affected and often l­imited the impact of t­ hese proj­ects in establishing the “Age of Elizabeth.” The example of the pro­cession or parade lends itself to a discussion of the workings of personal agency in controlling space and place, and can also powerfully demonstrate the function of spatiality in the power plays and power ploys of periodization. De Certeau emphasizes the efficacy of walking in shaping space, but I have argued elsewhere that we need to look at prac­ tices such as sitting (an act that may involve several agents, from the person who actually sits to the one who arranges benches or in vari­ous ways gestures ­toward them).19 And the verbal gesture, the “Hark” or “Lo” in many poems, or the use of “this” rather than “that,” can also orient ­people in space, and in par­tic­u­lar encourage them to look in certain directions—­and no less signifi­ cantly, not to look in o­ thers. This issue of how orientation is established and how it may involve turning one’s eyes away from one place and t­oward an­ other similarly illuminates our regional distinctions—­which denizens of ad­ joining areas in early modern E ­ ngland, and which l­ater students of the period, looked t­oward, say, theatrical developments in Chester in lieu of ­those in other areas? And what or who encourages them to do so? We can also approach orientation through the several conjunctions of space theory and queer theory, which have often focused on orientation, re­orientation, and the related concepts of orientation and the slanted. Impelled by the re­ search of Claire Falck on the cult of Elizabeth that flourished a­ fter her death, we might indeed map the “Age of Elizabeth” as the predictable chronological line—­but followed ­after 1603 by a slant line that juts into the Jacobean pe­ riod.20 Similarly, the study of Anglo-­Norman lit­er­a­ture creates a line that slants in several ways: it includes not only dif­fer­ent historical periods but also dif­fer­ent countries and regions within them. In short, analyzing how its den­ izens experience a space/place and how l­ater critics studying that experience represent it helps us to recognize the contingent and ­limited nature of period categories. Other paradigms from space theory advanced by de Certeau and Lefeb­ vre can both valuably gloss the significance of agency when one redefines pe­ riodization in terms of space—­and at the same time introduce caveats about such connections and about prob­lems in space theory itself. De Certeau’s in­ fluential model distinguishes the so-­called strategies by which ­those in power control space—­which are proper and propre in the French senses of belong­ ing to one’s self and demonstrating a distinctive style of one’s own—­from the

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tactics available to the disempowered or ­those with ­limited power, the latter lacking a base and being temporary, on the wing.21 In a related paradigm, as we have seen, Lefebvre distinguishes spatial practice, repre­sen­ta­tions of space, and repre­sen­ta­tional space—­encapsulating the distinctions of space as perceived, conceived, and lived, respectively.22 Borrowing ­these concepts for periodiza­ tion is valuable, though again only up to a point. The pageants within Lon­ don and progresses through the countryside ­were indeed a type of strategy that both established and emphasized the monarch’s control over space and argue for his or her naming rights for the period in question. But the models of power and authority developed by de Certeau and Lefe­ bvre are ­limited by their sometimes unspoken assumption of fully developed cap­i­tal­ist hierarchies, and the presupposition that space often replicates rather than revises preexisting power relations. Seeing periodization in terms of ques­ tions about agency demonstrates how power relations may be forged anew, and often in intriguingly skewed ways as well. Artists have more power than de Certeau’s category of tactics and Lefebvre’s category of repre­sen­ta­tional spaces generally suggest—­a poet who borrows from or riffs on the work of his classical pre­de­ces­sors may be both substantiating and complicating the label “Re­nais­sance,” for example. Groups that w ­ ere not elite also had types of power, not least the power to resist the strategies of their social superiors, that are sometimes neglected. Whereas one aim of this essay is to sustain and extend my e­ arlier empha­ sis on regional variations, it is subject to a potentially dangerous challenge ­today, which my 1994 response in PMLA was not. In fruitfully questioning the primacy of national—­a nd often implicitly or explic­itly nationalistic—­ analyses, the current emphasis on the global may risk distracting attention from smaller units than the national, such as the workings of Catholicism in many areas in the north of ­England. Much as the distant reading so problem­ atically advocated by Franco Moretti deliberately subsumes the nuances of a par­tic­u­lar text, so globalism risks ignoring the regional differences that are, I maintain, so central to periodization.23 On the other hand, ­these new com­ mitments could have a more salutary effect, the mirror image of the confla­ tions one fears. That is, the current emphasis on the global—­the distinctions, emphasized by the very terminology of “archipelago,” between E ­ ngland and neighboring members of the British Isles, and the more long-­standing post­ colonialist exploration of the relationship of the metropolitan to distant areas—­should all encourage more awareness of cognate issues about the rela­ tionship between London and distant areas within the same country. None­



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theless, the metropolitan remains the often unacknowledged and unchallenged source of evidence for generalizations about periodization, even as its primacy may be eroded by an emphatic recognition of the global.

Boundary Disputes Space and place are relevant to periodization not only b­ ecause in many in­ stances geography per se is significant in the ways outlined above but also ­because the central princi­ples and preoccupations attending the study of spa­ tiality can illuminate—­and be illuminated by—­other debates about periodiza­ tion, thus helping us both to reinterpret how periods w ­ ere seen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to reconfigure our own professional practices. For example, central questions about who controls space emerge even when regional differences are not germane. Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the military associations of space, realized etymologically in his citation of regere, to rule, can direct our attention to the ways that periodization often involves a fight to dominate territory within the profession and the resulting us/them mindset.24 This association of space with the military and militarism can also alert us to yet another connection between space theory and periodization. In the pro­cess of turning space into place, as posited by critics who define the former as amorphous and the latter as rule-­bound, one establishes rules that govern one’s territory (such as, “we should consider the dates of per­for­mance, not the First Folio in locating Shakespeare’s plays chronologically”) and bound­ aries that may enlarge the domains in which one rules (“even though Mar­ vell’s satires ­were published ­later, we ­will claim him as a poet of the ‘­later Re­nais­sance’ ”). And yet again the association of periodization with space the­ ory draws attention to debates and potential prob­lems in the latter field. Again, whereas some have contrasted space as the unbounded, un­regu­la­ted, and prior category and place as the regulated and delimited successor, many have argued instead that the two uneasily, problematically, coexist. Similarly, even scholars committed to turning seventeenth-­century space into a place that might be termed “the late Re­nais­sance” may recognize how Marvell’s satires challenge such categorization. The concept of creating place through inclusion and exclusion, so central to space theory, can also illuminate analogous patterns in periodization as ex­ perienced both in early modern E ­ ngland and as conceived in our own acad­ emies. Edward W. Casey, one of the most influential voices in space theory,

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describes t­ hese pro­cesses in terms that are, for my purposes, helpful in some ways, dubious in ­others: “The hold is a holding in and a holding out.”25 Who­ ever wrote the epistle that precedes Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, its defense of the “rough” words “holds in” the country folk said to use them while both drawing back in and holding in “good and naturall En­glish words, as have ben long time out of use and almost cleare disherited.”26 With equal determi­ nation, ­these comments on diction hold out O ­ thers, in this instance the im­ portations from foreign languages with which the vocabulary of this poem is contrasted. Within the history of our own profession, Donne was insistently held out of and back from evocations of the Elizabethan Golden Age. And long ­after the credo that that Golden Age was succeeded by the Jacobean vi­ sion of death and decay putatively exemplified by Donne has been discarded, too many critics are still prone to identify the monarch of wit with the reign of Jacobean monarchs and with the seventeenth ­century in general—­even though many of his love lyr­ics ­were prob­ably written and circulated and per­ formed around the time when the second half of The Faerie Queene was being published. More to my purposes ­here, however, the study of periodization en­ courages us further to evaluate and develop, not merely apply, Casey’s con­ cepts. He subsumes his discussion of holding in and holding out ­under the contention that gathering is an essential trait of places that involves “an or­ dered arrangement.”27 But his emphasis on stability and order is problematic: Casey’s model emphasizes stability, but in many instances gathering can in­ volve a continuing, unsettled pro­cess rather than the order Casey attributes to holding in and holding out. For example, the wedding invitations offered in Spenser’s Epithalamion participate in but do not definitively resolve ten­ sions about En­glish colonial rule in Ireland and about Spenser’s own disputed owner­ship of land. Moreover, often the bound­aries established for a space or a form like a period are left porous in ways that the model of holding in and holding out neglects, but the alternative of gathering accommodates. In returning to the linguistic discussions in the Epistle preceding Spenser’s collection of pasto­ rals, we might observe that when it allows in—­indeed, enthusiastically invites in—­medieval usages, that invitation might be seen as a reaching back in or­ der to hold in. But that model is less apt than the acknowl­edgment of a con­ tinuing and unstable pro­cess of gathering and on the queering of time in the porousness that may be associated with that gathering. And does Casey’s no­ tion of holding out sufficiently acknowledge the intense consciousness of what has come before and may come afterward as well?



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Although the model of gathering offers some theoretical advantages when spatializing periodization, that pattern nonetheless demands its own qualifi­ cations and nuances. In some regards, an era that so often figures itself in terms of repetition-­with-­a-­difference (a practice realized in many rhetorical figures) resists the spatial model of gathering in. The myth of Trojan descent, for ex­ ample, certainly gathers e­ arlier epochs of history into their putative culmina­ tion in the reign of the Tudors, much as the self-­consciousness with which early modern writers identify themselves with their classical pre­de­ces­sors per­ forms a type of gathering—­but reminders of difference and loss recur in many discussions of ­those genealogies.28 Additional analogies and tensions between space theory and periodiza­ tion emerge if we approach periods as forms in many senses of that contested concept. In her impor­tant study of form, one of the best to date, Angela Leigh­ ton acutely analyzes it as the capacity for something.29 Certain spaces are ar­ guably not unformed or formless but protoforms, capacities for form in Leighton’s sense. This model is germane to both spatial and temporal ap­ proaches to periodization; it could, for example, gloss the relationship be­ tween, say, the stanza in the Monk’s Tale and the Spenserian stanza or between Horace’s idyllic Epode 2 (“Beatus ille”) and the En­glish country h ­ ouse poem. Similarly, historical eras may usefully also be seen as containing the capacity for other eras: as Arthur O’Shaughnessy put it, “For each age is a dream that is ­dying, / Or one that is coming to birth.”30 For example, many medievalists find instances in their own period of the protocapitalism often associated with the early modern era. This perception of foreshadowing and early version is true not only of the analyses of ­later critics but also of the perceptions of ­those living through certain segments of time. Most obviously, adherents of mille­ narianism, a vision rooted in prophecy and anticipation, often saw in their own day the capacity and prefigurement of the millennium. Similarly, in ad­ dition to contrasting the years before the Interregnum with the period of ­Cromwell’s ascension by labeling the former the Stuart period or the late Re­ nais­sance, we can recognize that, as so much revolutionary lit­er­a­ture showed, some living through t­hose tumultuous years saw them as a capacity for re­ publicanism. Conversely, the label “Interregnum” as imposed by l­ater critics gestures ­toward a failed or literally bounded capacity. ­These instances recall the passages from Henry V on which this essay opened: agricultural fields have the potential to become battlefields. But do such contentions about capacity avoid the danger flagged early in this essay: attaching new terminology to familiar concepts? Arguably the

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contribution to periodization is l­imited inasmuch as my emphasis on capac­ ity merely renames the schema of dominant, residual, and emergent charac­ teristics posited by Raymond Williams some forty years ago.31 On the other hand, describing such patterns in terms of space and place, with the concept of space as sharing the capacity for something with other forms, can resolve controversies about w ­ hether space ever exists separate from place by moving from the either/or contrast between the two to a ­middle ground that allows for anticipations of the one within the other. In other words, rather than ­either subscribing to the position that space precedes place or the alternative that space never exists before or in­de­pen­dent of place, one would see place as potentialities within space. In one particularly impor­tant re­spect, positing analogies between the princi­ples of space theory and the practices of periodization is not always smooth sailing, though the winds that may blow us off course when we at­ tempt to do so may be refreshing as well as somewhat disorienting. Influenced by phenomenology, materialism, and the significance of the body in so many other fields contributing to space theory, often its prac­ti­tion­ers unqualifiedly and sometimes unthinkingly assert the primacy of that body in the workings of space. Casey’s pronouncements again reflect widespread assumptions: cit­ ing Edmund Husserl, he declares, “The body tout court is often assumed to be the sole effective here-­place.”32 Sometimes focusing on the role of the body can indeed illuminate spatial—as well as other—­approaches to historical pe­ riods. The movement of bodies into cities, leading to an extraordinary increase in the population of London in par­tic­u­lar, evidently characterizes early mod­ ern E ­ ngland. Repre­sen­ta­tions of the body of Elizabeth helped construct per­ ceptions of the period associated with her. Colonial proj­ects and voyages of exploration involve the movement of bodies from their native soil and, in the case of the former enterprise, often, the movement or containment or appro­ priation or destruction of native bodies. In other ways, however, seeing peri­ ods, ­whether spatially conceived or not, in such terms proves problematical. Although one can discuss the 1640s or the Interregnum in terms of bodies (for example, the perceived differences between a commoner’s body and a body whose royal prerogatives ­were sanctified by God), that is not at the core of the changes associated with ­those eras. Similarly, if the concept of the Re­nais­sance, as conceived by both its En­glish denizens and subsequent students, involves some versions of embodiment (Virgil reincarnated in the poets populating his sixteenth-­century fan club, and so on), surely the intellectual and literary con­ nections between the classical world and Troynouvant are far more signifi­



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cant. The confessional debates focused on “Hoc est corpus meum” demonstrate one way that third word is significant in defining the Reformation, but it would be merely tendentious to make the body central in an era defined through that label. Having opened by optimistically describing our own period as fertile ground for exploring not only spatial but many other approaches to periodiza­ tion, this essay must conclude on current threats to that optimism within the acad­emy itself. I w ­ ill focus mainly on my own country, although analogous issues do arise elsewhere. As several of my examples have implied, discussions of periodization benefit from—­arguably in many cases require—­significant knowledge of adjoining and even distant ages and a range of cultural prac­ tices. Yet, impelled by the understandable aim of decreasing time to degree for dissertation writers, and thus also limiting the financial indebtedness that gradu­ate work often entails, many doctoral programs in the United States ­today are encouraging early specialization in and within a historical period at ­every consecutive stage. Applicants are sometimes required to list not only their projected area of specialization (a legitimate demand if and only if some mechanisms allow a change relatively early in the program) but also, more du­ biously, their projected thesis topic. Similarly, whereas few would recom­ mend reverting to the insistence on an indisputable canon of En­glish and American lit­er­a­tures that all doctoral students should be expected to master, the pendulum has often swung in the other direction: once admitted, students often encounter very ­limited attention in both coursework and doctoral ex­ ams to anything outside the designated historical period (or in some cases, theoretical field). They may even be encouraged to take numerous courses ger­ mane to their anticipated dissertation rather than their period as a w ­ hole. This type of training risks enabling and even encouraging only the type of periodization that reduces historical eras other than one’s own specialty to straw men. On the other hand, although the ever-­increasing reliance on adjuncts is the principal scandal of our profession in my country, t­ here is one advantage to the economic prob­lems that have slashed hiring, especially at the tenure-­ track level. Many departments now expect their faculty members to teach ex­ tensively in more than one historical period; indeed, one often encounters the assumption that anyone who specializes in what some administrators, like our students, think of as “early lit­er­a­ture” can and should offer courses on any text written before 1800. Counterbalancing the pressures to ever narrower special­ ization lamented above, such situations may encourage students to develop a

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real knowledge of another historical field as well as, or rather than, establish­ ing their secondary specialty in terms of a methodology like gender studies. In par­tic­u­lar, early modernists with medieval training may be favored in hir­ ings (a possibility that in itself encourages developing M ­ iddle Ages as an ad­ ditional area of expertise) and, once hired, may be expected to teach medieval texts with some regularity. ­These very pro­cesses, as well as the expertise they encourage, can indeed facilitate the revisionist approaches to periodization to which this volume is dedicated.

Chapter 15

Always, Already, Again ­Toward a New Typological Historiography Kristen Poole Michel Serres:  All of our difficulties with the theory of history come from the fact that we think of time in this inadequate and naive way. Bruno Latour:  All the theologians agree with you. Michel Serres: ­Really?

History, Folded ­ ntil fairly recently, conversations about periodization tended to rethink U where, how, and why we place historical divisions. ­These conversations gener­ ally happened within the context of a normative understanding of time itself, and that dominant sense of time has been linear. In recent years, however, literary scholars have begun experimenting with nonlinear ways of thinking about historical time. Jonathan Gil Harris, in his brilliant and influential Un­ timely ­Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, invites us to think of the past in terms of polychronicity (how “objects collate many dif­fer­ent moments,” such as the Roman walls still vis­i­ble and in use in sixteenth-­century London) and multitemporality (how t­ hese polychronic objects “can prompt many dif­fer­ent understandings and experiences of temporality—­that is, of the relations be­ tween now and then, old and new, before and a­ fter”).1 Harris uses the mate­ rial form of the palimpsest—­the under­lying text that shows through on scraped and overwritten parchment, the scriptio inferior—as a conceptual model for

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the simultaneous presence of diverse temporalities.2 Harris himself is devel­ oping the ideas of Michel Serres; a touchstone source for rethinking time has been the idiosyncratic book Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, in which Serres is interviewed by the phi­los­o­pher and historian of science Bruno Latour. In Serres’s understanding, “Time does not always flow according to a line . . . ​nor according to a plan but, rather, according to an extraordinarily complex mixture, as though it reflected stopping points, ruptures, deep wells, chimneys of thunderous acceleration, rendings, gaps—­a ll sown at random, at least in a vis­i­ble disorder.”3 As an image of this concept of time, Serres pic­ tures a handkerchief. When the handkerchief is lying flat, it has “certain fixed distances and proximities,”4 but when the cloth is folded, or crumpled and shoved in one’s pocket, points can meet. Conceived or experienced as a handkerchief, time becomes “a multiple, foldable diversity.”5 In Serres’s tem­ poral hankie, persons and historical events that we conceptualize as distant and distinct can be brought together. And as opposed to the predictability and measurability of a number line, temporal points are constantly coming together in dif­fer­ent configurations, as the handkerchief is refolded or recrum­ pled. Serres’s theoretical notion of time, if fascinating to think about, pre­ sents challenges for the historicist scholar. How are we to work effectively with this model of the handkerchief, a model that differs so radically from the con­ ceptual timeline that tacitly underlies modern historiography? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The idea that historical persons or events connect across time is hardly new. This is a fundamental aspect of bib­ lical typology, which was a central temporal epistemology for early modern En­glish men and w ­ omen. Typology, at its most basic, is a mode of Christian biblical exegesis in which an event or person in the Old Testament is connected to an event or person in the New Testament. To take an obvious example, Abraham’s near-­sacrifice of his son Isaac (the type) connects to the Crucifix­ ion of Christ (the antitype). More subtly, the prohibition against breaking the bones of the paschal lamb in Exodus 12:46 connects to John 19:31, which spec­ ifies that Jesus’s legs w ­ ere not broken when his body was taken down from 6 the cross. (For now, I am using “connects” as a verb that is time-­value and relationally neutral. While prophecy has traditionally been considered the tem­ poral drive of typology, ­there is in fact a multitude of typological temporal relations, and ­these in turn can shape the significance of the relationship.) This hermeneutic approach endows both textual moments with theological rele­ vance and reciprocity, and creates textual coherence across Christian scripture.



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Typology was an early and dominant Christian mode of biblical interpreta­ tion, as early apologists sought to demonstrate both unity with and fulfillment of Hebrew scripture. If Serres’s crumpled handkerchief brings historical points together in haphazard ways, biblical typology might be pictured more like origami—­separate moments in the text and in time have contact, and thus theological meaning, through intricate and intentional patterned foldings. Biblical typology, for many interpreters, is a textual manifestation of a divine plan that encompasses cosmic time. ­People living in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century E ­ ngland often per­ ceived historical time, and their place within a larger eschatological history, in typological terms. They themselves ­were folded into this cosmic time that allowed discrete moments and temporally distant places to touch. This un­ derstanding of typological time could be experienced in the Eucharist, a rit­ ual in which past and pre­sent, the cross, the Last Supper, and the paschal feast of the Lamb are all activated. On a more quotidian if no less mystical level, the old Jerusalem of biblical times was not simply a precursor for the New Jerusalem—as London was commonly depicted in the 1590s—­but in some ­ ere ways they w ­ ere one and the same.7 The perceived historical relationship h is distinctive: the difference between type and antitype is not quite erased or collapsed; rather, typology allows both to be si­mul­ta­neously inhabited. Ty­ pology was more than an abstraction or a theoretical way of interpreting the cross-­currents of biblical text (Christ as the new Adam, for instance); as Bar­ bara Kiefer Lewalski has influentially argued, for En­glish Protestants biblical history was not merely exemplary, but was repeated through their own lives.8 Typology was a type of chronology, a form of epistemology, and an experien­ tial temporality. This “early modern” mode of understanding and experiencing time was itself a recapitulation of a patristic mode of thinking and being. One crucial consequence of the typological notion of time—­a past that is not restricted to itself but can reach into the ­future, and a pre­sent that reaches into both the ­future and the past—­was an expectation for early Christians not only to con­ template this complex temporality, but to live it. For patristic authors, typol­ ogy was to be actualized by believers. In some ways, the early Christian community viewed itself as an antitype writ large: par­tic­u­lar moments and individuals in the past connected to ­those in the ­future (which was now their pre­sent), and key events in the history of biblical Israel w ­ ere now real­ 9 ized in the church. Historical narrative had become lived real­ity. Charles

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Kannengiesser stresses this notion of lived typology as a defining aspect of early Christian life and hermeneutics. He writes, “Through diverse cultures and long centuries, biblical ‘types’ inflamed the Christian imagination, fuel­ ing again and again the actualizing pro­cess by which believers identified them­ selves with the Gospel even in keeping their tradition of faith alive.”10 This sense of living out history motivated, in turn, their hermeneutics: “The actu­ alizing instinct in which such claims ­were deeply rooted was absolutely cen­ tral and distinctive in the interpretive approach of Scripture familiar to early Christians.”11 The idea of actualization—­that the biblical events of the past are now be­ ing (re)lived and made manifest in the pre­sent—­leads to moveable, or elastic, temporal location. Since the now is always the now, and the actualization of types in pre­sent antitypes is happening in the now, ­there is no sense of his­ torical distance and chronological stability as we would find on a numbered timeline. ­There is no point in mea­sur­ing years (or some other temporal unit) between, say, Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac and the Crucifixion, since in a mystical sense Christ is always in the now. The movability of the spiritual pre­ sent renders chronological quantification irrelevant. Moreover, as early gen­ erations of Christians (spreading over the first five centuries or so a­ fter the death of Jesus) discovered the “always already-­ness” of the New Testament, the Old Testament also became subject to transformation.12 In a dif­fer­ent mode of understanding this sense of actualization, believers could find them­ selves identifying with the ancient Israelites, but also aware that “their own experience must be part of a continuous history, the first chapters of which are recorded in the Hebrew scriptures,” in the words of G. W. H. Lampe.13 ­There is a double sense of temporality ­here, one that emphasizes both the col­ lapsing of points of time (the Israelites, t­ hose in the pre­sent) and the spread of historical distance, as a stream of “chapters” increasingly pushes the past from the pre­sent. (Lampe’s casual use of “chapters,” though, is suggestive of the novel as a model of history—­that is, a predominantly linear narrative that one reads in sequential order.) This experience of what we might call typological time was reinforced in the early church in a variety of ways. Although the details of early public reading practices remain obscure,14 Christians continued the Jewish tradi­ tion of a lectionary, and the pairing of passages may have held typological import. Notions of typology w ­ ere also made manifest in the sacraments.15 We also find—­crucially, for my purposes—­a material manifestation of ty­ pological time in the uniquely Christian shift from scroll to codex, a tech­



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nology that facilitated the side-­by-­side display of multiple moments in the Bible.

Origen’s Hexapla Central to the early church’s adoption of the textual form of the codex was Origen’s extraordinary Hexapla. A proj­ect of monumental scope and intellec­ tual impact, the Hexapla both exemplified and s­haped the early Christian sense of text and time. The Hexapla was a third-­century collation of some of the available scriptures of the Hebrew Bible. It consisted of around forty co­ dices, each with four hundred leaves (or eight hundred pages), with at least six columns per page in a complex mise-­en-­page: the passage in Hebrew; a Greek transliteration; the Septuagint (the dominant Greek translation of He­ brew scriptures used by early Christians); and three of the many prominent alternative Greek translations. This biblical proj­ect was well-­funded, intricately conceived, and executed by well-­trained scholars with sophisticated spatial imaginations. The proj­ect was also revolutionary in that, according to Anthony Grafton and Megan Hale Williams, it was the first book to display informa­ tion in tabular form.16 The Hexapla filled a special scriptorium in the city of Caesarea, which rested luxuriously on the shore of the Mediterranean; schol­ ars or the po­liti­cal elite could walk into the room and see all the codices lying open si­mul­ta­neously, offering access to multiple points of texts and in infinite permutations. For scholars accustomed to the textual world of the scroll (which was still the dominant form at the time of the Hexapla’s creation), the effect must have been mind-­blowing. The Hexapla offered not simply a more prag­ matic technology for navigating text, but the seeming possibility of time laid open—­moveable, variable, in shifting configurations—as the scholar con­ trolled the vari­ous page openings of biblical narrative. Surrounded by a sea of open codices at his fingertips, the scholar might have experienced fantasies of omniscience, or omnitemporality. The shift from scroll to codex enabled a re­ conceptualization of history itself. Fundamentally, then, the material form of the text shapes its relationship with temporality, a phenomenon we can overlook given the degree to which the codex has become naturalized as our way of conceptualizing text. But Hebrew scriptures did not have pages, of course—­the dif­fer­ent books of the Bible ­were in the form of discrete scrolls. Scrolls, which fundamentally operated in the same way as the reel-­to-­reel film of old movie projectors (with one end

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winding, the other unwinding, and only a small portion of the text exposed at a time), also suggest linear time. But the codex paginates history, as it ­were. Instead of a continuum of linear text, we now have a text broken up, through the material form, into separable parts, or pages. And pages collated in a co­ dex allow for discontinuous reading practices that are not pos­si­ble with read­ ing a scroll, as Peter Stallybrass has argued.17 The Hexapla, a proj­ect that became famous in the world of early Christian scholars, not only allowed for multiple points of Old Testament history to be open si­mul­ta­neously, but the form of the Hexapla must have had an impact on the ways in which scholarly readers ­imagined the scriptural text and, correspondingly, the shape of the history it revealed. In a way, if the scroll presented each book of the Bible in the form of reel-­to-­reel film, a story that was told through a linear unwinding, the codex—­and especially an entire room of codices, open at multiple points—­ presented history almost as hypertext, as multiple “pages” to which one could turn. The influence of Origen’s textual proj­ect on understandings of time is ex­ emplified by Eusebius, the fourth-­century historian of the early church who adapted the form of the Hexapla for the telling of history. Grafton and Wil­ liams note that “Eusebius . . . ​denied that the Bible could support a firm chro­ nology, and provided detailed comparative ­tables that proved the point,” and that “the chronologer had to have an expert command of diverse rec­ords and traditions, of divergent calendars and terminologies. Chronology, far from be­ ing a way to make the ancient past neat and familiar, became a guide to the cosmopolitan variety of traditions that Christian historiography needed to take into account.”18 This flexible, divergent understanding of ­human time raised in­ter­est­ing possibilities and complications for typological reading. If the Bi­ ble does not have a clear linear chronology, the foreshadowing or typological connection of A to B is not a connection that happens across a standardized structure of time. Origen’s Hexapla thus had a profound impact not only on the form of the book, practices of reading, and hermeneutic princi­ples—it also had a pro­ found impact on how early Christians re­imagined time. So, too, did Origen’s ­actual writings, such as his biblical commentaries. For Origen, all biblical read­ ing was historically inflected.19 Origen is known for establishing the system­ atic exegetical practice of reading the scriptures allegorically, but his allegory was in the ser­vice of typology.20 (While the two are related, biblical typology insists on an intertextual hermeneutic—­both type and antitype must reside in the sacred text—­whereas allegorical interpretation can reach outside the



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textual limits of the Bible.) For a taste of Origen’s hermeneutic, we can look at his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. In just a brief section, we find a range of typological thinking. At the simplest, ­there is the gloss for Ro­ mans 1:2, “Which he had promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures,” in which Origen lists examples of the prophets promising the Gos­ pels, as in, “­There is also a promise of the gospel in Jeremiah, ‘Behold I am sending many shepherds and many hunters, and they ­shall catch them upon ­every mountain and upon e­ very hill.’ This is what Paul is now speaking of when he says that God ‘promised [it] through his prophets in the Holy Scrip­ tures.”21 More specifically, Origen sees the reiteration of an ­earlier biblical mo­ ment in Paul’s salutation of Romans 1:7, “To all God’s beloved in Rome: Grace to you and peace from God our F ­ ather and the Lord Jesus Christ,” which “is noth­ ing less than the blessing given by Noah to Shem and Japheth which has been fulfilled through the Spirit in t­ hose who have been blessed.”22 In the gloss on Romans 1:8, “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, ­because your faith is proclaimed in the ­whole world,” Origen collapses the time between his audience and Paul’s original readership, and also renders both time and space cosmic. Origen begins with stating, “If we interpret the words ‘in the ­whole world’ in a ­simple sense it would seem to denote that in many places of the world, that is, of this earth, the faith and religion of ­those who are in Rome is being proclaimed.” “But if,” he continues, “as in not a few other passages, the world denoted ­here is the one which consists of heaven and earth and every­thing in them, then it is pos­si­ble to understand that the powers . . . ​ are rejoicing far more over the conversion and faith of the Romans. . . . ​For they too are amazed at the conversion of the nations and that the sound of the apostles of Christ Jesus has gone forth into the ­whole earth. ­A fter all, they even rejoice as they behold the strug­gles of the saints in this world.”23 In short order, Origen moves from the par­tic­u­lar group of Romans being addressed by Paul, to the Roman Empire more generally, to the conversion of “nations” on the w ­ hole earth, to “saints.” From Paul’s epistolary salutation to an expres­ sion of gratitude, Origen is able to move across a broad swathe of time, from Old Testament prophecy to an eschatological engagement with angels. We do not find wooden moments of typological connection so much as a typologi­ cal epistemology that shapes how Origen is perceiving ­human and angelic in­ teractions. Origen’s sense of time, like his understanding of cosmology, was one of dizzying, and dazzling, complexity. If Eusebius holds that ­there is no singu­ lar, normative ­human timeframe, but multiple cohabitating chronologies, for

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Origen t­ here is no one, single eschatological time. This is vividly indicated in a stunning moment in the commentary (on Romans 1:2) in which Origen con­ jures up a vision of a dif­fer­ent type of Hexapla, a bibliographic fantasy of all of the dif­fer­ent texts—­past, pre­sent, and ­future—­that enable a reading of the Gospel.24 Origen pictures a range of books opened around us: the prophetic scriptures (all of them?); a Gospel that ­will arrive at the apocalypse; the book of life; the books inside of the book of Daniel; the books inside of the book of Ezekiel; and t­ hose books not even written in ink but in Spirit. If a scholar walking into the scriptorium housing the Hexapla could see a spread of mate­ rial books, open to vari­ous points of scripture but with the possibility of a near infinity of opening permutations, and thus cross-­scriptural connections, Origen’s reader h ­ ere enters into a similar, but even more mystical library, one in which the pre­sent text can be associated with books inside of books in the past and books in the f­ uture that have yet to even be revealed. The exegetical, typological mind boggles. If Origen’s biblical reading was deeply historical, his sense of historicity was not confined to linear time, to put it mildly. It was, instead, multitemporal and multidimensional, and s­ haped by an understand­ ing of the material text in the form of the codex.

Willet’s Hexaplae In the spirit of folding Serres’s handkerchief, we now turn to the period we have called the early modern, where we find a renewed interest in Origen’s eschatological time and his typological hermeneutics. As Jean-­Louis Quan­ tin has recently demonstrated in an impor­tant book, knowledge of patristics was central to seventeenth-­century educational and intellectual culture.25 Ori­ gen, along with the innumerable theologians he influenced, assumed new prominence, as scholarly editions of patristic authors proliferated. In addition to his a­ ctual theology, Origen’s model of the Hexapla was disseminated through multiple publications, as illustrated by the prolific ­career of Andrew Willet (1562–1621). In 1605, Willet’s first Hexapla appeared on the market, its title clearly signaling its indebtedness to Origen’s model: Hexapla in Genesin: that is, A sixfold commentarie vpon Genesis, wherein sixe seuerall translations, that is, the Septuagint, and the Chalde, two Latin, of Hierome and Tremellius, two En­glish, the ­great Bible, and the Geneva edition are compared, where they differ, with the Originall Hebrew, and Pagnine, and Montanus interlinearie in­ terpretation: Together with a sixfold vse of euery chapter. The book proved



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popu­lar enough to go into two additional printings in 1608, and another in 1633. In fact, the sheer number of Willet’s Hexaplae—­the volume on Genesis was followed by ­others on Exodus, Leviticus, Daniel, and Paul’s epistle to the Romans, most of which ­were reprinted multiple times—­speaks to their long-­ lived popularity.26 In 1633 alone, someone walking through London could have found new printings of Willet’s separate Hexapla on Genesis and on Exodus at one bookseller, and the combined Hexapla on Genesis and Exodus at no fewer than four dif­fer­ent booksellers (one at Saint Paul’s churchyard, and ­others at the sign of the Marigold, the sign of the Turk, and the sign of the Gun in Ivy). At the sign of the Greyhound, they might have still had some copies of the Hexapla on Leviticus (1631 edition). For all of t­ hese texts the word “Hexapla” was prominently featured on the title pages vis­i­ble to consumers as they browsed; the uniform titles of the books served as what we t­ oday would call branding. Indeed, it appears that Willet’s own name as author was less familiar than his brand; the 1631 Hexapla in Leviticum simply advertises “By the same Author of HEXAPLA, upon the two former Books of the Pentete­ vch, Genesis, and Exodvs.” In early seventeenth-­century E ­ ngland, “Hexapla” was thus not only a ubiquitous title, but a prevalent mode of reading instruction on the Bible. But as much as Willet is overtly invoking the form of Origen’s side-­by-­side com­ parison of multiple biblical translations (the Hexapla on Exodus promises a comparison of ten versions of the Bible, including the Septuagint, the Vul­ gate, the Hebrew, the Geneva and the “­great En­glish Bible”27), he also repeat­ edly pushes against Origen’s mode of mystical, allegorical, typological exegesis. In keeping with the hermeneutic fashion of his times, Willet tends to stress the literal meaning of scripture. Hexapla in Exodum opens with “Certain di­ rections to the reader” that assert, “The sense of the Scripture is e­ ither the lit­ erall and single sense, which is seene in the interpretation of the words; or the compound and mixt sense, which consisteth e­ ither in shewing the coherence of the text, with the other parts ­going before, and following.”28 Given the choice between a single (literal) and a compound and mixed (typological) sense, Willet gravitates t­ oward the former. This is manifest in a c­ ouple of ways. First, Willet repeatedly works with very specific dates; unlike Origen’s cos­ mic, mystical sense of time, Willet is working with chronological, linear time. In Hexapla in Genesin he observes, “This worthy historie containeth the space of 2368 yeares, aboue halfe the age of the world.”29 In his Hexapla on Romans, Willet tackles the prob­lems of chronology head-­on: “­Because we ­shall haue

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occasion afterward in the ­handling of some Questions to haue recourse vnto the yeares of the Romane Emperours, in whose time S. Paul liued, it s­ hall not be amisse, to make a iust computation of their yeares, wherein I finde g­ reat difference among Chronographers.”30 Yet Willet is able to determine the date of Paul’s conversion with remarkable precision, asserting that Paul was con­ verted about two years ­a fter the Crucifixion—or, more precisely, on Janu­ ary 25, or “one ­whole yeare and tenne months” “from the most holy death of our blessed Sauiour.”31 Such chronological calculations are the necessary grounding for a literal or historical reading of the Bible. Second, Willet repeatedly rejects the ways in which “Origen vnderstand­ eth . . . ​the spirituall and allegoricall sense.”32 Where Paul’s epistle speaks of the invisible t­ hings of God, Willet maintains that “Origens conceit ­here hath no probabilitie, who by ­these inuisible t­hings, vnderstandeth the Angels.”33 Where Paul cites Psalm 51 in Romans 3, “Origen thus expoundeth Dauid by ­these words of S. Paul, 1. Cor. 2.15. the spirituall man discerneth all ­things, yet he is iudged of none . . . ​But Dauid in this act was not spirituall, but carnall.”34 Where Paul writes of wages in Romans 4, “This the Apostle speaketh by way of concession, vsing a civill axiome taken from humane affaires. . . . ​This Ori­ gen not well vnderstanding, but supposing that the Apostle indeed speaketh of such as are rewarded for their worke before God: . . . ​he turneth the Apos­ tles meaning an other way.”35 Willet directs the reader away from Origen’s mysticism and t­oward the physical and the world of “humane affaires.” In­ deed, where Origen understands a reference to death in Romans 5 to mean the “death of hell,” Willet is bluntly literal: “But in truth . . . ​the death of the bodie is h ­ ere vnderstood.”36 Willet’s insistence on chronological accuracy, combined with his refuta­ tion of mystical readings, leads to a dif­fer­ent temporality and (thus) a dif­fer­ ent hermeneutic than in Origen’s patristic exegesis. Willet takes Origen’s mystical multitemporality and polychronicity and irons it into a more straight­ forward, linear chronology. This even applies to the idea of God’s glory in Romans 5:2: “Origen is ­here somewhat curious,” parsing God’s glory into three kinds: that seen on “Moses countenance, which is passed away”; that “which appeared in the incarnation of Christ”; and “the glorie of the next life.” In­ stead, “the Apostle must be vnderstood to speake of two kinds of glorie, one now enioyed in the state of grace, but the more full glorie is hoped and ex­ pected for in the kingdom of heauen.”37 If Origen can move freely between the interconnected temporalities of Moses, Christ, and heaven, Willet has two moments: the “now,” and the ­future one hopes and expects. Willet accepts



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the concept of types, acknowledging that “the old Scriptures [are] adorned with propheticall types and figures,”38 and recognizing major conventional types/antitypes (“Adam was a figure of Christ,”39 “Abraham offer[ing] vp Isaack . . . ​[is] a liuely type and repre­sen­ta­tion of the sacrifice of Christ”40). But, much to the outrage of one reader who voiced protest in a marginal comment,41 Willet seems to confine types and figures to the Old Testament, thereby break­ ing “the coherence of the text, with the other parts g­ oing before, and follow­ ing,” to return to his phrasing.42 Willet’s literalism rejects the patristic interpretive mode that inspires time travel. This is bluntly expressed in his snide comment on patristic exegesis of Adam and Eve in the garden: “They heard the voice of the Lord walking in the garden in the coole of the day. . . . ​2. Neither yet neede we runne to allegories, as with Irenaus, that this walking of God in the coole of the day, did shadow forth the comming of Christ ­toward the ende, as the euening of the world.”43 “Cool,” according to Willet, quite simply re­ fers to the temperature in Eden, not any mystical foreshadowing (or shadow­ ing forth, in his terms). This understanding keeps the first ­couple in their proper place, and fixed in a moment in time.

Foreshadowing Willet’s Hexaplae can thus be understood as continuing a patristic textual mode (the collation of multiple biblical texts) as well as marking a break from a patristic hermeneutic (reading for significance across multiple temporal frames). The shift might be understood as moving from the complex world of patristic figures to an early modern notion of foreshadowing. The En­glish verb “to foreshadow” emerges directly from biblical typology, as illustrated in the historical examples of the definition provided by the Oxford En­glish Diction­ ary, which cites a 1577 translation of Luther (“The ceremonies commanded in the law did foreshadow Christ”) and a 1677 edition of Barrow’s Works (“Our Saviour’s death . . . ​was by manifold Types foreshadowed”).44 The notion of fore-­shadows was a common theological habit of thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. William Guild, in Moses Vnuailed: or, Th ­ ose Figvres Which Served vnto the Patterne and Shaddow of Heauenly Th ­ ings, Pointing out the Messiah Christ Iesvs (1620, with multiple subsequent editions), writes, “Darke shaddowes ­were the fore-­runners of that bright substance, obscure types w ­ ere harbingers to that glorious Anti-­t ype.”45 Similarly, George Gifford writes, “And ­after that the ­children of Israel ­were come out of the bondage of

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Egypt, he did more fully deliuer his lawes and ordinances vnto them by Moses. But as yet all t­ hings w ­ ere vnder figures and shadowes. Moses and all the Prophets did foreshew, that in the fulnes of time the bridegrome him­ selfe would come in his owne person and fulfill all ­things. Then commeth the cleere light of the Gospell.”46 For both Guild and Gifford, types or figures do not just connect biblical persons and events across a cosmic time that has complex folds; the “fore” in “fore-­runners” and “foreshew” does not indicate the before and a­ fter that is a hallmark of linear, directional time. Rather, for ­these early modern authors this before and a­ fter is emphasized by the move­ ment from darkness (“darke” and “obscure”; “shadowes”) to light (“bright”; “cleere light”).47 Across millennia, then, a Jewish hermeneutic of types was appropriated by Christian exegetes who understood textual types to bind the Old and New Testaments (and mystical cosmic history) into a cohesive ­whole, but as time became quantified and therefore linear patristic typology would morph into the idea of foreshadowing. As a literary term, though, “foreshadowing” oc­ cludes its theological origins and has a truncated temporality in comparison to its patristic source. This, in any case, is the diachronic history of the idea as it appears to me. Surprisingly, I have not found an in-­depth scholarly ac­ count of the par­tic­u­lar shift from biblical typology to literary foreshadowing, but I ­will attempt h ­ ere to sketch out a brief history, one that traces the cor­ responding shift in the idea’s temporal complexity. The German term “Typologie” was actually coined in the late 1770s by the German theology professor Johann Salomo Semler as part of his work in textual criticism.48 Semler was a rationalist and a historicist, and he argued that the books of the Bible ­were not divinely inspired. Viewing ­these books as historical texts, Semler was interested in determining the sequence of their composition;49 the temporal connections of interest ­were the chronological ones of ­human history. In a way, then, typology was given a name so that it could be identified and theologically rejected. With the nineteenth-­century Higher Criticism that Semler influenced, typology went out of fashion. Stan­ ley Gundry describes this development: Instead of seeing the Bible as a vast harmonious complex of proph­ ecy and fulfillment, type and antitype, fused together by the inspi­ ration of the Holy Spirit, Biblical criticism sought to recover the true and original meaning of the literal sense and to set the vari­ous docu­ ments comprising the Bible in their proper context in history. . . . ​For



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t­ hose who followed the presuppositions, theories, and conclusions of destructive higher criticism, the typological method of interpretation became a ­matter of historical curiosity.50 In other words, once history becomes modern, typology becomes history. But while typology became outmoded in biblical reading, the notion of foreshadowing—­a term that assumed a noun form only in 183151—­became fash­ ion­able in the nineteenth-­century British novel. The work of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) illustrates the shifting locus of typological interest from the Bible to the novel. As the En­glish translator of David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1846), Eliot herself was instrumental in popularizing the Higher Criticism, thereby contributing to the rejection of a typological habit of biblical reading and interpretation.52 And yet her own influential novels (such as Mill on the Floss [1860]) made extensive and overt use of literary fore­ shadowing. We find, then, a nineteenth-­century textual phenomenon: biblical typol­ ogy transmogrified into literary foreshadowing. This phenomenon is evidenced by the historical definitions we find again in the Oxford En­glish Dictionary. The OED’s first definition of “typology” as a noun is “The study of symbolic repre­sen­ta­tion, esp. of the origin and meaning of Scripture types.”53 All of the OED’s examples of this definition of “typology” as “the origin and meaning of Scripture types” come from the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury: five of them are from between 1850 and 1867, and the sixth is from 1882. Most of ­these exam­ ples are negative, e­ ither lamenting the decline of typology, seemingly critiqu­ ing the limitations of typology, or providing an unflattering comparison of typology with spiritualism.54 If we look to one of typology’s verb forms, “fore­ shadowing,” we notice the mid-­nineteenth c­entury again dominating the OED’s string of examples. True, we find the examples from Luther (1577) and Barrow (1677) cited above, but most of the OED’s examples (inclusive of “fore­ shadowed” and “foreshadowing”) come from between 1855 and 1870.55 More­ over, the examples are no longer from theological contexts, but from novels—­two from Charles Dickens, one from George Eliot, and one from Wil­ liam Morris. A Google n-­gram reveals that the word “foreshadow” appears hardly at all u ­ ntil 1840, and that between 1840 and 1870 the term’s popularity spiked to a level it has comfortably maintained ­until t­ oday.56 Interestingly, the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century theological rejec­ tion of typology—­a mode of interpretation based in temporality, rather than the meta­phors of spatiality favored in allegorical interpretations57—­corresponds

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to the advent of the modern timeline. As Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Graf­ ton demonstrate, sequentiality comes to be the favored aspect of time, and a fascination with graphically representing this sequential time led to the wide­ spread printing of elaborate timelines.58 As examples, we can point to two texts that presented history in linear form, both published in 1844 on e­ ither side of the Atlantic: Azel S. Lyman’s Lyman’s Historical Chart: Containing the Promi­ nent Events of the Civil, Religious and Literary History of the World (Cincin­ nati) and Edward Bishop Elliott’s Horae Apocalypticae, or, A Commentary on the Apocalypse, Critical and Historical (London).59 In some ways, the waning of typology (a temporally based hermeneutic) might seem to run ­counter to this cultural interest in chronology, but the kind of time that interested bibli­ cal historicists like Semler was particularly linear and sequential. Perhaps pa­ tristic biblical typology went out of fashion ­because, as much as anything, it did not fit in a world of linear time. The foreshadowing in Victorian novels, by contrast, was a chronological narrative ele­ment that did help to render time linear. Tapping back to our example of George Eliot, we might note that she, too, had considered publishing a detailed timeline of early ecclesiastical his­ tory,60 thus sharing in her culture’s epistemological fascination with the chart­ ing, and lineating, of time. This way of thinking about time would appear to feed into the temporal construction of the novel as a linear form, with the literary device of foreshadowing calling attention to this linearity.

Conclusion: Codex, Scroll, Film The exegetical concept of typology, in which one person or event in the Bible connects across the text to another, thus shifts into foreshadowing, a struc­ ture of the novel that is based on sequential, linear time. Furthermore, with the advent of film, foreshadowing becomes paired with the flashback. Given the material form of celluloid film, which contains one discrete photographic frame ­after another, the narrative flashback—­and by connection, foreshadowing— assumes a manifest linearity, and a linear chronology. Event A and Event B, with the one forecasting the other, or the one remembering back to the other, can be precisely located along a film reel. It may be an accident of the materi­ ality of the medium, but the sequential photographic images of reel-­to-­reel film assume the form of a timeline: although coiled, the reel of film always contains the possibility of unwinding into a long strand of sequential images, usually placed in chronological order. While the notion of a timeline has be­



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come so intellectually naturalized that we usually do not question its temporal assumptions, the sequential ordering of time is both a product and contribut­ ing ­factor of modernity. Perhaps, then, the conceptual form of celluloid film is not accidental ­after all, but substantial: the very idea of a sequence of tem­ poral frames (our notion of periodization) may have inspired the idea of se­ quential photo­graphs to produce moving film, which in turn provides a material and conceptual basis for the narrative idea of the flashback, which then inflects the concept of foreshadowing with a heightened sense of move­ ment across linear time. In other words, not only is the medium the message, but the message inspires the medium. As noted e­ arlier, reel-­to-­reel film, in its ­actual coiled structure and movement of winding/unwinding, can easily be considered a modern analogue for the ancient scroll. Fundamentally, both reel-­to-­reel film and the scroll, for all of their circularity, are temporally linear forms: a film’s or a scroll’s chronological sequentiality would be manifest if they w ­ ere unrolled into a long strip. Both the flashback and the foreshadow can, in this way, be understood as points on a timeline. This is all speculative thinking, but it does seem that the literary concept of foreshadowing has become a shadow of its former patristic self, and the con­ cept’s adaptation to modern linear time is perhaps in large part responsible for the flattening of the idea. That narrative Point A functions as a “symbol” (per OED) of ­later narrative Point B, with A and B as fixed points on a relatively stable chronological sequence, is a fairly closed and uninteresting hermeneutic system. If we understand typology in terms of novelistic foreshadowing, the concept seems of l­imited use for thinking about chronology and periodization. But a return to typology’s complex patristic temporality, particularly as inher­ ited from Origen, not only provides us with a distinctly unmodern way of conceptualizing time, it also gives us better access to understanding pre-­and early modern temporalities, and for developing creative chronological models. Indeed, while I have laid out this brief history of typology in a chronological order—­along a rough timeline, as it w ­ ere—­the concept invites the kind of his­ tory expressed in Serres’s handkerchief. Not only does typology develop into a feature of the novel, but we find that the novel shapes the way in which scholars approach the biblical text. And not only does typology lead to foreshadowing, which leads to the idea of the flashback, but we find that the form of reel-­to-­reel film, and its material structuring of narrative time, can lead us back to the an­ cient scroll. The history of typology, in other words, allows for thinking about history with both timeline and handkerchief in hand. Typology expresses and shapes divergent ways of understanding connections across time.

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The mode of typological history I have been exploring—­and modeling— in this essay pre­sents an experiment. If our conversations about periodizing time are to move beyond repositioning markers on a timeline, we might do well to reconsider our very notions about time itself, imagining a historicity that is nonlinear, or larger in scope. What are the payoffs for bringing Origen’s and Willet’s Hexaplae together? On a fundamental level, it demon­ strates a vibrant connection between texts that are separated by what we might consider 1,400 years of linear time. Typologically speaking, we can think of Origen’s text foreshadowing Willet’s, creating a sense of coherence across history. But we can also think of ­these Hexaplae as modeling their own form of historicism, one that enables multiple, eclectic connections. We find ­here a concept of history as richly multidimensional, and indigenous nonlinear temporal models that work with and against Serres. Do we find, perhaps, the ­future of our own historiography? If e­ arlier historical and nar­ rative models ­were grounded in timelines and a Darwinian notion of science and the nature of development over time, might our model t­ oday look more like the iceberg, at once ancient, pre­sent, and releasing carbon trapped since the nineteenth ­century? Are we moving from a linear model that features historical foreshadowing, to a temporally complex Hexapla (stripped of its eschatological teleology)? And what are the risks of typological history? As James Simpson noted in his essay in this volume, “Diachronic historicism sinned against the pro­ scription of anachronism.”61 Typological history is wildly and multiply dia­ chronic, and in its movements across time inevitably commits the anachronistic sin. (To wit: I used “typology” throughout this essay although it is a nineteenth-­ century coinage.) For literary study, the possibilities of typological history are both stimulating and threatening. As a historicist scholar, I am excited by the creative intellectual opportunities of eclectic time but I am also concerned about the loss of depth in local knowledge. Andrew Willet’s Hexaplae, for in­ stance, are not for novices; without an understanding of cultural, textual, po­liti­cal, and hermeneutical context, I imagine the texts would seem impen­ etrable. How ­will we continue to cultivate the deep historical knowledge and expertise that enables understanding and interpretation, while enabling ex­ pansive intellectual inquiry beyond the box of a historical period? Time, I sup­ pose, w ­ ill tell.

Notes

Introduction 1. Thomas Blundev­ille, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hysto­ ries, According to the Precepts of Francisco Patricio, and Accontio Tridentino (London, 1574), sig. H4. In ­these quotations, u’s have been silently modernized to v’s, and vv to w, and in a ­couple of places punctuation has been modernized for clarity. 2. Blundev­ille, True Order and Methode, sig. B4r. 3. Blundev­ille, True Order and Methode, sig. A2r. 4. Blundev­ille, True Order and Methode, sig. A3v. 5. Blundev­ille, True Order and Methode, sig. A3. 6. Blundev­ille, True Order and Methode, sig. F2v. 7. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “period (n., adj., and adv.),” A.I.3.a, accessed December 13, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. The OED’s first example of this definition is from 1596. 8. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Re­nais­sance Po­ etry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 43, 45. 9. Andrew Willett, Hexapla in Exodum (London, 1608), sigs. A2v, A5v. 10. This point was made by Gregory Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shake­ speare Com­pany, in his plenary lecture at the World Shakespeare Congress in Stratford-­ upon-­Avon, August 1, 2016. 11. D. R. Woolf, “The Power of the Past: History, Ritual, and Po­liti­cal Authority in Tudor E ­ ngland,” in Po­liti­cal Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Dis­ course, and Disguise, ed. Paul Fideler and Thomas F. Mayer (London: Routledge, 1992), 39, 20–21. 12. Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of ­England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (Lon­ don, 1587), 6:543, accessed June  25, 2017, http://­english​.­nsms​.­ox​.­ac​.­uk​/­holinshed​/­texts​ .­php​?­text1​=­1587​_­5095. ­Here, typographic u’s have been silently modernized to v. 13. Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), x. 14. Lawrence Besserman, “The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives,” introduction to The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Per­ spectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New York: Garland, 1996), 3.

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15. Lee Patterson, “The Place of the Modern in the Late M ­ iddle Ages,” in Besserman, Challenge of Periodization, 52. 16. Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Pres­ tige of En­glish Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 17. Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization: or, On Institutional Time,” New Literary His­ tory 42.4 (2011): 740. 18. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 19. Jonathan Gil Harris, introduction to Untimely M ­ atter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 1–25. 20. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 47. 21. Achsah Guibbory, introduction to The Map of Time: Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), esp. 8. 22. Cited in Guibbory, Map of Time, 28. 23. Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Prince­ton Architectural Press, 2010), ch. 2. 24. Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies, 130, 136. 25. Besserman, “Challenge of Periodization,” 9. 26. Patterson, “Place of the Modern,” 52–53. 27. See Margreta de Grazia, “The Modern Divide: From E ­ ither Side,” Journal of Me­ dieval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007): 453–67, esp. 461. 28. Smith, Chapter 2 in this volume, 44–45. 29. Cameron, Chapter 3 in this volume, 57. 30. Simpson, Chapter 5 in this volume, 92. 31. Simpson, Chapter 5 in this volume, 97. 32. Giles, Chapter 6 in this volume, 105. 33. Bruster, Chapter 10 in this volume, 151. 34. Lupton, Chapter 11 in this volume, 200. 35. Lupton, Chapter 11 in this volume, 212. 36. Zwicker, Chapter 12 in this volume, 223. 37. Zwicker, Chapter 12 in this volume, 217. 38. Greene, Light in Troy, 34.

1. Periodizing the Early Modern 1. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 213. 2. See the Introduction to this volume, 5–6. 3. Collingwood, Idea of History, 213. 4. Formative and more recent works in this area include Lynn Hunt, Mea­sur­ing Time, Making History (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University Press, 2008); Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); G. J.



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Whitrow, Time in History: The Evolution of Our General Awareness of Time and Temporal Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Peter Burke, “The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Pous­ sin,” in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (Wood­ bridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2001), 157–73. 5. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern ­England (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4 and n*. 6. William Johnson, Early Modern Eu­rope: An Introduction to a Course of Lectures on the Sixteenth C ­ entury (Cambridge: E. Johnson, Trinity Street, 1869); Phil Withington, So­ ciety in Early Modern ­England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Power­ful Ideas (Cam­ bridge: Polity Press, 2010), 19. 7. Withington, Society in Early Modern ­England, 20. 8. Withington, Society in Early Modern ­England, 26. 9. Withington, Society in Early Modern E ­ ngland, 22. 10. Withington, Society in Early Modern E ­ ngland, 45–48, 58. 11. Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution: The Pelican Economic His­ tory of Britain, vol. 2 (Harmonds­worth, UK: Pelican Books, 1969), back cover. The book was first published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1967. In the New Eco­ nomic History of Britain series, Hill’s book was superseded by Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000; Penguin, 2002). Wrightson’s dates ­were slightly dif­fer­ent—ca. 1450 to ca. 1750—­ though “early modern” is now explic­itly invoked in the subtitle. 12. W. W. Rostow, “The Take-­Off into Self-­Sustained Growth,” Economic Journal 66.261 (1956): 25–48. 13. Thomas, Ends of Life, 4. 14. This framing, it should be noted, works only for ­England; for continental Eu­ rope, the period is perhaps better framed as from the discovery of the New World in 1492 to the onset of the French Revolution in 1789. 15. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Par­ sons, foreword by R. H. Tawney (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930); R. H. Tawney, Reli­ gion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (London: J. Murray, 1926). See also Margaret Jacob and Matthew Kadane, “Missing, Now Found in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury,” American Historical Review 108.1 (2003): 20–49. 16. Withington, Society in Early Modern E ­ ngland, 70. 17. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secu­ larism Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 2, 3–4. 18. J. Hillis Miller, “Reading and Periodization,” in The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New York: Garland, 1996), 197. 19. Frederic William Maitland, The Constitutional History of ­England, ed. H. A. L. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 143. See also Marc Bloch, Feudal

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Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2nd ed., 1962), esp. vol. 1, ch. 13; Christopher Brooke, Eu­rope in the Central M ­ iddle Ages 962–1154, rev. ed. (London: Longman, 1975), 99–101; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Eu­rope,” American Historical Review 79.4 (1974): 1063–88. 20. The thesis advanced by C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern ­England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), has not gained ac­cep­tance. 21. David Clark, Between Pulpit and Pew: Folk Religion in a North Yorkshire Fishing Village (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in ­England 1700–1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982); Bob Bushaway, ‘ “Tacit, Unsuspected, but Still Implicit Faith’: Alternative Belief in Nineteenth-­ Century Rural ­England,” in Popu­lar Culture in ­England, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995), 189–215. 22. Lectures on Modern History. By the Late Right Hon. John Emerich Edward First Baron Acton, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere (London: Macmillan, 1906), 24. 23. Lawrence Stone, The F ­ amily, Sex and Marriage in E ­ ngland 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). See also Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern F ­ amily (Lon­ don: Collins, 1976). 24. Peter Burke, Popu­lar Culture in Early Modern Eu­rope (London: ­Temple Smith, 1978). 25. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicol­ son, 1971). 26. Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart ­England: A Regional and Com­ parative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). 27. Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in E ­ ngland 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basil Black­ well, 1986). 28. Alan Macfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), vii–­viii. 29. G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). For criticisms, see, in par­tic­u­lar, R. B. Wernham, “Review: The Tudor Revolution in Government by G. R. Elton,” En­glish Historical Review 71.276 (1956): 92–95; Penry Williams, “A Revolution in Tudor History? Dr. Elton’s Interpretation of the Age,” Past and Pre­sent 25 (1963): 3–8; G. L. Harriss, “A Revolution in Tudor History? Medieval Government and Statecraft,” Past and Pre­sent 25 (1963): 8–39; Penry Williams, “A Revolution in Tudor History? The Tudor State,” Past and Pre­sent 25 (1963): 39–58; J. P. Cooper, “A Revolution in Tudor History?,” Past and Pre­sent 26 (1963): 110–12; G. R. Elton, “The Tudor Revolution: A Reply,” Past and Pre­sent 29 (1964): 26–49; G. L. Harriss and Penry Williams, “A Revolution in Tudor History?,” Past and Pre­sent 31 (1965): 87–96; G. R. Elton, “A Revolution in Tudor History?,” Past and Pre­sent 32 (1965): 103–9; Christopher Coleman and David Starkey, eds., Revolution Reas­ sessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford: Claren­ don Press, 1986).



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30. Margaret Bowker, The Henrician Reformation: The Diocese of Lincoln ­Under John Longland 1521–1547 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Florence Higham, Catholic and Reformed: A Study of the Anglican Church, 1559–1662 (London: SPCK, 1962). 31. Peter Marshall, Reformation E ­ ngland 1480–1642, 2nd ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). The war-­of-­religion argument was famously first proposed by John Mor­ rill, “The Religious Context of the En­glish Civil War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th series, 34 (1984): 155–78. 32. Nicholas Tyacke, ed., ­England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1998). 33. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in En­glish Society 1559– 1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Scholars more typically see the Jacobethan period as starting somewhere in the ­middle, rather than the beginning, of Elizabeth’s reign. See, e.g., Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in E ­ ngland, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34. See the discussions in Marshall, Reformation ­England, 126–35; Tim Harris, Rebel­ lion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 4. 35. Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern E ­ ngland: Pol­ itics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 36. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 37. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an En­glish Village: Ter­ ling, 1525–1700 (New York: Academic Press, 1979). 38. Marjorie K. McIntosh, Anatomy and Community. The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Marjorie K. McIntosh, A Com­ munity Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1991); Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in ­England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Paul Seaver et al., “Symposium: Controlling (Mis)Be­hav­ior,” Journal of British Studies 37 (1998): 231–305; Martin Ingram, “Reformation of Manners in Early Modern ­England,” in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern E ­ ngland, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 47–88; Margaret Spufford, “Puritanism and Social Control,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern ­England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 41–57. For Wrightson’s reply to critics of the Terling study, see Keith Wrightson and David Levine, “Postscript: Terling Revisited by Keith Wrightson,” in Poverty and Piety in an En­glish Village: Terling, 1525–1700, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 186–220. 39. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of E ­ ngland, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981; 1st paperback ed. with new introduction, 1989), 2, 4, 454. 40. Demographic regime has been the conceptual logic ­behind some social-­economic history surveys, for instance: Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval E ­ ngland: Rural

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Society and Economic Change, 1036–1348 (London: Longman, 1978); John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the En­glish Economy, 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977); Keith Wright­ son, En­glish Society 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982); R. W. Malcolmson, Life and ­Labour in ­England 1700–1780 (London: Hutchinson, 1981). For an impor­tant early article linking economic developments in the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries to demographic developments, see E.  L. Jones, “Agriculture and Economic Growth in ­England, 1660–1750: Agricultural Change,” Journal of Economic History 25.1 (1965): 1–18. 41. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986); John Marshall, John Locke: Re­sis­tance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 7. 42. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Po­liti­cal Thought, 2 vols. (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Quentin Skinner, “The Origins of the Calvin­ ist Theory of Revolution,” in A ­ fter the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 309–30. 43. See, e.g., Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 6 vols. (London: Pick­ ering and Chatto, 1999). 44. Margreta de Grazia, “The Modern Divide: From E ­ ither Side,” Journal of Medi­ eval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007): 453. See also Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 92–93. 45. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “early (adj. and n.),” accessed December 7, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. See also Withington, Society in Early Modern ­England, 58. 46. A concern raised by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, “The History Manifesto: A Critique,” American Historical Review 120.2 (2015): 530–42; Da­ vid Armitage and Jo Guldi, “The History Manifesto: A Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler,” American Historical Review 120.2 (2015): 543–54. 47. Steven C. A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Scott Sowerby, “Pantomime History,” Parliamentary History 30.2 (2011): 236–58. 48. What is deemed the “early modern” period for E ­ ngland or Spain is, of course, the “colonial period” for North and Latin Amer­i­ca; see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Mi­ chael J. Braddick (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 23. 49. See Mihoko Suzuki, Chapter 13 in this volume. 50. Tim Harris, “Introduction: Revising the Restoration,” in The Politics of Religion in Restoration ­England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 6–9. 51. ­These include Jonathan Scott, ­England’s Trou­bles: Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Po­ liti­cal Instability in Eu­ro­pean Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Princi­ples: Republican Writing of the En­glish Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and



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Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of En­glish Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1996).

2. Time Bound­a ries and Time Shifts in Early Modern Liter ary Studies 1. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “periodization (n.),” accessed December 13, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. All subsequent references to the OED are from this edition. 2. All examples in this paragraph come from OED, “period (n., adj., and adv.),” with quotations specified below. 3. OED, “period (n., adj., and adv.),” A.I.7a. 4. OED, “period, (n., adj., and adv.),” A.II.11b. This par­tic­u­lar instance is deceptive, however, since that dating is taken from a printed text, whereas the original was written before the invention of printing in the fifteenth ­century—­the dif­fer­ent points of origin inadvertently illustrate how material conditions of production can create competing eti­ ologies and periods. 5. OED, “period (v.),” 1–2. 6. OED, “period (n., adj., and adv.),” A.III.16a. 7. OED, “period (n., adj., and adv.),” A.I.1. 8. Salman Rushdie, “Public Events, Private Lives: Lit­er­a­ture and Politics in the Mod­ ern World,” Prince­ton University Public Lecture, May  10, 2017. The comment was at­ tributed in the lecture to Harold Pinter. 9. Douglas Bush, En­glish Lit­er­a­ture in the ­Earlier Seventeenth C ­ entury, 1600–1660 (Ox­ ford: Clarendon Press, 1945), ch. 1. 10. U ­ ntil recently, early modern manuscript circulation had been thought to have been in decline, but renewed attention to systems of manuscript circulation has shown their durability; see John Barnard et al., eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Brit­ ain, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–), esp. vols. 3 (1400–1557) and 4 (1557–1695). 11. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Win­ dus, 1937). 12. See Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the En­glish Revolution of the Seventeenth C ­ entury (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958), and, more controversially, Christopher Hill, Milton and the En­glish Revolution (London: Faber, 1977). 13. See David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the En­glish Re­nais­sance (London: Rout­ ledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); David Norbrook, Writing the En­glish Republic: Poetry, Rhe­ toric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Blair Worden, Lit­er­a­ture and Politics in Cromwellian ­England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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14. Cleanth Brooks, “Criticism and Literary History: Marvell’s Horatian Ode,” Se­ wanee Review 55.2 (1947): 199–222; Douglas Bush, “Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’,” Sewanee Review 60.3 (1952): 363–76, anthologized in abridged form in John Carey, ed., Andrew Mar­ vell (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin Books, 1969), 179–210. 15. Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti-­Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Pa­ pists and Players in Post-­Reformation ­England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). 16. See, e.g., Greg Walker, Reading Lit­er­a­ture Historically: Drama and Poetry from Chaucer to the Reformation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 17. See, e.g., Timothy J. Reiss, “Re­nais­sance Theatre and the Theory of Tragedy,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3, The Re­nais­sance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 229–48; Gary R. Grund, ed. and trans., Humanist Comedies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 18. For the Spanish impact on En­glish lit­er­a­ture, see, e.g., Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 19. See, for instance, the greatly differing senses of contrasting periods, overlap­ ping and sometimes clashing in the following two collections: Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith, eds., Politics and Aesthetics in Eu­ro­pean Baroque and Classicist Tragedy (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva,  and  Kirill Ospovat, eds., Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 20. Hence the significance of Steven N. Zwicker’s period boundary–­defying Lines of Authority: Politics and En­glish Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1993). 21. See Nigel Smith, “Cross-­Channel Cavaliers,” Seventeenth ­Century, 32.4 (2017): 433–53. 22. See Russ Leo, “Hamlet’s Early International Lives: Geeraardt Brandt’s De Veinzende Torquatus and the Per­for­mance of Po­liti­cal Realism,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture 68.2 (2016): 155–80; Wilhelm Kühlmann, Martin Opitz: Deutsche Literatur und Deutsche Nation, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Manutius, 2001); Nicola Kaminski, Ex bello ars, oder, Ur­ sprung der “Deutschen Poeterey” (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004); Stefan Kiedroń, Andreas Gryphius und die Niederlande: niederländische Einflüsse auf sein Leben und Schaffen (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1993); Stefan Kiedroń, Christian Hofman von Hofmanswaldau und seine “niederländische Welt” (Wrocław: ATUT; Dresden: Neisse, 2007). 23. The exception is the study of the influence of John Donne in the Netherlands (nineteen of Donne’s poems w ­ ere translated into Dutch by the eminent poet diplomat Constantijn Huygens), exemplified in the vital work on Anglo-­Dutch relations of Paul R. Sellin. See his “John Donne and the Huygens ­Family, 1619–1621: Some Implications for Dutch Lit­er­a­ture,” Dutch Quarterly Review 12 (1982): 193–204.



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24. See, e.g., Anston Bosman, “Re­nais­sance Intertheater and the Staging of Nobody,” En­glish Literary History 71.3 (2004): 559–85. 25. See Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the En­glish Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern E ­ ngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David Wallace, Strong ­Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347–1645 (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2011), esp. ch. 3. 26. But see the impor­tant work of interconnection in John Kerrigan, Archipelagic En­ glish: Lit­er­a­ture, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 27. ­There is very ­little narrative literary history of this period in Scotland, but see, e.g., Roderick J. Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics, and Cultural Change in Jaco­ bean Scotland (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies, 2005); Kevin J. McGinley and Nicola Royan, eds., The Apparelling of Truth: Lit­er­at­ ure and Liter­ ary Culture in the Reign of James VI: A Festschrift for Roderick J. Lyall (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010); Nicholas McDowell, “A Rabelaisian Scotsman in King ­Cromwell’s Court: Sir Thomas Urquhart, the Hartlib Circle and the Nonsense of a Ra­ tional Language,” Re­nais­sance Studies 30.1 (2016): 152–68. For the extraterritorial and dip­ lomatic history of Scottish poetry, see Daniel Dornhofer, Petrarkistischer Diskurs und höfische Kommunikation im Wandel: Strategien schottischer Dichter, 1580–1625 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012). 28. See Deana Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift: En­glish Writing in Seventeenth-­ Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For a late Latin exam­ ple, see Poema de Hibernia, a Jacobite Latin Epic on the Williamite Wars, ed. Pàdraig Lenihan and Keith Sidwell (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2018). 29. See, e.g., A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Re­nais­sance in En­glish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 30. Warren Boutcher, The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Eu­rope, Volume 2: The Reader-­Writer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3–4; Jeroen Jansen, “P. C. Hooft, lecteur et imitateur de Montaigne,” in Montaigne and the Low Countries (1580–1700), ed. Paul J. Smith and Karl A. E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 173–85. 31. Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cor­ nell University Press, 2011); see also Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds., Read­ ing the Medieval in Early Modern ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds., Shakespeare and the ­Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 32. See, e.g., Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Po­liti­cal Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Annabel S. Brett, Liberty, Right, and Na­ ture: Individual Rights in ­Later Scholastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Annabel S. Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natu­ral Law (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011). 33. For the former position, note Anthony Grafton’s ongoing work on the dif­fer­ent chronologies of Christian history developed in the early modern periods, as in his Margaret

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Mann Phillips lecture at the Re­nais­sance Society of Amer­i­ca annual meeting, Berlin, March  27, 2015 (Annual Meeting Program, 16): “Re­nais­sance Humanism and Christian Antiquity: Philology, Fantasy, and Collaboration”: “This lecture ­will ask how Re­nais­sance scholars devised their visions of early Chris­tian­ity . . . ​it ­will trace three themes: how hu­ manists tried to reconstruct Christian antiquity as it ­really was, using sophisticated criti­ cal and antiquarian practices; how humanists, artists, and o­ thers in­ven­ted attractive versions of Christian antiquity, using sophisticated artistic and literary methods; and how humanists and printers learned to work together, and by ­doing so filled the marketplace with a vast range of material.” 34. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008), 4.1.7, 17; for the “seven ages of man” monologue, see William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in Norton Shakespeare, 2.7., 138–65. See also J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medi­ eval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 35. Shackerley Marmion, The Antiquary a Comedy: Acted by Her Maiesties Servants at the Cock-­pit (London: 1641), sig. B2r. I owe this reference to Zoe Gibbons. 36. See Amy Boesky, “Giving Time to W ­ omen: The Eternizing Proj­ect in Early Mod­ ern E ­ ngland,” in “This Double Voice”: Gendered Writing in Early Modern E ­ ngland, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), 123–41. 37. Paul Stevens, “The Pre-­Secular Politics of Paradise Lost,” in The Cambridge Com­ panion to Paradise Lost, ed. Louis Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 94–108. See, too, the essay by Ethan H. Shagan, Chapter 4 in this volume. 38. OED, “epoch (n.),” A.I.1, 2a, 2ba, 3aβ, II.5aα; OED, “era (n.),” 1, 2, 3b. 39. OED, “age (n.),” II.7; time: OED, “era (n.),” A.I.3.a, 4a; OED, “­century (n.),” II.4, 5a. 40. Reinhart Koselleck, F ­ utures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Ricardo Quinones, The Re­nais­sance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). 41. David Houston Wood, Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern ­England (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009); Brian Walsh, Shakespeare, the Queen’s Men, and the Elizabethan Per­for­mance of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Matthew Wagner, “In This Good Time: Cardenio and the Temporal Character of Shakespearean Drama,” in The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play, ed. David Car­ne­gie and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 267–79. 42. See J. K. Barret, Untold F ­ utures: Time and Literary Culture in Re­nais­sance E ­ ngland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 43. Miranda Wilson, “Watching Flesh: Poison and the Fantasy of Temporal Control in Re­nais­sance ­England,” Re­nais­sance Studies 27.1 (2013): 97–113; see also Zoe Gibbons’s work on experiential time as opposed to chronicle time in this period: “Writing Time, Unwriting History: Narratives of Temporality in Early Modern E ­ ngland, 1610–1670” (un­ published Ph.D. dissertation, Prince­ton University, 2017). 44. See Helen Small, The Long Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).



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45. See Amy Boesky, “Paradise Lost and the Multiplicity of Time,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 380–92. 46. Philip Schwyzer, “ ‘Late’ Losses and the Temporality of Early Modern Nostal­ gia,” Parergon 33.2 (2016): 97–113. 47. Schwyzer, “ ‘Late’ Losses,” 112–13. 48. An example by a prolific early modern historian is David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Knopf, 2017). 49. Schwyzer, “ ‘Late’ Losses,” 113. 50. Jeff Dolven, Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 51. Joel B. Davis, “ ‘Thus I Restles Rest in Spayne’: Engaging Empire in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Garcilaso de la Vega,” Studies in Philology 107.4 (2010): 493–519. 52. Cited in Dolven, Senses of Style, 63. O’Hara’s “Ode to Michael Goldberg(’s Birth and Other Births),” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 293–94. 53. Dolven, Senses of Style, 63. 54. Dolven, Senses of Style, 67. The Erasmus reference is to the Collected Works of Eras­ mus, 86 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), 24:301. 55. See Emily Vasiliauskas, “The Outmodedness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” En­glish Literary History 82 (2015): 759–87. 56. Compare with my e­ arlier assessments of this issue: Nigel Smith, foreword to The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Eliz­ abeth Scott-­Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), vii–­x v; Nigel Smith, af­ terword to Rethinking Historicism, ed. Anne Coiro and Thomas Fulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 283–93.

3. How Early Modern Church Historians Defined Periods in History 1. Martin Luther, Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Deutsche Bibel, 12 vols. (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1906–61), 11:2.36–37, interpreting Daniel 11:6. An edition of this text is published in The Annotated Luther, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand, Kirsi I. Stjerna, and Timo­ thy J. Wengert, 6 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015–17), 6:401. 2. For a ­later example, see Walter Raleigh, The History of the World, ed. C. A. Pat­ rides (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1971), books 4 and 5. Raleigh’s book, pub­ lished in 1614, reached the wars between the Romans and the Macedonian and Syrian kings. 3. According to the prologue to Jerome’s commentary on Daniel, the pagan Porphyry denied “that [Daniel] was composed by the person to whom it is ascribed in its title, but rather by some individual living in Judaea at the time of the Antiochus who was surnamed Epiphanes. He furthermore alleged that ‘Daniel’ did not foretell the ­f uture so much as he

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related the past, and lastly that what­ever he spoke of up till the time of Antiochus con­ tained au­then­tic history, whereas anything he may have conjectured beyond that point was false, inasmuch as he would not have foreknown the f­ uture.” See Jerome, Jerome’s Com­ mentary on Daniel, trans. Gleason L. Archer Jr. (­Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1958), 15–16. 4. Calculations of the time between Creation and Incarnation varied a good deal. The Hebrew Bible dates ­were typically used in the early modern period, in preference to the higher numbers in the Septuagint. Before the time of J. J. Scaliger, chronographers usually estimated that Jesus was born in am 3960–70 or thereabouts. Joseph Justus Scal­ iger, Opus novum de emendatione temporum (Paris, 1583) calculated the Incarnation at am 3948 and was widely followed. 5. See, for instance, Martin Luther in his Supputatio annorum mundi, in Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe [Schriften], 73 vols. (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883–2009), 53:171 (hereafter WA): “Hoc anno (1540) numerus annorum Mundi precise est 5500. Quare spe­ randus est finis mundi, Nam sextus Millenarius non complebitur, Sicuti tres dies mortui Christi non sunt completi.” 6. Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne-­Buriall, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk (London, 1658), 73. 7. Thomas Malvenda Setabitanus, OP, De Antichristo (Lyon, 1647), book 2, chs. 21– 23, argued that the end of time could never be known. 8. For example, Luther reportedly regarded the printing press as both “God’s high­ est and extremest act of grace” and as “the last flame before the extinction of the world.” See Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horse­men of the Apocalypse: Re­ ligion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2000), 17. 9. Th ­ ere are still some (let it be said) in extreme conservative American Protestant­ ism, who expect this kind of divine apocalypse. The official Doctrinal Statement of Lib­ erty University of Lynchburg, ­Virginia, states: “We affirm that the return of Christ for all believers is imminent. It ­will be followed by seven years of ­great tribulation, and then the coming of Christ to establish His earthly kingdom for a thousand years.” (See “Doctrinal Statement,” Liberty University, accessed August  18, 2017, https://­w ww​.­liberty​.­edu​ /­aboutliberty​/­​?­PID​= ­6907​.­) Some of ­these same ­people also deny ­human ability to change the ecosystem in the time remaining. 10. Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus, translated in Nicene and Post-­Nicene ­Fathers, first series, ed. Philip Schaff, 14 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 3:277–314. 11. Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493). 12. Sebastian Franck, Chronica, Zeÿtbuch vnd Geschÿcht Bibel von Anbegyn biss inn diss gegenwertig M.D.xxxi. Jar [sic] (Strassburg, 1531). ­There ­were numerous subsequent editions. 13. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, ed. I. Epstein, trans. Jacob Shachter and H. Free­ man (Teaneck, NJ: Talmudic Books, 2012, accessed August  19, 2017), 97a–­b, www​ .­halakhah​.­com​/­pdf​/­nezikin​/­Sanhedrin​.­pdf; Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah, ed. I. Ep­



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stein, trans. A Mishcon and A. Cohen (Teaneck, NJ: Talmudic Books, 2012, accessed August 19, 2017), 9a, www​.­halakhah​.­com​/­pdf​/­nezikin​/­Avodah​_ ­Zarah​.­pdf. 14. Johannes Carion, The Thre Bokes of Cronicles, whyche Iohn Carion (a Man Syngu­ larly Well Sene in the Mathematycall Sciences) Gathered Wyth ­Great Diligence [. . .], 2nd ed. (London, 1550), sigs. *6v–7r. 15. Luther, Supputatio, in WA 53:22; George Joye, The Exposicion of Daniel the Proph­ ete Gathered oute of Philip Melanchton, Iohan Ecolampadius, Chonrade Pellicane [and] out of Iohan Draconite, ­etc. (‘Geneue’ [i.e., Antwerp], 1545), fols. 9v–10r; [Johannes Carion], Chronicon Carionis expositum et auctum multis et veteribus et recentibus historiis . . . ​ab ex­ ordio mundi usque ad Carolum Quintum imperatorem, ed. Philipp Melanchthon and Cas­ par Peucer (Wittenberg, 1572), 10; a chronological t­ able to this effect is in Johann Heinrich Alsted, Thesaurus chronologiae: in quo universa temporum & historiarum series in omni vi­ tae genere ponitur ob oculos (Herborn, 1624); further editions in 1628, 1637, and 1650. 16. Otto, Bishop of Freising, The Two Cities; a Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D., ed. Austin P. Evans and Charles Knapp, trans. Charles Christopher Mi­ erow (New York: Octagon Books, 1956), 114–17. 17. Hillerbrand, Stjerna, and Wengert, Annotated Luther, 6:384 and nn. 18. Lorenz Faust, Anatomia statuae Danielis: kurtze u. eigentl. Erklerung d. grossen Bild­ nis d. Propheten Danielis (Leipzig, 1585). 19. On Calvin’s reading of Daniel, see Barbara Pitkin, “Prophecy and History in Calvin’s Lectures on Daniel (1561),” in Die Geschichte der Daniel-­Auslegung in Judentum, Christentum und Islam: Studien zur Kommentierung des Danielbuches in Literatur und Kunst, BZAW 371, ed. Katharina Bracht and David S. Du Toit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 323–45; Barbara Pitkin, “Calvin, Theology, and History,” Seminary Ridge Review (2010): 1–16. 20. Franciscus Junius, Opera theologica Francisci Junii Biturigis . . . ​Editio postrema, prioribus auctior (Geneva, 1613) cols. 1181–87. I am grateful to Kirsten Macfarlane for point­ ing out Junius’s role in this debate. 21. Jean Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Heidelberg, 1591), ch. 7, 416–33; discussion in Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Eu­rope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 167–73. 22. Hugh Broughton, Daniel His Chaldie Visions and His Ebrevv [. . .] (London, 1596), esp. chs. 7, 8, and 11. 23. Joannes Sleidanus, De quatuor summis imperiis libri tres, in gratiam iuventutis con­ fecti [. . .] ([Strasbourg], 1557); for the En­glish editions, see, e.g., The key of historie: Or, A Most Methodical Abridgement of the Foure Chiefe Monarchies, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, 3rd ed. (London, 1635). 24. William Aspinwall, A Brief Description of the Fifth Monarchy or Kingdome that Shortly Is to Come into the World (London, 1653). See B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Millenarianism (London: Faber, 1972). 25. On reformed ideas of covenant see Johannes Oecolampadius, In Hieremiam Prophetam commentariorum libri tres (Strasbourg, 1533), on Jeremiah 31:31–34, in fos. 161

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bis recto-164 bis recto; Heinrich Bullinger, De Testamento seu Foedere Dei unico et aeterno (Zu­rich, 1534). 26. Besides Luther, Supputatio, in WA, vol. 53, see also Heinrich Bullinger, Epitome temporum et rerum ab orbe condito (Zu­rich, 1565), printed ­a fter his homilies on Daniel, and consisting largely of a very long chronological t­able. A similarly long and complex ­table was appended to the end of Raleigh’s History of the World. 27. Luther debated t­ hese biblical passages at length in On the Jews and Their Lies (1543); see Hillerbrand, Stjerna, and Wengert, Annotated Luther, 5:550–60. 28. Joannes Oecolampadius, Commentariorum Ioannis Oecolampadii in Danielem prophetam libri duo (Geneva, 1553), 26. 29. One might think of Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of H ­ uman Socie­ties (New York: Norton, 1997), though Diamond’s primary focus is on c­ auses rather than periods. 30. Examples could include Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), and Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953). 31. Nearly all interpreters of Daniel since Julius Africanus (ca. 160–ca. 240) and fol­ lowing him Jerome, had understood the “seventy weeks” of Daniel 9:24–27 to mean “sev­ enty weeks of years,” i.e., 70 times 7  years or 490  years. See Jerome, Commentary on Daniel, 95. 32. Chronicon Carionis, sig. a5r. 33. Chronicon Carionis, sig. a7r. 34. Eusebius of Caesarea, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, ed. Andrew Louth, trans. G. A. Williamson (London: Penguin, 1989), 1.4.14–16. 35. Caesar Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici, 12 vols. (Rome, 1588–1607). See also Giuseppe Antonio Guazzelli, “Cesare Baronio and the Roman Catholic Vision of the Early Church,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Re­nais­sance World, ed. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2012), 52–71. 36. Chronicon Carionis, 352. 37. Chronicon Carionis, 352. 38. John Foxe, preface to Actes and Monuments, 2nd ed. (London, 1570), sig. ☞ 3r, accessed August 20, 2017, https://­w ww​.­johnfoxe​.­org​/­index​.­php​?­realm​= ­text&gototype​ =­&edition​=­1570&pageid​=­3. The 1570 and 1576 prefaces to the Acts and Monuments may be read online at, respectively, https://­w ww​.­johnfoxe​.­org​/­index​.­php​?­realm​=­text&gototype​ =­&edition​=­1570&pageid​=­1 and https://­w ww​.­johnfoxe​.­org​/­index​.­php​?­realm​=­text&gototype​ =­&edition​=­1576&pageid​=­1. 39. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London, 1583), 1.1, accessed August 20, 2017, https://­www​.­johnfoxe​.­org​/­index​.­php​?­realm​=­text&gototype​=­&edition​=­1583&pageid​=­24. The opening chapter of book 1 in the 1583 edition of the Acts and Monuments may be read at https://­w ww​.­johnfoxe​.­org​/­index​.­php​?­realm​=­text&gototype​=­&edition​=­1583&pageid​=­24. 40. Heinrich Bullinger, De origine erroris libri duo (Zu­rich, 1539).



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41. Gilbert Génébrard, Chronographiae libri quatuor (Lyon, 1599), 21–22, 38, 68–70, 113–15, 160–61, 165–71, 376–77, 388–89, 406, 433–34. 42. See Miguel A. Granada, “Helisaeus Roeslin’s Chronological Conception and a New Manuscript Source,” Early Science and Medicine 18.3 (2013): 231–65.

4. Periodization and the Secul ar Thanks to t­ hose who commented on an e­ arlier draft of this essay, especially Kristen Poole, Tim Harris, and James Simpson. The ideas for this essay w ­ ere developed while co­ teaching a gradu­ate seminar with Vicky Kahn on the Re­nais­sance and the secular, and I owe thanks to Vicky, and to all our students, for helping me to gestate my ideas. 1. See Joseph Clair, “The Concept of the Secular in Augustine’s City of God,” in Re­ thinking Secularization: Philosophy and the Prophecy of a Secular Age, ed. Herbert De Vri­ ese and Gary Gabor (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 27–56; Robert Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1970). 2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25. 3. The urtext h ­ ere is Lucien Febvre, The Prob­lem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth C ­ entury: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), first published as Le Problème de l’ incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Ra­ belais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942). 4. Catechisme ou instructions des premiers fondemens de la religion Chrestienne (Paris, 1575), 10 (my translation). Some of the issue ­here is the theological distinction between believing and believing in, but that is only a small part of a much larger debate over the meaning of belief. For a full treatment, see Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the ­Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton Uni­ versity Press, 2018). 5. Martin Luther, Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al., 55 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–86), 29:235. (Weimarer Ausgabe 57, 252–53: “ ‘Credere Deum’ adeo esse facile multis videtur, ut id et poetis et philosophis tribuerint. . . . ​Verum talis fides humana est sicut et alia quaedam hominis cogitatio, ars, prudentia, somnium ­etc. Haec enim omnia, quam cito tentatio ingruit, mox ruunt.”) 6. John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (Lon­ don, 1561), sig. A4 [I.iv.1–2]. Calvin’s Latin is “Deum esse negat,” and his French is “nient qu’il y ait un Dieu.” 7. Sebastian Franck, 280 Paradoxes or Wondrous Sayings, trans. Edward Furcha (Lew­ iston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1986), 375, checked against Sebastian Franck, Paradoxa, ed. Siegfried Wollgast (Berlin: Akademie-­Verlag, 1966), 348. 8. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1931).

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9. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, ed. Donald Frame (Stan­ ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 611. 10. Thomas Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59. 11. Dante Alighieri, Dante: Monarchy, ed. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1996), 90. 12. Martin Luther, Von Weltlicher Oberkeit, in Luther and Calvin on Secular Author­ ity, ed. and trans. Harro Höpfl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 8–12. 13. Troeltsch, Social Teaching. Unlike most theorists, Troeltsch distinguished sect-­ type Chris­tian­ity not only from church-­t ype but also from a mystical type, ­under which he included a few of the radicals like Sebastian Franck, David Joris, and Hendrik Niclaes, whose programs relied so heavi­ly on individual revelation. 14. Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the En­glish Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 162–74. 15. John Alcock, Spousage of a Virgin to Christ (Westminster, 1497). 16. Alcock, Spousage of a Virgin, sig. A6v. 17. Alcock, Spousage of a Virgin, sig. B1r. 18. Alcock, Spousage of a Virgin, sig. A3v. 19. Alcock, Spousage of a Virgin, sig. A5r. 20. Alcock, Spousage of a Virgin, sig. A6r. 21. William Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations, or Callings of Men (1605), taken from The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Uniuersitie of Cambridge, Mr. William Perkins, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1612–13), 1:750. 22. Perkins, Workes, 1:750. 23. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Par­ sons (New York: Scribner, 1958); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A His­ torical Study (London: J. Murray, 1926). 24. Perkins, Workes, 1:754. 25. David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an En­glish Town in the Seventeenth ­Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 26. Richard Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977–98), 3:319 [VIII.1.2]. 27. See Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, eds., Religion in Revolutionary ­England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 28. Just to give a c­ ouple of examples: see Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restora­ tion ­England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2011); Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie, eds., The Politics of Religion in Restoration ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 29. Roger L’Estrange, Toleration Discuss’ d (London, 1663), 5–6. 30. Quotations are from John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1997).



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5. Tr ans-­R efor mation En­g lish Liter ary History 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gil­ bert (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 5 (originally published as L’ancien régime et la révolu­ tion [Paris: Lévy, 1856]). 2. Respectively: Act of Uniformity, 1558: 1 Eliz 1 c 2; Ministers required to swear con­ formity to the 39 Articles in 1571: 13 Eliz 12 c 1; Religion and Recusants Act 1593: 35 Eliz 1 c 1. ­These are all available in T. E. Tomlins et al., eds., Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (Lon­ don: Dawsons, 1810–28; repr. 1963), vol. 4. 3. Most influentially in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London: 1563, 1570, 1576, 1583), which sees the Reformation in ­England typologically as a fulfillment of the history of the early Church. 4. For which, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of ­England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation E ­ ngland, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 5. A huge topic, but for one penetrating account of the individual, subjective experi­ ence of Calvinism, see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: En­glish Puritan­ ism and the Lit­er­a­ture of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 6. For which, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Eu­rope’s House Divided, 1490– 1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 7. For an example of seeing colonial invasion and idolatry attack as a replay of the foundation of the primitive Church, see Thomas Cummins, “The Golden Calf in Amer­ i­ca,” in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, ed. Mi­ chael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 77–104, esp. 83. For the attendant historiographical schemes that subtend colonial domination, see Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 8. An obviously contentious and contended claim, but for the idea that the En­glish Civil War was plausibly E ­ ngland’s “war of religion,” see John Morrill, “Charles I, Tyr­ anny and the En­glish Civil War,” in The Nature of the En­glish Revolution: Essays, ed. J. S. Morrill (London: Longman, 1993), 285–306, esp. 303. See also John Coffey “Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Lit­er­a­ture and the En­glish Revolution, ed. Laura Lunger Knop­ pers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 98–117. 9. For the volume of the religious print output, see Coffey, “Religion,” 99; for the comparative printing figures, for which, for example, the Puritan Perkins vastly outsells Shakespeare up to 1640, see Kari Konkola and Diarmaid MacCulloch, “­People of the Book: Success in the En­glish Reformation,” History ­Today 53.10 (2003): 23–29. 10. For the status of which as a revolution, see Paul Veyne, Quand notre monde est devenu chrétien (312–394), enl. ed. (Paris: Edition Albin Michel, 2007), esp. 190–91. 11. For that vio­lence, see, for example, the parade of events, often with huge loss of life, that marches through MacCulloch, Reformation, such as the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25: 100,000–300,000 victims (158); the Devonshire Rebellion of 1549: 4,000–5,000

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victims (Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, rev. 5th ed. [Har­ low, UK: Pearson Longman, 2008], 57); the Marian persecution of Protestants: 283 vic­ tims (MacCulloch, Reformation, 285); the French Wars of Religion: 2,000,000–4,000,000 victims between 1562 and 1629, including the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, ca. 5,000 victims (R. J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion, 3rd ed. [London: Longman, 2010], 96); the Elizabethan persecution of Catholics: 191 victims (MacCulloch, Reformation, 392); the Thirty Years’ War in Central Eu­rope: 25–40 ­percent of population as victims (MacCull­ och, Reformation, 485); the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: 400,000 Protestant exiles (MacCulloch, Reformation, 670); the En­glish Civil War: ca. 160,000 victims (M. J. Brad­ dick, God’s Fury, ­England’s Fire: A New History of the En­glish Civil Wars [London: Allen Lane, 2008], 389, 395); and ­Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland: a minimum of 6,000 victims (cited from the Dictionary of National Biography, “Oliver C ­ romwell,” u ­ nder “­Cromwell in Ireland 1649–1650”). For evangelical promotion of vio­lence in the early Reformation, see Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in ­England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ch. 2. 12. For the power of ­legal discourse to resist the textuality of the new dispensation, see Sebastian Sobecki, Unwritten Verities: The Making of ­England’s Vernacular ­Legal Cul­ ture, 1463–1549 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). 13. For a witty debunking of the secularization thesis more broadly, see Peter L. Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, ed. Peter L. Berger (Washington, DC: Eth­ ics and Public Policy Center, 1999), 1–18. For the implications of this thesis for Reforma­ tion En­g lish literary history, see Brian Cummings, introduction to Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 2–23. 14. For a vigorous recent attack on supercessionism, see Brad S. Gregory, introduc­ tion to The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cam­ bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 1–10. For a critique of the rest of this book, see James Simpson, “Brad Gregory’s Unintended Revelations,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 46.3 (2016): 545–54. 15. For the larger practice of supercessionist historiography, see Anthony Kemp, The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a historiographical survey of the operation of the secu­ larization thesis in En­glish Reformation historiography, see Alexandra Walsham, “The Ref­ ormation and the Disenchantment of the World,” Historical Journal 51.2 (2008): 497–58. 16. For which, see Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), who analyzes the rise of religious fundamentalism in “secular” states of Israel, India, and Algeria. 17. For the turn to religion as a fit object of study in early modern En­glish literary studies, see Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern En­glish Studies,” Criticism 46.1 (2004): 167–90. For one exemplary exception to the rule of periodic stability, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­



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ton University Press, 2001). See also the University of Notre Dame Press series ReForma­ tions, edited by David Aers, Sarah Beckwith, and James Simpson, titles from which are cited below. 18. For a broad history of scholarship on the En­glish Reformation, see Rosemary O’Day, The Debate on the En­glish Reformation (London: Methuen, 1986), and Peter Mar­ shall, “(Re)defining the En­glish Reformation,” Journal of British Studies 48.3 (2009): 564–86. 19. Thomas Warton, The History of En­glish Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eigh­teenth Centuries, 3 vols. (London: J. Dodsley et al., 1774–81), 2:51. 20. C. S. Lewis, En­glish Lit­er­a­ture in the Sixteenth ­Century, Excluding Drama, The Oxford History of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). Lewis divides the content of his book into “Late Medieval,” “The Drab Age,” and “The Golden Age.” 21. See Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of Califor­ nia Press, 1981), for drama; and Margaret Aston, E ­ ngland’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Im­ ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), for religious art making. 22. For the resurgence of medieval studies from the 1970s, see James Simpson, “Dia­ chronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern E ­ ngland, ed. David Matthews and Gordon McMullan (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2007), 17–30. For an account of the shape and force of New His­ toricism, see Louis Montrose, “New Historicisms,” in Redrawing the Bound­aries: The Transformation of En­glish and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association of Amer­i­ca, 1992), 392–418. 23. See Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 26–27; see also 42–43. 24. See the brilliant essay by Margreta de Grazia, “A Story of Anachronism,” in Cul­ tural Reformations: Medieval and Re­nais­sance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 1. 25. “Almost” b­ ecause Stephen Greenblatt does offer acute accounts of Reformation culture in his seminal Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1980). 26. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931). 27. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, 88. 28. Wallace K. Ferguson, The Re­nais­sance in Historical Thought (New York: Hough­ ton Mifflin, 1948). 29. See Geoffrey Elton, E ­ ngland U ­ nder the Tudors, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1974; 1st ed. 1955) (and repeated in many ­later studies by Elton), for whom the Reformation in ­England is fundamentally and positively a constitutional break, “the definition of in­de­ pen­dent national sovereignty achieved by the destruction of papal jurisdiction in E ­ ngland” (cited in O’Day, Debate on the En­glish Reformation, 121). 30. For the history of liberty as the master code of the Whig interpretation of history, see J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the En­glish Past (Cambridge:

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Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 9. The Whig tradition’s relation with evangelical theol­ ogy is not without its complications, but Burrow argues that “a Whig historian of ­England must of necessity be Protestant—­was bound in some mea­sure to cherish it” (243–44). 31. For some key instances of which, see James Simpson, “Humanism,” in Diction­ ary of the ­Middle Ages, suppl. 1, ed. in chief William Chester Jordan (New York: Scrib­ ner’s, 2004), 279–82. 32. See Peter Burke, The Re­nais­sance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969). 33. See David Daniell, The Bible in En­glish: Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 34. See Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the En­glish Re­nais­sance (Dur­ ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965). 35. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popu­lar Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth ­Century ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, first published 1971), for whom the Reformation is expressive of the rational disenchantment of the world against the deceptive magical operations of the pre-­Reformation Catholic Church. For a history of this topic, see Walsham, “Reformation.” 36. See Thomas M. Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History, ed. Pe­ ter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 241–64; and Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Re­ nais­sance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). 37. See Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-­Revolutionary E ­ ngland (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), in which Puritanism is taken to be the liberating religion of the working class. 38. Michel Foucault, The Order of ­Things: An Archaeology of the ­Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971). Originally published in French as Les mots et les choses: une archéolo­ gie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 39. Each of the areas of scholarship in the following notes would require extensive biblio­graphies. I give exemplary, seminal references. For Lollardy, see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 40. See Helen Barr, Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition (Cam­ bridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1994). 41. See Paul Strohm, ­England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Le­ gitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 42. See Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-­and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 43. See Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Lit­er­a­ture of Late Medieval ­England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). 44. See the essays in Larry Scanlon and James Simpson, eds., John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian ­England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).



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45. See Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shake­ speare (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 46. See David R. Carlson, En­glish Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 47. Brian Stock, “The M ­ iddle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism,” New Literary History 5.3 (1974): 527–47. 48. See Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination. 49. See James Simpson, Burning to Read: En­glish Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), ch. 4. 50. See Simpson, Burning to Read. 51. See Aston, ­England’s Iconoclasts, and James Simpson, ­Under the Hammer: Icono­ clasm in the Anglo-­American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 52. For which, see James Simpson, “No Brainer: The Early Modern Tragedy of Tor­ ture,” Religion and Lit­er­a­ture 43.3 (2011): 1–23. 53. For the intimate connections between po­liti­cal and theological tyranny, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, The Oxford En­glish Literary His­ tory, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 7. See also Greg Walker, Writing ­Under Tyranny: En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2005). 54. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Eu­rope’s House Divided (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 55. Not, of course, that late medieval society was innocent of violent persecution, for which, see the classic R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford: Black­ well, 1987). 56. See, e.g., Simpson, “Diachronic History.” 57. Giles Constable, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life: Concepts and Reali­ ties,” in Re­nais­sance and Renewal in the Twelfth ­Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, with Carol D. Lanham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 37–67. 58. Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 87–108. 59. David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of the Early Modernists, or Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject’,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on En­glish Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 177–202. 60. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in E ­ ngland, 1400– 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). See the brilliant review by David Aers, “Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars,” Lit­er­a­ture and History 3.2 (1994): 90–105. 61. Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution. For discussion of this volume, see the following: Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35.1 (2005), dedicated to discus­ sion of the book; Debora Shuger, “The Reformation of Penance,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71.4 (2008): 557–71, attacking the book; and James Simpson, “The Reformation

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of Scholarship: A Reply to Debora Shuger,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.2 (2012): 249–68. 62. David Matthews and Gordon McMullan, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 63. Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds., Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Re­nais­sance in Literary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 64. See John N. King, En­glish Reformation Lit­er­a­ture: The Tudor Origins of the Prot­ estant Tradition (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1982). 65. See, e.g., Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook to Tu­ dor Lit­er­a­ture, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 66. For an early example, see Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory. 67. Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Troilus as Temporal Archive,” in Theory and the Pre­ modern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 80–98; and James Simp­ son, “Not Yet: Chaucer and Anagogy,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 31–54. 68. Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). For diachronic “resonance,” see Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112.5 (1997): 1060–71. 69. Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cor­ nell University Press, 2011). For another example of a medievalist writing about early mod­ ern materials, see Simpson, U ­ nder the Hammer. See also James Simpson, Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019). 70. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Pre­sent (Lon­ don: Verso, 2002), 29.

6. Time and Pl ace in Shakespeare’s Str atford-­u pon-­Avon 1. Lawrence Besserman, The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Per­ spectives (New York: Garland, 1996). 2. Jennifer Summit and David Wallace, “ReThinking Periodization,” Journal of Me­ dieval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007): 447–51. 3. Chris Gerrard, Medieval Archaeology. Understanding Traditions and Con­temporary Approaches (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2003), xi–­xii. 4. Chris Gerrard, “Retrospect and Prospect: 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology,” So­ ciety for Medieval Archaeology, accessed June 21, 2017, http://­w ww​.­medievalarchaeology​ .­co​.­uk​/­index​.­php​/­the​-­sma​/­sma​-­retrospect​-­and​-­prospect​/­. 5. See, e.g., Mark Gardiner and Stephen Rippon, “Looking to the ­Future of Medi­ eval Archaeology,” and Roberta Gilchrist, “Medieval Archaeology and Theory: A Disci­ plinary Leap of Faith,” in 50 Years of Medieval Archaeology, ed. Roberta Gilchrist and Andrew Reynolds (London: Maney, 2009), 65–78, 358–408.



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6. Harold Mytum, “A Short History of the Society for Post-­Medieval Archaeology,” Post-­Medieval Archaeology 50.1 (2009): 6–18. 7. See, e.g., Dan Hicks and Mary Beaudry, eds., The Cambridge Companion to His­ torical Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8. David Gaimster and Paul Stamper, introduction to The Age of Transition: The Ar­ chaeology of En­glish Culture 1400–1600 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997), ix. 9. Gaimster and Stamper, Age of Transition, x. 10. Dan Hicks, “From Questions That Count to Stories That ­Matter,” Antiquity 78 (2004): 934–39. 11. Margreta de Grazia, “The Modern Divide: From ­Either Side,” Journal of Medi­ eval and Early Modern Studies 37.3 (2007): 454–67. 12. Paul Courtney, “The Tyranny of Constructs: Some Thoughts on Periodisation and Change,” in Gaimster and Stamper, Age of Transition, 9–24; and de Grazia, “Modern Divide,” 461. 13. David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist, The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580 (Leeds: Maney, 2003), 1. 14. Hicks, “From Questions That Count,” 938–39. 15. ­There have been extensive debates about the level of investment in this period in housing, prompted by W. G. Hoskins’s seminal article “The Rebuilding of Rural ­England,” Past and Pre­sent 4 (1953): 44–59. For a reflection on its enduring significance, see Chris Dyer, “Vernacular Architecture and Landscape History: The Legacy of the Rebuilding of Rural ­England and The Making of the En­glish Landscape,” Vernacular Architecture 37 (2006): 24–32. For a theoretically informed approach to housing, see Matthew Johnson, En­glish Houses 1300–1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2010). 16. Kate Giles, “Buildings Archaeology,” in Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, ed. Claire Smith (New York: Springer Reference, 2014), 1033–41; Jane Grenville and Richard Morris, “Archaeological Approaches to the Recording of Buildings,” Field Archaeologist 16 (1992): 300–301. 17. David H. Caldwell and Catriona Cooper, “The Medieval to Early Modern Tran­ sition in a Digital Age: New Developments Relevant to the Study of Domestic Buildings,” Post-­Medieval Archaeology 50.1 (2016): 19–33. 18. Richard K Morris, The Archaeology of Buildings (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2000). 19. Gavin Lucas, “Historical Archaeology and Time,” in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, 41; Jana Rogasch, “Building Biographies,” in Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, 1030–33. See Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of ­Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Th ­ ings Tell the Stories of P ­ eoples’ Lives (New York: Routledge, 1998). 20. Lucas, “Historical Archaeology,” 41; Harold Mytum, “Ways of Writing in Post-­ Medieval and Historical Archaeology: Introducing Biography,” Post-­Medieval Archaeol­ ogy 44 (2010): 237–54.

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21. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Re­ assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2005). 22. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010); David Gaim­ ster, Tara Hamling, and Catherine Richardson, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Eu­rope (London: Routledge, 2016). 23. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, Staged Properties in Early Modern En­ glish Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 24. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely ­Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 13. 25. Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: En­glish ­People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 26. Harris, Untimely ­Matter, 22, 95–118. For London as a new Jerusalem, see Beatrice Groves, “­England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s ­England,” in The Bible on the Shakespear­ ean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation E ­ ngland, ed. Thomas Fulton and Kris­ ten Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 27. Harris, Untimely ­Matter, 20. 28. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Re­nais­sance (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 29. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Re­nais­sance, 9. 30. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Re­nais­sance, 13. 31. Besserman, Challenge of Periodization, 10. 32. Besserman, Challenge of Periodization, 9, 9–13. 33. Peter Burke, “Reflections on the Cultural History of Time,” Viator 35 (2004): 617–26. 34. Chris Humphrey and Mark Ormrod, Time in the Medieval World (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2002). 35. Karen Elaine Smyth, “Changing Times in the Cultural Discourse of Late Medi­ eval ­England,” Viator 35 (2004): 435–54. 36. Burke, “Reflections,” 626. 37. Robert Bearman, The History of an En­glish Borough: Stratford-­upon-­Avon, 1196– 1996 (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1997). 38. Mairi Macdonald, The Register of the Guild of the Holy Cross, St. Mary and St. John the Baptist, Stratford-­upon-­Avon (Bristol: The Dugdale Society, 2007), 1–2; Mairi Mac­ donald, “The Guild of the Holy Cross and its Buildings,” in The Guild and Guild Build­ ings of Shakespeare’s Stratford: Society, Religion, School and Stage, ed. J.  R. Mulryne (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 13–30. 39. Val Horsler, Martin Gorick, and Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare’s Church: A Par­ ish for the World (London: Third Millennium, 2010), 21–23. 40. Paul Edmondson, Kevin Colls, and William Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place: An Archaeological Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 20;



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Robert Bearman, Stratford-­upon-­Avon: A History of Its Streets and Buildings (Stratford-­ upon-­Avon Society, 2007a; 1988), 30. 41. The National Archives, Richmond, UK (hereafter TNA), C66/369  m.13; C 66/424 m.5; Shakespeare Centre Library and Archives, Stratford-­upon-­Avon (hereafter SCLA) BRT1/2/153; BRT1/2/153; BRT1/2/239; Macdonald, Register, 2–3. 42. SCLA BRT1/3/155; Macdonald, Register, 7–8. 43. SCLA BRT 1/3/31; Kate Giles and Jonathan Clark, “The Archaeology of the Guild Buildings of Shakespeare’s Stratford-­upon-­Avon,” in Mulryne, Guild and Guild Buildings, 140–42. 44. Macdonald, Register, 5. For a compelling account of the role of guilds and the paraliturgical symbolism of the guild feast, see Gervase Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the ­Middle Ages: Guilds in ­England, 1250–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 45. SCLA BRT 1/3/35. 46. SCLA BRT 1/3/38; Giles and Clark, “Archaeology of the Guild Buildings,” 143–45. 47. SCLA BRT 1/3/38; Giles and Clark, “Archaeology of the Guild Buildings,” 149–50. 48. SCLA BRT 1/3/38; Giles and Clark, “Archaeology of the Guild Buildings,” 153–57. 49. Giles and Clark, “Archaeology of the Guild Buildings,” 155–56. 50. TNA PROB 11/13/570; Giles and Clark, “Archaeology of the Guild Buildings,” 152–54. 51. SCLA BRT 1/3/55; BRT 1/3/59. 52. Macdonald, Register, 25; M. R. Macdonald, “Hugh Clopton,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 3, 2008, http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​/­view​/­a rticle​/­5700. 53. Edmondson, Colls, and Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place, 30–56. 54. Edmondson, Colls, and Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place, 96. 55. TNA PROB 11/11/66; a transcript of the ­will is also held at SCLA ER 1/121. 56. Kate Giles, Anthony Masinton, and Geoff Arnott, “Visualising the Guild Cha­ pel, Stratford-­upon-­Avon: Digital Models as Research Tools in Buildings Archaeology,” Internet Archaeology 32 (2012); Clifford Davidson, The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-­upon-­Avon (New York: AMS Press, 1988). 57. Thomas Fisher, Ancient Allegorical, Historical, and Legendary Paintings: in Fresco, Discovered in . . . ​1804, on the Walls of the Chapel of the Trinity, Belonging to the Gilde of the Holy Cross, at Stratford-­upon-­Avon, in Warwickshire, from Drawings, Made at the Time of Their Discovery, with a Description by J.G. Nichols, (London: H. G. Bohn, 1838); Robert Bell Wheler, History and Antiquities of Stratford-­upon-­Avon (Stratford-­upon-­Avon: J. Ward, 1806); Wilfrid Puddephat, “The Mural Paintings of the Dance of Death in the Guild Cha­ pel of Stratford-­upon-­Avon,” Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society 76 (1958): 29–35, and Puddephat’s archive SCLA DR624/13 (iii), 624/16, 624/17, 624/22, 624/33, 624/27–31. 58. Amy Appleford, “The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Dance of Poulys,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38.2 (2008): 285– 314; Sophie Oosterwijk, “Death, Memory and Commemoration: John Lydgate and the ‘Macabrees Daunce’ at Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, London,” in Memory and Commemoration

308

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in Medieval ­England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline Barron and Clive Burgess (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 185–201. 59. Linne Mooney, “Verses upon Death and Other Wall Paintings Surviving in the Guild Hall, Stratford-­upon-­Avon,” Journal of the Early Book Society 3 (2000): 182–90. 60. Giles, Masinton, and Arnott, Visualising the Guild Chapel, sect. 4.1; Richard Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval ­England (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2004), 157–85. 61. Kate Giles, “Public Buildings in Early Modern Eu­rope,” in Gaimster, Hamling, and Richardson, Routledge Handbook, 98–114; Rosser, Art of Solidarity, 193–213. 62. Robert Bearman, “The Early Reformation Experience in a Warwickshire Mar­ ket Town: Stratford-­upon-­Avon, 1530–1580,” Midland History 32 (2007b): 83. 63. Sylvia Gill, “Reformation: Priests and ­People,” in Mulryne, Guild and Guild Buildings, 31–57. 64. Bearman, “Early Reformation Experience,” 84–86; Robert Bearman, “The Guild­ hall, Stratford-­upon-­Avon: The Focus of Civic Governance in the Sixteenth ­Century,” in Mulryne, Guild and Guild Buildings, 97–114. 65. Macdonald, “Guild of the Holy Cross,” 18. 66. Cited in Bearman, “Guildhall, Stratford-­upon-­Avon,” 101. 67. Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the En­glish Urban Com­ munity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 97. 68. J. R. Mulryne, “Professional Theatre in the Guildhall 1568–1620: Players, Puri­ tanism and Per­for­mance,” in Mulryne, Guild and Guild Buildings, 171–206; Oliver Jones, “The Queen’s Men in Stratford and the Troublesome Reigne of John, King of E ­ ngland,” in Mulryne, Guild and Guild Buildings, 207–24. 69. Delia Garratt and Tara Hamling, Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life: Trea­sures from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 10. 70. Mark Perry and Richard Lithgow, “The Guildhall, King Edward VI School, Stratford-­upon-­Avon: Wall Paintings in the Hall: Investigatory Phase Report” (unpub­ lished conservation report, 2014), 6; Mark Perry and Richard Lithgow, “The Guildhall, King Edward VI School, Stratford-­upon-­Avon: Wall Paintings in the Hall and Council Chamber” (unpublished conservation report, 2016), 17. 71. Perry and Lithgow, “Guildhall” (2014), 6, 11. 72. Giles and Clark, “Archaeology of the Guild Buildings,” 151–52; Davidson, The Guild Chapel, 4–5. 73. Harris and Korda, Staged Properties, 18. 74. Bearman, “Early Reformation Experience,” 97; Bearman, “Guildhall, Stratford-­ upon-­Avon,” 108. 75. Richard Savage, Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-­upon-­Avon and Other Rec­ords, 6 vols. (Warwick: The Dugdale Society 1921), 1:128, 138. 76. Bodleian Library, Tanner MS. 464, Vol. V, fol. 60v. 77. Current conservation work on the Doom and f­ uture work on the Dance of Death and Life of Adam by Perry Lithgow may help to answer t­ hese questions. 78. Edmondson, Colls, and Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place, 76.



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79. See Robert Bearman, “John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual Testament’: A Reappraisal,” Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003): 183–202, and “John Shakespeare: A Papist or Just Penniless?,” Shakespeare Quarterly 56.4 (2005): 411–33. 80. Savage, Minutes and Accounts, 3:27, 36; 4:xix, 31. 81. Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: A & C Black, 2010); Ruth Morse, Helen Cooper, and Peter Holland, eds., Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Pre­ sents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 82. SCLA ER1/1/97, f.124; Edmondson, Colls, and Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place, 73. 83. Edmondson, Colls, and Mitchell, Finding Shakespeare’s New Place, 96–97; 104–7. 84. Harris, Untimely ­Matter, 113. 85. Gill, “Reformation: Priests and ­People,” 42. 86. Harris, Untimely ­Matter, 4.

7. Much Ado About Ruffs Note to epigraph: Fanny Bury Palliser, A History of Lace, 2nd ed. (London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston, 1869; 1865), 267. 1. Freeman M. O’Donoghue identifies the ruff as “peculiarly associated with Eliza­ beth” and suggests that its “rise and pro­gress” might be used to trace the Queen’s own rise and pro­gress through her portraiture, developing an elaborate system of classification based on the “vari­ous forms which it took at dif­fer­ent periods” of her reign. See O’Donoghue, A Descriptive and Classified Cata­logue of Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Lon­ don: Dryden Press, 1894), xiv. 2. Hannah Greig, “As Seen on the Screen: Material Culture, Historical Accuracy and the Costume Drama,” in Writing Material Culture History, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Gior­ gio Riello (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 303. 3. Mattel, Elizabethan Queen Barbie, in “The ­Great Eras Collection,” vol. 6 (1994), #12792. 4. See, e.g., James Robinson Planché, Cyclopaedia of Costume, or Dictionary of Dress . . . ​ A General Chronological History of the Costumes of the Principal Countries of Eu­rope, from the Commencement of the Christian Era to the Accession of George the Third, 2 vols. (Lon­ don: Chatto and Windus, 1876–79), 1:433–37; Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’ d (Leeds: Maney, 1988), 15; C. Willet Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington, Hand­ book of En­glish Costume in the 17th  ­Century (Boston: Plays, 1972), 97–105; “The Closet Historian,” Bianca Esposito, “Closet Histories #2.2: The Ruff,” Closet Historian, October 1, 2014, http://­t heclosethistorian​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2 014​/­10​/­closet​-­histories​-­22​-­ruff​.­html; and Drea Leed, “Elizabethan Ruffs,” Elizabethan Costume Page, http://­w ww​.­elizabethan​ costume​.­net​/­ruffs​/­index​.­html. 5. Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses Contayning a Discoverie, or Briefe Sum­ marie of Such Notable Vices and Imperfections, as now Raigne in Many Christian Countreyes

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of the Worlde: but (Especiallie) in a Verie Famous Ilande Called Ailgna . . . ​To Be Read of All True Christians, Everie Where: but Most Needefull, to be Regarded in En­glande (London, 1583), sigs. D7v–­D8r. 6. Oxford En­glish Dictionary [OED] Online, s.v. “period (n., adj., and adv.),” C. adv., accessed December 13, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. 7. John Taylor, “The Praise, of Cleane Linnen With the Commendable Use of the Laundresse” (1624), in All the Workes of John Taylor the Water-­poet Beeing Sixty and Three in Number. Collected into One Volume by the Author: with Sundry New Additions Corrected, Revised, and Newly Imprinted (London, 1630), sig. Pp3r [169]. 8. Palliser, History of Lace, 268. 9. Pamela A. Sambrook, The Country House Servant (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 1999), 120, 126. 10. Sambrook, Country House Servant, 117. See also Carole Rawcliffe, “A Marginal Oc­ cupation? The Medieval Laundress and her Work,” Gender & History 21.1 (2009): 147–69. 11. The material culture of laundry work included battledores (for beating linens to drive out dirt), ashes (for lye), powder blue (for whitening), white starch, mangles, smooth­ ing irons, goffering irons or setting sticks (for creating ruffs’ distinctive folds), clothes­ lines, and washing or bucking tubs. See Sambrook, Country House Servant, 153. 12. Leonard Mascall, A Profitable Booke Declaring Dyvers Approoved Remedies, to Take Out Spottes and Staines, in Silkes, Velvets, Linnnen [sic] and Woollen Clothes . . . ​With a Per­ fite T ­ able Hereunto, to Fynde All Thinges Readye, Not the Like Revealde in En­glish Hereto­ fore. Taken out of Dutche, and En­glished by L.M. (London, 1583), sigs. B2r–­B2v. 13. Mascall, Profitable Booke, sig. A2r–­A3r. 14. Gervase Markham, Countrey Contentments, or The En­glish Huswife Containing the Inward and Outward Vertues Which ­Ought to Be in a Compleate ­Woman . . . ​and All Other ­Things Belonging to an Houshold. A Worke Generally Approved, and Now Much Aug­ mented (London, 1623), 173–75. 15. Stale urine was a natu­ral source of cleansing ammonia and could be used in lieu of lye, as could a solution made of poultry feces or animal dung ­a fter it was steeped and strained. See Sambrook, Country House Servant, 128–33; Rawcliffe, “Marginal Occupa­ tion,” 152; Patricia E. Malcolmson, En­glish Laundresses: A Social History, 1850–1930 (Ur­ bana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 4–5. 16. Elisabeth Berry Drago, “Thomas Wijck’s Painted Alchemists at the Intersection of Art, Science, and Practice” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2016), 157. On depic­ tions of ­women’s work in general and laundering in par­tic­u ­lar in alchemical treatises, see Jayne Elisabeth Archer, “­Women and Chymistry in Early Modern ­England: The Manu­ script Receipt Book (c. 1616) of Sarah Wigges,” in Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture, ed. Kathleen P. Long (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 195. 17. H. G. Wells, The Shape of Th ­ ings to Come: The Ultimate Revolution, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2011), 382. 18. This section represents a reworking of material found in Natasha Korda, “Shake­ speare’s Laundry: Feminist ­Futures in the Archive,” in Rethinking Feminism in Early Mod­



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ern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality, ed. Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez (New York: Routledge, 2016), 93–112. 19. A typical example is found in The Critic of 1850, where an anonymous critic opines: “It has long been cause of complaint that our organs of veneration are called upon to be influenced by the I.O.U.’s and washing-­bills of ­great men.” See Anonymous, “Exhibition of Modern British Art at the Old W ­ ater Colour Gallery,” The Critic: The London Literary Journal 9 (1850): 576. See also “On a Joke Once Heard from the Late Thomas Hood,” in Roundabout Papers (New York: Harper & ­Brothers, 1863), 117; and “Hero-­Worship In Ex­ tremis,” ­Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading 1.2 (January 13, 1866): 40. 20. Frederic Harrison, Historical Method of Professor Freeman (London: Macmillan, 1898), 14, 17, 26. 21. Harrison, Historical Method, 18; see also 14, 16. 22. Harrison, Historical Method, 12. 23. Harrison, Historical Method, 12–13; emphasis added. 24. Bonnie G. Smith, “­Women’s History: A Retrospective from the United States,” Signs 35.3 (2010): 723–47, esp. 726. 25. Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian E ­ ngland, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 29. 26. “Heroes and Valets,” Cornhill Magazine 35.205 (1877): 49–51. F. W. Bateson dis­ cusses the trope as a “reductio ad absurdum of external evidence pursued for its own sake,” in “Shakespeare’s Laundry Bills: The Rationale of External Evidence,” in Approaches to Shakespeare, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1964), 290. 27. Thomas Sinclair, The Mount: Speech from Its En­glish Heights (London: Trübner & Co, 1878), 5–6. In 1889, William Barry complained of critics who “transmute the finest inspiration [of poetry] to prose” by “smother[ing] the immortal [poet] in his . . . ​washing-­ bills,” in “The Keepers of Lit­er­a­ture,” The Living Age, 7th series, vol. 5 (1889): 311–21, 315. Sir Edward Hamley mocked ­those who “look for poetry in . . . ​the bard’s weekly washing-­ bills,” in Shakespeare’s Funeral and Other Papers (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1889), 128. See also Leslie Stephen, “The Browning Letters,” The National Review 33 (1899): 401–15, esp. 413. 28. Anon., “Shakespeare’s Personality,” The Acad­emy and Lit­er­a­ture 79 (1910): 367– 68, esp. 367. 29. One of Hall’s appendices includes the shirts, handkerchiefs, nightkerchiefs, socks, and collars found in the Darrell f­ amily’s laundry basket. Hubert Hall, Society in the Eliz­ abethan Age, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888; 1886), app. 2 [The Darrell Pa­ pers]: 209. 30. For an account of this shift, see Bonnie G. Smith, “The Contribution of ­Women to Modern Historiography in G ­ reat Britain, France, and the United States, 1750–1940,” The American Historical Review 89:3 (1984): 708–32, esp. 718–20; and Smith, “­Women’s History.” On the historiography of “­women worthies,” see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Gen­ der and Genre: ­Women as Historical Writers, 1400–1820,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned

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­ omen of the Eu­ro­pean Past, ed. Patricia Labalme (New York: New York University Press, W 1980), 153–82. 31. See Billie Melman, “Gender, History and Memory: The Invention of ­Women’s Past in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” History and Memory 5.1 (1993): 5–41, esp. 23–24; see also Maxine Berg, “The First ­Women Economic Historians,” Eco­ nomic History Review 45.2 (1992): 308–29. 32. Lucy Maynard Salmon et al., “The Ubiquitous Laundry List” (1925), Vassar Col­ lege Archives and Special Collections. LMS 54.1. 33. OED, s.v. “modern (adj. and n.),” 1, 3.a., 3.b., 4, accessed December 13, 2018, http://­ www​.­oed​.­com. 34. The appearance of the “shirt waist, stock[ings], and the separate dress skirt” in laundry lists, for example, reflected “the entrance of ­women into business life.” See Lucy Maynard Salmon, Historical Material (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933), 89. 35. That this ­f uture lies in “counter-­a rchives” is suggested by Salmon’s own work, which is only fully accessible through her archives at Vassar College: most of her hetero­ dox scholarship remained unpublished during her lifetime (much remains unpublished ­today), and her full contribution can only be understood by considering the counter-­ archives she compiled, including her archive of laundry lists. See Smith, “Contribution of ­Women,” 725–26; Claire Bond Potter, “Ahead of Her Time,” ­Women’s Review of Books 19.2 (2001): 21–22; and Anthony Grafton, “History’s Postmodern Fates,” Daedalus 135.2 (2006): 54–69, esp. 61. 36. On “counter-­a rchives,” see Charles Merewether, ed., The Archive: Documents of Con­temporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), esp. 10–17, 12, 16–17, 43, 144–46; Ann Cvetkovich, “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popu­lar Cul­ ture,” Camera Obscura 17.1 (2002): 107–47, esp. 109, 111; Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feel­ ing: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 37. Woolf described herself and her s­ ister, painter Vanessa Bell, as “explorers, revolu­ tionists, reformers,” while describing her ­father as “a typical Victorian.” See ­Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Sussex: Sussex University Press, 1976), 126. 38. V ­ irginia Woolf, “The Art of Biography” (1939), in The Essays of V ­ irginia Woolf, ed. A. McNeillie, 6 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1986–88), 6:186. 39. “The American ­Woman” (1905) and “­Women and Fiction” (1929) in Essays of ­Virginia Woolf, 1:47 and 5:28. 40. Woolf, “Art of Biography,” 6:184, 187. 41. Lorraine Sim, ­Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 2–3. 42. See Juliet Dusinberre, ­Virginia Woolf ’s Re­nais­sance: W ­ oman Reader or Common Reader? (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1997); Sally Greene, ed., ­Virginia Woolf: Reading the Re­nais­sance (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999); Jane De Gay, “­Virginia Woolf’s Fem­ inist Historiography in Orlando,” Critical Survey 19.1 (2007): 62–72.



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43. ­Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. J. H. Stape (Oxford: Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1999), 15. 44. Woolf, Orlando, 47–48. 45. The Bard’s name is h ­ ere invoked, but ironically remains unspoken b­ ecause of, not in spite of, his deification: “was it Sh-­p —re?,” Orlando asks himself, and adds, in ex­ planation of Memory’s stitched-­together orthography, “for when we speak names we deeply reverence to ourselves we never speak them ­whole.” Woolf, Orlando, 177. 46. Woolf, Orlando, 58–59; see also 152. 47. Woolf, Orlando, 52–53. When Nick Greene reappears at the end of the novel as a professor and “the most influential critic of the Victorian age,” he mourns nostalgically for the lost Elizabethan age, now elevated to glory: “Ah! My dear lady, the ­great days of lit­er­a­ture are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson—­those ­were the ­giants” (158–59). 48. Woolf, Orlando, 54. 49. V ­ irginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, ed. Susan Gubar (New York: Harcourt, 2005; 1929), 41–42. 50. Woolf, Room of One’s Own, 45. 51. Woolf, “­Women and Fiction,” in Essays of V ­ irginia Woolf, 5:29. The archive of “old papers” and ephemera Woolf compiled for her own uncompleted history of w ­ omen’s con­ tributions to lit­er­a­ture was recently donated to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University by activist-­collector Lisa Unger Baskin. 52. ­Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, eds. Susan Dick and Mary S. Miller (Oxford: Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 2002), 34, 45. 53. Woolf, Between the Acts, 45 54. Woolf, Between the Acts, 34. 55. Woolf, Between the Acts, 45. 56. Woolf, Between the Acts, 46–47. 57. Woolf, Between the Acts, 49. 58. Woolf, Between the Acts, 51. 59. Woolf, Between the Acts, 51. 60. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Pre­sent in Con­temporary Culture (London: Verso, 2012; 1994), 8, 18. 61. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 23.

8. The Period Concept and Seventeenth-­C entury Poetry 1. The terms resonance and entanglement are heard often in discussion of the field of quantum entanglement. Entanglement was coined by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, translat­ ing the German Verschränkung. For an overview, see https://­en​.­w ikipedia​.­org​/­w iki​ /­Quantum​_­entanglement, accessed December 14, 2018. For thinking about this term in relation to the concept of the period, I have benefitted from Andrew Warren’s book in pro­gress, Romantic Entanglements: The Figure of an Era, 1759–1845.

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2. John Donne, Infinitati Sacrum, 16 Augusti 1601. Metempsychosis. Poêma Satyricon, “The Progresse of the Soule, First Song,” in The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols., ed. Her­ bert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 1:293–316. The question of the rela­ tion between Spenser and Donne is reopened in a rich collection of essays, edited and introduced by Yulia Ryzhik, forthcoming (2019) from Manchester University Press, Spenser and Donne: Thinking Poets. See also Yulia Ryzhik, “Complaint and Satire in Spenser and Donne: Limits of Poetic Justice,” En­glish Literary History 47.1 (2017): 110–35; and Yulia Ryzhik, “Spenser and Donne Go Fishing,” Spenser Studies 32 (2018): 417–37. 3. Bob Dylan, Chronicles, vol. 1 (London: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 38. “I read a lot of pages aloud and liked the sound of the words, the language. Milton’s protest poem, ‘Massacre in Piedmont.’ A po­liti­cal poem about the murder of innocents by the Duke of Savoy in Italy. It was like the folk song lyr­ics, even more elegant.” 4. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 1:810. 5. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), pt. 3, line 176 and pt. 5, line 428, vol. 1:650n and 705n. 6. Ricks and McCue, Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1:705: “quando ver venit meum? / quando fiam uti chelidon ut tacere desinam? / perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit.” “[W]hen w ­ ill my spring come? When s­ hall I be as the swallow so that I may cease being ­silent? I have lost my inspiration [my muse] in silence, nor does Apollo look on me with ­favor.” 7. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ piú eccelenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Ci­ mabue insino a’ tempi nostri, ed. Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1991; 1550), 208. In the preface to the second part, 1:206–15, Vasari explains his methods and assumptions. 8. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943); Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone: A Study of the Seventeenth-­Century Controversy over Order and Decay in the Universe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); James Winny, The Frame of Order: An Outline of Elizabethan Belief Taken from Treatises of the Late Sixteenth ­Century (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957); C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Im­ age: An Introduction to Medieval and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1964); Basil Willey, The Seventeenth ­Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949; 1939); Douglas Bush, En­glish Lit­er­a­ture in the ­Earlier Seventeenth ­Century, 1600–1660 (Ox­ ford: Clarendon Press, 1946; 1945), 37: “The capacious and flexible mind of the age could accommodate all the ‘humours’ which in other ages are likely to exist in much more im­ perfect fullness and harmony. Some peculiar and fundamental characteristics of seventeenth-­century lit­er­a­ture arise from the simultaneous embracing of dif­fer­ent planes of knowledge and experience or the habit of immediate and almost unconscious transi­ tion from one to another”; Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses; une archéologie des sci­ ences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated as The Order of ­Things: An Archeology



not es to pag es 152 – 159 315

of the H ­ uman Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). Foucault’s notion of the “epis­ teme” (Gr. epistêmê, “knowledge”) is similar. But Foucault’s concept concerns knowledge, not being. In practice, the difference may appear slight, but it is not slight for poets. 9. Henry Vaughan, “The World” (lines 1–9), in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. Leonard Cyril Martin, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), 2:466. 10. See Vaughan, “The Evening-­Watch. A Dialogue”: “Heav’n / Is a plain watch, and without figures winds / All ages up,” Works 2:425, lines 11–13. 11. John Donne, An Anatomie of the World. Wherein, by occasion of the untimely death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and the decay of this w ­ hole World is represented. The first Anniversary, lines 205–19, in Poems of John Donne 1:237–38. Donne’s pessimism and irony, his citing of the astronomers’ quest for new worlds as a rhetorical index of the de­ cay of this one, is perhaps understressed in William Empson’s justly famous essay, “Donne the Space Man,” Kenyon Review 19.3 (1957): 337–99; rpt. Essays on Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture, ed. John Haffenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 78–128. For Donne, the new philosophy is a sign not of hope but of de­cadence just b­ ecause it “calls all in doubt.” In ­these poems, at least, his allegiance is not to what might be hoped for but rather to what has been lost. 12. Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queene (7.7.514–22), in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960; 1912), 406. 13. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “dilate (v.),” accessed December 14, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. 14. Patricia Parker, “The Dilation of Being,” in Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), 54–64. See Balachan­ dra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: En­glish Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 82–83. 15. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer­ sity Press, 1958), 40–51. For criticism of Wind’s perhaps zealous application of the Neo­ platonic model of emanation, conversion, and return, see the review by Robert Klein in Re­nais­sance News 13.3 (1960): 237–40. See also S. K. Heninger Jr., “Meta­phor as Cosmic Correspondence,” in Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Re­nais­sance Poetics (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1974), 325–63. 16. John Donne, Of the Progresse of the Soule. Wherein, by occasion of the Religious death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury, the incomodities of the Soule in this life, and her exaltation in the next, are contemplated.The second Anniversarie, lines 263–74, in Poems of John Donne, 1:259. 17. John Donne, Of the Progresse of the Soule (lines 205–13), in Poems of John Donne, 1:257. 18. Edmund Spenser, “Sonnet 75,” lines 1–4, in Poetical Works, 575. For commentary, see Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), 9–14. 19. Spenser, “Sonnet 75,” lines 5–8. 20. Spenser, “Sonnet 75,” lines 9–14. 21. Michael Drayton, “To My Most Dearly-­Loved Friend, Henery Reynolds, Esquire,” lines 105–10, in The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford:

316

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Shakespeare Head Press, 1961), 3:228–29. On the force of the word “clear” in Drayton, see Joan Grundy, “Brave Translunary ­Things,” Modern Language Review 59.4 (1964): 501–10. For Henry Reynolds’s Neoplatonic poetics, see Mythomystes, in Critical Essays of the Sev­ enteenth C ­ entury, vol. 1: 1605–1660, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957; 1908–09), 141–79. See also A.  M. Cinquemani, “Henry Reynolds’s Mytho­ mystes and the Continuity of Ancient Modes of Allegoresis in Seventeenth-­Century ­England,” PMLA 85.5 (1970): 1041–49. 22. Donne, “The Sunne Rising,” line 22, in Poems of John Donne, 1:11. 23. See George Herbert, “The Win­dows,” “The Church Floor,” and “The Pulley,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964; 1941). 24. Cavendish published Philosophical Fancies in 1653, including poems on atoms and on worlds within worlds. For her vitalist materialism, see John Rogers, “Margaret Caven­ dish and the Gendering of the Vitalist Utopia,” in The ­Matter of Revolution: Science, Po­ etry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 176–211. Lucy Hutchinson translated Lucretius; her “Elegies” mention atoms learnedly and often show the influence of Donne, but without his pessimism. See David Norbrook, “Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies’ and the Situation of the Republican ­Woman Writer (with text),” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 27.3 (1997): 468–521; see also Hutchinson’s Order and Disor­ der, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). 25. Ben Jonson, “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” lines 9–23, in Poems, ed. Ian Donald­ son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 55–56. 26. Philip Larkin, “Vers de Société,” lines 1–6 and 31–36, in Collected Poems, ed. An­ thony Thwaite (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989; 1988), 181–82. 27. See Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” stanzas 6–7, in The Poems of Andrew Mar­ vell, ed. Nigel Smith (Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2003), 157–58. 28. Marvell, Upon Appleton House, stanza 97, in Poems of Andrew Marvell, 241.

9. Love Poetry and Periodization 1. John Graunt and William Petty, Natu­ral and Po­liti­cal Observations upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662). See Ted McCormick, “Population: Modes of Seventeenth-­ Century Demographic Thought,” in Mercantilism Re­imagined: Po­liti­cal Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of E ­ ngland (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 533–35, 563–76. 3. Andrew Hinde, ­England’s Population (London: Hodder Arnold, 2003), 114. 4. Massimo Livi Bacci, The Population of Eu­rope, trans. Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen and Carl Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 1–17. 5. Population growth in pre­industrial socie­t ies has well-­e stablished effects on the prices of commodities; see, e.g., Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart ­England



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(Harlow, UK: Longman, 1988), 42–47. It is much less certain that such trends lead to in­ creased mortality along Malthusian lines, raising doubts about purely endogenous expla­ nations for population cycles; see Ronald Lee and Michael Anderson, “Malthus in State Space: Macro Economic-­Demographic Relations in En­glish History,” Journal of Popula­ tion Economics 15.2 (2002): 195–220. 6. Anne E. C. McCants, “Historical Demography and the Crisis of the Seventeenth ­Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.2 (2009): 195–214. 7. Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, “Girl Power: The Eu­ro­pean Marriage Pattern and L ­ abour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period,” Economic History Review 63.1 (2010): 1–33; Anthony Wrigley, “Eu­ro­pean Marriage Patterns and Their Implications: John Hajnal’s Essay and Historical Demogra­ phy During the Last Half C ­ entury,” in Population, Welfare and Economic Change in Brit­ ain, 1290–1834, ed. Chris Briggs, P. M. Kitson, and S. J. Thompson (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2014), 15–42; Wally Seccombe, A Millennium of F ­ amily Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Eu­rope (New York: Verso, 1992), 239–42. 8. John A. Taylor, British Empiricism and Early Po­liti­cal Economy: Gregory King’s 1696 Estimates of National Wealth and Population (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005). 9. Lawrence Stone, The ­Family, Sex, and Marriage in ­England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 10. Henry Abelove, “Some Speculations on the History of Sexual Intercourse Dur­ ing the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury in ­England,” Genders 6 (1989): 125–30. 11. George Herbert, “Sonnet I,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchin­ son (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 3–4. 12. Giovanni Botero, The Cause of the Greatnesse of Cities (London, 1635), 166. 13. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Princi­ple of Population and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2015; 1803), 36. 14. E. A. Wrigley, “The Growth of Population in Eighteenth-­Century ­England: A Conundrum Resolved,” Past & Pre­sent 98 (1983): 149. 15. Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of ­England, 421–35, 455–80. 16. Patrick R. Galloway, “Basic Patterns in Annual Variations in Fertility, Nuptiality, Mortality, and Prices in Pre­-­industrial Eu­rope,” Population Studies 42.2 (1988): 275–303. 17. John Hatcher, “Understanding the Population History of ­England, 1450–1750,” Past & Pre­sent 180 (2003): 83–130; Richard Smith, “Periods, Structures and Regimes in Early Modern Demographic History,” History Workshop Journal 63 (2007): 202–18. 18. Brent Shaw, “The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage: Some Reconsiderations,” Jour­ nal of Roman Studies 77 (1987): 30–47. 19. The pattern was first identified in John Hajnal’s essay, “Eu­ro­pean Marriage Pat­ terns in Perspective,” in Population in History, ed. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (Lon­ don: Edward Arnold, 1965), 101–43. 20. de Moor and Van Zanden, “Girl Power,” 28–29. 21. Keith Wrightson, En­glish Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni­ versity Press, 1982), 70.

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22. Wrightson, En­glish Society; Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in E ­ ngland: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). For a more skeptical take, see Diana O’Brien, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor ­England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 23. George Whetstone, An Heptameron of ciuill discourses (London, 1582), sig. Y1. 24. T. H. Hollings­worth, The Demography of the British Peerage (London: The Popu­ lation Investigation Committee, 1964), 25. Gregory Clark and Gillian Hamilton have argued that wealthier h ­ ouse­holds produced significantly more offspring, in “Survival of the Richest: The Malthusian Mechanism in Pre­-­Industrial ­England,” Journal of Eco­ nomic History 66.3 (2006): 707–36. This was likely due to a lower average age at first marriage, but may also have been influenced by dif­fer­ent patterns of breastfeeding, as Dorothy McLaren shows, in “Marital Fertility and Lactation, 1570–1720,” in ­Women in En­glish Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Routledge, 1985), 1–24. 25. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 611, 669. 26. John Witte Jr., From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997); Eric Carlson ar­ gues for a less radical pattern of change, in Marriage and the En­glish Reformation (Ox­ ford: Blackwell, 1994). 27. William Whately, A bride-­bush, or A vvedding sermon compendiously describing the duties of married persons (London, 1617); William Gouge, Of domesticall duties (Lon­ don, 1622). 28. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 61–79. 29. Sara Heller Mendelson, “Debate: The Weightiest Business: Marriage in an Upper-­ Gentry ­Family in Seventeenth-­Century ­England,” Past & Pre­sent 85 (1979): 129. See Ian Frederick Moulton, Love in Print in the Sixteenth ­Century: The Popularization of Romance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 30. George Puttenham, The Arte of En­glish Poesie (London, 1589), 36. 31. Baldassare Castiglione, The courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio diuided into foure bookes, trans. Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), sig. 2I1v. 32. Loves Garland, Posies for Rings, Handkerchers, and Gloves (London, 1624). 33. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in the Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Clar­ endon Press, 1936); Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love Poetry of the Re­nais­sance (New York: Macmillan, 1958); Linda Paterson, “Fin’amour and the De­ velopment of the Courtly canso,” in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28–46. 34. Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-­ Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Eighth Song, 93–96. 35. Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: En­glish Petrarchism and Its Counter-­Discourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).



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36. Arthur Marotti has explored the effects of Elizabethan politics, while Ramie Tar­ goff has demonstrated the influence of Protestantism. See Arthur Marotti, “ ‘Love is Not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” En­glish Literary History 49.2 (1982): 396–428, and Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Re­nais­sance ­England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 37. Ralph Houlbrooke, The En­glish F ­ amily 1450–1700 (London: Longman, 1984), 66. 38. Walter Raleigh, Instructions to his Sonne (London, 1632), 28–29. 39. Elizabeth’s exact age is not known. Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 299. 40. Edmund Spenser, “Sonnet LX,” in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 5–8. 41. Giles Fletcher, Licia, or Poemes of loue in honour of the admirable and singular ver­ tues of his lady (Cambridge, 1593). 42. Among the nobility, the situation was particularly difficult for younger sons; Ralph Houlbrooke notes that 42 ­percent of younger sons of dukes remained unmarried at age thirty between 1330 and 1679 (En­glish ­Family, 65). For the poor, Steve Hindle shows that ­after the establishment of poor rates at the beginning of the seventeenth ­century, members of the local gentry became especially e­ ager to prevent “pauper marriages,” which might re­ sult in ­children for whose charge the community would be responsible. See Steve Hindle, “The Prob­lem of Pauper Marriage in Seventeenth-­Century ­England: The Alexander Prize Essay,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 8 (1998): 71–89. 43. Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” in The Complete Po­ ems of Robert Herrick, ed. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2013), 1:1–4, 13–16. 44. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 40. 45. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “spinster (n.),” accessed December 13, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. 46. A. J. Smith, The Metaphysics of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 248. 47. William Habington, Castara (London, 1635). Habington’s marriage-­minded love sequence rec­ords his courtship of Lucy Herbert, against the wishes of her f­ amily, provid­ ing in­ter­est­ing evidence of how amorous lyric, applied to courtship, could reinforce the status of individual choice within marriage. 48. Paul Hartle, “ ‘Fruition Was the Question in Debate’: Pro and Contra the Re­ nais­sance Orgasm,” Seventeenth ­Century 17.1 (2002): 78–96. 49. Ben Jonson, “­Doing, a Filthy Plea­sure Is and Short,” in Ben Jonson: The Complete Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52), 8:1, 7, 6. 50. John Suckling, “Against Fruition,” in The Works of Sir John Suckling, The Non-­ Dramatic Works, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 5.

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51. Suckling, “Against Fruition,” 15–16, 17–18. 52. Edmund Waller, “In answer of Sir John Sucklins [sic] Verses,” in Poems &c. writ­ ten by Mr. Ed. Waller (London, 1645), 162. 53. John Wilmot, The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 49, 55, 60–61. 54. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden explore the connection between Paradise Lost and the tradition of erotic lyric, in “Milton’s Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Re­nais­sance Love Poetry,” En­glish Literary History 53.1 (1986): 27–51.

10. Shakespeare, Period 1. All quotations from Shakespeare in this essay refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 2. See Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkley: Uni­ versity of California Press, 1981); Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on ­Daughters: ­Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, 1983); and Louis Montrose, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form,” in Rewriting the Re­nais­sance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 65–87. 3. See Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Medieval into Re­nais­sance (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1977), and The En­glish Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Mon­ mouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 4. See David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’ ” in Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on En­glish Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester, 1992), 177–202. 5. David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in ­England and Italy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 6. Stephen Greenblatt, Re­nais­sance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chi­ cago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 7. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in ­England, c. 1400– ­c. 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 8. See Gordon McMullan and David Matthews, eds., Reading the Medieval in Early Modern ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Martha Driver and Sid Ray, eds., Shakespeare and the ­Middle Ages: Essays on the Per­for­mance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); and Curtis Perry and John Watkins, eds., Shakespeare and the M ­ iddle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 9. See Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London: Arden, 2010); Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni­



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versity Press, 2011); and William Kuskin, Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). 10. Jennifer Schuessler, “Lit’s Dynamic Duo, ­Will and Jane, Shared Path to Pop Star­ dom,” New York Times, August 5, 2016, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2016​/­08​/­05​/­books​/­will​ -­jane​-­two​-­literary​-­superheroes​-­united​-­in​-­pop​-­culture​.­html​?­​_­r ​= ­0. 11. Exhibit program, W ­ ill & Jane, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2016, p. 2. Program courtesy of Janine Barchas, cocurator of the exhibit. 12. For this tag­line, see http://­nfs​.­sparknotes​.­com​/­, accessed May 8, 2018. 13. James Shapiro, “Shakespeare in Modern En­glish?,” New York Times, October 7, 2015, https://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2015​/­10​/­07​/­opinion​/­shakespeare​-­in​-­modern​-­english​.­html. 14. Ronald Trowbridge, “The Case for Higher Ed Accountability,” Texas Tribune, April 29, 2011, https://­w ww​.­texastribune​.­org​/­2011​/­04​/­29​/­guest​-­column​-­the​-­case​-­for​-­higher​ -­ed​-­accountability​/­. 15. Julián Aguilar, “Police Are Dead B ­ ecause of Black Lives M ­ atter, Dan Patrick Says,” Texas Tribune, September 24, 2016, https://­w ww​.­texastribune​.­org​/­2016​/­09​/­24​/­dan​-­patrick​ -­tribfestival. 16. “Shakespeare in Love: Tag­line,” IMDb, the International Movie Database, accessed December 6, 2018, http://­w ww​.­imdb​.­com​/­title​/­tt0138097​/­taglines​?­ref​_ ­​=­tt​_ ­stry​_­tg.

11. Periodic Shakespeare 1. Lee Patterson, “The Place of the Modern in the Late ­Middle Ages,” in The Chal­ lenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New York: Garland, 1996), 52–53. 2. Michael Bristol, “Macbeth the Phi­los­o­pher: Rethinking Context,” New Literary History 42.4 (2011): 641–62. 3. Jeffrey Dolven, “Besides Good and Evil,” Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 57.1 (2017): 1–22, esp. 3; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 25–52. 4. For a compelling philosophical account of acting, see Tzachi Zamir, Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014). 5. Louise Glück, Averno (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007); Sarah Beck­ with, “Shakespeare’s Book of Second Chances: The Winter’s Tale and Its Hauntings,” talk at State University of New York Buffalo and Bard College, October 13, 2016; Denise Vil­ leneuve, dir., Arrival (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 2016); based on Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” in Stories of Your Life and ­Others (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 91–146. 6. Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, “Statues That Move: Vitality Effects in The Win­ ter’s Tale,” Lit­er­a­ture and Theology 28.3 [a special issue on Religion and Cognition] (2014): 299–313. 7. All references from Shakespeare are taken from The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Gary Taylor et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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8. Jan M. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014). 9. For Catholic, Protestant, and secular readings of The Winter’s Tale, see, e.g., Rich­ ard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2004), ch. 12; Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2009), ch. 5; Houston Diehl, “ ‘Does Not the Stone Rebuke Me?’ The Pauline Rebuke and Paulina’s Lawful Magic in The Winter’s Tale,” in Shakespeare and the Cultures of Per­for­mance, ed. Paul Yachnin (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 69–82; Fran­ ces Dolan, “Hermione’s Ghost: Catholicism, the Feminine, and the Undead in Early Modern Studies,” in The Impact of Feminism on Early Modern Studies, ed. Dympna Cal­ laghan (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007), 214–37; and Richard McCoy, Faith in Shake­ speare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 5. 10. Hannah Arendt, The ­Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 186. 11. Arendt, ­Human Condition, 36. 12. Holloway Sparks cites Bickford citing Arendt. See Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Demo­cratic Theory, Po­liti­cal Courage, and Activist W ­ omen,” Hypatia 12.4 (1997): 94. 13. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Real­ity (London: Routledge Classics, 2005), esp. 150, 13–14. 14. Ted Morahashi, “ ‘Our Perdita Is Found’: Loss and Restoration of Trust in Satoshi Miyagi’s The Winter’s Tale,” paper delivered at the Trust and Risk in Lit­er­a­ture international research group, University of California, Irvine, May 30, 2017. 15. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1970). On latency and emergence in The Winter’s Tale, see Anselm Haverkamp, Shakespearean Genealogies of Power: A Whispering of Nothing (Lon­ don: Taylor and Francis, 2010), 87–107. 16. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000; 1952), 8. 17. W. H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2000), 295. On Hermione as the anti-­Galatea, see Beckwith, Gram­ mar of Forgiveness, 141. 18. Bonnie Honig, Public ­Things: Democracy in Disrepair (New York: Fordham Uni­ versity Press, 2017), 65. 19. Honig, Public ­Things, 63. 20. Honig, Public ­Things, 65. 21. François Laroque links Perdita’s story to Exodus: “Born amid storms and pas­ sions and having, like some baby Moses, miraculously escaped a massacre of innocents, her reappearance sixteen years ­later in the magical land of Bohemia is a symbolic second birth”; Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1991), 218. 22. Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” 112. Chiang’s other stories show an affinity with Re­nais­sance fiction-­making. “Seventy-­Two Letters” takes place in a Victorian era in which



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Re­nais­sance hermeticism is the direction taken by the scientific revolution. “Hell Is the Absence of God” takes flight from a truism of Augustinian theology in order to imagine a counter-­Miltonic modernity ruled by angels of catastrophe. 23. Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” 110. 24. Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” 130. 25. Dolven, “Besides Good and Evil,” 6, citing Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 29. 26. “It All Comes Back,” from Fun Home, musical adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori from Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home: A ­Family Tragicomic (Boston: Hough­ ton Mifflin, 2006). 27. In her ecofeminist account of postsecularism, Rosi Braidotti writes that thought “is a gesture of affirmation and hope for sustainability and endurance, of immanent rela­ tions and time-­bound consistency. Moving beyond the paralyzing effects of suspicion and pain, working across them, is the key to ethics”; Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braid­ otti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 348. Hope is a recurrent theme in her work. The journal Po­liti­cal Theology published a special issue, “The Secularization of Hope,” Po­liti­cal Theology 17.2 (2016). 28. Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, eds., Haber­ mas and Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Chris­tian­ity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Braid­ otti, Nomadic Theory. 29. Anthony Oliveira, “Exit the King: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the En­glish Baroque” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2017). 30. Thomas Betteridge, “Writing Faithfully in a Post-­Confessional World,” in Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613, ed. Andrew J. Power and Rory Loughnane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 225. In related work, Amy Appleford, rejecting a view of irenicism that would simply dissolve religion into humanism, argues that the late plays “Catholi­ cize” Protestant history by recallingc both recusant and conforming Catholic relations to the pre-­Reformation past and its genres; “Shakespeare’s Katherine of Aragon: Last Medi­ eval Queen, First Recusant Martyr,” Journal of Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies 40.1 (2010): 149–72.

12. John Dryden and Restor ation Time 1. The Plays of William Shakespeare. In ten volumes (London: C. Bathurst, 1785), 1:170; for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see, e.g., George Saintsbury, Dryden (Lon­ don: Macmillan, 1881); The Age of Dryden, vol. 8 of The Cambridge History of En­glish Lit­ er­a­ture, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912); Lionel Johnson, “The Age of Dryden,” in Post Liminum: Essays and Critical Papers, ed. Thomas Whittemore (London: Elkin Mathews, 1911); Benjamin Boyce, Tom Brown of

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Facetious Memory: Grub Street in the Age of Dryden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). 2. William Yonge, ­England’s Shame (London, 1663), 86. 3. I have explored some of t­ hese issues in “Is Th ­ ere Such a Th ­ ing as Restoration Lit­ er­a­ture?,” Huntington Library Quarterly 69.3 (2006): 425–49, and in “ ‘May You Live in In­ter­est­ing Times’: The Lit­er­a­ture of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration,” in The Ox­ ford Handbook of The En­glish Revolution, ed. Michael J. Braddick (Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2015), 466–82. 4. See Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 76. 5. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. ed. Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E. E. Duncan-­Jones, 2 vols., 3rd rev. ed. (Oxford: Ox­ ford University Press, 1971), 1:137.324. 6. The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg Jr. et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956–2000), 1:11.1–4. 7. G. E. Briscoe Eyre and C. R. Rivington, eds., A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Com­pany of Stationers, 3 vols. (London, 1912–13), 2:211. Herringman was the stationer who entered Three Poems into the Stationers’ Register and thereby claimed his owner­ship of the copy, but when Three Poems was published, his name was not on the title page and hence he had abandoned his right to the copy or sold it to William Wilson the printer. 8. Works of John Dryden, 1:16.145–48. 9. Works of John Dryden, 1:16.135–36. 10. On cremation, see Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Urne Burial (1658), in Thomas Browne, ed. Kevin Killeen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 516: “Christians ab­ horred this way of obsequies, and though they stickt not to give their bodies to be burnt in their lives, detested that mode a­ fter death; affecting rather a depositure than absump­ tion, and properly submitting unto the sentence of God, to return not unto ashes but unto dust againe, conformable unto the practice of the patriarchs, the interrment of our Sav­ iour, of Peter, Paul, and the ancient martyrs.” See also Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 491–92, who notes the long hiatus in the history of cremation. 11. Works of John Dryden, 2:175.22–25. 12. Works of John Dryden, 17:33.27. 13. Works of John Dryden, 17:73.4–8. 14. Works of John Dryden, 1:30.292. 15. Works of John Dryden, 1:36.120. 16. See Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 18–21, for details about the dating of the poem and the early editions. 17. Of the verses on the king’s whores and his whoring, Lord Rochester’s “Scepter” Lampoon, “In the Isle of Brittain,” is the most famous but hardly the only scabrous verse



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on this theme; for more examples, see John Harold Wilson, Court Satires of the Restora­ tion (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976). The vari­ous texts of Rochester’s lam­ poon are presented in The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 85–90. 18. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent En­glish Poets; With Critical Obser­ vations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2:136, “Who can forbear to think of an enchanted c­ astle, with a wide moat and lofty battlements, walls of marble and gates of brass, which vanishes at once into air, when the destined knight blows his horn before it?” 19. Works of John Dryden, 2:36.1028–31. 20. Works of John Dryden, 2:99.21, 36. 21. Works of John Dryden, 2:99–102. 22. Works of John Dryden, 2:122.432. 23. Works of John Dryden, 2:99.32–33; 100.10–11; 100.24–25. 24. Works of John Dryden, 2:108–9, “It remains that I acquaint the Reader, that the Verses w ­ ere written for an ingenious young Gentleman my Friend; upon his Translation of The Critical History of the Old Testament, compos’d by the learned ­Father Simon.” 25. Works of John Dryden, 2:120.369. 26. Works of John Dryden, 16:273.94–97. 27. Works of John Dryden, 16:423; for Dryden’s contribution to Fletcher’s play, see the headnote in Works of John Dryden, 16:419–27. 28. Works of John Dryden, 7:25.36–44, 64–65. 29. Works of John Dryden, 7:31.269–70. 30. Works of John Dryden, 7:510.140. 31. Works of John Dryden, 7:24.1–10. 32. Works of John Dryden, 5:336.5–9; a­ fter I had finished this essay I came across Charles Simic’s wonderful meditation on poetry and time in The Life of Images, Selected Prose (New York: Ecco, 2015), 30: “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.” 33. Works of John Dryden, 7:25.48–49. 34. Works of John Dryden, 11:8.1–3. 35. Luctus Britannici, or, The Tears of the British Muses for the Death of John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1700). 36. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro, eds., Milton in the Long Restoration (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 37. James McLaverty, “Pope and the Book Trade,” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190. 38. For the section on “Drydeniana,” see Macdonald, John Dryden, 187–315. 39. Edmond Malone, ed., The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden, 3 vols. in 4 (London, 1800); volume 1 in two parts; Walter Scott, ed., The Works of John Dryden, 18 vols. (Edinburgh, 1808), rev. by George Saintsbury (Edinburgh, 1882–93); E. N.

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Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg Jr., et al., eds., The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956–2000), referred to as the “California” Dryden.

13. Did the En­g lish Seventeenth ­C entury ­ Really End at 1660? 1. David Blackbourn, “ ‘ The Horologe of Time’: Periodization in History,” PMLA 127.2 (2012): 303. 2. Blackbourn, “Horologe,” 304. Blackbourn goes on to discuss the “long eigh­teenth ­century” (1688–1832) and the “long nineteenth ­century” (1780s to 1914). 3. Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Pres­ tige of En­glish Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 161–62. 4. Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered, 14, 15. 5. Katie Trumpener, “In the Grid: Period and Experience,” PMLA 127.2 (2012): 350, 352, 355. 6. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Re­nais­sance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (New York: Harper and Row, 1958); and Charles Homer Haskins, The Re­ nais­sance of the Twelfth C ­ entury (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927). 7. Antonio Gramsci, “The Re­nais­sance,” in Se­lections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-­Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 224–25, 231. 8. Gramsci, “Humanism and the Re­nais­sance [i],” in Se­lections, 219. 9. Gramsci, “Re­nais­sance,” 234. 10. Gramsci, “Humanism and Re­nais­sance [i],” 217; “Humanism and Re­nais­sance [ii],” in Se­lections, 218. 11. Gramsci, “Re­nais­sance,” 226. 12. Gramsci, “Re­nais­sance,” 234. See also 226. Guido Ruggiero has more recently sug­ gested that the Italian Rinascimento was marked by a shift in the thirteenth to ­fourteenth centuries from the cultural hegemony of the rural/feudal aristocratic elite to that of the urban mercantile elite (popolo grosso). See Ruggiero, The Re­nais­sance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 13. Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Eu­rope (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). 14. Joan Kelly, “Did ­Women Have a Re­nais­sance?,” in Becoming Vis­i­ble: ­Women in Eu­ro­pean History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 148–61. 15. Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods?, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), x. 16. Le Goff, Must We Divide History?, 115. 17. Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secular­ ization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3.



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18. James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford En­glish Literary His­ tory, Vol. 2, 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3, 4. 19. Masahide Bitô, The Edo Period: Early Modern and Modern in Japa­nese History (To­ kyo: Tôhô Gakkai, 2006), 5, 9. 20. Bitô, Edo Period, 20–21. 21. Bitô, Edo Period, 24–25. 22. Fredric Jameson, The Po­liti­cal Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 28. Cited in Marshall Brown, “Periods and Re­sis­tances,” Modern Language Quarterly 62.4 (2001): 314. 23. Brown, “Periods and Re­sis­tances,” 313. 24. See, for example, Conrad Russell, ed., The Origins of the Civil War (London: Mac­ millan, 1973); John Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the En­glish Civil War, 1630–1650 (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1976); J. C. D. Clark, Revo­ lution and Rebellion: State and Society in E ­ ngland in the Seventeenth and Eigh­teenth Centu­ ries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and J. P. Kenyon, Stuart ­England (Harmonds­worth, UK: Penguin, 1985). For challenges to revisionist historiography, see Christopher Hill, “Parliament and the ­People in Seventeenth-­Century ­England,” in Col­ lected Essays, 3 vols. (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1986), 3:21–64; J. P. Som­ merville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in ­England 1603–1640, 2nd  ed. (London: Longman, 1999), 224–65; and James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Strug­gle in the En­glish Revolution (London: Verso, 2000), 9–45. 25. As exemplified in the title of Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: En­glish Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), which in fact demon­ strates the flourishing of royalist closet drama during the period when the public the­ aters ­were closed. Margaret Ezell discusses the notion of the “Cavalier winter,” which resulted from emphasizing, as did Douglas Bush, “the continuity with e­ arlier Stuart court literary culture,” and suggesting that “lit­er­a­t ure, too, was defeated by a Puritan aesthetic”; and so “courtly literary culture survived in exile and in retreat . . . ​de­ feated, dejected, and in despair.” Ezell, “Literary History’s Alternate Groove: The Ex­ pectations of Periodization and Seventeenth-­C entury Literary Culture,” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 3.3 (2006): 446. 26. However, a roundtable on “The Sixteenth/Seventeenth-­Century Divide in French” at the 2018 MLA Convention posed the questions: “What’s at stake in this divide, how did it come to be, and how have its constraints s­ haped our field? How do t­ hose of us who work across that divide articulate our difference from that norm? . . . ​W hat approaches, methodologies, or problematics benefit from rethinking our ways of working?” 27. François Guizot, Why Was the En­glish Revolution Successful? A Discourse on the History of the En­glish Revolution, trans. William Hazlitt (London, 1850), 41, 49–50. 28. Guizot, Why Was the En­glish Revolution Successful?, 53. 29. See, e.g., François Guizot, History of France from the Earliest Times to 1848, 8 vols., trans. Robert Black (London: 1870–81). In The History of the Origins of Representative Gov­ ernment in Eu­rope, trans. Andrew R. Scoble (London: 1852), Guizot traces the historical

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antecedents to the En­glish and French Revolutions in the strong tradition of representa­ tive government in Eu­ro­pean history. 30. Keith Wrightson, “The Enclosure of En­glish Social History,” in Rethinking So­ cial History: En­glish Society 1520–1970 and Its Interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson (Manches­ ter: Manchester University Press, 1993), 70. 31. Lawrence Stone, “The Educational Revolution in E ­ ngland, 1560–1640,” Past and Pre­sent 28 (1964): 78, 80. 32. Jonathan Scott, ­England’s Trou­bles: Seventeenth-­Century En­glish Po­liti­cal Insta­ bility in Eu­ro­pean Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25–26. 33. Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xiv. See ch. 2, “The Shadow of the Past.” 34. Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Po­liti­cal Nation, and Literary Form in E ­ ngland, 1588–1688 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 108. 35. Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), emphasizes the links between opposition to the restored monar­ chy and the En­glish Civil Wars. 36. Harris, London Crowds, 220, 233. On the petitions prompted by the Exclusion Crisis, see 174–80. 37. Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1986). 38. See Jonathan Scott, “Algernon Sidney’s Life and Works (1623–1683),” in The Ash­ gate Research Companion to the Sidneys, 1500–1700, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Michael Bren­ nan, and Mary Ellen Lamb, 2 vols. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 1:151–69. See also Scott, Algernon Sidney, 353–58. 39. Paul Salzman has also argued against the “artificial dividing line that is drawn at 1660,” which produces “a distorting effect on the approach to many ­women writers who flourished during the intensely productive period of the Civil War and its after­ math,” Salzman, Reading Early Modern W ­ omen’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2–3. 40. Patricia Crawford, “­Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700,” in ­Women in En­ glish Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 211–82. 41. Katherine Philips, Pompey: A Tragedy (1663); Poems by the incomparable Mrs. K.P. (1664); Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda; to which is added Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey & Horace (1667). See Mihoko Suzuki, “­Women, Civil War, and Empire: The Politics of Translation in Katherine Philips’s Pom­ pey and Horace,” in The History of British ­Women’s Writing, 1610–1690, ed. Suzuki (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 270–86. 42. See Mihoko Suzuki, “The Case of Mary Carleton: Representing the Female Sub­ ject, 1663–73,” Tulsa Studies in ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture 12.1 (1993): 61–83. 43. See, e.g., Margaret Fell, “A Letter Sent to the King from M. F.” (1666); Joan Whitrowe, “The H ­ umble Address of W ­ idow Whitrowe to King William” (1689). Both texts and o­ thers by Fell and Whitrowe can be found in ­Women’s Po­liti­cal Writings, 1610–



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1725, ed. Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman, 4 vols. (London: Picker­ ing and Chatto, 2007), 3:3–16, 203–51. 44. Elinor James, Elinor James, ed. Paula McDowell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). See Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 267–75. 45. Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects, 248, 266. See Elizabeth Cellier, ed. Mihoko Suzuki (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). 46. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Col­o­nel Hutchinson with a Fragment of Autobiography, ed. N. H. Keeble (London: J. M. Dent; Rutland, VT: Everyman, 1995). Katharine Gillespie, ­Women Writing the En­glish Republic, 1625–1681 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2017), begins her study with the pre–­Civil War prophetic writ­ ings of Eleanor Davies and concludes with Lucy Hutchinson’s post-­Restoration biblical epic, Order and Disorder (1679). 47. Several volumes of Halkett’s meditations ­were published in 1701; her memoirs ­were first published in 1875. Margaret J. M. Ezell has shown that Halkett prepared her manuscripts following conventions of printed works—­including, for example, a ­table of contents and pagination—­indicating her intention for her works to be published. See Ezell, “Ann Halkett’s Morning Devotions: Posthumous Publication and the Culture of Writing in Late Seventeenth-­Century Britain,” in Print, Manuscript, Per­for­mance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern ­England, ed. Arthur Marotti and Michael D. Bris­ tol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 215–31. 48. Anne Halkett and Anne Harrison Fanshawe, The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 55. The space indicated by brackets is left blank in the original. 49. Halkett and Fanshawe, Memoirs, 56. 50. Halkett and Fanshawe, Memoirs, 29. 51. Halkett and Fanshawe, Memoirs, 61. 52. Halkett and Fanshawe, Memoirs, 61. 53. Anne Halkett, meditations, 1660, MS 6490, fol. 56–64, 355–65, National Library of Scotland. 54. Halkett, meditations, fol. 56. 55. Halkett, meditations, fol. 60, 62. 56. On Margaret Cavendish and Brilliana Harley as providing an “on the ground” account of the Civil War, see Joanne H. Wright, “Not Just Dutiful Wives and Besotted Ladies: Epistemic Agency in the War Writing of Brilliana Harley and Margaret Caven­ dish,” Early Modern W ­ omen: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4 (2009): 1–25. 57. Halkett, meditations, fol. 355–56, 362–63. 58. Halkett, meditations, fol. 363. 59. Halkett, meditations, fol. 358. 60. Anne Halkett, Lady Anne Halkett: Selected Self-­Writings, ed. Suzanne Trill (Alder­ shot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 160. The marginal note states “Isa. 58.22,” but cf. Isaiah 58:9–12. 61. On Davies, Poole, and Fell, see Phyllis Mack, “­Women as Prophets During the En­glish Civil War,” Feminist Studies 8.1 (1982): 18–45.

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62. Halkett, meditations, fol. 256–60 (Sarah), 267–69 (Miriam), 295–313 (Hannah), 327–32 (Deborah), and 333–42 (Huldah). 63. Halkett, Selected Self-­Writings, 161. 64. Halkett, Selected Self-­Writings, 162.

14. Space Tr avel I thank Kristen Poole and Owen Williams for their contributions to this essay. 1. Barbara Johnson, “Teaching Deconstructively,” in Writing and Reading Dif­ ferently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Lit­ e r­ a­ t ure, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Michael  L. Johnson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 140. 2. I cite throughout The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Bos­ ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 3. On that distinction, see Heather Dubrow, Deixis in the Early Modern En­glish Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like “­Here,” “This,” “Come” (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 50, 117; Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 154–56, ch. 5. 4. For an overview of that theory, see ­Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “General Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Jackson and Prins (Bal­ timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 5. See Joanna S. Cook’s as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation, “The Shadow of Succession: Royal Funeral Ritual and Shakespeare’s First and Second Tetralogies” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-­Madison, 2013). 6. Judith Owens, “The Poetics of Accommodation in Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion,’ ” Stud­ ies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture 1500–1900 40 (2000): 41–62. 7. See esp. Yi-­Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 8. On that coexistence, see Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place, ed. Ste­ ven Field and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), esp. 13–14. 9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-­Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), esp. 31–33; the quoted passages appear on 33. 10. Among William F. Hanks’s many impor­tant contributions to linguistic anthro­ pology is Intertexts: Writings on Language, Utterance, and Context (Lanham, MD: Row­ man and Littlefield, 2000). On deixis, see esp. 89–90. 11. Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time,” New Literary His­ tory 42 (2011): 740.



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12. Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Re­nais­sance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Mil­ ton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3, 5. 13. Compare trenchant discussions of refrains by John Hollander, such as Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), ch. 7. 14. Heather Dubrow, “The Term Early Modern,” PMLA 109 (1994): 1025–26. 15. Living for a year in Kent, a county that subscribed to gavelkind, alerted me to ­these patterns: the splendid profusion of half-­timbered ­houses can be traced in signifi­ cant mea­sure to the distribution of wealth created by that system of inheritance. 16. See, e.g., Patrick Collinson, “The En­glish Reformation in the Mid-­Elizabethan Period,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 375–76. 17. Among the best examples of t­ hese newer approaches is Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern E ­ ngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 18. David Scott Kastan, “ ‘Shewes of Honour and Gladnes’: Dissonance and Display in Mary and Philip’s Entry into London,” Research Opportunities in Re­nais­sance Drama 33 (1994): 1–15, esp. 4. Although the essay focuses on a ceremony for another monarch, its generalizations are very relevant to Elizabeth I. 19. De Certeau, Practice, ch. 7; I comment on sitting in Deixis, 23–27. 20. Claire Falck, “A Meeting of the Petty Gods: Elizabethan Entertainments in The Winter’s Tale,” lecture delivered at the New York Public Library, April 2014. 21. De Certeau, Practice, xviii–­x xii. 22. Lefebvre, Production of Space. 23. See Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), esp. 47–48. 24. Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected In­ terviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), esp. 68–70. 25. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 25. 26. See The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 16. 27. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 25. 28. For a related but dif­fer­ent approach to gathering, see Heather Dubrow, “ ‘You May Be Wondering Why I Called You All ­Here ­Today’: Patterns of Gathering in the Early Mod­ ern Lyric,” in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-­Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 23–38. 29. Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 26–27. 30. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode,” Poetry Foundation, accessed June 28, 2018, https://­ www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­poems​-­and​-­poets​/­poems​/­detail​/­54933. 31. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Lit­er­a­ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–27.

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32. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: ­Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-­World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 52.

15. Always, Already, Again Special thanks to Matthew Rinkevich for his research assistance and perceptive com­ ments on a draft of this essay. This essay grew out of a stimulating seminar taught by J. Jayakiran Sebastian at the United Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia. Note to epigraph: Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxeanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 59. 1. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely ­Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 4. 2. Harris, Untimely ­Matter, 13–19. 3. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 57. Thanks to Matthew Rinkevich for bringing this passage to my attention. 4. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 60. 5. Serres and Latour, Conversations, 59. 6. Charles Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis: The Bible in Ancient Chris­ tian­ity (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 239. 7. See Beatrice Groves, “­England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s Henriad,” in The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation E ­ ngland, ed. Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 87–102. 8. Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979), 129–32. 9. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, 185 10. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, 239. 11. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, 208. 12. ­Here, again, is Kannengiesser: “As the very source of their experience of faith, the NT turned the believers ­towards a creative re-­w riting of the OT. The more they as­ similated the story of Jesus as narrated by the NT the more they discovered that the NT was already announced, or better, ‘immanent’ in the OT” (Handbook of Patristic Exege­ sis, 228). 13. G. W. H. Lampe, “Typological Exegesis,” Theology 56 (1953): 201. 14. John Reumann, “A History of Lectionaries: From the Synagogue at Nazareth to Post-­Vatican II,” Interpretation 31.2 (1977): 122. 15. For typology and Eucharist, see Lampe, “Typological Exegesis,” 205. For typol­ ogy and baptism, see Glenn W. Olsen, “Allegory, Typology, and Symbol: The Sensus Spir­ italis, Part 1: Definitions and Earliest History,” Communio 4 (1977): 172. 16. Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Chris­tian­ity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press



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of Harvard University Press, 2006), 17. For the Hexapla’s physical description and an ac­ count of its composition, see 103–9. 17. Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern ­England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 42–79, esp. 42. Stallybrass’s argu­ ment for discontinuous biblical reading enabled by the codex is impor­tant, but so too is W. R. Owen’s corrective response, which demonstrates that many early modern readers did read the Bible continuously; “Modes of Bible Reading in Early Modern E ­ ngland,” in The History of Reading, Vol. 1: International Perspectives, c. 1500–1990, ed. Shafquat Towheed and W. R. Owens (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 32–45. 18. Grafton and Williams, Chris­tian­ity and the Transformation of the Book, 155, 170. 19. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Christian Exegesis, 546. 20. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Christian Exegesis, 253, collating a number of schol­ ars. S. N. Gundry provides a caveat to Origen’s interest in typology: “In Origen the em­ phasis has shifted from a historically based typology to allegorical interpretations in which the content forced upon the text is not inherent within the text, but rather is fixed and known to the interpreter before he begins”; S. N. Gundry, “Typology as a Means of Interpretation: Past and Pre­s ent,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 12.4 (1969): 235. 21. Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 1–5, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, in The ­Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 103, ed. Thomas P. Halton et al. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 2001), 68. The original text has fishers, not shepherds. Rufinus has “shepherds” for “fishers,” but Scheck considers this an early translation error. 22. Origen, Commentary, 75. 23. Origen, Commentary, 77–78. 24. Origen, Commentary, 66–67. 25. Jean-­L ouis Quantin, The Church of ­England and Christian Antiquity: The Con­ struction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth ­Century. Oxford-­Warburg Studies, ed. Charles Hope and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 26. Hexapla in Exodum, that is, A sixfold commentary upon the second booke of Moses called Exodus (London, 1633); Hexapla in Genesin & Exodum: that is, A sixfold commentary upon the tvvo first bookes of Moses, being Genesis and Exodus (London, 1633; 4 printings); Hexapla in Danielem: that is, A six-­fold commentarie vpon the most diuine prophesie of Dan­ iel (Cambridge, 1610); Hexapla in Leviticum that is, A six-­fold commentarie vpon the third booke of Moses, called Leviticus (London, 1631); Hexapla: that is, A six-­fold commentarie vpon the most diuine Epistle of the holy apostle S. Paul to the Romanes (Cambridge, 1611). The suc­ cess of the Hexaplae was also used to sell other Willet texts; the 1608 Hexapla in Exodum advertises itself as “according to the method propounded in Hexapla upon Genesis,” clearly trying to capitalize on the popularity of the e­ arlier text, and a subsequent harmony then makes hay of both of ­these, as is evident from the title: An harmonie vpon the first booke of Samuel, wherein according to the methode obserued in Hexapla vpon Genesis and Exodus,

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but more compendiously abridged, t­hese speciall t­hings are obserued vpon euery chapter . . . ​ Wherein aboue fowre hundred theologicall questions are handled, with ­g reat breuitie, and much varietie, by the former author of Hexapla on Genesis and Exodus (Cambridge, 1614; 4 printings). The British Library copy of this text is heavi­ly dog-­eared and underlined, the trace of at least one studious reader; British Library shelfmark General Reference Collec­ tion 1476.d.26.(1.). 27. The full list from the title page: “1. The Chalde. 2. The Septuagint. 3. The vulgar Latine. 4. Pagnine. 5. Montanus. 6. Iunius. 7. Vatablus. 8. The ­great En­glish Bible. 9. The Geneua edition. 10. And the Hebrew originall maketh the tenth.” 28. Willet, Hexapla in Exodum, sig. A7r. I am citing from the 1608 edition. 29. Willet, Hexapla in Genesin, Dedicatory Epistle to King James, sig. A2v. I am cit­ ing from the 1608 edition. 30. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 12. 31. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 13. 32. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 318. 33. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 61. 34. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 151. 35. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 201. 36. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 254. 37. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 238. 38. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, Dedicatory Epistle to King James, sig. A3r. 39. Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, 236. 40. Willet, Hexapla in Genesin, 236. 41. My transcription of this marginalia: “Our auth.[or] erreth ­here & in y[e] third page and is very confused & crosse to him selfe, which is occasioned by making the old couenant as large in extent as to go through all y[e] old testam[ent] whereas it is euident y[at] the old testam[ent] comprehended y[e] new couen[ant] in y[e] types of the ceremo­ niall law”; Willet, Hexapla . . . ​S . Paul to the Romanes, sig. A1r; British Library General Reference Collection 1475.bb.1. Special thanks to Matthew Rinkevich for checking my transcription. 42. Willet, Hexapla in Exodum, sig. A7r. 43. Willet, Hexapla on Genesin, 49. 44. Oxford En­glish Dictionary Online, s.v. “foreshadow (v.),” accessed December 17, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. 45. William Guild, Moses Vnuailed: or, ­Those Figures which Served vnto the Patterne and Shaddow of Heauenly Th ­ ings, Pointing out the Messiah Christ Iesus (London, 1620), sig. A3v. 46. George Gifford, Fifteene Sermons, vpon the Song of Salomon (London, 1598), 23. 47. This sense of foreshadowing is still with us; the entry on Andrew Willet in the Dictionary of National Biography, for instance, notes, “His move to Christ’s College in the same year foreshadowed the godly convictions that would animate his subsequent c­ areer.”



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Anthony Milton, “Andrew Willet,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, January 3, 2008, accessed June 16, 2017, http://­w ww​.­oxforddnb​.­com​.­udel​.­idm​.­oclc​.­org​/­view​/­a rticle​ /­29445. 48. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Christian Exegesis, 232. 49. See Eric Wilhelm Carlsson, “Johan Salomo Semler, the German Enlightenment, and Protestant Theology’s Historical Turn (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-­Madison, 2006), 360. 50. Gundry, “Typology as a Means of Interpretation,” 237. 51. William Sharpe, “ ‘Look Elsewhere’: Literal Foreshadows in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture,” Miranda 8 (2013): 9. The term first appeared in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. 52. For a discussion of the context of Eliot’s translation, see Jane Donahue Eberwein, “ ‘Dangerous Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge’: Mary Ann Evans, Emily Dickenson, and Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu,” Emily Dickinson Journal 21.2 (2012): 1–19. 53. OED, s.v. “typology (n.)” 1, accessed December 17, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. We might note that this overly broad definition strangely misses the crucial hermeneutic of typology, as a way of understanding the relationship of the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Christian Bible. The use of the word “symbol” is also somewhat anach­ ronistic, as “symbol” became the Romantic word that came to replace and reject e­ arlier ideas about allegory. 54. See, for instance, “The Typology of Scripture has been one of the most neglected departments of theological science,” in Patrick Fairbairn, The Typology of Scripture: Viewed in Connexion with the Entire Scheme of Divine Dispensations, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Philadel­ phia: Smith and En­glish, 1854), 17. “­There is typology as well as a teleology in nature,” in “Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 23 (1856): 241; or “Contrast the numerous errors and monstrously crude typology of the former [the Epis­ tle of Barnabas] with the splendid spiritualism of the latter [the Epistle to the Hebrews],” in Frederic W. Farrar, Early Days Chris­tian­ity, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London, Paris, and New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1882), 105. 55. See OED, s.v. “foreshadow (v.),” accessed December 17, 2018, http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. 56. “Foreshadow,” Google Books Ngram Viewer [set to En­glish corpus, years 1800– 2000], accessed August  23, 2018, https://­books​.­google​.­com​/­ngrams​/­g raph​?­content​ =­foreshadow&year​_ ­s tart​= ­1800&year​_­end​= ­2 000&corpus​= ­15&smoothing​= ­3&share​ =­&direct​_­url​=­t1%3B%2Cforeshadow%3B%2Cc0. 57. “A typical hierarchical mode of thought inclined ancient interpreters of the ‘senses’ of Scripture t­ owards meta­phors of spatiality more than to meta­phors of chronology”; Kan­ nengiesser, Handbook of Christian Exegesis, 206. 58. Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (New York: Prince­ton Architectural Press, 2010), ch. 4. 59. Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time, 171, 191. 60. Eberwein, “Dangerous Fruit,” 4, citing Cross. 61. Simpson, Chapter 5 in this volume, 95.

Contributors

Douglas Bruster is the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor of American and En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the Univer­ sity of Texas at Austin. His research centers on Shakespeare, literary history, and the editing of early modern drama from Mankind to Middleton’s The Changeling. His books on Shakespeare and early modern drama include Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare; Quoting Shakespeare; Shakespeare and the Question of Culture; and To Be or Not to Be. Euan Cameron is Henry Luce III Professor of Reformation Church History at the Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia Uni­ versity. His research focuses on the role and transformations of religion in Eu­ ro­pean society in the ­later ­Middle Ages and Reformation periods. His books include The Reformation of the Heretics; Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Eu­rope; The Eu­ro­pean Reformation; and Enchanted Eu­rope: Supersti­ tion, Reason and Religion 1250–1750, and he has edited Early Modern Eu­rope: An Oxford History and The New Cambridge History of the Bible, volume 3. Heather Dubrow is the John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in Poetic Imagination at Fordham University. She has long been interested in building bridges between interdisciplinary critical approaches, including the interactions between form in its many senses and material and historical analy­sis. Her many scholarly titles include Deixis in the Early Modern En­glish Lyric: Unsettling Spatial An­ chors Like “­Here,” “This,” “Come”; The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern ­England; and Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Depriva­ tion, Mourning, and Recuperation, as well as a volume of her own poetry. Kate Giles is Se­nior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of York, where she specializes in historic buildings. In addition to numerous journal articles and chapters, she has written An Archaeology of Social Identity: Guildhalls in

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York, c. 1350–1630 and edited, most recently, Dwellings, Identities, and Homes: Eu­ro­pean Housing Culture from the Viking Age to the Re­nais­sance. She is par­ ticularly interested in the relationship between p ­ eople, places, and possessions and in the archaeology of public buildings, such as guildhalls, town halls, and village halls from the ­Middle Ages to the pre­sent day. Tim Harris is the Munro-Goodwin-Wilkinson Professor in European His­ tory at Brown University. A social historian of politics in the tumultuous seventeenth c­ entury, he has written about the interface of high and low poli­ tics, popu­lar protest movements, ideology and propaganda, party politics, popu­lar culture, and the politics of religious dissent during Britain’s Age of Revolutions. His titles include Restoration: Charles II and his Kingdoms, 1660– 1685 and Revolution: The ­Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720, and, most recently, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642. Natasha Korda is Director of the Center for the Humanities and Professor of En­glish at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern ­England and ­Labors Lost: ­Women’s Work and the Early Modern En­glish Stage. Her research interests in­ clude early modern En­glish dramatic lit­er­a­ture and culture; theater history; ­women’s social, economic, and ­legal history; and material and visual culture studies. She is a member of the Theater without Borders research collabora­ tive. Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of En­glish and Comparative Lit­er­a­ ture at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on Shake­ speare, religion, post-­ secularism, and virtue ethics. Her titles include Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life; Citizen-­Saints: Shake­ speare and Po­liti­cal Theology; Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture; and Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013–14. Kristen Poole is Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of En­glish Re­nais­ sance Lit­er­a­ture at the University of Delaware. She specializes in early mod­ ern En­glish lit­er­a­ture, religious culture, theology, and science. She is the author of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern ­England and Super­natural Environments in Shakespeare’s ­England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama. She is the coeditor of British Lit­er­

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a­ture in Transition 1557–1623 (with Lauren Shohet) and The Bible on the Shake­ spearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation E ­ngland (with Thomas Fulton). Ethan H. Shagan is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies early modern Britain in par­tic­u­lar and early mod­ ern Eu­rope more generally, focusing especially on the history of religion. His most recent book is The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the ­Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. ­Earlier titles include The Rule of Modera­ tion: Vio­ lence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern ­England; Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern E ­ ngland; and Popu­lar Politics and the En­glish Reformation. James Simpson is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of En­glish at Harvard University. His books include Sciences and the Self in Medieval Po­ etry;  Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547;  Burning to Read: En­glish Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents; ­Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-­American Tradition; and Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism. His scholarship addresses late medieval and early modern Western Eu­ro­pean Lit­er­a­ture, 1150–1690, and how we sur­ vived the cultural disciplines of revolutionary evangelical modernity. Nigel Smith is the William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of An­ cient and Modern Lit­er­a­ture in the Department of En­glish at Prince­ton Uni­ versity. He has published widely on early modern lit­er­a­ture and its social roles, especially in the radical politics and religions of the seventeenth-­century pub­ lic sphere. Titles include Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon; Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? The Poems of Andrew Marvell; Lit­er­a­ture and Revolution in ­England 1640–1660; and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Lit­er­a­ture in En­ glish Radical Religion, 1640–1660. Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of En­glish, Cooper Fellow in the Humanities, and founding director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami. In addition to six editions or edited collections that mostly involve gender in the early modern period, she is the author of two books: Metamor­ phoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic and Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Po­liti­cal Nation, and Literary Form in ­England, 1588–1688. She has recently completed “Antigone’s Example: Early Modern W ­ omen’s Po­liti­c al

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Writings in Time of Civil War, from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Wil­ liams.” Her scholarship focuses on Re­nais­sance and early modern lit­er­a­ture and culture—­both En­glish and European—­with an emphasis on gender and authorship; early modern po­liti­cal thought and historiography; and the clas­ sical tradition. Gordon Teskey, Professor of English at Harvard University, writes on Eng­ lish Renaissance poetry, especially Spenser and Milton. He is interested in the history and theory of allegory and in Continental philosophy and its relation to poetry. His books are Allegory and Violence, Delirious Milton, The Poetry of John Milton, and the Norton edition of Paradise Lost. Spenserian Moments is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Julianne Werlin is the Bacca Foundation Assistant Professor of Rhe­toric, Culture and Society at Duke University’s Department of En­glish. Her research interests include early modern poetry and prose, state formation, and the so­ ciology of literary forms. She was a long-­term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2017–18. She is currently exploring the effects of po­liti­cal and eco­ nomic change on the development of literary styles and genres over the course of the seventeenth c­ entury in the works of Bacon, Milton, and Pepys. Owen Williams is the Associate Director for Scholarly Programs at the Fol­ ger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, for which he welcomes some two hundred scholars to the Folger’s seminars, conferences, and workshops each year. In addition to his research interests involving the early En­glish puritans and their literary and cultural influences, he also edited a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s First Folio called Foliomania! Stories B ­ ehind Shakespeare’s Most Impor­tant Book. Steven N. Zwicker is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Pro­ fessor in the Department of En­glish at Washington University in St. Louis. His titles and editions include Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane, and The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, both with Derek Hirst; and Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality in Early Modern ­England and Refigur­ ing Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the En­glish Revolution to the Roman­ tic Revolution, both edited with Kevin Sharpe. His new edition of Dryden for the 21st-­Century Oxford Authors series is forthcoming from Oxford Univer­ sity Press.

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate figures. Absalom and Achitophel (Dryden), 220–21, 223, 324n17 academia, periodization in, 265–66 Acton, Lord, 26 Aers, David, 99, 190 agency, personal, 259–60 “The Age of Dryden,” 215–16, 226–29. See also Dryden, John age(s), as term of use, 7, 46, 215 Alcock, John (Bishop of Ely), 78–80 allegorical interpretation, and biblical typology, 272–73, 277, 333n20 Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 61 American New Critics, 39, 40, 94 Amoretti (Spenser), 157–58, 159, 172–73, 175 An Anatomie of the World (Donne), 153, 155, 315n11 Andrewes, Lancelot, 40 Anglo-­A merican New Critics, 39, 40, 94 Annus Mirabilis (Dryden), 228 antecedent, 1, 4, 152, 327–28n29 Antigone (Sophocles), 203–4, 205 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 184 apocalyptic temporality, 217, 219, 223–24, 227, 228 Appadurai, Arjun, 109 Appleford, Amy, 323n30 archaeology: archaeological stratigraphic methodology, 105–6, 109, 111, 123; buildings archaeology, 106, 107, 108, 123, 305n15; medieval and postmedieval, 106–8. See also Guildhall of Stratford-­ upon-­Avon architectural developments: buildings archaeology and, 106, 107, 108, 123, 305n15; space and, 257–58, 331n15

archival ­labor, 135–36, 141 Arendt, Hannah, 203, 205, 207, 208, 209 Arianism, 68, 69 Aristotle, 154, 201 Armitage, David, 293n48 Arrival (film, 2016), 202, 208–9 artworks: chronologies and, 31–32, 145, 146, 147; Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon and, 116, 117, 120–21, 122–23, 308n77; ­mother and child image in cartoon, 198, 199, 200, 202; period as cultural concept and, 150–51, 152; temporalities and, 110, 200. See also material culture; and specific artworks Asad, Talal, 210 Astræa Redux (Dryden), 219–20 Auden, W. H., 207 Augustine of Canterbury, 70 Augustine of Hippo, 44, 59–60, 64–65, 72, 76 Austen, Jane, 192, 193 authority and power, 62, 252–53, 258–60, 331n18 Babylonian Talmudic system, 60–61, 64–65 Baronio, Cesare, 69 Baroque period, 211 Barrow, Isaac, 277, 279 Barry, Lynda, “How to Look at Art,” 198, 199, 200, 202 Bateson, Mary, 136, 141–42 Baudelaire, Charles, 154 Bearman, Robert, 120 Beaumont, Francis, 240–41 Bechdel, Alison, 210 Beckwith, Sarah, 44, 100, 191, 202, 208

342 Index Bell, Vanessa, 312n37 Benjamin, Walter, 49 Berlin, Isaiah, 23–24 Besserman, Lawrence, 8, 11, 110 Betteridge, Thomas, 211 Between the Acts (Woolf), 140–41 beyond time, and alternative modes of thinking about historicity and period, 16–17. See also biblical typology; space Beza, Theodore, 82 Bible: chronologies and, 276; Higher Criticism and, 278–79; Latin translations of, 64; prophets and, 245; scrolls and, 270–72, 281. See also Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament); New Testament biblical typology: about, 16–17, 268–69, 281–82; allegorical interpretation and, 272–73, 277, 333n20; celluloid film and, 271–72, 280, 281; chronologies and, 273–74, 275; codices and, 270, 271–77, 282, 333n17, 333n26; continuity versus discontinuity and, 270, 272, 333n17; decline of, 278–80, 335n54, 335n57; early Chris­tian­ity and, 269–70; flashback and, 280, 281; foreshadowing and, 277–78, 279–80, 281, 334n47; Hexapla (Origen), 271–74, 275, 282; Hexaplae (Willet), 274–77, 282, 333n26; Higher Criticism and, 278–79; literal interpretation and, 275–76, 277; lived typology and, 269–70, 332n20; multidimensional model and, 274, 282; multitemporality and, 274, 276; mystical interpretation and, 269, 270, 274, 275, 276, 277; New Jerusalem and, 109, 269; scrolls and, 270–72, 281; temporalities and, 268, 269, 270, 274, 276, 278, 279–81, 282; time and, 269, 271–72, 273–74, 278, 280, 281; timeline and, 279–80, 281, 282; transformation and, 270, 332n12; type/antitype and, 268, 269, 270, 272–73, 276–77, 278–79; typology defined, 278, 279, 335n53 Bickford, Susan, 203 Bitô, Masahide, 236 Blanchett, Cate, 124, 125 Bloch, Marc, 110 Blundev­ille, Thomas, 1–2, 3, 4 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 225, 226, 233 Bodin, Jean, 64

the body: and circular motion concept and poetry, 154–57, 158; space theory and, 264–65 Book of Daniel: chaos versus order/same versus differences view of history and, 56–57, 293n3; Daniel system and, 61–62, 63, 64–65, 66, 296n31; Luther’s translation of, 56, 62, 65, 294n8; numerical pattern/ universal time frame and, 67–68, 69, 70, 296n31; prophesy on monarchy and, 244 Botero, Giovanni, 166 bound­a ries, and space, 251, 252, 254, 261–62, 263 Boyle, Elizabeth, 172, 319n39 Brady, Thomas, 76 Braidotti, Rosi, 210, 323n27 Bristol, Michael, 200 Brooks, Cleanth, 40 Broughton, Hugh, 64 Brown, Marshall, 237 Browne, Thomas, 58–59, 324n10 buildings archaeology, 106, 107, 108, 123, 305n15. See also Guildhall of Stratford-­ upon-­Avon buildings biography, 109–11. See also Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon Bullinger, Heinrich, 65, 71, 296n26 Burckhardt, Jacob, 24, 232–33, 255 Burke, Edmund, 238, 239 Burke, Peter, 27 Burrow, J. W., 301n30 Bush, Douglas, 39, 40, 314n8, 327n25 Butterfield, Herbert, 95–96 Caldwell, David H., 108 calling doctrine, 80–81 Calvin, John, 64, 74, 203, 297n6 Calvinism, 31, 83, 90 The Cantos of Mutabilitie (Spenser), 146, 155 capitalism, development of: early modern and, 25, 32, 107, 235, 257, 263; global context and, 34, 107; historical studies and, 3; and language, spread of, 182; Protestantism and, 25; temporalities and, 252; and transition from feudalism, 27 Carew, Thomas, 173 Carion, Johannes, 61, 67, 69 Carleton, Mary, 242 Carlson, Eric, 318n26

Index Caroline period, 150, 175 Cary, Mary, 245 Casey, Edward W., 261–62, 264 Castiglione, Baldassare, 170 Catherine of Braganza (Queen of E ­ ngland), 220 Catholicism: Arianism and, 68, 69; colonialism and, 90; convents and, 43, 76, 78–80; Counter-­Reformation and, 29, 210, 211, 233, 326n12; cultural historiography and, 302n35; foreign influences on categorization in literary studies and, 43; God’s role in h ­ uman history and, 58; Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon and, 118, 121; philosophy in historiography and, 31; popes, 70, 76; regional variations and, 258, 260; Saint Barnabas Day, 253; Saint Crispin Day and, 251, 253; Shakespeare’s plays and, 203, 323n30; space and, 251, 253; time or chronologies and, 201–2; traditions in antiquity and, 68–69; world history and, 59, 294n7 causation, and literary studies, 38–41, 189n10, 289n8 Cavalcanti, Guido, 149 Cavalier poets, 164, 177 Cavendish, Margaret, 159, 242, 316n24 Caxton, William, 46, 97 Cellier, Elizabeth, 242–43, 245 celluloid film, and biblical typology, 271–72, 280, 281 ­century, as term of use, 6, 46 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 47 chaos versus order/same versus differences view of history, 56–57, 293n3 Chapman, George, 187 Charles I (King of En­gland/Scotland/Ireland), 41, 42, 82, 175, 231, 238, 242, 244, 245 Charles II (King of En­gland/Scotland/ Ireland): chronologies and, 146; continuity versus discontinuity in literary studies and, 237; corruption ­under, 216, 220–21, 324n17; courtly literary culture and, 233–34; En­glish Civil Wars and, 230, 245; foreign influences on categorization in literary studies and, 42; historical periodization and, 232; Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660 and, 216–17, 230; literary studies and, 240–44; marriage of, 216, 220; philosophy in historiography

343

and, 31; reign of, 217; Restoration Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81 and, 240, 241, 242–43; salvation/redemptive time as ironic and, 222; temporalities and, 32; ­women writers and, 242, 243, 244–45; worldly religion and, 85. See also Interregnum; Restoration Chaucer, Geoffrey: chronologies and, 146; foreign influences on categorization in literary studies and, 41; form in space theory and, 263; language/literary language and, 44; literary eternity and, 224, 225; literary history and, 93; medieval En­glish lit­er­a­ture and, 190, 191, 193 Chiang, Ted, 202, 208–9, 322n22 Chris­tian­ity, 58, 65, 68, 69, 110. See also biblical typology; early Chris­tian­ity; early modern Church historians; and specific religions chronologies: about, 5–6, 10; biblical typology and, 273–74, 275; classical period and, 10, 58, 94–95, 263, 264; early Chris­tian­ity and, 272, 276; in early modern E ­ ngland, 1, 5, 12; Hebrew Scripture and, 9, 272; historiography and, 1–2, 3–4, 21, 22–23, 28, 29, 31–32, 145–47, 314n3; humanists and, 46; plays of Shakespeare and, 146, 261; poetry and, 145–48, 313n1, 314n3; Re­nais­sance and, 201–2, 203; time and, 3–4, 46 Cicero, 31, 201 circular motion: of the body and poetry, 154–57, 158; of heavenly bodies and poetry, 152–53, 154–55, 159, 314n8; period and, 10; time and, 10, 11, 139 Clapham, J. H., 24 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 42, 239 Clark, Gregory, 318n24 classical period: chronologies and, 10, 58, 94–95; courage and, 203, 210; eroticization of courtship in lit­er­a­ture and, 169; French education and, 233; historiography and, 8, 9, 31, 32, 263; literary studies and, 8, 9, 233, 264–65; marriage for ­women during, 174; Re­nais­sance and, 233; time/ timeliness and, 202 clergy’s temporal/spiritual division of ­labor, and the secular, 75–77, 80 Clopton, Hugh, 114, 116, 122 codices, and biblical typology, 270, 271–77, 282, 333n17, 333n26

344 Index Collingwood, R. G., 21–22, 31, 110 Collinson, Patrick, 258 colonialism, 25, 90, 288n48 consciousness, and poetry, 161–62 continuity versus discontinuity: biblical typology and, 270, 272, 333n17; literary studies and, 233–34, 235–36, 237, 246–47 Cook, Joanna S., 252 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Lord Shaftesbury, 216 Cooper, Catriona, 108 Cooper, Helen, 190, 191 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 37 cosmic time, and biblical typology, 269, 273, 278, 279 Counter-­Reformation, 29, 210, 211, 233 courage, 202, 203–5, 206–8, 210 court lit­er­a­ture, 233–34, 240, 327n25 Coutances, John de (Bishop of Worcester), 111 Covell, William, 37–38 Cowley, Abraham, 172, 215, 216 Crawford, Patricia, 242 Cressy, David, 29 ­Cromwell, Richard: chronologies and, 146; death and funeral of, 217–18, 219; elegies on, 217–19, 241–42, 324n7, 324n10; interventionism during regime of, 82; po­liti­cal history and, 239, 243, 263, 299n11; Restoration and, 216–17 cultural historiography: early modern Church historians and, 68–69, 296n29; gender norms and, 208, 245; Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon and, 116, 122, 123; Interregnum and, 264; laundry time and, 129, 310n1; memory and, 98, 122, 189, 191; period as cultural concept and, 149, 228–29; religious culture and, 89, 91, 92–93, 96, 97–98; Re­nais­sance as term of use, 234, 235, 255, 326n12; Restoration and, 238; the secular and, 72–73; Shakespeare as representative of the past and, 181–82, 188–89 Cummings, Brian, 100, 101 cyclicality, 11, 23, 37, 38, 45 Daniel, Samuel, 172 Dante Alighieri, 76, 207 date of origin, as term of use, 46 David (biblical figure), 220–21 Davies, Eleanor, 245, 329n43

Davis, Bette, 124, 125 Davis, Kathleen, 25–26, 235 Deborah (biblical figure), 245 decay, and poetry, 155, 157–60, 316n24 de Certeau, Michel, 254, 259–60 de Grazia, Margreta, 32, 107 demographics: birthrates, 168, 318n24; historiography and, 30–31, 164, 166–67, 287n40; illegitimate births, 165, 166; Industrial Revolution, 30, 164; life cycle and, 166; love poetry and, 163, 164, 166; marriage and, 164–69; mortality rates, 164, 166, 316n5; pre­industrial, agrarian social trends and, 30, 164, 168, 316n5; reproduction and, 163, 166, 176; social cosmos and, 165 Derrida, Jacques, 8 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 89 Diamond, Jared, 296n29 Dickens, Charles, 279 Dinah (biblical figure), 79 Dolven, Jeff, 49–50, 200–201, 210, 212 domains, and space, 257, 258, 261 Donne, John: An Anatomie of the World, 153, 155, 315n11; chronologies and, 146; circular motion of the body and, 155–57, 158; circular motion of heavenly bodies and, 153–54, 154–55, 158, 315n11; decay and, 155, 316n24; demographics and, 164; ego and, 159, 161; entanglements and, 146; foreign influences on categorization in literary studies and, 290n23; inclusion/exclusion and, 262; marriage and, 172; Metempsychosis, 146; Of the Progresse of the Soule, 153–54, 155–56; “The Sunne Rising,” 155, 159, 161, 164; twin compasses and, 251–52 Doran, Gregory, 283n10 Drayton, Michael, 147, 159 Driver, Martha, 191 Dryden, John: Absalom and Achitophel, 220–21, 223, 324n17; “The Age of Dryden,” 215–16, 226–29; Annus Mirabilis, 228; apocalyptic temporality and, 219, 223–24, 227, 228; Astræa Redux, 219–20; causation in literary studies and, 39; on C ­ romwell’s death, 217–19, 241–42, 324n7, 324n10; elegies and, 217–20, 223, 241–42, 324n7, 324n10; An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 219, 224; Fables, 224–26; ­f uture temporality and, 227–28,

Index 229; Hebrew Scripture time/typologies and, 220–21, 223; The Hind and the Panther, 227; ironic sacred history and, 219–21, 324n17; literary eternity and, 223–26, 325n32; in memory of, writings, 227; period as cultural concept and, 149, 228–29; The Pilgrim (Fletcher) and, 224, 228; po­liti­cal history in literary studies and, 39, 216; pre­sent tense in i­magined time and, 217–20; prose writing and, 219, 224; Religio Laici, 221–23; Remains (Oldham), 219; Restoration and, 215, 216, 219–20, 227, 241; Roman analogy/culture and, 218, 219, 324n10; salvation/ redemptive time and, 221–23; the secular and, 219, 227; The Works of Virgil, 228. See also Heroique Stanzas (Dryden) Duffy, Eamon, 99, 109, 191 Dylan, Bob, 147, 314n3 early Chris­tian­ity: allegorical versus literal interpretation and, 277; biblical typology and, 269–71, 274, 276; chronologies and, 272, 276; Hexapla (Origen) and, 271–74, 275, 282; historical periodization and, 6; lectionaries and, 270; scroll to codex shift and, 270–71; time/temporalities and, 272, 276, 291n33. See also Chris­tian­ity early modern: historiography and, 23–26, 234–35, 285n11, 285n14, 288n48; as term of use, 23–26, 234–35, 285n11, 285n14, 288n48. See also early modern E ­ ngland early modern Church historians: about, 13, 70–71; Augustinian “ages” and, 59–60, 64–65; birth of Jesus Christ and, 46, 58, 60, 64, 294n4; c­ entury as term of use, 6, 46; chaos versus order/same versus differences view of history and, 56–57, 293n3; cultural historiography and, 68–69, 296n29; Daniel system and, 61–62, 63, 64–65, 66, 296n31; God’s role in h ­ uman history and, 56, 57–58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 68, 71; linear time and, 65, 296n26; Messiah and, 60, 65–66; numerical pattern/universal time frame and, 67–68, 69, 70, 296n31; Reformation historians and, 69–70; Second Coming and, 58–59, 61; secularization theory and, 73; Talmudic system and, 60–61, 64–65; traditions in antiquity and, 68–70; world history and, 58–59, 294n4, 294nn7–9

345

early modern E ­ ngland: chronologies and, 1, 5, 12; description of, 23, 28–32, 34–35, 287n31, 287n33, 287n40; history/historical studies and, 2, 3, 6, 7. See also early modern economic status in regional variations, and space, 257–58, 331n15 Edmondson, Paul, 116, 122 Edward VI (King of E ­ ngland), 29, 116–17, 118–19, 120, 121 ego, and poetry, 159, 161 elegies, 217–20, 223, 324n10 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans), 279, 280 Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land, 147–48 Elizabeth (film, 1998), 124 Elizabethan period: the body and space theory and, 264; eroticism in love poetry and, 170, 171–72; inclusion/exclusion in literary studies and, 262; love in poetry and, 175; orientation/re­orientation/slanted and, 259; Petrarch’s love poetry and, 171–72, 177; power/authority and, 258–59; ruffs and, 124, 125, 125–26, 127, 139–40, 141, 313n47; Shakespeare as representative of, 188–89; sonnets and, 171; spatiality and, 259; time in lit­er­a­ture during, 47 Elizabethan Queen Barbie doll, 124, 142 Elizabeth I (Queen of ­England): the body of, 264; cult of, 259; dramas on stage and screen and, 124, 125; power/authority of, 258–59, 260, 331n18; religious historians and, 29, 287n33; ruffs and, 124, 125, 141, 309n1; temporalities and, 32. See also Elizabethan period Elizabeth: The Golden Age (film, 2007), 124 Elliott, Edward Bishop, 280 Elton, Geoffrey, 28, 301n29 Empson, William, 315n11 ­England: Act of 1571, 90; Act of Supremacy of 1534, 88, 97; Act of Uniformity of 1549, 78, 84; Act of Uniformity of 1558, 90; Chantries Act of 1547, 116–17; the Commonwealth (1649–1653), 231, 232, 235–36, 237, 240; demographics and, 164, 165, 167–68; early modern as term of use in, 25, 285n14, 288n48; En­glish Revolution (1642–49), 28–29, 238–39, 241; Glorious Revolution (1688–89), 34, 40, 88–89, 238–39, 240; Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660, 216–17, 230; Interregnum, 216–17, 235–36, 238, 240, 263, 264; Religion Act

346 Index ­England (continued) and Recusants Act of 1591, 90; religious historians and, 28–29, 287n31, 287n33; Restoration Act of Uniformity of 1662, 29; temporalities as concept and, 6, 7–8; Toleration Act of 1689, 29. See also specific periods, and specific rulers En­glish Civil Wars: about, 16, 230–32, 246–47; the Commonwealth (1649–1653) and, 231, 232, 235–36, 237, 240; continuity versus discontinuity in literary studies and, 233–34, 235–36, 237, 246–47; court lit­er­a­ture and, 233–34, 327n25; En­glish Revolution (1642–49) and, 28–29, 238–39, 327n29; Glorious Revolution (1688–89) and, 238–39, 240; Hebrew Scripture and, 245, 246, 329n60; historical periodization and, 239–40, 241, 328n35; literary studies and, 240–42; narratives of ideological significance and, 237–39; Puritanism and, 85, 86; Reformation and, 233–34, 235–36, 237; Restoration and, 241, 242, 328n35; Royalists and, 242, 243, 245; subaltern writers and, 230, 233–34, 241–46, 328n39, 329nn46–47, 329n60; w ­ omen writers and, 242–46, 328n39, 329nn46–47, 329n60 En­glish Revolution, 28–29, 238–39, 241. See also En­glish Civil Wars Enlightenment: early modern as term of use, 25; God’s role in h ­ uman history and, 58; historical periodization and, 25, 26, 27, 34, 148; literary studies and, 151; material culture and, 55, 74, 89; Scottish Enlightenment, 43; the secular and, 74, 87, 92; traditional divisions of history and lit­er­a­ture and, 8 entanglements, and poetry, 145, 146, 148, 313n1 environment, as term of use, 148 Epithalamion (Spenser), 147, 253, 262 epochs: definition of, 46; historical periodization and, 3, 217, 263; literary studies and, 217, 228; Petrarch’s epoch model and, 3, 4–5, 6; Shakespeare’s plays and, 201–2, 203, 211, 212, 323n30; time and, 3, 217 era, as term of use, 46, 59 Erasmus, 49–50, 151 Erastus, Thomas, 82 eroticism: courtship and, 169, 172–73, 175, 319n39; literary studies and, 169, 170,

171–72, 172–73, 175, 319n39; married love and, 165–66, 173, 174–75 An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (Dryden), 219, 224 ethics: feminism and, 323n27; literary studies and, 200–201; Shakespeare’s plays and, 200, 201, 202–3, 204, 205, 207. See also virtues Eu­rope: Daniel system and, 62, 64; early modern as term of use in, 285n14; gender differentiation and, 43; historical periodization and, 34, 46, 66; intra-­ Christian religious war in, 42, 43, 98; marriage patterns in, 167, 169; philosophy and, 31, 44; post-­Restoration and, 231, 240–41, 242, 244, 246; Romanticism and, 148, 149–50, 335n53; temporalities and, 6, 7–8; world history and, 58. See also demographics; M ­ iddle Ages; Reformation; Re­nais­sance; and specific countries Eusebius of Caesarea, 68, 272, 273–74 Evans, Mary Ann (George Eliot), 279, 280 event study, inside and outside of, 21–22, 31, 33–34 extrinsic conceptual models, 21, 22, 23 Ezell, Margaret, 327n25 Fables (Dryden), 224–26 The Faerie Queene (Spenser), 43, 146, 200, 262 Falck, Claire, 259 Farrar, Frederic W., 335n54 Faust, Lorenz, 62, 63, 64 Fell, Margaret, 242, 245 Felltham, Owen, 38 feminism, 136–37, 140, 141–42, 203, 323n27 film, biblical typology and celluloid, 271–72, 280, 281 films, and Shakespeare’s plays, 124, 125, 188, 189, 191, 196 Fisher, Thomas, 116, 117 flashback, 280, 281 Fletcher, Giles, 47, 147, 173, 224, 228 Fletcher, John, 224, 228, 240 foreign influences on categorization, in literary studies, 41–44, 290n23 foreshadowing, 277–78, 279–80, 281, 334n47 form model, 263 Fortescue, John, 33 Foucault, Michel, 8, 11, 39, 96–97, 261, 314n8 Foxe, John, 70

Index France: civil wars and, 238; classical education in, 233; early modern as term of use, 235; foreign influences on categorization in literary studies and, 41–42; marriage age rate and, 167; period as term of use in ­Middle French, 37; Re­nais­sance and, 24, 233; Revolution of 1789, 40, 74, 89, 234, 239, 285n14, 327n29; Revolution of 1848, 239, 328n29 Franck, Sebastian, 60, 74, 298n13 Fun Home (musical drama), 210 Galileo Galilei, 153 gathering concept, 262, 263 Gell, Alfred, 109 gender differentiation: cultural historiography and, 208, 245; literary studies and, 43, 79, 136, 138–39, 202; space and, 253. See also ­women gender relations, 159 geography/geo­graph­i­cal areas, 258, 261 Germany: foreign influences on categorization in literary studies and, 42–43; marriage age rate and, 167; Protestantism and, 61, 234; Roman culture’s continuation into modernity and, 62, 64; Talmudic system and, 61; temporalities as new and, 6, 46; typology defined, 278 ghosts/spirits, and Shakespeare, 184–86, 189, 193, 196 Giffard, Godfrey (Bishop of Worcester), 111–12 Gifford, George, 277–78 Gillespie, Katherine, 329n46 global context: historical periods and, 8; historiography and, 34, 35, 288n48; regional variations and, 260–61; Shakespeare’s plays and, 193; space and, 254, 260–61. See also international context Globe Play­house, 188, 189, 192 Glück, Louise, Averno, 202 God: and belief in God and the secular, 73–74; and role in h ­ uman history for early modern Church historians, 56, 57–58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 68, 71 Graf, N. S. B., 24 Grafton, Anthony, 11, 271, 272, 280, 291n33 Gramsci, Antonio, 233–34, 246, 326n12 Greeks, ancient: Antigone (Sophocles), 203–4, 205; cyclicality and, 37, 58; gathering model of space and, 263; period

347

defined, 37, 38; Septuagint and, 271, 275, 294n4; Shakespeare’s plays and, 201, 203–4, 205, 209. See also classical period Greenblatt, Stephen, 190, 191, 301n25 Greene, Thomas M., 4, 17, 140 Gregory I (Pope), 70 Gregory VII (Pope), 70, 76 Greig, Hannah, 124–25 Guibbory, Achsah, 10 Guild, William, 277, 278 Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon, Warwickshire, E ­ ngland: artworks and, 116, 117, 120–21, 122–23, 308n77; Corporation charter for Stratford-­upon-­ Avon and, 117–18, 120, 121, 122; cultural historiography and, 116, 122, 123; Guild Chapel, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119–20, 121–22; Guildhall building, 111, 112, 113; Guildhall chaplains’ parlors and chapel, 112, 113, 118, 122; Guild of the Holy Cross, 111–12, 114, 116–17; infill h ­ ouse (school­ house), 112, 114, 115, 118; material cultural transition from medieval to early modern world and, 117–23, 119, 120, 308n77; and memory, cultural, 122; New Place ­house and, 114, 116, 122; palimpsestic material culture and, 118–19, 119, 120, 122–23; po­liti­cal history and, 116–17; religious culture and, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122; Shakespeare’s life and, 118, 121; South Wing, 114, 118–19, 119, 120; Stratford-­ upon-­Avon history and, 111–12, 117 Guizot, François, 239, 327n29 Gundry, S. N., 278–79, 333n20 Habermas, Jürgen, 210 Habington, William, 175–76, 319n47 Halkett, Anne, 243–46, 329n47 Hall, Hubert, 136, 311n29 Hamilton, Gillian, 318n24 Hamlet (film, 1990), 188 Hamlet (film, 1996), 188 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 198, 200 Hamling, Tara, 109 Hanks, William F., 254 Hannah (biblical figure), 245 Harner, James, 195 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 9, 109–10, 267–68 Harrison, Frederic, 135–36, 141 Harvey, William, 155–56 Haskins, Charles Homer, 233

348 Index Hayot, Eric, 9, 255 Hazlitt, William, 239 heavenly bodies, poetry and circular motion of, 152–53, 154–55, 159, 314n8 Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament): Augustinian “ages” and, 59–60; chronologies and, 9, 272; Hexapla (Origen) and, 271–74, 275, 282; Hexaplae (Willet) and, 274–77, 282, 333n26; literary studies and, 40; m ­ other and child theme and, 208, 322n21; prophets and, 245; religious periods and, 202; as scroll, 271–72; temporalities and, 9; time and typologies in poetry and, 220–21, 223, 324n17; translations of, 64, 271, 275; ­women’s writings on En­glish Civil Wars and, 245, 246, 329n60; world history and, 58, 294n4. See also biblical typology; Book of Daniel; and specific biblical figures Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, 105, 110 Henrietta Maria (Queen of ­England), 42, 175 Henry II (King of France), 41 Henry IV (King of E ­ ngland), 115 Henry IV (King of France), 41 Henry IV plays (Shakespeare), 191 Henry V (film, 1989), 188 Henry V (King of E ­ ngland), 7, 97, 253 Henry V (Shakespeare), 251, 252, 253, 263 Henry VII (King of E ­ ngland), 40, 97 Henry VIII (King of ­England), 29, 78, 97 Herbert, George, 159, 164, 165 Heroique Stanzas (Dryden): apocalyptic temporality and, 219, 223; pre­sent tense in ­imagined time and, 217–20; Roman analogy/culture and, 218, 219, 324n10; the secular and, 219 Herrick, Robert, 173, 174–75 Herringman, Henry, 218, 324n7 Hesiod, 6 Heywood, Thomas, 187 Hicks, Dan, 107 Hill, Christopher, 24, 25, 39, 285n11, 302n37 The Hind and the Panther (Dryden), 227 Hindle, Steve, 319n42 historical periods/periodization: about, 1–6, 9, 10–11, 17; academia and, 265; age(s) as term of use, 7, 46, 215; ­century as term of use, 6, 46; date of origin as term of use, 46; En­glish Civil Wars and, 239–40, 241, 328n35; epochs and, 3, 217, 263; era as term of use, 46, 59; global context and, 8; linear

time and, 110; literary studies and, 36, 50, 232, 241–42; models of, 9–11, 283n10; period defined, 3, 37, 38, 151, 283n7; po­liti­cal history and, 232; religious culture and, 88, 89, 92–93, 97, 99, 100; Restoration and, 239–40; Roman Empire and, 6–7; the secular and, 73, 82, 87. See also historiography historical self-­emplacement, 5, 9, 16. See also Dryden, John; En­glish Civil Wars historicity, 1, 4, 5, 9–10, 123, 274, 282 historiography: about, 1, 12, 17, 21–23, 32–33; and capitalism, development of, 3, 25, 27, 32, 34; chronologies and, 3–4, 21, 22–23, 28, 29, 31–32, 145–47, 314n3; chronologies of historical events and, 314n3; demographics and, 30–31, 164, 166–67, 287n40; early modern as term of use, 23–26, 234–35, 285n11, 285n14, 288n48; early modern E ­ ngland described, 23, 28–32, 34–35, 287n31, 287n33, 287n40; extrinsic conceptual models and, 21, 22, 23; feminist historiographers and, 136–37, 138–39, 140, 141–42, 313n51; global context and, 34, 35, 288n48; handkerchief model and, 268, 269, 274, 281; homogeneities and, 25–26; humanists and, 2–3, 4; inside and outside of event study and, 21–22, 31, 33–34; international context and, 34; Japa­nese, 236–37; of laundry time, 129–30, 136, 310n1; linear time in, 23, 31, 110; lived experience and, 22–23, 32, 232; material culture and, 31–32; metanarratives and, 12, 33–34; modernization theory and, 12, 27–29; periodization and, 4–5, 25–32, 287n40; philosophy and, 26, 31; po­liti­cal history and, 28; reevaluation of early modernity and, 33–35, 288n48; religious historians and, 28–29, 287n31, 287n33; revolutionary historiography, 88–92, 299nn2–3; social historians and, 29–30; subfields of history and, 23, 26, 28; temporalities and, 22–23, 31, 32; timeline and, 65, 268, 270. See also cultural historiography; historical periods/ periodization history and historical studies: chaos versus order/same versus differences view of, 55–57, 293n3; con­temporary notions of, 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 8–9; cyclicality and, 11, 23; in early modern E ­ ngland, 2, 3, 6, 7; hand of

Index God in h ­ uman history and, 2, 56, 57–58, 68; ironic sacred history and, 219–21, 324n17; New Historicism, 39, 94, 95, 97, 190, 191, 258; nonlinear time and, 267, 282; periodization and, 4–5; world history and, 58–59, 294n4, 294nn7–9. See also cultural historiography; historical periods/periodization; historiography; po­liti­cal history Hobbes, Thomas, 40, 216 Hobsbawn, Eric, 24 Hoccleve, Thomas, 97, 190 Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles, 7 Hollywood films, and Shakespeare, 124, 125, 188, 189, 191, 196, 202, 208–9 Homer, 225, 226 Honig, Bonnie, 207–8 Hooker, Richard, 48, 82 hope, 207–10, 323n27 Horace, 263 Hoskins, Janet, 109 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 319n42 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 93 “How to Look at Art” (Barry), 198, 199, 200, 202 Huldah (biblical figure), 245 humanism: chronologies and, 46; cultural historiography and, 7; four-­monarchies system in religious culture and, 64; historiography and, 2–3, 4; period/ periodization and, 77, 151; Re­nais­sance and, 323n30; Shakespeare’s plays and, 203, 211; space and place as coexistent and, 254; spatial relationships and, 256; temporalities and, 201–2; time and, 46, 291n33 Humphrey, Chris, 111 Husserl, Edmund, 264 Hutchinson, Lucy, 159, 243, 316n24, 329n43 Huygens, Constantijn, 290n23 Illyricus, Matthias Flacius, 70 inclusion/exclusion, and place, 261–62 In­de­pen­dents, 82, 244 Industrial Revolution: demographics and, 30, 164; early modern as term of use and, 24, 25, 26, 234 inherited/institutionalized models of periodization, 231–32, 235, 238, 255–56, 257, 260, 327n26 international context, 12, 34, 36, 40. See also global context

349

Interregnum: the body and space theory and, 264; historical periodization and, 263, 264; literary culture and, 235–36, 238, 240; po­liti­cal history and, 64, 216–17, 263; Restoration and, 216–17, 235–36 interventionism, 76, 81–83 Ireland, 43, 253, 262 ironic sacred history, 219–21, 324n17 Italy: Counter-­Reformation and, 233, 326n12; demographics and, 164; Italian lit­er­a­ture, 41; marriage age rate and, 167; Re­nais­sance in, 24, 41, 151, 233, 234; saeculum and, 72 Jackson, V ­ irginia, 252 Jacobean period. See Stuart period James, Elinor, 242 James I/James VI (King of En­gland/ Scotland), 29, 32, 43, 82, 244, 245, 287n33 James II/James VII (King of En­gland/ Scotland/Ireland), 238–39, 240–41, 242, 243 James III (King of Scotland, the Old Pretender), 245, 246 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 11, 95, 100, 237 Japan, 149–50, 205, 236–37 Jardine, Lisa, 188 Jerome, Saint, 61, 62, 72, 293n3, 296n31 Jesus Christ: birth of, 7, 46, 58, 60, 64, 294n4; Daniel system and, 64; marriage between nuns and, 78–80; as Messiah, 60, 65–66; ­mother and child theme and, 208; salvation/redemptive time and, 222, 223; Second Coming of, 58–59, 60, 61, 65–66, 217; temporalities and, 6 Jews: cultural historiography and, 66; God’s role in h ­ uman history and, 57–58, 65; historical periodization and, 66; lectionaries and, 270; literary studies and po­liti­cal history and, 40; material palimpsest in building biography and, 109; Messiah and, 60, 65–66; world history and, 58 John, Saint, 58, 159 Johnson, Barbara, 251 Johnson, Samuel, 221, 325n18 Johnson, William, 24 Jonson, Ben, 7, 44, 159–60, 161, 176, 187, 313n47 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 151 Joye, George, 61

350 Index Julius Africanus, 296n31 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 183, 184 Junius, Franciscus, 64 Kahn, Coppélia, 188 Kannengiesser, Charles, 269–70 Kastan, David Scott, 258, 331n18 Kempe, Margery, 97 Kepler, Johannes, 71, 153 King, Gregory, 164 King, John N., 100 Knights, L. C., 39 Koselleck, Reinhart, 46 Kuskin, William, 191 Lampe, G. W. H., 270 language: figurative language, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160; literary language, 43–44; space and, 254 Lanier, Aemilia, 159 Larkin, Philip, “Vers de Société,” 160–61 Latin, 37, 38, 45, 46, 64 Latour, Bruno, 9, 109, 267, 268 laundresses, and ruffs, 127, 129, 134, 134 laundry lists, 137, 137–38, 141–42, 312nn34–35 laundry time: about, 5, 14, 141; archival ­labor and, 135–36, 141; artifacts of material culture for laundry work and, 129, 310n11; cultural historiography and, 129, 310n1; feminist historiographers and, 136–37, 140, 141–42; historiography of, 129–30, 136, 310n1; laundry lists and, 137, 137–38, 141–42, 312nn34–35; lived experiences of, 128, 130–32, 133, 134, 134; methods for laundry work and, 130–31, 132, 310n15; periodicity and, 128–32, 133, 134; repetitiveness and, 130, 131, 132; ruffs and, 127, 129, 134, 134; washing-­bills and, 135, 136, 140, 311n19, 311n27, 311n29 Lear (Shakespeare), 211 Lear, Jonathan, 207 Leavis, F. R., 94 Lefebvre, Henri, 254, 259, 260 Le Goff, Jacques, 111, 234–35 Leighton, Angela, 263 L’Estrange, Roger, 84 Levellers, 82, 241, 242–43 Levine, David, 29, 30 Lewis, C. S., 93, 301n20 life cycle, 163, 166, 169, 178. See also demographics; lived experience; marriage

Lilburne, John, 242–43 linear time: biblical typology and, 271–72, 280, 281; early modern Church historians and, 65, 296n26; flashback and, 280, 281; historical periodization and, 110; historiography and, 23, 31, 110; literary studies and, 46–47, 280; Re­nais­sance and, 23. See also time; timeline literary studies, 1–2, 12–13, 36, 50–51. See also specific authors, and artworks lived experience: biblical typology and, 269–70, 332n20; historiography and, 22–23, 32, 232; laundry time and, 128, 130–32, 133, 134, 134. See also life cycle Locke, John, 31, 216, 241 Lollards, 77, 93, 97 Looking for Richard (film, 1996), 188 Louis-­Philippe I (King of France), 239 Louis XIV (King of France), 41 love: literary studies and, 169–72, 170, 175–76, 177, 319n47; love in poetry and, 319n47; married love, 165–66, 173, 174–75; Platonic love, 175, 177 Lovelace, Richard, 173, 177 love poetry: about, 15, 165–66, 177–78; adulterous love and, 170–72, 175; aristocracy and, 170, 171; and courtship, eroticization of, 172–73, 175, 319n39; demographics and, 163, 164, 166; eroticism in lit­er­a­ture and, 170, 171–73, 175, 319n39; and love, idea of, 170; marriage and, 165, 170, 172, 173, 175; Petrarch and, 165, 171–72, 175, 177; social cosmos and, 163; ­women and, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174. See also love Luctus Britannici, 227 Luther, Martin: belief in God and, 74; Book of Daniel translation and, 56, 62, 65, 294n8; chaos versus order/same versus differences view of history and, 56; Daniel system and, 62; foreshadowing and, 277, 279; Messiah and, 65; ninety-­five t­ heses in Germany (1517) and, 234; numerical pattern/universal time frame and, 69; the secular versus withdrawal of religion and, 77; Shakespeare’s plays and, 203; Talmudic system and, 61; timelines in historiography and, 65; world history and, 294n8. See also Reformation Lutheranism, 70 Lydgate, John, 37, 97, 116, 190, 289n4 Lyman, Azel S., 280

Index Macbeth (Shakespeare), 183, 211 Macdonald, Hugh, 228 Macfarlane, Alan, 27, 28 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 44 Magdeburg Centuries, 6, 46 Maitland, Frederic William, 26 Malone, Edmond, 229 Malory, Thomas, 93, 97 Malthus, Thomas, 166, 316n5 manuscripts/manuscript circulation, 39, 43, 289n10 Markham, Gervase, 130–32 Marlowe, Christopher, 93, 146, 159, 187, 313n47 Marmion, Shakerley, 45 marriage: aristocracy and, 168, 169, 171, 172, 318n24, 319n42; average age of, 165–66, 167, 169, 172, 318n24; average rate of, 165–66, 167, 173, 319n42; classical period and, 174; demographics and, 164–69; eroticization of courtship and, 169, 172–73, 175, 319n39; eroticization of married love, 165–66, 174–75; f­ ree choice and, 168, 169, 171, 172, 319n47; historical periodization and, 5; ­legal categories and, 169, 174, 318n26; literary studies and, 169; love in poetry and, 319n47; love poetry and, 165, 170, 172, 173, 175; pre­industrial, agrarian social trends and, 167; religious culture and, 169, 173, 318n26; social cosmos and, 165; unwed population versus, 168, 174–75; wedding ceremony of nun to Jesus Christ, 78–80; ­women and, 5, 78–80, 167–68 Marshall, Peter, 28–29 Marvell, Andrew: causation in literary studies and, 39, 40; consciousness in poetry and, 161–62; elegy on C ­ romwell’s death by, 217, 218, 219, 324n7; period as cultural concept and, 151; periodization in literary studies and, 241–42, 261; po­liti­cal history in literary studies and, 39, 40, 216; Rehearsal Transpros’ d, 241–42; Upon Appleton House, 161–62, 241–42 Marx, Karl, 11, 39, 105, 110 Mary I (Queen of ­England), 29 Mary II (Queen of E ­ ngland), 238 Mascall, Leonard, 130, 132 “Massacre in Piedmont” (Milton), 147, 314n3 material culture: about, 14; historiography and, 31–32; literary studies and, 5, 31–32,

351

39, 45, 46–47, 289n10; spatiality and, 256; temporalities and, 5, 7; and transition from medieval to early modern world, 117–23, 119, 120, 308n77. See also archaeology; artworks; Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon, Warwickshire, ­England; laundry time; ruffs Matthews, David, 100, 191 McMullan, Gordon, 100, 191 Medieval period. See ­Middle Ages Meiji Restoration, 236–37 Melanchthon, Philipp, 61, 67 memory: cultural historiography and, 98, 122, 189, 191; lit­er­a­ture and, 202, 206, 227; periodicity and, 200 Messiah, 58–59, 60, 61, 65–66 metanarratives, 12, 33–34 metaphysical style, and figurative language, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160 Metempsychosis (Donne), 146 Michelet, Jules, 24 microcosm-­macrocosm analogy, 156–57 microhistories, 2–3, 29 ­Middle Ages: archaeology and, 106–8; Augustinian “ages” and, 60; chronologies and, 10, 235; circular motion concept and, 153, 156; continuity versus discontinuity in literary studies and, 233, 234, 235; cultural historiography and, 66, 98, 303n55; early modern and, 25–26, 263; inherited/ institutionalized models of periodization and, 256; literary studies and, 93–94, 97, 165, 170; long M ­ iddle Ages and, 190, 191, 235; material cultural transition to early modern world and, 117–23, 119, 120, 308n77; religious culture and, 93–94, 97, 100; religious culture synergy of early modern and, 98, 99–100; Scholasticism and, 31, 69; Shakespeare as representative of, 189–91; temporalities and, 6, 76–77, 110–11; traditional divisions of history and lit­er­a­ture and, 8; traditions in antiquity and, 69; Whig historiography and, 95–96; ­women’s status and, 234 Middleton, Thomas, 187 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 184–85, 189, 191, 201 Miller, J. Hillis, 26 Milton, John: causation in literary studies and, 39; chronologies and, 146, 147, 314n3; ­f uture temporalities and, 227; literary

352 Index Milton, John (continued) eternity and, 224; love poetry and, 173, 177; marriage and, 172, 173; “Massacre in Piedmont,” 147, 314n3; Paradise Lost, 48, 177, 241; Paradise Regained, 84–86, 241; period as cultural concept and, 149, 151; periodization in literary studies and, 241; Re­nais­sance lit­er­a­ture studies and, 93, 164; time in literary studies and, 48; worldly religion and, 84–86 Miriam (biblical figure), 245 Miyagi, Satoshi, 205, 207 modernization theory, 12, 27–29 Modern Language Association (MLA), 231–32, 235, 238, 255, 257, 260, 327n26 Montaigne, Michel de, 44, 75 Montrose, Louis, 188 Morahashi, Ted, 205 moral space of lit­er­a­ture, 200, 201, 202–3, 204, 205, 207, 210 More, Thomas, 93 Moretti, Franco, 260 Morris, William, 279 Moses (biblical figure), 61, 208, 322n21 ­mother and child: Arrival (film, 2016), 208, 209; “How to Look at Art” (Barry), 198, 199, 200, 202; Shakespeare’s plays and, 204, 208, 322n21 Much Ado About Nothing (film), 188 multitemporality, 9, 109–10, 267, 274, 276 mystical interpretation, and biblical typology, 269, 270, 274, 275, 276, 277 Nagel, Alexander, 110 nationalism: Reformation and, 24, 90, 96, 301n29; regional variations and, 260; space and, 253; Stuart period and, 29; temporalities and, 7–8; time and, 253; Tudor period and, 7, 29 Nef, John U., 24 Neoplatonism, 154, 159 the Netherlands, 41, 42, 290n23 new formalism and spatiality, 256 New Historicism, 39, 94, 95, 97, 190, 191, 258 New Jerusalem, 109, 269 New Testament: God’s role in h ­ uman history and, 60; Hexapla (Origen) and, 271–74, 275, 282; Hexaplae (Willet) and, 274–77, 282, 333n26; Shakespeare’s plays and, 202. See also biblical typology; and specific biblical figures

Nietz­sche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 110 Noah’s sons (biblical figures), 222–23 North Amer­i­ca, 24, 288n48. See also United States Norton, Thomas, 187 the “now,” 7, 219–20, 283n10 numerical pattern/universal time frame, and early modern Church historians, 67–68, 69, 70, 296n31 Of the Progresse of the Soule (Donne), 153–54, 155–56 O’Hara, Frank, 49–50 Oldham, John, Remains, 219 Old Testament (Hebrew Scripture). See Bible; Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) Oliveira, Anthony, 211 orientation/re­orientation/slanted, and place, 259 Origen: allegorical interpretation and, 272–73, 275, 333n20; biblical typology and temporality and, 281; Hexapla, 271–74, 275, 282; mystical interpretation and, 274, 275, 276 Orlando (Woolf), 138–40, 313n45, 313n47 O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, 263 Overton, Robert, 243, 244, 245 Ovid, 6, 225, 226 Owens, Judith, 253 Ozment, Steven, 234 palimpsest: building biography and, 109; Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon and, 118–19, 119, 120, 122–23; literary studies and, 109–10, 123; material culture and, 5, 105, 106, 109, 111; temporalities and, 267–68; time and, 105, 106, 109, 110 Palliser, Fanny Bury, 124, 128 Paradise Lost (Milton), 48, 177, 241 Paradise Regained (Milton), 84–86, 241 Patrick, Dan, 195–96 patristics. See early Chris­tian­ity Patterson, Lee, 8, 11, 99, 198, 209–10 Paul, Saint, 6, 79, 202, 273, 275–76 Pericles (Shakespeare), 153, 210 period: circular motion and, 10; as cultural concept, 148–52, 149, 228–29; definition of, 3, 37, 38, 127, 151, 152, 198, 283n7; literary studies and, 37–38, 47–48, 127–28, 149, 228–29, 289n4, 293n2; as mea­sure of time, 3

Index periodicity: laundry time and, 128–32, 133, 134; romance and, 210; ruffs and, 14, 127–28, 139–40; Shakespeare’s plays and, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206 periodization: about, 4, 11, 17, 198; in academia, 265–66; con­temporary debates about, 4, 5, 8–9; global context and, 8; historical models of, 4–5, 25–32, 287n40; inherited/institutionalized models of, 231–32, 235, 238, 255–56, 257, 260, 327n26; literary studies and, 36–37, 232, 241–42, 261, 293n2, 355; medieval and postmedieval archaeology and, 106–8; revisionist approaches and, 257, 263–64, 265–66; Shakespeare’s plays and, 198, 200; timeline and, 10–11. See also historio­ graphy Perkins, William, 80–81 Perry, Curtis, 191 personal agency, 259–60 Pervigilium Veneris (Spenser), 147 Petrarch, Francesco: epochs model and, 3, 4–5, 6; eroticism in lit­er­a­ture and, 170; linear time in historiography and, 11, 110; love poetry and, 165, 171, 172, 175, 177; period as cultural concept and, 149, 151; periodization and, 105; religious culture and, 233; Re­nais­sance literary studies and, 93 Peucer, Caspar, 67–68, 69, 70 Philip II (King of Spain), 49 Philips, Katherine, 159, 242 philosophy, 26, 31, 44 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Heptaplus, 154–55 The Pilgrim (Fletcher), 224, 228 Pincus, Steven C. A., 34 place: definition of, 254; gathering and, 262; geography/geo­graph­i­cal areas and, 261; inclusion/exclusion and, 261–62; orientation/re­orientation/slanted and, 259; power/authority and, 252–53; scholarly approaches and, 253–54; space’s coexistence with, 254, 261 Platonic love, 175, 177 Plutarch, 4–5 PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), 231–32, 257, 260 poetry: about, 14–15; adulterous love and, 175, 176; and agency and spatiality, 259; the body and, 154–57, 158; Cavalier poets,

353

164, 177; chastity and, 175, 176, 177; chronologies and, 145–48, 313n1, 314n3; circular motion concept and, 152–53, 154–55, 154–57, 158, 159, 314n8; consciousness in, 161–62; decay and, 155, 157–60, 316n24; ego and, 159, 161; entanglements and, 145, 146, 148, 313n1; environment as term of use, 148; eroticism of secular verse and, 170; gender relations and, 159; heavenly bodies and, 152–53, 154–55, 159, 314n8; libertine tropes and, 175, 176; love and, 170, 175–76, 319n47; metaphysical style in figurative language and, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160; period as cultural concept and, 148–52; period defined, 152; poetics and, 5, 165, 226, 227; posies and, 170; repetitiveness and, 147–48, 158; resonances and, 146, 148, 149, 152, 154, 313n1; social cosmos and, 159–61, 163; sonnets and, 50, 158, 170, 171, 173; sphere/temporal-­spatial sphere and, 148–52; temporalities and, 148–52; and temporality and spatial relationships, 251–52; w ­ omen poets and, 159, 316n24. See also love poetry Politian, 149 po­liti­cal history: causation in literary studies and, 39, 289n8, 289n10; conservative politics in United States and, 195–96; four-­monarchies system and, 64; Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon and, 116–17; historiography and, 28; Interregnum and, 64, 216–17, 263; literary studies and, 39, 40–43, 216, 232, 289n8, 289n10; religious culture and, 89–92, 299n3, 299n11 Polydore Vergil, 11, 110 Poole, Elizabeth, 245 Pope, Alexander, 228 Postan, Michael, 24 postmedieval archaeology, and periodization, 106–8. See also M ­ iddle Ages post-­Restoration, 231, 240–41, 242, 244, 246. See also Restoration postsecularism, 210–12, 323n27 power and authority, 62, 252–53, 258–60, 331n18 pre­industrial, agrarian society, and demographics, 30, 164, 168, 174, 316n5 pre­sent tense, in i­magined time, 217–20 Prins, Yopie, 252 private/internal religious practice, and the secular, 83–86

354 Index The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (film, 1939), 124, 125 Prospero’s Books (film, 1991), 188 Protestantism: colonialism and, 90; in Germany, 61, 234; God’s role in ­human history and, 58; literary studies and, 241; New Jerusalem and, 109; Shakespeare’s renewability through time and, 203, 211, 323n30; temporalities and, 110–11, 201–2; in United States, 294n9. See also Reformation Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), 231–32, 257, 260 Puddephat, Wilfrid, 116, 117 Purchas, Samuel, 37 Puritanism: cultural historiography and, 302n37; En­glish Civil Wars and, 85, 86; historical periodization and, 88–89; literary studies and, 299n9, 327n25; saeculum and, 82; the secular and, 81–82, 83 Puttenham, George, 169–70 Quakers, 81–82, 83, 242 Quantin, Jean-­L ouis, 274 queer theory, 100, 254, 259, 262 Questier, Michael C., 29 Quinones, Ricardo, 46 Raleigh, Walter, 172, 293n2, 296n26 Randall, Dale B. J., 327n25 Randolph, Thomas, 173 Ray, Sid, 191 redemption/salvation, and time, 221–23 Reformation: the body and space theory and, 265; continuity versus discontinuity in literary studies and, 232–36, 237; cultural historiography and, 96, 97, 98, 301nn29–30, 302n35, 302n37; early modern as term of use and, 24, 25, 26, 40, 234; literary studies and, 92–95, 301n20, 301n25; long Reformation and, 34, 227; medieval and postmedieval archaeology and, 107–8; nationalism and, 24, 90, 96, 301n29; ninety-­five t­ heses in 1517 and, 234; numerical pattern/universal time frame and, 69; po­liti­cal revolutions and, 90–91, 299n2–3; religious culture, as term of use in, 234; religious historians and, 28–29, 69–70; the secular and, 77–78, 298n13;

Shakespeare’s plays and, 203, 211; Shakespeare’s renewability through time and, 203, 211, 323n30; space and, 253; time or chronologies and, 46; and traditional divisions of history and lit­er­a­ture, 8; traditions in antiquity and, 69–70; transhistorical context in literary studies and, 48; withdrawal of religion and, 77–78, 83, 298n13. See also Luther, Martin; Protestantism regional variations, and space, 257–58, 260–61 Rehearsal Transpros’ d (Marvell), 241–42 Religio Laici (Dryden), 221–23 religion and religious historians, 5, 13–14, 28–29, 287n31, 287n33. See also early Chris­tian­ity; early modern Church historians; the secular; and specific religions religious culture: cultural historiography and, 89, 91, 92–93, 96, 97–98; epochs and, 201–2, 203, 211, 323n30; Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon and, 114, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122; historical period and periodization and, 88, 89, 92–93, 97, 99, 100; marriage and, 169, 173, 318n26; ­Middle Ages and, 93–94, 97, 100; New Historicism and, 94, 95, 97; palimpsest and, 109; po­liti­cal revolutions and, 89–90, 89–92, 299n3, 299n11; Reformation and literary studies and, 92–95, 301n20, 301n25; Restoration and, 83; revolutionary historiography and literary studies and, 88–92, 299nn2–3; secularism and, 92; Shakespeare’s plays and, 201–2, 203, 211, 323n30; space and, 251, 253, 258; spatiality and, 253; synchronic historicism and, 94–95, 96–97, 98, 100; synergy of late medieval/early modern period and, 98, 99–100; temporalities and, 110–11; Trans-­Reformation Studies and, 13–14, 88, 99–101; Whig historiography and, 95–96, 98, 99, 301n30. See also religion and religious historians; the secular; and specific religions Remains (Oldham), 219 Re­nais­sance: and artworks and temporal relationship, 110; the body and space theory and, 264–65; circular motion of heavenly bodies and, 153, 154; classical

Index period and, 233; continuity versus discontinuity in literary studies and, 232–36, 261; Counter-­Reformation and, 233, 326n12; early modern as term of use, 23, 24; historical periodization and, 263; in Italy, 24, 41, 151, 233, 234; literary studies and, 93–94; long Re­nais­sance and, 191; period as cultural concept and, 148–49, 150–51; poetry and demographics and, 164; postmedieval archaeology and, 107; the secular and, 74; as term of use, 234, 235, 255, 326n12; time or chronologies and, 201–2, 203; and traditional divisions of history and lit­er­a­t ure, 8; universalism and, 233; ­women’s status and, 234 repetitiveness: laundry time and, 130, 131, 132; poetry and, 147–48, 158 resonances, and poetry, 146, 148, 149, 152, 154, 313n1 Restoration: about, 35, 216; courtly writings and, 233–34; cultural historiography and, 238; Dryden and, 215, 216, 219–20, 227; En­glish Civil Wars and, 241, 242, 328n35; ­f uture temporality of, 227–28, 229; historical periodization and, 239–40; Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660 and, 216–17, 230; Interregnum and, 216–17, 235–36; literary studies and, 42, 238, 240–42, 327n25; long Restoration, 227; MLA and, 231, 238; religious culture and, 83; Restoration Act of Uniformity of 1662, 29; Royalists and, 42; subaltern writers and, 230, 233–34, 243, 246. See also Charles II (King of En­gland/Scotland/ Ireland); Dryden, John; post-­Restoration revisionist approaches, and periodization, 257, 263–64, 265–66 revolutionary historiography, 88–92, 299nn2–3. See also specific revolutions Reynolds, Henry, 159 Ricardian lit­er­a­ture, 93, 97 Richard II (King of E ­ ngland), 93 Richard III (Shakespeare), 184 Richardson, Catherine, 109 Richardson, Samuel, Cla­ris­sa, 177 Richelieu, Cardinal, 41–42 Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot), 177, 324n17 romance lit­er­a­ture, 201, 209, 210–11

355

Roman Empire: analogy/culture in poetry and, 218, 219, 324n10; and continuation of culture into modernity, 62, 64; historical periodization and, 6–7; marriage and, 167, 174; philosophy in historiography and, 31; polychronicity and, 267; power/ authority of, 62 Romanticism, 148, 149–50, 335n53 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf), 140 Rosenberg, Daniel, 11, 280 Rostow, W. W., 25 Royalists, 42, 242, 243, 245 ruffs: Elizabethan period and, 124, 125, 125–26, 127, 139–40, 141, 313n47; Elizabeth I and, 124, 141; fragility of, 125–27, 127; as iconic period marker, 124–25, 139–41, 142; laundresses and, 127, 129, 134, 134; laundry time and, 127, 129, 134, 134; as material culture, 124–25; period defined, 127; periodicity and, 14, 127–28, 139–40; Shakespeare and, 139–40; timeline and, 125, 126 Rushdie, Salman, 38–39, 289n4 Sackville, Thomas, 187 saecula saeculorum, 13, 72. See also the secular saeculum, 13, 45, 72, 74–75, 81, 82, 84. See also the secular Salmon, Lucy Maynard, 137, 137, 138, 141–42, 312nn34–35 salvation/redemptive time, 221–23 Salzman, Paul, 328n39 Sambrook, Pamela A., 129 Samuel, Raphael, 141 Sarah (biblical figure), 245 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 294n4 Schedel, Hartmann, 60 Schofield, Roger, 30, 166–67 Scholasticism, 31, 69 Schrödinger, Erwin, 313n1 Schwyzer, Philip, 48, 49 Scotland, 7, 31, 43, 82, 243. See also specific rulers Scott, Jonathan, 240 Scott, Walter, 229, 325n39 scriptural text. See Hebrew Scripture (Old Testament) scrolls, 270–72, 281 Second Coming, 58–59, 60, 61, 65–66, 217. See also Messiah

356 Index the secular: about, 13, 73, 86–87; belief in God and, 73–74; calling doctrine and, 80–81; clergy’s temporal/spiritual division of l­abor and, 75–77, 80; cultural historiography and, 72–73; interventionism and, 76, 81–83; poetry and, 219, 227; private/internal religious practice and, 83–86; Puritanism and, 81–82, 83; Quakers and, 81–82, 83; Reformation and, 77–78, 298n13; religious culture and, 92; saecula saeculorum and, 13, 72; saeculum and, 13, 72, 74–75, 81, 82; wedding ceremony of nun to Jesus Christ and, 78–80; withdrawal of religion and, 75, 77–80, 83, 84, 298n13; worldly religion and, 75–76, 79, 80, 83, 84–86 secularization theory, 45, 73, 219, 227 self-­emplacement, historical, 5, 9, 16. See also Dryden, John; En­glish Civil Wars Sellin, Paul R., 290n23 Semler, Johann Salomo, 278, 280 Serres, Michel, 9, 267, 268, 269, 274, 281, 282 Setabitanus, Thomas Malvenda, 294n7 Shakespeare, John, 120, 121 Shakespeare, William: “The Age of Dryden” and, 215; birth and death of, 181; bound­ aries and, 251, 252, 263; chronologies and, 146, 261; circular motion of heavenly bodies and, 153; demographics and, 164; foreign influences on, 42–43; Henry V, 251, 252, 253, 263; the “now” and, 7, 283n10; palimpsest in literary studies and, 109–10, 123; the past and literary studies and, 187–88, 189, 192, 193; Pericles, 153, 210; philosophy in literary studies and, 44; ruffs and, 139–40; sonnets and, 50, 182–83, 186–87; space in literary studies and, 251, 252, 253; Stratford-­upon-­Avon and, 105, 116, 118, 121, 122; The Tempest, 10, 153; temporalities and, 5, 15, 123; time and, 45, 47, 251, 252; transhistorical context in literary studies and, 50; Trans-­Reformation Studies and, 100; washing-­bills and, 136, 140, 311n27. See also Shakespeare, William, as representative of the past Shakespeare, William, and plays as renewable through time: about, 15, 198, 200–201, 212; ancient Greece and, 201, 203–4, 205, 209; within and between characters (“two actors in one role”) and, 205, 207; courage and, 202, 203–5, 206–8;

epochs and, 201–2, 203, 211, 212, 323n30; ethics and, 200, 201, 202–3, 204, 205, 207; Hamlet, 198, 200; hope and, 207–8; humanism and, 203, 211, 323n30; Lear, 211; Macbeth, 211; memory and, 202, 206; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 201; ­mother and child theme and, 204, 208, 322n21; period defined, 198; periodicity and, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 209; periodization and, 198, 200; postsecularism and, 210, 211–12; religious culture and, 201–2, 203, 211, 323n30; romances and, 201, 209, 211; and time/timeliness and temporalities, 201–2; Twelfth Night, 201, 210; virtue and, 200–201, 202–4. See also Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, William, as representative of the past: about, 15, 181, 196–97; Antony and Cleopatra, 184; classroom curriculum and, 194, 195; conservative politics and, 195–96; cultural historiography and, 181–82, 188–89; Elizabethan culture and, 188–89; ghosts/spirits and, 184–86, 189, 193, 196; global context and, 193; Globe Play­house and, 188, 189, 192; Henry IV plays and, 191; Hollywood films and, 188, 189, 191, 196; Julius Caesar, 183, 184; literary studies and, 187–88, 189, 192, 193; Macbeth, 183; medieval studies and, 189–91; and memory, historical, 181, 189; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 184–85, 189, 191; Richard III, 184; Sonnet 55, 182–83, 186–87; The Tempest, 184, 185–86, 187; theatrical per­for­mances in United States and, 192–93, 195; theatrical writing in plays and, 185–86; time in plays and, 182–84, 185, 186–87; translations into modern En­glish and, 194–95; The Two Noble Kinsmen, 191; “­Will & Jane” exhibit and, 192. See also Shakespeare, William; Shakespeare, William, and plays as renewable through time Shakespeare in Love (film, 1998), 188, 196 Shapiro, James, 194–95 The Shepheardes Calendar (Spenser), 38, 262 Shirley, James, 187 Sidney, Algernon, 241 Sidney, Philip, 41, 171, 172, 177 Sim, Lorraine, 138 Simic, Charles, 325n32 Simon, Richard, 223

Index Simpson, James, 235, 282 Skelton, John, 44, 151 Sleidan, Johannes, 64 Smith, A. J., 175 Smith, Lucy Toulmin, 136, 141–42 Smyth, Karen Elaine, 111 social cosmos: demographics and, 30, 164, 165, 168, 316n5; poetry and, 159–61, 163 social historians, 29–30, 40, 165 Society for Medieval Archaeology, 106, 107 Society for Post-­Medieval Archaeology, 106, 107 Sonnet 55 (Shakespeare), 182–83, 186–87 Sonnet LX (Spenser), 172–73 sonnets, 50, 158, 170, 171, 173, 182–83, 186–87. See also poetry Sophocles, Antigone, 203–4, 205 space: about, 5, 16, 254; agency and, 259–60; architectural developments in regional variations and, 257–58, 331n15; the body and, 264–65; bound­a ries and, 251, 252, 254, 261–62, 263; domains and, 257, 258, 261; economic status in regional variations and, 257–58, 331n15; form model and, 263; gathering and, 262, 263; gender differentiation and, 253; geography/geo­graph­i­cal areas and, 258, 261; global context and, 254, 260–61; inherited/institutionalized models of periodization and, 255–56; language and, 254; nationalism and, 253; orientation/re­orientation/slanted and, 259; place’s coexistence with, 254, 261; power/ authority and, 258–60, 331n18; regional variations and, 257–58, 260–61; religious culture and, 251, 253, 258; revisionist approaches to periodization and, 257, 263–64, 265–66; scholarly approaches and, 253–54; space theory and, 254–55, 259–60, 261–62, 263, 264–65; and temporality and spatial relationships, 251–52, 256; w ­ omen’s role and, 253 space theory, 254–55, 259–60, 261–62, 263, 264–65. See also space Spain, 40, 41, 42, 46, 49, 146, 240, 288n48 Sparks, Holloway, 203 spatiality: about, 251; agency and, 259; inherited/institutionalized models of periodization and, 255; material studies and, 256; new formalism and, 256; power/ authority and, 252–53; religious culture and, 253

357

Spenser, Edmund: Amoretti, 157–58, 159, 172–73, 175; bound­a ries and, 262; Boyle as wife of, 172, 319n39; The Cantos of Mutabilitie, 146, 155; chronologies and, 146; circular motion of heavenly bodies and, 155, 158; decay and, 155, 157–58, 159; demographics and, 164; Epithalamion, 147, 253, 262; eroticization of courtship and, 172–73, 175, 319n39; eroticization of married love and, 173; ethics and, 200; The Faerie Queene, 43, 146, 200, 262; foreign influences on categorization in literary studies and, 43; form model and, 263; inclusion/exclusion and, 262; language/literary language and, 44; metaphysical style in figurative language and, 158; period as mark of conclusion and, 38; Pervigilium Veneris, 147; Re­nais­sance lit­er­a­ture studies and, 93; repetitiveness in works of, 147, 158; The Shepheardes Calendar, 38, 262; sonnets and, 158, 172–73; virtue and, 200–201 sphere/temporal-­spatial sphere, and poetry, 148–52 Stallybrass, Peter, 272, 333n17 Stephen, Leslie, 136, 138, 140, 312n37 Stone, Lawrence, 27, 165, 240 Stow (Stowe), John, 109, 121, 122 Stratford, John de, 112 Stratford, Robert de, 111–12 Stratford-­upon-­Avon, Warwickshire, ­England: Corporation of, 117–18, 120, 121, 122; history of, 111–12, 117; material cultural transition from medieval to early modern world and, 117–18; Shakespeare and, 105, 116, 118, 121, 122. See also Guildhall of Stratford-­upon-­Avon, Warwickshire, ­England Strauss, David Friedrich, 279 Strier, Richard, 255 Stuart period: absolutism and, 244, 245; early modern E ­ ngland described, 34–35; historical periodization and, 263; historiography and, 29, 34–35; interventionism during, 82; love poetry and, 170, 262; modernization theory and, 27; nationalism and, 29; orientation/ re­orientation/slanted and, 259; period as cultural concept and, 150; periodization in literary studies and, 255; po­liti­cal history and, 28; religious historians and,

358 Index Stuart period (continued) 29; social historians and, 29; temporalities and, 32. See also specific rulers Stubbes, Philip, 125–27 subaltern writers, and periodization in literary studies, 230, 233–34, 241–46, 328n39, 329nn46–47, 329n60 Suckling, John, 173, 176 “The Sunne Rising” (Donne), 155, 159, 161, 164 Swift, Jonathan, The B ­ attle of the Books, 227–28 symbol, theory of, 148, 335n53 synchronic historicism, 94–95, 96–97, 98, 100 Talmudic system, 60–61, 64–65 Tawney, R. H., 25, 80 Taylor, Charles, 73, 74, 86, 87, 200, 210, 297n4 Taylor, John, 128, 132 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 10, 153, 184, 185–86, 187 temporalities: about, 5–7, 9, 12, 46, 251; age as term of use and, 7; apocalyptic temporality and, 219, 223–24, 227, 228; artworks and, 110, 146; biblical typology and, 268, 269, 270, 274, 276, 278, 279–81, 282; centuries as term of use and, 6–7; in Eu­rope, 7–8; f­ uture temporality and, 227–28, 229; historiography and, 22–23, 31, 32; literary studies and, 123, 267–68; ­Middle Ages and, 6, 76–77, 110–11; multitemporality and, 9, 109–10, 267, 274, 276; nationalism and, 7–8; the “now” and, 7, 219–20, 283n10; periodicity and, 127, 128–29, 131, 132, 138, 139–40; poetics and, 5; poetry and, 148–52; polychronicity and, 267, 276; power/authority and, 252, 253; Protestantism and, 110–11; queer theory and, 100, 262; religious culture and, 110–11; self-­emplacement and, 5, 9; Shakespeare’s plays and, 201–2; spatial relationships and, 251–52, 256; temporal division and, 1, 256; and transition from medieval to early modern world, 110–11 Theobald, Lewis, 47 Thomas, Keith, 23–24, 25, 27, 302n35 Tillich, Paul, 207 time: about, 2, 4, 6, 10–11; apocalyptic thinking and, 217; biblical typology and,

269, 271–72, 273–74, 278, 280, 281; chronologies and, 3–4, 46; circular motion and, 10, 11, 139; con­temporary notions of, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8–9, 11–12; cosmic time, 269, 273, 278, 279; cyclicality and, 10; early Chris­tian­ity and, 272, 291n33; epochs and, 3, 217; eternity in lit­er­a­ture and, 223–26, 325n32; handkerchief model and, 268, 269, 274, 281; Hebrew Scripture typologies in poetry and, 220–21, 223, 324n17; historical period as concept and, 3; historiography and, 3–4; nationalism and, 253; new formalism and, 256; nonlinear time, 267, 282; palimpsest and, 105, 106, 109, 110; period defined and, 3; periodization and, 4, 111; pre­sent tense in ­imagined time, 217–20; queer theory and, 100, 262; as recursive, 10, 139; Re­nais­sance and, 201–2, 203; salvation/redemptive time, 221–23; Shakespeare’s plays and, 45, 47, 182–84, 185, 186–87, 201–2, 251, 252 timeline: biblical typology and, 279–80, 281, 282; celluloid film and, 280; flashback and, 281; foreshadow and, 281; historical periodization and, 10–11; historiography and, 65, 268, 270; periodization and, 10–11; ruffs and, 125, 126. See also linear time; time Tittler, Robert, 118 Tonson, Jacob, 228 transhistorical context, 48–50, 293n48 transnational context. See global context Trans-­Reformation Studies, 13–14, 88, 99–101 Trapnel, Anna, 245, 246 Tremellius, Immanuel, 64 Trismosin, Salomon, 132, 133, 134 Tristram, E. W., 116, 117 Troeltsch, Ernst, 75, 77–78, 298n13 Trumpener, Katie, 232 Tuan, Yi-­Fu, 254 Tudor period: early modern ­England described, 34–35; gathering model of space and, 263; historiography and, 24; modernization theory and, 27, 28; nationalism and, 7, 29; po­liti­cal history and, 28; religious historians and, 29; social historians and, 29; temporalities and, 32. See also specific rulers Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 201, 210

Index “two actors in one role” (within and between characters), 205, 207 The Two Noble Kinsmen (Shakespeare), 191 type/antitype, and biblical typology, 268, 269, 270, 272–73, 276–77, 278–79 typology, 278, 279, 281, 335n53. See also biblical typology Underdown, David, 82 Underwood, Ted, 232, 237 United States: American War of In­de­pen­ dence, 25; Anglo-­A merican culture and, 89, 94, 95, 96, 188; buildings biography and, 109; colonial period and, 25, 288n48; conservative politics and, 195–96; early modern as term of use and, 24; Hollywood films on Shakespeare’s plays and, 124, 125, 188, 189, 191, 196, 202, 208–9; Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and, 258; periodization and, 37; Protestantism and, 294n9; Shakespeare’s plays per­for­mances in, 192–93, 195 universal time/numerical pattern frame, and early modern Church historians, 67–68, 69, 70, 296n31 Upon Appleton House (Marvell), 161–62, 241–42 Valla, Lorenzo, 94–95 van der Borcht, Pieter, 134, 134 Vasari, Giorgio, 150–51 Vaughan, Henry, 152–53, 156, 157 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 49 Vega, Lope de, 187 Villeneuve, Denis, 202 Villiers, Francis, 216 Virgil, 160, 228, 264–65 The Virgin Queen (film, 1955), 124 virtues, 200–201, 202–4, 210, 323n27. See also ethics Wallace, David, 191 Waller, Edmund, 176, 215, 216, 224 Wannamaker, Sam, 188, 192 Wars of the Roses, 40, 97 Warton, Thomas, 93, 150 washing-­bills, and laundry time, 135, 136, 140, 311n19, 311n27, 311n29 Watkins, John, 191 Weber, Max, 25, 80, 111

359

Whig historiography, 95–96, 98, 99, 301n30 Whitrow, Joan, 242 Willet, Andrew: foreshadowing and, 334n47; Hexaplae, 274–77, 282, 333n26 Willey, Basil, 148 William III (King of ­England), 228, 238, 242 Williams, Megan Hale, 271, 272 Williams, Raymond, 263–64 “­Will & Jane” exhibit, Folger Shakespeare Library, 192 Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 177, 324n17 Wilson, William, 324n7 Winnicott, D. W., 204, 207 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare): ancient Greece and, 203–4, 205, 209; within and between characters (“two actors in one role”) and, 205, 207; courage and, 202, 203–5, 206–8; epochs and, 201–2, 203; ethics and, 202–3, 204, 205, 207; hope and, 207–8; memory and, 202, 206; ­mother and child theme and, 204, 208, 322n21; periodicity and, 204, 205, 206, 209; postsecularism and, 210; religious culture and, 201–2, 203; and time/ timeliness and temporalities, 201–2; virtue and, 202–4 within and between characters (“two actors in one role”), 205, 207 Withington, Phil, 24, 25 Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 202 ­women: archival l­abor of, 136, 138–39, 141; class status and, 234; feminist historiographers and, 136–37, 138–39, 140, 141–42, 313n51; gender differentiation and, 43, 79, 136, 138–39; gender relations in poetry and, 159; homogeneities in historiography and, 25–26; love poetry and, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174; marriage and, 5, 78–80, 167–68; as nuns in convents, 43, 76, 78–80; as poets, 159, 316n24; as prophets of En­g lish Civil War, 244, 245, 246; space and, 253; worldly religion and, 78–80; as writers on En­g lish Civil Wars, 242–46, 328n39, 329nn46–47, 329n60. See also laundry time; and specific ­women Wood, Christopher S., 110

360 Index Woolf, D. R., 7 Woolf, ­Virginia: Between the Acts, 140–41; characteristics of, 312n37; as feminist historiographer, 138–39, 140, 313n51; Orlando, 138–40, 313n45, 313n47; periodicity and, 139–40; A Room of One’s Own, 140; ruff as iconic period marker and, 139–41, 142

Worde, Wynkyn de, 79 The Works of Virgil (Dryden), 228 world history, 58–59, 294n4, 294nn7–9 worldly religion, and the secular, 75–76, 79, 80, 83, 84–86 Wrightson, Keith, 29, 30, 240, 285n11 Wrigley, E. A. (Tony), 30, 137, 166–67 Wyatt, Thomas, 44, 49, 93, 94, 190

A c k n o w l­e d g m e n t s

The editors of this collection first met, very early in our respective c­ areers, in a Folger Institute Seminar, “Forms and Formats of Tudor Historiography,” taught by David Scott Kastan. Clearly the seminar had a lasting impact, grounding our mutual fascination with historiography and periodization that has culminated, over two de­cades ­later, in this collection. We would like to thank David for such a formative and transformative experience, in his unique classroom that freely extended from the Folger Shakespeare Library reading rooms to the back room at the Hawk ’n Dove (in its previous incarnation). Two gradu­ate students from the University of Delaware, Matthew Rinkevich and Frank Desiderio, served as editorial assistants for the volume. Matt saw the manuscript through the first phase, reading and proofing and formatting as we prepared the volume for initial submission; Frank saw the manuscript through fine-­tuning and fact-­checking before the book went into production. Both provided this crucial assistance with efficiency, intelligence, good humor, and equanimity. We are extremely grateful for their help, and to the University of Delaware for providing the financial support that enabled this editorial assistance (the Office of the Provost in Matt’s case, the Department of En­glish in Frank’s case). Kristen also benefited from the lively conversations about periodization and chronology in her gradu­ate seminar, “Shakespeare’s Tetralogies and the Contours of Time,” taught at the University of Delaware in 2015; she would like to thank her students for providing much food for thought. The Folger Institute, as the research arm of the Folger Shakespeare Library, has provided Owen the time and intellectual space to coedit this volume. The institute also sponsored the lively weekend symposium “Periodization 2.0,” which sparked lots of continuing conversation. Thanks go especially to the Institute’s Executive Director, Kathleen Lynch, who approved a subvention and adds this collection to the ever-­growing list of titles to emerge from

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A c k now l­edg m ents

the special relationship that the Folger enjoys with the University of Pennsylvania Press. We also appreciate the support of Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger, and Eric Johnson, Director of its Digital Media and Publications division. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, our editor Jerry Singerman has provided a steady and expert hand through the publication pro­cess. The reports of Reader A and Reader B (whose identities ­were revealed post–­peer review as Zachary Schiffman and Evelyn Tribble) provided encouragement and helpful suggestions for revision. Our colleague, Lauren Shohet, provided us with a rigorous reading of an early draft of the introduction and pointed out a number of areas for us to sharpen. At Westchester Publishing Ser­vices, Erin Davis steered the volume through a smooth production pro­cess, and our copyeditor Therese Malhame provided a thorough and keen-­eyed reading of the manuscript. Our index was expertly and thoughtfully prepared by Naomi Linzer at J. Naomi Linzer Indexing Ser­vices. Kristen would like to thank Martin, Corinna, and Juliana Brueckner for patiently enduring her long periods of editorial sequestration. Owen would like to thank Lauren and Charlotte Williams for their gift of nights and weekends as this volume came into being. This book is dedicated to the scholars—­past, pre­sent, and ­future—­who, to paraphrase Shakespeare, face that which goes before, that sequent toil of time and history with which all forwards do contend.